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economic inequality
Stop Crime Talk: Overcriminalization of Youth Spells Disaster for America’s Future
From conventional therapy to culturally relevant initiatives and healing-based, trauma-informed programming, youth can grow in a healthy manner through a sustainable relationship with community-based caregivers.
Mar 23, 2025
The currently popular “tough on crime” narratives touted by local, state, and federal policymakers—as evidenced by the attacks on mayors of sanctuary cities at recent congressional hearings—pose a risk that the United States will revert to a dangerous place that will harm marginalized communities for decades to come.
The nation’s stability is directly tied to the stability of this country’s younger generations. As a 25-year veteran of Juvenile Diversion programs in Denver, I took an early retirement to lead a nonprofit that works with young people referred through deflection, a pre-citation or pre-arrest intervention that connects young people to resources without criminalizing their behavior.
The goal is to make my old job obsolete.
Something must change. Community based organizations and legal advocates are already seeking solutions and are floating reform initiatives across the country.
During the past three decades, I have been deeply involved in community organizing, while simultaneously working full time inside the Juvenile Justice Industrial Complex where I have heard the internal systemic whisperings while also seeing how those systemic policies affect the communities they serve in real time.
On any given day, there are about 27,600 youth in detention centers in the U.S., representing a 75% decline since the year 2000. Juvenile crime rates plummeted between 1994-2020 by 78%. There is an obvious correlation between the drop in youth in detention and the decrease in crime. Reducing involvement in the juvenile justice system reduces juvenile crime.
The troubling national trend of rolling back justice reform efforts is raising alarms among advocates, as seen in Washington state where they are repurposing adult detention centers to create more juvenile lock-ups. And in North Carolina, legal expert Jake Sussman criticized policies leading to youth isolation, stating, “We are only aggravating any existing problems by placing these very vulnerable kids in isolation.”
Recently, I witnessed a 10-year-old stand behind his mother in Denver’s municipal juvenile court, clutching her jacket sleeve, struggling to understand how he came to be paraded before a judge for age-appropriate behavior. He tossed a pencil behind his back that grazed a teacher’s leg. Sitting in the intake room, his feet did not even touch the floor.
A 2024 study clearly spells out the damage that this one experience in the juvenile justice system will have on this child’s life as he grows up, carrying the trauma of this day and the burden of heightened scrutiny that will come from being placed on juvenile diversion. The study highlights the fact that young offenders often experience polyvictimization, developmental trauma, and complex PTSD, emphasizing the need for trauma-informed approaches within juvenile justice systems.
The National Center for Youth Law published a report in January detailing the extensive harm that tickets inflict on students everywhere, which unveils specifically how Lakewood, a large Denver suburb, has vastly overcriminalized students through the municipal court system.
Many municipal courts in the country, like Cleveland, New Orleans, and Denver, function in much the same manner as Lakewood. Children are ticketed for low-level offenses not worthy of a district-level charge, often by a police officer at their own school.
Ticketed students are siphoned into diversion programs that require them to miss school (and their parents to miss work) so they can show up for a court appearance. That experience is followed by another missed day of school and work to show up for a highly invasive intake interview.
Finally, the student is required to participate in costly classes that range from $60-$150 for one class, which is designed to address and correct criminogenic thinking in adults, at the family’s expense.
Students are required to complete rigorous community service assignments that can include dozens of hours of work. In Colorado for instance, a child is not permitted to perform community service hours without a parent present. So once again, a child’s ticket jeopardizes their parent’s employment.
Something must change. Community based organizations and legal advocates are already seeking solutions and are floating reform initiatives across the country such as the Colorado Youth Justice Collaborative, MILPA Collective, and Denver Healing Generations.
Ideally, healing a young person happens at home and within their own school and community. Some children are not able to have these positive resources.
In the school environment, alongside school discipline matrix reforms is a push for what has been termed deflection. The proposed deflection policies are what advocacy organizations nationwide tout as a means of avoiding harming a child through the juvenile justice system. The goal is to send the young person to an organization for services within their community directly from the point of contact with law enforcement instead of formally charging them.
There are bills in Colorado Judiciary Subcommittees that would begin to codify these policies and lead to a refreshing approach to addressing problematic behavior in young people. The City of Longmont, Colorado has had an 86% success rate already with its Deflection program as it routed youth away from the justice system.
Similarly, Cambridge, Massachusetts has a program that serves as a model for expansion into more cities.
From conventional therapy to culturally relevant initiatives and healing-based, trauma-informed programming, youth can grow in a healthy manner through a sustainable relationship with community-based caregivers. This is an investment in the future of America where healthy young people become healthy adults. That is a net positive for everyone.
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In the Ongoing Billionaire Heist, Schumer and Fetterman Are Driving the Getaway Car
While the senators claim to be fighting for the working class, their actions—like voting for a government funding bill that slashes social spending while protecting corporate interests—show they’re more focused on keeping the machine running than fixing what’s broken.
Mar 18, 2025
Let’s discuss something happening under our noses: The middle class is disappearing.
Last week, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) teamed up with Republicans to pass a government funding bill. If you ask them, they’ll say, “We did this to save American workers!”
But, if they cared about American workers, they wouldn’t have cut $13 billion from healthcare, education, and infrastructure while adding $6 billion to defense. Unless the average American is now classified as a fighter jet, that extra money isn’t going to help you.
So the next time a politician tells you they’re fighting for you, ask them: What are they doing to take wealth and power away from the billionaire class?
And that’s the problem. Over and over, we’re told that these decisions are in our best interest. Yet somehow, the rich keep getting richer while the rest of us are left with higher bills, lower wages, and a government that never seems to have money for schools or healthcare—but always has billions for bombs.
Why? Because the billionaires at the top have turned the economy into a giant vacuum—and guess what? It’s sucking up everything you own.
Here’s the kicker: Most people don’t even realize it’s happening. Things cost more. Your savings may be shrinking. But you still have food on the table, so it doesn’t feel like a crisis—yet.
Seniors notice it first—property taxes and school taxes. Their fixed income isn’t stretching as far, so they complain about taxes because they assume the government can do nothing about rising prices but can lower taxes.
Younger people? They know something is off, but they’ve been told to blame immigrants. ”They’re buying up your homes! They’re driving up rent!” That’s exactly what the rich want you to believe—because as long as we’re busy fighting each other, we’re not paying attention to the people rigging the system.
Are we going to fall for it again? Or are we going to start paying attention?
While Schumer and Fetterman claim to be fighting for the working class, their actions—like voting for a government funding bill that slashes social spending while protecting corporate interests—show they’re more focused on keeping the machine running than fixing what’s broken.
What’s broken? The fact that wealth isn’t disappearing—it’s just being moved.
The Pandemic Was Among the Biggest Wealth Transfers in History—And You Paid for It
It started how these things always begin: with regular people getting squeezed. Offices shut down. Businesses closed. Millions of people were laid off overnight. Rent was still due, bills kept coming, and suddenly, survival wasn’t just about avoiding a virus—it was about making it to the next month without losing everything.
Meanwhile, something very different happened in a parallel universe occupied by the world’s wealthiest men. In just two years, the 10 richest men on the planet doubled their net worth—going from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion. That’s an extra $15,000 per second. Not for doing anything new. Not for inventing anything, building anything, or working harder than anyone else.
At the same time, 160 million people fell into poverty. That’s roughly half the U.S. population—wiped out financially while the wealthiest men on Earth raked in $1 trillion.
This wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t a glitch in the system. It was the system. The pandemic proved that the real money isn’t in work; it isn’t in clocking in early and staying late. It’s in ownership. If you have read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Robert Kiyosaki tried to teach us this; the rich listened.
Billionaires became more prosperous by owning companies that laid people off, raising prices, and cashing in on government bailouts. They owned the companies from which we bought food, mortgages, and electricity. The system isn’t designed to reward labor but to reward the people who profit from it.
Trillions of dollars in stimulus money flooded the market. Some of it went to everyday people, but most of it—directly or indirectly—ended up in the pockets of those who already had more money than they could ever spend. And just like that, the most significant wealth transfer in modern history was complete.
Your Wealth Didn’t Vanish—It Was Transferred Upward
During the Covid-19 pandemic, the government injected massive cash into the economy to prevent total collapse. And let’s be clear—that was the right move. Despite all the hand-wringing about inflation on the news, people needed money to survive.
But then, when workers didn’t immediately rush back to low-paying jobs, the rich threw a tantrum. Suddenly, they claimed that the government had “overstimulated” the economy—suggesting that people were so flush with cash that they just decided to stop working.
You’re not struggling because of bad luck or bad budgeting. You’re struggling because the rich own everything—and they’re making sure you own nothing.
Like most economic takes from the ultra-wealthy, this was a complete lie. Yes, increasing the money supply can contribute to inflation, but this kind of inflation is easy to manage. You can pull money back out of the economy through taxation or adjustments to monetary policy. The real problem wasn’t too much money—it was that, for once, regular people had a tiny bit of breathing room, and billionaires didn’t like it.
Here’s how they pulled off the biggest wealth heist in modern history:
We Pay Them for Everything
The rich don’t make money by working. They make money because they own everything, and because they own everything, we’re forced to pay them for everything.
- They own our homes → We pay rent.
- They own the businesses where we shop → We pay for goods and services.
- They own the farms and energy companies → We pay them every time we eat or turn on the lights.
- They own the banks → We pay them interest when we borrow money.
They Raise Prices—Because They Can
Now, here’s where it gets worse. Since they own everything, they set the prices. And what do they do? Raise them.
- Housing is unaffordable. That’s because investors buy homes and turn them into overpriced rentals.
- Grocery prices are ridiculous. That’s because big corporations own the farms, the processing plants, and the grocery chains.
- Energy bills keep rising. That’s because the same handful of companies own the power plants, oil refineries, and gas pipelines.
And when everything gets more expensive, what do we do? We pay them more, and now they have us blaming immigrants.
They Loan Us Money—And Make Us Pay Them Back With Interest
Since prices are rising faster than wages, most people can’t keep up. But instead of fixing the problem, the rich found another way to profit: debt.
- Can’t afford a home? Here, take out a mortgage—and pay them interest for 30 years.
- Struggling with everyday expenses? Just put it on a credit card—and pay them interest forever.
- Want to get an education? Take out student loans—and keep paying them long after you graduate.
So, we pay them for necessities, and when we can’t afford those things, we borrow from them—and pay them even more in interest.
The End Result?
Every year, the rich own more because they’re constantly collecting our money. Every year, we own less because we’re constantly paying them for necessities. And it gets worse. The more money they collect, the more they buy up assets—houses, land, businesses—making it even harder for the rest of us to catch up.
Schumer and Fetterman Just Helped Keep This Rigged System in Place
So why does this all matter? Because instead of addressing these problems, our leaders keep making them worse. Schumer and Fetterman’s latest vote shows exactly where their priorities are. They passed a funding bill that keeps the government running but at the cost of cutting billions from social programs. Meanwhile, defense spending—where corporations and wealthy investors make billions in profits—keeps growing.
It’s Time to Face the Truth
You’re not struggling because of bad luck or bad budgeting. You’re struggling because the rich own everything—and they’re making sure you own nothing. And as long as our leaders keep protecting them, things will only worsen.
So the next time a politician tells you they’re fighting for you, ask them: What are they doing to take wealth and power away from the billionaire class?
And let’s be clear—Chuck Schumer is not the leader we need right now. Under his watch, Democrats failed to deliver real economic relief, leaving millions frustrated enough to turn to President Donald Trump. Under his leadership, the party keeps acting like taking the high road will somehow fix a rigged system. It won’t.
It’s time to fight back. And that starts with demanding new leadership—because Schumer has already shown us whose side he’s on.
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Neo-Feudalism: the Enemy the Left Must Name to Defeat
The only way forward is to complete the unfinished revolution against feudalism—not through reactionary nationalism, but through systemic transformation.
Mar 18, 2025
In 1776, America declared independence not just from a king, but from an entire feudal order. The promise was radical: no more lords and vassals, no more aristocratic monopolies, no more inherited rule. It was a vision of self-governance, economic freedom, and political democracy.
As we know, this promise was deeply flawed from the outset—built atop the brutal reality of chattel slavery, which entrenched a racial caste system even as the revolution sought to break from feudal hierarchy.
Still, the revolutionary spark—that governance should belong to the people, not an inherited elite—set a course for future struggles, from abolition to labor rights to civil rights. The unfinished promise of 1776 has always been to extend that right to everyone, dismantling old forms of domination wherever they persist.
The fight against neo-feudalism must be reclaimed by a left willing to challenge entrenched power at its roots, not merely manage decline.
Yet nearly 250 years later, we find ourselves under the shadow of a system that eerily resembles the one we once revolted against. Power is no longer held by monarchs but by corporate oligarchs and billionaire dynasties. The vast majority of Americans—trapped in cycles of debt, precarious labor, and diminishing rights—are not citizens in any meaningful sense.
We talk around this reality. We call it “money in politics,” “corporate influence,” and “economic inequality.” But these are symptoms, not the disease. The disease is neo-feudalism—a system in which power is entrenched, inherited, and designed to be impossible to escape. And unless we call it by its true name, we will never build the movement needed to fight it.
Feudalism may have faded in name, but many of its structures remain. Today’s hierarchy mirrors the past in ways we can no longer ignore.
- Then: Lords owned the land, and peasants worked it under their control.
Now: A handful of corporations and investment firms own vast swaths of housing, farmland, and industry. - Then: Aristocracies passed power down through hereditary privilege.
Now: Dynastic billionaires and corporate monopolies ensure that wealth remains concentrated in a ruling class. - Then: The peasantry was bound to their lords by custom, debt, and necessity.
Now: Student debt, medical bills, and stagnant wages trap entire generations in perpetual economic dependence. - Then: Political power was controlled by a small elite who ruled by divine right.
Now: The illusion of democracy masks the fact that billionaires fund both parties, controlling policy no matter who is elected.
This is not the free society America was supposed to be. It is a highly stratified system in which the many serve the interests of the few, with no meaningful path to real power. And worse, the establishment left—rather than challenging this order—has come to represent it.
The Democratic Party was once the party of the working class. Today, it has become the party of the professional-managerial elite—the bureaucrats, consultants, and media figures who believe that governing is their birthright.
The establishment left has in many ways absorbed the role of the aristocracy—not just in terms of wealth but in the way it positions itself as the enlightened ruling class. They claim to stand for “equity” and “democracy,” yet do nothing to challenge the real structures of power.
Instead, they manage decline while maintaining their own privilege—careful not to upset the donor class that sustains them.
As newly elected Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin put it, “There are a lot of good billionaires out there that have been with Democrats, who share our values, and we will take their money. But we’re not taking money from those bad billionaires.”
Pronouncements from global elites certainly don’t help either. The now-infamous slogan “You’ll own nothing and be happy”—popularized by the World Economic Forum and widely interpreted as a blueprint for a hyper-managed future—only fuels growing resentment toward an emerging system where ownership, autonomy, and mobility are increasingly out of reach for the average person.
This is why figures like Steve Bannon and reactionary populists have hijacked the narrative of neo-feudalism. Despite his own ties to oligarchs, Bannon has correctly identified that America is no longer a capitalist democracy but a feudal order where power is locked away from ordinary people.
He explicitly frames this crisis as a return to feudal hierarchy: “The ‘hate America’ crowd… they believe in some sort of techno-feudal situation, like was in Italy, back in the 14th and 15th century… where they are like a city-state, and there are a bunch of serfs that work for them. Not American citizens, but serfs, indentured servants.”
He has also drawn direct comparisons between modern economic conditions and serfdom: “Here’s the thing with millennials, they’re like 19th-century Russian serfs. They’re in better shape, they have more information, they’re better dressed. But they don’t own anything.”
However, Bannon’s solution—a nationalist strongman government—represents just another form of vassalage.
Reactionary populists like Bannon, President Donald Trump, and Tucker Carlson exploit real economic grievances and redirect them into a revenge narrative. Instead of seeing neo-feudalism as a system that transcends party or nationality—one that has evolved from medieval serfdom to corporate vassalage—they reframe it as a nationalist grievance.
Bannon likens “globalists” (an ambiguous term) to feudal overlords, but insists that nationalism can break their grip. Trump labels the deep state and liberal elites as the enemy, but assumes the role of a strongman to restore justice. Carlson says the working class is being crushed, but blames cultural elites rather than the billionaire class as a whole.
This misdirection is key. Rather than exposing the true architects of neo-feudalism—corporate monopolists, financial barons, and entrenched dynasties—these reactionaries redirect public anger toward an amorphous “cultural aristocracy” of media figures, academics, and bureaucrats. The real oligarchs escape scrutiny, while the working class is fed a narrative that pits them against cultural elites rather than the economic structures that keep them in servitude.
The only way forward is to complete the unfinished revolution against feudalism—not through reactionary nationalism, but through systemic transformation. The fight against neo-feudalism must be reclaimed by a left willing to challenge entrenched power at its roots, not merely manage decline.
The question is no longer whether neo-feudalism exists. The question is whether the left will finally recognize it—and act before it’s too late. If it fails, the fight will be lost to those who see the problem but offer only deeper subjugation as the solution.
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