Betsy DeVos gets a lump of coal for Christmas

Just a small lump, in context. But this is not disheartening, as far as it goes. It has been signed into law.

By contrast, the bill largely ignores the Trump administration's proposed Education Department budget, which would slash aid to the agency by about 10 percent. In fact, the spending bill continues to fund all the 29 programs the administration sought to eliminate. The spending deal also ignores Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos' signature proposal, Education Freedom Scholarships, which would use federal tax credits administered by the Department of the Treasury to pay for private school costs and a host of other educational services. The Treasury Department's budget under the deal includes no mention of new funds to administer these tax credits. - Education Week

Really inflicting their agenda on our education system has never been a big priority for Trump and his crowd of almost equally despicable witlings, so DeVos doesn’t have anyone’s ear at budget time. That said, she absolutely has done a lot of (under-reported, in corporate media), damage.

House plan would give immigrant farm workers some well-deserved breaks

This would be a good thing. Though as the article points out if you go down a ways there are caveats.

Of course much of Trump’s base would hate it. But after any initial feelings of anger and betrayal, they’d just go into full, cognitively rigid denial. As they do, for example, when confronted with evidence of Republican plans to destroy earned benefits like Social Security.

As part of a compromise to allow farmers to hire year-round foreign guest workers, the House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to create a path to legal status for over a million undocumented farm workers, in what could be the most significant action on immigration in decades.

The Farm Workforce Modernization Act, a sweeping, 224-page bill, passed the House by a 260-165 vote. Backed by hundreds of farm groups, and politicians on both sides of the aisle, supporters said the act would end the shadow of uncertainty and fear of deportation experienced by many field workers in the U.S. - New Food Economy

Latest big China "deal" does little for farmers

Or for anyone else. In their desperate efforts to produce some - indeed, any - kind of plausible false equivalence in the case of Trump, corporate “news” media has been pimping this as a triumph. Which is a preposterous, and pathetic, take.

The agricultural purchases required in the agreement are both vague and clearly far too small to restore even the conditions that existed before Trump’s actions sent China looking to South America and other regions to replace goods they would have previously purchased from America. In 2019, farm debt topped $416 billion—absolutely swamping the scale of Trump’s “enormous deal,” even when including non-agricultural products. 

Even as bankruptcy is up 24% in a single year, Trump is telling America’s farmers that it’s time to buy “much larger tractors” to generate all the grain required by this deal. Trump says that he expects China to buy $50 billion of U.S. agricultural products. That $50 billion figure is one that Trump has deployed before. It’s just that the date keeps shifting. And shifting. That number is imaginary, but the exploding farm debt and bankruptcies are very real. - Daily Kos

About that Trump order on "campus anti-Semitism"

I acknowledge that when I first saw something about this, it qualified as one of those “just when I thought I was inured to anything this demented, despicable, just plain sick crew might try…” This article explains some things, including how it’s not so unprecedented. And it’s well worth reading in full for other reasons as well.

Trump signed the order on Wednesday, and, in viewing the text, some Jewish leaders have said it is not significantly different than the guidelines issued by Barack Obama in 2010, which provided an expanded definition of anti-Semitism. Sam Bagenstos, a University of Michigan Law professor who worked on the same issues in President Obama’s Justice Department, told Vox, “The text of the EO is really a nothingburger that doesn’t change the law in any way. The key question will be how it is applied in practice.” The application, some fear, could “result in reclassifying campus advocacy for the Palestinians as anti-Semitism—forcing universities to either crack down on student free speech or risk losing a whole lot of federal funding.” To that end, many believe the order has nothing to do with protecting American Jews and everything to do with Israel—which is not hard to believe given that the president doesn’t actually seem to know that most Jewish people who live in the United States are not Israeli, not to mention his repeated insistence that American Jews who don’t support the country are traitors who need to be brought to heel.

The whole thing has naturally brought up a lot of talk about how, while Trump claims to love himself some Hebrews, he has a strange way of showing it, i.e. running wildly anti-Semitic campaign ads, tweeting Hillary Clinton’s face atop a pile of money next to a Star of David and the phrase, “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!” and claiming that a group of neo-Nazis had some “very fine people” in the mix. It’s almost as though, and we don’t want to step on any toes here, Donald Trump is an anti-Semite, a charge to which his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, says, How DARE you. - Vanity Fair 

New NAFTA apparently limps to the finish line

To be clear, New NAFTA, aka the U.S., Mexico, Canada Trade Agreement, regarding which a deal was announced yesterday, does have some improvements over the existing one.  According to the text it does, anyway. Whether, for example, new environmental and labor protections will be enforced remains to be seen.

But in other ways it’s not really any better at all. The content of this blog often reflects my interest in farm issues, and that’s where I’m going, here:

But what exactly is the win for farmers in the new USMCA? Nearly all tariffs for agriculture were removed under the original NAFTA. The International Trade Commission, which analyzes trade deals for Congress, projected that the USMCA would result in a slight net deficit for agriculture trade: meaning we would import slightly more than export. The small projected increase in agriculture exports – mostly dairy to Canada – would have no substantive effect on the ongoing, dramatic loss of small and mid-sized dairies in the Midwest.

Grading trade deals solely on the value of goods crossing the border has always obscured the real winners and losers. The original NAFTA, combined with the formation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the 1996 Farm Bill, led to the ramping up of agricultural production and an increase in agriculture exports. It also led to an almost immediate drop in commodity crop prices and farmer income. In fact, since the original NAFTA we’ve seen the steady consolidation of agribusiness firms and of farmland ownership, the loss of hundreds of thousands of small and mid-sized farms and independent ranches, and the rapid growth of large-scale concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) fueled by cheap (often below cost) feed. We now have a largely integrated North American agriculture market, where young cattle from Mexico and feeder pigs from Canada routinely cross borders to be finished here. For agriculture, NAFTA’s real winners were not countries, but global agribusiness firms like Cargill, JBS, Tyson and Smithfield that operate in all three countries. - IATP

As far as the politics goes, this isn’t going to be huge for the 2020 election. Nothing else has changed the fact that half of American adults (that is, almost twice the percentage that actually voted for him, in 2016) - including 60% of women - want Trump gone, like, yesterday, whatever it takes, and this won’t, either. We just rightfully loathe and despise the guy, as the utterly repugnant, despicable failure as a human being that he is. But I’m adding this as a politics junkie thing.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), an adviser to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), said a deal that the AFL-CIO's endorsed "could be problematic," but vowed to reserve judgement until senators got a presentation on the agreement. "I just hope he hasn't gone too far in Speaker Pelosi's direction, and the AFL-CIO's direction that he might lose some support here," he said. "My concern is that what the administration presented has now been moved demonstrably to Democrats, the direction that they wanted." - The Hill

Why is NATO still around?

I found this to be quite enlightening. I also found myself to be, by the time I got there, in full agreement with the conclusion. Which I'm quoting.

In an age where people around the world want to avoid war and to focus instead on the climate chaos that threatens future life on earth, NATO is an anachronism. It now accounts for about three-quarters of military spending and weapons dealing around the globe. Instead of preventing war, it promotes militarism, exacerbates global tensions and makes war more likely. This Cold War relic shouldn’t be reconfigured to maintain U.S. domination in Europe, or to mobilize against Russia or China, or to launch new wars in space. It should not be expanded, but disbanded. Seventy years of militarism is more than enough. - Truthdig

Another back door effort to privatize the VA

Yes, the attacks on Veterans Administration services being a public good are ongoing. Though you have to look around quite a bit, to find out about that.

The influence of health care industry interests and ideological groups like the Koch-backed Concerned Veterans for America was on full display (two weeks ago), when a hearing of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs (HVAC) considered legislation to deal with the vexing problem of veteran suicide. Before, during, and after the hearing, Republicans launched a series of attacks on the integrity of the committee’s Democratic Chairman Mark Takano of California, who has dared to question a Trump administration bill that would further outsource veteran care to the private sector.

The bill, deceptively titled the Improve Well-Being for Veterans Act, would, in the name of reducing veteran suicide, fund millions in grants to a plethora of private-sector providers outside the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) networks. These providers would be tasked with conducting outreach; helping with social support and delivering outpatient mental health treatment; and potentially other types of medical care, to the highest-risk veterans. 

While not a massive privatization measure like the VA Mission Act, the Improve Act is arguably more dangerous, as it begins paying for health care services for veterans and their families in the private sector, without pre-authorization or oversight by the VHA. - The American Prospect