The Healthcare Update

 

The USA has been left behind because they kneeled to the billionaire class. They don't give a fuck about you. pic.twitter.com/svQ15smLAH

— Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) April 27, 2026

"Gambling is a tax on ignorance." - Warren Buffett

 

Warren Buffett, in his first sit-down since stepping down as Berkshire CEO, gave the cleanest indictment of legalized gambling in a decade. He called it a tax cut for the wealthy. The math proves him exactly right.

Americans wagered $165 billion at legal sportsbooks in 2025.… pic.twitter.com/edLe9hAO2Z

— Aakash Gupta (@aakashgupta) April 26, 2026

An Italian Economist: Why Capitalism Isn't Natural or Inevitable, It's Enforced.

 

Jail Talk

(c) by Mark Dempsey 

A "listening session" for the Sacramento County Jail Master Plan (PSJA@saccounty.gov) just occurred. It sought to shape the jail's future, and a presentation, eventually, to the County's Supervisors. The county is motivated to change because it lost the Mays Decision, a federal lawsuit filed on behalf of mistreated prisoners.

The Mays Decision itself doesn't request bigger facilities; jail personnel are the problem. Public comments said this remains unchanged, and jailers remain abusive, even denying inmates their medication.

In fairness to the County, the jail is full. However, the County did not mention that 60%-80% of the prisoners are not convicted of anything except being too poor to afford bail. The US and the Philippines are the only two countries that require cash bail. Illinois and Washington, D.C., have abandoned it for selected crimes without bad consequences. The public, not the County, brought up eliminating cash bail.

The US incarcerates at five times the world's per-capita average, seven times more than Canada, and Canadian crime rates are lower. Prisons do not prevent crime.

The only prisoners described in the County's presentation were mentally ill or addicted. There was no mention of anything to address the poverty that prevents prisoners from posting bail. That's despite the largest homeless population since the Great Depression--driven primarily by poverty, not mental illness; in a country where 40% of the population can't afford a $400 emergency, and 60% of workers live check to check.

Santa Clara County has Destination: Home, which supplies emergency funds to those on the verge of homelessness. It took the public, not the County, to bring this up.

Will the "listening" produce any change in the County's willful ignorance about poverty driving people to desperate behavior like crime? Let's just say I'm not holding my breath.

From William Murphy here:

The United States does not have a “crime problem” in the way it’s usually framed. It has a social organization problem—a system that reliably generates the conditions under which crime becomes rational, predictable, and, in many cases, unavoidable. ....

When large sections of a population face economic precarity, unstable housing, inadequate healthcare, and underfunded education, those conditions shape behavior. Not in a simplistic, deterministic way—but in a probabilistic one. The more pressure you apply to a system, the more predictable its outcomes become.

In the U.S., those pressures are intense:

• Wages that lag far behind cost of living
• Housing markets that function as speculative assets rather than human necessities
• Healthcare tied to employment or priced out of reach
• Education systems stratified by zip code
• A labor market that oscillates between exploitation and exclusion

 Under those conditions, “crime” is not an anomaly. It is one of several adaptation strategies.

The key point: these outcomes are not bugs in the system. They are features.....

And it leads to a fundamental contradiction: the same system that produces the conditions for crime also deploys force to contain its consequences. ...



Under capitalism, certain social conditions are not just tolerated—they are functional:

• Cheap labor requires economic vulnerability
• High rents require housing scarcity
• Private healthcare profits require limited access
• Consumer markets thrive on debt and instability

These dynamics generate inequality. And inequality, in turn, generates crime.

At the same time, entire industries profit from the management of crime:

• Private prisons
• Surveillance technologies
• Security services
• Insurance markets

This creates a feedback loop where the system has no structural incentive to eliminate the root causes of crime. It only has incentives to manage and monetize its effects.

 
If the problem is structural, then the solution has to be structural. Not cosmetic reforms, not rhetorical shifts—material changes.

Here’s what the evidence shows works:
1. Economic Stability - Cash transfers, wage increases, and employment programs consistently reduce property crime and, in some cases, violence.

2. Housing as a Right - [Also] Lowers overall system costs

3. Universal Healthcare Mental health issues and substance use are deeply intertwined with crime, particularly at the street level.Treating these as criminal issues rather than health issues produces predictable results: cycling people through jails without addressing the underlying causes.

4. Education and Youth Investment - These are not quick fixes. They are long-term investments.

5. Community-Based Violence Reduction - ...don’t rely on coercion. They rely on legitimacy.

6. Justice System Reform The current system often exacerbates the very problems it claims to solve.

• Ending cash bail for low-level offenses
• Reducing excessive sentences
• Expanding parole and reentry support
• Using restorative justice where appropriate

The goal is not to eliminate accountability—but to make it constructive rather than purely punitive.

7. Redefining the Role of Police - Not every social problem requires an armed response.
  At the same time, accountability for use of force must be real, not symbolic.

The Real Question ...The deeper question is this: What kind of society are we trying to build? One that manages inequality through force? Or one that reduces inequality so that force becomes less necessary?

.... Crime is not an isolated pathology. It is a system output.

Update:

Finland gave every homeless person a house and within 6 months 85% had a job and were financially independent.

Less crime, less hospital visits, less suffering and even including the cost of the house, LESS COST than the UK/USA method of abandoning them on the streets. pic.twitter.com/G7hnCGa9bO

— BladeoftheSun (@BladeoftheS) April 24, 2026

War is the priority

 

The spending on police is the domestic version of this. See 

Public Safety Is Not a Police Problem. It’s a Political Economy Problem.

How structural insecurity and capitalist waste turn public safety into an expensive system of crisis management instead of prevention

Excerpt: "We’re told the U.S. has a 'crime' problem, but most of what gets policed is just poverty in motion. If you actually removed the economic pressure producing survival crime, you wouldn’t need half the policing apparatus we currently fund. The real question isn’t how to police better—it’s why we’ve built a society that manufactures instability and then pays billions to contain it.

"The United States treats policing like a technical issue: more funding, better training, smarter deployment, new tech. But that’s like treating a flooded house by buying better mops.

"The real driver of 'crime' in the U.S. is not individual pathology—it is structural insecurity produced by the economic system itself. When people are priced out of housing, buried in medical debt, and trapped in precarious labor markets, survival begins to reorganize itself outside formal legality. What gets labeled 'crime' is often just the informal survival logic of a stressed society."

Biden wanted to attack Iran too

Quoting neocon Hochstein from a CBS interview. Is the agenda to persuade us that the Iran war was inevitable a la Boss Tweed ("I don't care who people vote for as long as I can pick the candidates")?

From Caitlin Johnstone:

Former senior Biden advisor Amos Hochstein said during an interview on Sunday that the Biden administration had been preparing to bomb Iran if they had won re-election in 2024. 

Hochstein was asked by Face the Nation’s Margaret Brennan, “In July 2024 Secretary Blinken claimed Iran was one or two weeks away from having enough fissile material breakout capacity to eventually make a weapon if Iran had decided to do so. There were indirect negotiations that the Biden administration did, but it went nowhere. So when President Trump argues that he did what no other president would, is it just simply that the bill was coming due and it fell on his watch?” 

“I do think there’s a certain element to that, and that’s why I was supportive of President Trump joining in in June to take the strikes that we had thought internally in the Biden administration, we may have to take if there was a second term,” Hochstein replied. “We thought that the spring, summer of 2025 was probably, we may have to be there in the same place. And we did, we did war games. We did some practice runs on what it would look like to look into it, because that may have had to happen under our watch as well.” 

Hochstein, for the record, is an Israel-born IDF veteran who reportedly played a major role in the Biden administration encouraging Israel’s horrific bombardment of Lebanon in September 2024. And his narrative that an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities “may have had to happen” under a theoretical second Biden term is false. 

In March of last year, US intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard testified before Congress that the intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and supreme leader Khomeini [sic] has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003,” contradicting both the claims of President Trump and of Antony Blinken the year before. 

But even if you accept that Iran was a nuclear risk, there was nothing stopping the Biden administration from simply restarting the nuclear deal that the Obama administration secured with Tehran in 2015. The JCPOA was working fine while it was in place; anyone who says otherwise is a lying warmonger. Trump and his handlers torched the JCPOA in 2018 because it was the primary obstacle preventing them from getting to war with Iran, and the Biden administration refused to reverse this move because they wanted war too. 

The Democrats were beating the drums of war for Iran well ahead of the 2024 election. Here’s an excerpt from the official 2024 Democratic Party platform explicitly attacking Trump for not going to war with Iran in his first term: 

“All of this stands in sharp contrast to Trump’s fecklessness and weakness in the face of Iranian aggression during his presidency. In 2018, when Iranian-backed militias repeatedly attacked the U.S. consulate in Basra, Iraq Trump’s only response was to close our diplomatic facility. In June 2019, when Iran shot down a U.S. surveillance aircraft operating in international airspace above the Straits of Hormuz, Trump responded by tweet and then abruptly called off any actual retaliation, causing confusion and concern among his own national security team. In September 2019, when Iranian-backed groups threatened global energy markets by attacking Saudi oil infrastructure, Trump failed to respond against Iran or its proxies. In January 2020, when Iran, for the first and only time in its history, directly launched ballistic missiles against U.S. troops in western Iraq, Trump mocked the resulting Traumatic Brain Injuries suffered by dozens of American servicemembers as mere ‘headaches’ — and again, took no action.” 

Kamala Harris, who controversially replaced the dementia-addled Biden as the Democratic candidate late in the race, labeled Iran the number one enemy of the United States. In their 2024 debate, Harris repeatedly slammed Trump for being too soft on America’s enemies and announced that she “will always give Israel the ability to defend itself, in particular as it relates to Iran and any threat that Iran and its proxies pose to Israel.” 

I’ve seen a lot of people trying to argue that Trump’s depravity in Iran proves everyone should support Democrats, but it’s clear the Democratic Party is just the more polite-looking face on the same evil power structure. 

The war with Iran was always planned. Analysts like Brian Berletic and Richard Medhurst have been laying out solid arguments that this American war is more about attacking the economic and energy interests of Russia and China in a last-ditch effort to retain planetary hegemony than it is about assisting Israel. This places the United States on a dangerous trajectory toward increasingly hostile escalations between nuclear-armed powers. 

These moves were planned years in advance, and would have been rolled out regardless of what impotent meat puppet happened to be wheeled into office in January 2025. 

You don’t get to vote out an empire. Whether or not the US will continue working to dominate the planet will never be on the ballot. We will continue seeing reckless US wars of immense human consequence until the empire falls, or until the American people bring the revolutionary change to their country that the world so desperately needs.

The Return of Full Employment Policy - Randall Wray

 An accompanying primer.

These Articles should help those who do not understand what a government is with monetary sovereignty and who do not understand Public/Federal Debt which does not operate as a household budget.



Bill Mitchell:  If you think you know what ‘debt’ is, read on
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=24850

Bill Mitchell:  There is no federal public debt problem in the US
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=15490

Bill Mitchell:  DEBT IS NOT DEBT
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=3346

Bill Mitchell:  Been searching for a public debt overhang - didn’t get far
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=26289

Bill Mitchell:  The US government can buy as much of its own debt as it chooses
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=25161

Bill Mitchell:  Direct central bank purchases of government debt
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=29140

George Monbiot: 1) Neoliberalism - the ideology at the root of all our problems 
https://goo.gl/LOferJ

George Monbiot:  2) Neoliberalism: the deep story that lies beneath Donald Trump’s triumph 
https://goo.gl/vHveSG

Warren Mosler:  “The Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy” located here from Mosler's website:  https://goo.gl/xOeKRT 

 

Austerity creates fascism

Austerity creates fascism

Cory Doctorow, April 12, 2026 [Pluralistic]
 

…”Austerity begets fascism” is one of those things that makes a lot of intuitive sense, but it turns out that there’s a good empirical basis for believing it. In “Public Service Decline and Support for the Populist Right” four economists from the LSE and Bocconi provide an excellent look at the linkage between austerity and support for fascists: Public Service Decline and Support for the Populist Right – Evidence from England’s National Health Service (pdf) Here’s how they break it down. Political scientists have assembled a large, reproducible body of evidence to show that “public service provision is crucial to people’s perceptions of their quality of life and living standards.” Good public services are the basis for “the social contract between rulers and the ruled” – pay your taxes and obey the laws, and in return, you will be well served. When public services go wrong, people don’t always know who to blame, but they definitely notice that something is going wrong, so when public services fail, people stop trusting the state, and that social contract starts to fray. They start to suspect that elites are lining their pockets rather than managing the system, and they “withdraw their support” for the system. Fascists thrive in these conditions. Fascists come to power by mobilizing grievances. By choosing a scapegoat, fascists can create support from people who are justifiably furious that the services they rely on have collapsed. So when you can’t get shelter, or health care, or elder care, or child care, or an education for your kids, you become a mark for a fascist grifter with a story about “undeserving migrants” who’ve taken the benefits that should rightly accrue to “deserving natives.”….

The Real Story of Crypto

 

.@ben_mckenzie on how crypto helps criminals and hostile states evade sanctions — and how Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick profits from it. #theweeklyshow #jonstewart #politics pic.twitter.com/cVzlhiq5ST

— The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart (@weeklyshowpod) April 15, 2026

 

So...besides enabling ransomware, and significantly contributing to global warming, crypto corrupts our government.

 JFYI, China has outlawed crypto mining. 

Update: Bitcoin Gets A Dark Money-Backed Assist In Congress

Veronica Riccobene, Apr 13, 2026 [The Lever]
 

Bitcoin’s secret backers celebrate a bonanza. A dark money pro-cryptocurrency influence group with deep ties to Trumpworld is lauding a new Senate bill codifying President Trump’s plans for a crypto-boosting strategic Bitcoin reserve and onshoring Bitcoin mining. The Lever’s Freddy Brewster reports that the Satoshi Action Fund — a 501(c)(4) group that does not disclose its donors — has shared top personnel with the Koch network of right-wing think tanks and dark money nonprofits. That includes the Heritage Foundation, which published the Project 2025 plan to overhaul the government under Trump. An executive with the pro-Bitcoin group even wrote the Project 2025 chapter on dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency. A federal Bitcoin stockpile could boost the crypto token’s value to nearly $1 million a token, more than 10 times its current value — a massive giveaway to the largest Bitcoin owners, two percent of whom own more than 90 percent of all of the currency in circulation. The new bill was co-introduced by Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), who is not seeking reelection after serving a sole term as a senator, during which she bestowed the title of “the Senate’s first and finest bitcoiner.”

  

MMT vs. Austrian Economics

Austrians want to make microeconomics the foundation of macroeconomics. Sonenshein, Mantel and Debreu proved, mathematically that micro is unsuitable as a foundation of macro. Two plus two would have to equal five before Austrians could be true.

Microeconomics: Savings is a good idea.

Macroeconomics: If everyone net saves, and your spending is my income, then we get the Great Depression. 

One other Austrian myth: Money supplanted barter, and credit ultimately replaced money. The sequence here: barter, then money, then credit.

Archaeologists have discovered evidence of credit from ~3500 BCE, primarily marks on clay tablets for pay stubs, bar tabs and other obligations. Money (coins) arrived at ~800-600 BCE, literally millenia later. The correct sequence: credit, then money, and very, very rarely, barter.

David Graeber observes, in Debt: The First 5,000 Years, that there has never been economic money (not magical money) without a supervising authority like a temple, king, or state. Never!

States create markets like this: If the king wants to hire 1,000 soldiers, he has a logistical nightmare ahead. He has to pay, clothe, feed, train and supply the soldiers and their steeds. How does he do it? He pays them in the authorized currency--let's call it "crowns." Then he taxes the entire population in crowns. This is obviously a simple example, and real world markets are more complex, but you get the idea. The Austrian idea of markets originating with "free people" with "free exchanges" is not something supported by history. 
 

Why are things so expensive?

 

pic.twitter.com/DxQ6g4oY3x

— Thursday (@ennui365) April 7, 2026

The costs of war

 

China's high speed rail costs about $17-21 million per km to build.

China built over 1,000 km of high speed rail for the cost of US war on Iran so far https://t.co/CWy3p1Hfgp pic.twitter.com/A0i87Cvgrs

— Carl Zha (@CarlZha) March 16, 2026

From Every Country That Lost It All Passed Through This Moment First — The U.S. Government Has Been Converted Into a Single Family’s Financial Instrument

Economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, whose work on why nations fail identified the transition from inclusive to extractive institutions as the single most reliable predictor of national economic deterioration, documented this sequence across centuries of comparative history before this administration took office. Extractive institutions are those designed to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a narrow elite at the expense of the broader population. Every country that completed this transition took the same path: oversight capture first, financial extraction second, institutional hollowing third, and population bearing the biological cost last….

The critical variable in every case is not the volume of theft. Plenty of governments have sustained corruption without producing failed states. The critical variable is the deliberate destruction of the institutional layer between the extraction and the population.

 

Business as usual

 

Watching the discourse around the plane crash in Iran.

Everyone’s arguing over the aircraft , the recovery operation, the timeline, the flight path, the debris, the radar data…

Meanwhile, nobody stops to ask the most obvious question — whether the entire ridiculous story is… pic.twitter.com/bB3KMP1kw0

— Morgan (@MorganC000) April 5, 2026

Houston...meh!

Houston is often touted as the apotheosis of the "abundance" agenda, and is revered by anti-government libertarians. Why? Because it has the most minimal zoning possible, specifying only minimum lot sizes and road design. If you live in a single family home and want to open a bar in your living room (and the private subdivision restrictions don't forbid it), you can. It's a libertarian paradise!

One other observation: if you look at cities (and counties) with complex zoning restrictions--e.g., Sacramento City or County--you will see they look almost identical to Houston. Zoning, at least as practiced in parts of California, is completely ineffective, and regularly ignored, especially if someone politically influential wants a zoning change. (I've discussed this before here.) 

A new bit of information is that Houston's lack of zoning does not lead to prosperity or more affordable housing.

 

Notice that three Texas cities populate in this poverty ranking, but only two California cities appear.  The ranking is even more one-sided when one compares the availability of affordable rentals.

 

From replies to the Tweet that is the source of the above:

What's the percentage of the population that is classified as rent burdened?

 Alicia Gerardo: According to Rice University's Kinder Institute for Urban Research, about 51% of renters in Houston are rent-burdened, meaning they pay more than 30% of their income on housing. Additionally, more than 25% of renters spend half of their income on rent.

 Philip: Any info on the right graph as to what was considered affordable?

Alicia Gerardo: The National Low Income Housing Coalition's The Gap Report defines affordable housing as "Housing units with rent and utilities that do not exceed 30% of a given income threshold."nlihc.org  

The U.S. has a shortage of more than 7.2 million rental homes affordable and available to extremely low-income renter households. Find out more. #TheGap26

 Philip: Nice, thank you! I think what the “just build more housing!” crowd doesn’t get is that no amount of new housing is ever going to drive prices down to a price affordable to people making 30-40k a year, which is a gigantic chunk of people.

 

The Meaning of Home Ownership

 

perspective pic.twitter.com/CL11i4GLtP

— Financial Physics (@FinancialPhys) April 4, 2026

Matt Stoller's take on what it will take to solve current problems: What does a non-oligarch driven America look like?

From Twitter/X: The reason Democrats have no position on the war is because no one has a coherent view on what to do. It’s not on them. 

The U.S. is basically the bank account and army for global oligarchs. This positioning is not good for Americans and it’s not good for the world. But it’s also impossible to imagine an alternative. 

The foreign policy establishment sees their work as a hobby. The U.S. is so endlessly rich and heroic that it’s all a game. They don’t think that the realm of foreign affairs should be good for ordinary people; that’s a rhetorical afterthought. To them the deindustrialization and erosion of the middle class at the heart of the destabilization of the world is sad but necessary, if they bother to notice it at all. 

The left foreign policy world is not actually that different. They are libertarian and hostile to Americans, and they don’t care about economics. Foreign policy to them is a hobby of the rich, it’s just the U.S. is the central villain instead of central hero. They do not understand or care about deindustrialization as a result of Chinese overcapacity, which is a central and fundamental foreign policy challenge. To them that’s handwaving away as ‘economics’ and boring. Let’s just do ‘care’ work, they imagine, as if a nation that makes nothing and imports food can afford to have its young people do nothing but wipe the asses of the old. 

What does a non-oligarch driven America actually do? What does it look like? Well for starters we pull back dramatically from the rest of the world. No troops in Europe, maybe offer some defense weapons to East Asian nations. No presence in the Middle East. Cut Israel loose entirely. Total revamp of our bloated and incompetent military and its corrupt establishment. Fire most admirals and generals and put in a new generation capable of actually thinking. 

This change will require us to be a LOT more protectionist. We put up huge trade barriers so that we can rebuild our industries. We also impose capital controls and confiscate or tax assets held by foreigners. No foreign ownership of land. We are not your bank account, Mr. Saudi Prince or Chinese money launderer. 

Finally, we crush capitalism. Rebuild our farms and factories. No more driving our corporations for shareholders. Lots of public utility regulation or nationalization of assets. No more private equity. No more crypto or corporate gambling. If you want to make money, you do something useful. Otherwise it’s poverty or handcuffs. 

America needs to be run for its people, not for the Epstein Class or for weirdos who can’t go over the Iranian overthrow of the shah or for lefty hobbyists funded by Koch industries to deindustrialize what’s left of what we have.