Trump's USDA is something else

A very bad something else.

The Department of Agriculture (USDA) has doubled down on its refusal to let schools serve free meals to all students this fall—despite rising food insecurity and pleas from anti-hunger advocates, school nutrition officials, and lawmakers...

Then in March, as the economy contracted and unemployment soared, USDA issued regulatory waivers permitting all schools to serve free breakfast and lunch to all children, including those not of school-age or enrolled in private institutions. School nutrition officials welcomed the move, which allowed many districts to serve as de facto hunger relief organizations within their communities. USDA said that initial waivers were possible thanks to a boost in funding from the Families First coronavirus relief bill, but that it needed another infusion of cash to extend them.

This means that schools will soon have to begin charging for meals again and tracking meal debt among kids who can’t pay. - The Counter

Update: A bunch of Republicans, including Rep. Jim Hagedorn (R-MN), signed on to a letter asking the USDA to reconsider. They are however apparently making little, if any, effort to see that more money is forthcoming.

Update #2: Schools will now be allowed to offer free lunch to everyone, "as funding allows."

MN-04: McCollum seeks to block annexation

At least she, and some other electeds, have some integrity and humanity on this.

Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN) has introduced legislation that condemns the Israeli government’s proposed annexation of the West Bank and blocks any U.S. aid that would potentially be used to fund it.

The Israeli Annexation Non-Recognition Act is endorsed by over 30 progressive organizations and is cosponsored by six other Democratic House members: Reps. Rashida Tlaib (MI), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY), Ayanna Pressley (MA), Ilhan Omar (MN), Mark Pocan (WI), and Andre Carson (IN).

“I want Palestinians and Israelis to have their human rights respected, their right to self-determination realized, and a future with peace, security, equality, and justice,” said McCollum in a statement,  “Annexation is antithetical to these goals and will fuel instability, injustice, and an abhorrent system of apartheid. This is an intolerable outcome for Palestinians, Israelis, and Americans. I reject Israeli annexation. I condemn annexation. And I will work to ensure the U.S. does not support, defend, or legitimize any plan to illegally annex Palestinian lands.” - Mondoweiss

The facts about jobs moving elsewhere under Trump

Everything about this guy, and his administration, and contemporary right-wing conservatism, is such BS that so much just gets lost in the muck.

While the Trump administration has claimed that the era of U.S. offshoring is “over,” the reality is that the United States has not begun to address the root causes of America’s growing trade deficits and the decline of American manufacturing. Decades of trade, currency, and tax policies that incentivized offshoring, combined with an utter failure to invest adequately in infrastructure and good jobs at home, have contributed to growing inequality and an eroding middle class.

President Trump’s erratic, ego-driven, and inconsistent trade policies have not achieved any measurable progress, despite the newly combative rhetoric. On top of that, COVID-19—and the administration’s mismanagement of the crisis—has wiped out much of the last decade’s job gains in U.S. manufacturing.

Unless steps are taken now—to reform our trade policy, to curb dollar overvaluation, to eliminate tax incentives for offshoring, and to rebuild the domestic economy—there won’t be a comeback. - Economic Policy Institute

Mega-humiliation for Trump on Iran

As something of an aside, I've never really bought the claim of the U.S. as the "leader of the free world," past or present. Among other things we've always been more a plutocracy than a democracy. Though it's not as if a true democracy has really existed, yet, anywhere. But getting back on point:

On Friday, the United Nations Security Council took up a resolution presented by US ambassador to the UN, Kelly Craft, aimed at an indefinite extension of the UN arms embargo on Iran. Only one of the 15 members, the Dominican Republic, supported the US resolution. Eleven abstained. And two–Russia and China, voted against it. The resolution would have needed 8 to pass and would have needed to avoid a veto by one of the five permanent members.

But it failed by 13 to 2. China and Russia did not even have to brandish a veto. It is hard to remember another vote on which the US was humiliated quite this badly, though if George W. Bush had actually pursued a UNSC authorization for his Iraq War in spring of 2003, he might have similarly gone down to epochal diplomatic defeat.

Let us underline this. The most powerful countries in the world and the current representatives of the main global blocs just sided with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei against Donald J. Trump.

The United States is no longer the leader of the free world. - Informed Comment

Alternatives to voting by mail

Trump is astonishingly stupid, and going after the Post Office months before the election, giving public outrage ample time to build, is yet another indicator of that. That said, here's something to consider, given current reality.

But there are always ways to wade around pond scum like Trump and his cronies. Here are four ways you can cast your ballot this election that will cut out Trump’s possible sabotage. - Daily Kos

Of course Trump & Co. have no problem with people going hungry

So far it doesn't look like they're going to back down on this.

The Agriculture Department (USDA) is restricting key flexibility in SNAP (food stamps) that the President and Congress gave states in the Families First Act of March to help them manage an applications influx due to COVID-19 and the recession — saying states must return to “normal operations,” even though current circumstances are anything but normal.

SNAP responded quickly, as it’s designed to do, to the sharp rise in unemployment and food insecurity, especially among households with children. Caseloads jumped by more than 6 million people or about 17 percent nationally between February and May, as household incomes fell precipitously. SNAP could manage this unprecedented increase largely because Families First allowed USDA to let states temporarily change their SNAP procedures to make it easier for people to receive food assistance while state SNAP agencies operate remotely.

...as COVID-19 hot spots continue to flare up and some areas that began reopening reverse course, individual states continue to see rising need for SNAP. States that may have hoped the crush of SNAP applications was temporary are now planning for a long period of increased need while facing budget shortfalls and long-term economic uncertainty. - Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

Minneapolis's sanctuary movement

This article is some righteous, heavy shit.

Both Southside Harm Reduction and the Sanctuary movement are based in the belief that communities are already best equipped to care for and protect one another. In contrast to the non-profit model, in which decisions are often made by people outside the communities ostensibly being served, trust and relationships are built over time, and people are given the resources to build their own futures. “There’s something about having to explain yourself to somebody to get what you need that, and I’ve experienced this, feels really degrading,” Tina Monje, a member of Southside told me. “To say, ‘This is how in need I am.’ It’s like having to justify your need for life.” What was special about the Wall, Martin said, was that it was supported by residents of Little Earth, many of whom were relatives of those who were living outside. “People would just come and hang out, and it was no different from just having a neighbor,” he said. The goal, he said, is to support people in the ways they want to support each other.

The housing-deprived, often by necessity, model values that racial capitalism would rather deny: community, care, cooperation. “We aren’t the ones who are choosing to inject safer, we aren’t the ones who, 99.9 percent of the time, are injecting Naloxone and reversing overdoses—it’s the people that we’re seeing,” Martin said. “That is mutual aid, and that needs to be supported.” It’s an example of the communal care—encompassing practices like the AIM patrols that began in the sixties and were continued during the recent uprisings, or the social programs of the Black Panthers—that has long been practiced by marginalized groups. When considering this country’s history of brutal dislocations in protection of whiteness; when considering the forced separations of family and neighbors through chattel slavery, reservations, boarding schools, mass incarceration, immigration detention, foster care, evictions, and encampment sweeps; when considering all this, it seems possible that holding your people close in a world that would destroy you is the most revolutionary thing someone can do. - The Baffler

Effort to screw police reform, per education "reform", in Minneapolis

You won't see anything like this, in the Minnesota metro's corporate media.

In June, a competing vision of police reform had been on the table in Minneapolis. Just as community-led initiatives were gaining traction, Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo announced in June that his department would be using “real-time data” to overhaul its operations.

The work would be driven not by local grassroots groups, but instead by a Chicago-based company called Benchmark Analytics. Chief Arradondo announced on June 10 that the Minneapolis Police Department “would contract with Benchmark Analytics to identify problematic behavior early,” according to local NBC affiliate KARE 11...

The push to bring in Benchmark Analytics was not the first time either (former Mayor R.T.) Rybak or the Minneapolis Foundation has attempted to use power and wealth to push privatization plans on city residents—even though they often claim they are acting on behalf of marginalized people of color.

For evidence of how this approach can fail the public, look no further than the Minneapolis Public Schools, where a similar cast of characters and strategies have already been used to shake up the district’s schools. These “reform” efforts took Minneapolis schools down a failed path, and they stand as a warning sign of how attempts to rehabilitate police forces, in Minneapolis and elsewhere, can be subject to the same sort of misguided thinking and exploitation by opportunists. - Sarah Lahm/LA Progressive

Protest highlights Cargill's awfulness

When asked to name a company that embodies all that's wrong with Big Ag, most progressives would probably name Monsanto, because it gets the most attention in media in general (and because Neil Young put it in an album title). Others are little, if at all, better - including Minnesota's own.

Cargill, which trades in agricultural commodities like soybeans, buys from farmers all over the world, including the ones razing forests to make way for farm fields. This is especially troubling in Brazil, simultaneously the world’s top exporter of soybeans and home to most of the Amazon rainforest. Slash-and-burn farming in Brazil has already destroyed a fifth of the Amazon. Last year, it contributed to wildfires that consumed 2.2 million acres.

In 2014, Cargill signed on to the United Nations' New York Declaration on Forests, pledging to stop purchasing products grown on deforested land by the end of 2020. That deadline is just around the corner, and the company’s not going to make it. Last year, after receiving corporate sustainability awards and conciliatory praise from environmental groups, Cargill announced it would actually give itself until 2030 to stop sourcing from deforesters. By then, more than half of the Amazon would be lost, according to the World Wildlife Fund. - City Pages