Trump has wrecked local food/small farm initiatives

This administration is a pitiful failure in every conceivable way.

In March 2020, as pandemic lockdowns began, Americans accustomed to the most abundant, available food supply in history encountered empty shelves in supermarkets. With international supply chains scrambled, the narrative around “local food” shifted from “yuppie pipe dream” to “food security necessity.”

…While the (Biden) administration did little to upend the structure of the dominant commodity agriculture system, officials started listening to farmers and advocates that operate outside of it. They talked about the need for not just efficiency, but also redundancy and resilience, in case of another crisis.

In collaboration with lawmakers in Congress pushing through huge pandemic relief packages, Biden’s USDA then made historically large investments in new programs intended to support small farms and local food systems…

“The last administration was making a concerted effort to try to level the playing field to some extent for those smaller farmers, and a lot of farms and local food systems ramped up in response to that influx of funding,” said Farm Aid’s Tremblay. So, when things changed, many had already made investments they couldn’t simply cancel. Now, they’re stuck. - Civil Eats

Getting a righteous deal on a used EV

Useful tips.

The market for used EVs is surging; their average cost of $35,895 is now competitive with that of used gas cars (average $34,799)...

Figure out what range you actually need, based on how much you typically drive and how frequently you’ll charge, recommends Desiree Moore, program manager at Drive Clean Colorado, a state program that aims to reduce greenhouse gas pollution from vehicles…

InsideEVs, U.S. News & World Report, and Recurrent, a company that aggregates data on vehicle battery health, are a few of the sources that list their top used EV picks, which will give you a sense of the best range for your buck…

But the most important EV research might be what you do in person. ​“Drive as many as you possibly can, because there’s such a difference in driving style and acceleration and turning radius — all of the things that you would expect from any used car,” said Andrew Garberson, Recurrent’s head of growth and research. - Canary Media

Stock market and consumer sentiment diverge more than ever

Well, since consumer sentiment has been measured, anyway. This is not at all surprising.

Multiple polls and surveys released in recent days have shown US consumer sentiment cratering—and all the while, the US stock market keeps hitting record highs.

…up until around 2020, consumer sentiment matched stock market performance closely, although there was a large divergence between the two leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, where stocks briefly outperformed consumer sentiment before crashing downward as the housing bubble burst.

But throughout the last six years, the graphic shows, the S&P 500 has produced an almost continuous upward surge even as consumer sentiment spirals downward.

“Absolutely incredible,” commented Kobeissi Letter. “Over the last six years, the S&P 500 has risen +130% while US Consumer Sentiment has collapsed by -55%, to its lowest since data began in 1952. We are witnessing the formation of the biggest wealth divide in modern history.” - Common Dreams

Little has changed in Gaza

US "mainstream" media is happily using Iran in order to avoid giving Israel's continuing behavior much coverage.

The raft of condemnations by Western governments of Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir’s taunts of flotilla volunteers whom the Israeli military illegally kidnapped from international waters was attended by a good deal of hypocrisy, since the US government despises them as well, and few European governments support them.

What much of the reporting ignores, however, is how necessary the aid flotilla still is, since the Israelis have gone back to blockading key foodstuffs, medicine and fuel, and continue to shell and bomb people in Gaza. In other words, the genocide continues under the cover of the Hormuz crisis. - Informed Comment

“Corporate Social Responsibility” is pretty much dead

Not that it ever showed much life. In any case it will only be resurrected if it’s forced on them. I don’t doubt that plenty of business school grads start with some measure of idealism. But current corporate culture gets them ditching that in a hurry.

It’s 15 years since Michael Porter and Mark Kramer galvanised the stodgy world of Corporate Social Responsibility with their report in the Harvard Business Review, ‘Creating Shared Value’, with the not unambitious sub-title of: ‘How to Reinvent Capitalism and Unleash a Wave of Innovation and Growth’...

Nobody talks about Shared Value these days. Back then, the idea that the surplus value created by companies could be shared more equitably between shareholders, employees, suppliers, communities and other stakeholders did indeed present itself as an imaginative way of rescuing capitalism from its own worst tendencies, moving beyond ‘self-defeating trade-offs between business and society’.

Well, yes – depending on how much faith you have in the idea of companies acting voluntarily for the ‘common good’– in the absence of legislation. In retrospect, Porter and Kramer were staggeringly naive in their expectations of the so-called ‘voluntary principle’. - Beyond Nuclear

Corporate health care gouging is worse than ever

An excellent presentation of what’s been going on for a while.

The largest corporate health care hospitals in the country are consolidating their power and using it to rip off patients, a new study from Families USA shows. Released amid the GOP’s manufactured affordability crisis, the study shows that health care executives at a handful of corporations are setting “high and irrational prices” in every state and charging patients almost three times what Medicare pays for the exact same service.

The 15 largest systems charged an average of 282 percent more than the Medicare rate, the study found, resulting in $22 million in profit per hospital per year…

The reason hospital executives can do this is because they are consolidating at a rapid clip, buying up independent providers, and jacking up prices at will. Five or fewer corporations in 42 states and the District of Columbia “controlled at least half of all hospital care in 2023,” researchers found. In almost half of all states, just three corporations controlled the majority of hospital care. Hospital executives have no competition or regulations to discipline their price-gouging, so they “can charge basically whatever they want, because they can,” said Anthony Wright, executive director of Families USA. - Tha American Prospect

More ICE cruelty to detainees

Conditions in facilities are no secret. And there’s this:

On October 3, 2025, the Trump administration abruptly stopped paying third-parties for medical care provided to detainees in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Third-party providers are used to provide “medically necessary” care including “dialysis, prenatal care, oncology, [and] chemotherapy,” according to ICE…

The decision to stop reimbursing third parties for the medical care of ICE detainees has coincided with a significant spike in deaths, according to data released by the agency.

From 2018 to 2024, the average number of people who died in ICE custody annually was 8.9. That includes a spike in 2020 related to the onset of the COVID pandemic. In 2025, 33 people died in ICE custody, including 12 after the medical reimbursements stopped.

The trend is accelerating. In the first four months of 2026, 18 people have died in ICE custody. Since ICE stopped medical reimbursements on October 3, 2025, people have been dying in ICE custody at a rate of 51.7 people annually. This is more than five times the death rate before the policy was implemented. - Popular Information