Democrats bear some responsibility for the farm crisis, too

The whole system is messed up, though Trump and his allies are certainly making it worse than it's ever been. Or at least since the era of wholly unregulated exploitation, leading up to the Dust Bowl days.

In recent years, consolidated agribusinesses have translated their rising profits into formidable political power. They have successfully weakened or killed many measures that would have limited their control over farmers’ lives and livelihoods, including fighting laws that would give farmers the right to repair their own equipment, something that overzealous copyright protections have prevented them from doing. When these and other nasty practices get too much attention, Big Ag wields its considerable weight to silence critics, whether that means getting a newspaper cartoonist fired or suing the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency to close a public comment period on a proposed merger.

Over the past few decades, Democrats have too often either supported the policies that got us here, or fallen short in resisting them. - AlterNet

SCOTUS taking up CFPB case is not what you may have feared

Anyway, it’s certainly not what I feared, when I first saw the headlines.

Nerves frayed among progressive judiciary watchers on Friday afternoon as the Supreme Court announced plans to take up Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This case will decide whether the bureau’s leadership structure, in which a single director can only be removed by the president for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office,” is constitutional...

Everyone expects that the Court will follow Kavanaugh’s lead from 2016, and will grant the president the power to fire the CFPB director for any reason. But this could be a very positive step in the current context. It would mean that an Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders (or likely any Democratic) administration wouldn’t be stuck with anti-regulatory director Kathy Kraninger in place until December 2023. - The American Prospect

Concerns that the radical-right brigade on SCOTUS might take this as an opportunity to quash the CFPB, and even Dodd-Frank, entirely, are addressed later in the article.

Following the money in "border control"

One of the few Latin phrases in my long-term memory is Cui bono, which can be translated as "Who profits?" Of course what's going on now isn't all about money, by any means, but it's an aspect of it that corporate "news" media certainly doesn't dwell on. And the trend started well before Trump, though his administration has brought things to a horrifically degraded extreme.

The report begins by tracing the history of border control and militarization. It shows how US budgets for border and immigration control massively increased from the mid-1980s, a trend that has been accelerating ever since. These budgets rose from $350m in 1980 (then run by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)) to $1.2 billion in 1990; $10.2 billion in 2005 and $23.7 billion in 2018 (under two agencies, the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)). In other words, budgets have more than doubled in the last 13 years and increased by more than 6000% since 1980. This growth was matched by a similar growth in border patrol from 4,000 agents in 1994 to 21,000 today. Under its parent CBP agency (which includes an Office of Air and Marine, investigative units, and the Office of Field Operations) there are 60,000 agents, the largest federal law- enforcement agency in the United States. - tni

Greedheads foiled in effort to mess with electric vehicles in Minnesota

For now, anyway. I don't know what kind of court challenges might be available. Where do these assholes from Big Filthy Fossil Fuels get off?

Minnesota regulators on (October 7) stamped out manufacturing and petroleum groups' attempt to reverse approval of Xcel Energy's $25 million electric vehicle pilot program.

The state's Public Utilities Commission (PUC) approved the program in July, and five large industrial groups, including oil groups Marathon Petroleum and Flint Hills Resources, filed a petition with the commission on Aug. 6 asking regulators to reconsider the decision.

Those groups argued the commission did not have authority to regulate Xcel for behind-the-meter charging and raised general ratepayer concerns. EV and clean energy stakeholders were skeptical of the groups' involvement, noting that it may be the beginning of a longer fight between oil and electric power interests as EV adoption grows. - Utility Dive

Trump starts stealth attack on seniors' health care

Corporate "news" media is of course not presenting this as it should. (If, that is, it expects to still be regarded as legitimate journalism. Maybe they really have explicitly given up on that.) If you do a search, as I did just now, you'll find, likely without the slightest trace of surprise, that they're mostly just passing along the Trumpies' bullshit claims. Here's some reality:

Watch out, older Americans and people with disabilities! President Trump just announced a plan to give corporate health insurers more control over your health care. His new executive order calls for “market-based” pricing, which would drive up costs for everyone with Medicare, eviscerate traditional Medicare, and steer more people into for-profit “Medicare Advantage” plans.

Seema Verma, the Trump appointee who heads the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), may not have warned Trump about the slew of government audits revealing that many Medicare Advantage plans pose “an imminent and serious risk to the health of… enrollees.” They also overcharge taxpayers to the tune of $10 billion a year. - Independent Media Institute/AlterNet

Farmers seething over Trump betrayal

Seething enough to change their voting habits, in numbers big enough to make a substantial difference in 2020 and beyond? That remains to be seen. But at this time it certainly seems to be a viable hypothesis.

As the Trump administration fights political fires raging in Washington, another one is smoldering on the prairie. Farmers in the corn belt, the cluster of states centered on Iowa that produce the great bulk of corn and soybeans, supported Trump overwhelmingly in 2016, helping swing battleground states like Iowa and Wisconsin. But now many of them are furious, because the administration has been messing with one of the pillars of the region’s economy: the government-created market for corn-based ethanol. And that’s on top of a long-running trade war with China that has cut demand for the region’s two other main farm products, soybeans and pork. - Mother Jones 

Trump’s Ag Secretary, Sonny Perdue, told traditional, small dairy farmers, in so many words, that they’re obsolete and have no future.