A farmer's look at Ag policy

This is by a retired dairy farmer. Most of it has to do with the massive red flags raised by the pick of Tom Vilsack as Ag Secretary. I'm quoting the concluding paragraphs, which suggest that all is not lost by any means.

In a Sep­tem­ber inter­view, Mr. Vil­sack (at the time an advis­er to the Biden cam­paign) said ​“I don’t think most farm­ers want gov­ern­ment pay­ments,” not­ing a ​“need for new poli­cies that sup­port a more resilient farm sec­tor.” Under a Biden admin­is­tra­tion, he added, ​“the USDA could set up region­al food-sup­ply mar­kets and direct fed­er­al incen­tives to farm­ers who adopt cli­mate-friend­ly prac­tices.” Right on!

Let’s give Vil­sack cred­it for embrac­ing that kind of think­ing. And let’s lift up the idea of a just food sys­tem, feed our­selves, pay our farm­ers and farm work­ers fair­ly and pay every­one else a fair wage — as Bernie Sanders says, ​“a min­i­mum of 15 bucks an hour.” Let’s admit that forc­ing over-pro­duc­tion of dairy, or any com­mod­i­ty, on the world mar­ket is a los­ing game. If folks like Rogue Riv­er and oth­ers can export their spe­cial­ties, more pow­er to ​‘em.

Ricar­do Sal­vadore at Union of Con­cerned Sci­en­tists stressed that ​“any change in admin­is­tra­tion is an oppor­tu­ni­ty to strike in a new direc­tion. So, obvi­ous­ly, going back to a [USDA] sec­re­tary of the past is not the way to strike in a new direc­tion. That is sta­tus quo.”

Giv­en a sec­ond chance, will Tom Vil­sack be that ​“some­one with vision for a just food sys­tem” that Joe Maxwell hoped for, some­one who will Build Back Bet­ter, or will it be ​“déjà vu all over again”? The fate of farm­ers, rur­al com­mu­ni­ties and our food sys­tem depends on the answer. - In These Times

This has an interview with the new Chair of the House Ag Committee, Rep. David Scott (D-GA).

More, and more successful, strikes in 2020

This article is a solid, comprehensive look at where things are at.

Like every other social movement in the U.S. this year, the compounding crises of 2020 proved a catalyzing force for the labor movement, compelling essential and frontline workers to join picket lines to ensure basic protections and increased pay as they continue to face disproportionate risks and increasingly perilous working conditions amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

But essential workers weren’t the only sector on strike this year: Prisoners and tenants across the country also withheld their labor and rent to fight for their fundamental human right to life and housing. Building momentum after major strike waves in 2018 and 2019, 2020 has cemented the strike’s resurgence as a crucial tactic for workers and organizers not only in the U.S. but around the world. - Truthout

The pandemic is costing some way more than others

It's the same deal in Minnesota, as everywhere else.

When it comes to the front lines of the pandemic, Asian women, Native American women, and Black women are disproportionately employed in high-risk essential health care, retail, and service jobs in Minnesota, according to researchers at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs.

At the same time, pandemic-related layoffs have disproportionately affected women, Native Americans, and Blacks, compared to other groups. And differences in demographic composition across jobs categories and industries explain only a fraction of these job losses.

New research published by the Center on Women, Gender, and Public Policy this week highlights the ways that different groups of workers were unequally impacted as the pandemic tightened its grip on Minnesota over the spring and summer months. - Humphrey School of Public Affairs

Monsanto needs to be crushed

First, though, I'm noting that the fervent, eloquent tsunami of criticism of Tom Vilsack as the pick for Ag Secretary is entirely valid. Lost in that is that Rep. David Scott (D-GA) is the pick to replace Rep. Collin Peterson (D-MN) as chair of the House Ag Committee. He's saying, or rather posting, the right things.

“I will use this critical opportunity to represent the values of our entire caucus and advance our priorities for trade, disaster aid, climate change, sustainable agriculture, SNAP, crop insurance, small family farms, specialty crops, and rural broadband,” - Black Enterprise

Getting back to the title, Rep. Scott needs to set his sights on the likes of this.

This real­i­ty is what Mon­san­to was count­ing on when it launched dicam­ba-tol­er­ant crops, an inves­ti­ga­tion by the Mid­west Cen­ter for Inves­tiga­tive Report­ing found.

Monsanto’s new sys­tem was sup­posed to be the future of farm­ing, pro­vid­ing farm­ers with a suite of seeds and chem­i­cals that could com­bat more and more weeds that were becom­ing hard­er to kill.

Instead, the system’s roll­out has led to mil­lions of acres of crop dam­age across the Mid­west and South; wide­spread tree death in many rur­al com­mu­ni­ties, state parks and nature pre­serves; and an unprece­dent­ed lev­el of strife in the farm­ing world.

Exec­u­tives from Mon­san­to and BASF, a Ger­man chem­i­cal com­pa­ny that worked with Mon­san­to to launch the sys­tem, knew their dicam­ba weed killers would cause large-scale dam­age to fields across the Unit­ed States but decid­ed to push them on unsus­pect­ing farm­ers any­way, in a bid to cor­ner the soy­bean and cot­ton markets. - In These Times

How to deal with pandemic profiteering

For anyone who doesn't have his head permanently up the billionaires' butts, this makes complete sense.

America's 651 billionaires have gained so much wealth during the coronavirus pandemic that they could fully pay for one-time $3,000 stimulus checks for every person in the United States and still be better off than they were before the crisis.

That's according to new research released Wednesday by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), groups that have been tracking the "pandemic profits" of U.S. billionaires since mid-March.

In the nearly nine-month period between March 18 and December 7, American billionaires gained more than $1 trillion in wealth as people across the U.S. lost their jobs, their businesses, their homes, and their lives to the pandemic. The collective net worth of U.S. billionaires now sits just above $4 trillion—nearly double the combined wealth owned by the bottom 50% of the American population. - Common Dreams

Worse than Betsy DeVos, for public schools?

Believe it or not, such a thing is possible.

When a Biden victory in the 2020 presidential election became certain, supporters of public education gleefully took to social media to say good riddance to U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. DeVos came into office with an agenda to further the privatization of public education by expanding charter schools and by encouraging families to opt out of public schools by any means possible. During her tenure, she effectively used her bully pulpit to cheer on efforts by Republican state lawmakers to expand various forms of voucher programs that give parents public money to homeschool their children or send them to private schools. She awarded many of the nation's largest charter school chains with millions in federal funding, and she used the pandemic as an opportunity to redirect emergency funds for public schools to private schools and internet-based instruction—all the while refusing to even visit struggling public schools.

Biden is expected to oppose voucher programs and limit the growth of the charter school industry. But despite the promising prospect of a transition from DeVos to a Biden administration, progressive public school advocates can't afford to overlook a threat to democratically governed schools that preceded DeVos and will continue when she is long gone.

In midsized metropolitan areas like Indianapolis and Stockton, California, parents, teachers, and public school advocates warn of huge sums of money coming from outside their communities to influence local politics and bankroll school board candidates who support school privatization. In phone conversations, emails, and texts, they point to a national agenda, backed by deep-pocketed organizations and individuals who intend to disrupt local school governance in order to impose forms of schools that operate like private contractors rather than public agencies—an agenda not dissimilar from that of DeVos. - Jeff Bryant/AlterNet

Will farmers get a better deal?

Yesterday I had occasion to take a back roads drive, mostly through Benton and Morrison Counties. Plenty of country folks are still displaying their Trump signs and flags. None of my business, what they put in their yards.

A farm economy awash in an unprecedented infusion of public dollars directed by the Trump administration could face a reckoning soon. Close to $40 billion in agriculture-related payments this year mask structural problems in a badly broken market that doesn’t pay most farmers enough to continue farming. New leadership in the White House and congressional agriculture committees should act to fix a policy framework that has greatly benefited global grain and meat companies at the expense of farmers before these ad hoc Trump payments disappear.

The massive public payments over the last three years help conceal how little farmers have made from the market. The USDA projects median farm income in 2020 will be $934, up from $296 in 2019. Median farm income has been negative from 1996 through 2018. Farm debt is forecast to rise to a record $433 billion in 2020, according to the Congressional Research Service. The farm asset to debt ratio is up 14%, the highest since 2003 after rising steadily over the last eight years. Approximately 8% of loans are in poor condition, double the rate in 2014, according to the Farm Credit Council.

It is off-farm jobs, often coming with a health care plan, that keep most farm families going. - IATP

Will anything change about America's Forever Wars?

This is something of a downer, but I have to do what I can to amplify it anyway, because it's a critical issue.

In this mystifying moment, the post-electoral sentiments of most Americans can be summed up either as “Ding dong! The witch is dead!” or “We got robbed!” Both are problematic, not because the two candidates were intellectually indistinguishable or ethically equivalent, but because each jingle is laden with a dubious assumption: that President Donald Trump’s demise would provide either decisive deliverance or prove an utter disaster.

While there were indeed areas where his ability to cause disastrous harm lent truth to such a belief -- race relations, climate change, and the courts come to mind -- in others, it was distinctly (to use a dangerous phrase) overkill. Nowhere was that more true than with America’s expeditionary version of militarism, its forever wars of this century, and the venal system that continues to feed it.

For nearly two years, We the People were coached to believe that the 2020 election would mean everything, that November 3rd would be democracy’s ultimate judgment day. What if, however, when it comes to issues of war, peace, and empire, “Decision 2020” proves barely meaningful? After all, in the election campaign just past, Donald Trump’s sweeping war-peace rhetoric and Joe Biden’s hedging aside, neither nuclear-code aspirant bothered to broach the most uncomfortable questions about America’s uniquely intrusive global role. Neither dared dissent from normative notions about America’s posture and policy “over there,” nor challenge the essence of the war-state, a sacred cow if ever there was one. - TomDispatch

Who Biden picks as trade representative will say a lot

This article is a really good overview.

For several presidencies, including those of Obama and Clinton, the U.S. trade representative has been keeper of the orthodoxy. U.S. policies ignored the fate of domestic manufacturing. Instead, they pursued a brand of globalism by and for multinational corporations, especially financial ones.

Biden’s USTR nominee will signal whether he is serious about rebuilding U.S. industry and jobs. - The American Prospect

Pandemic profiteering should be a much bigger story

A lot of people seem to be just resigned to this. A lot of others apparently honestly believe that backing the likes of Trump is the way to change it. It's all really unfortunate.

As over a thousand people in the U.S. alone die each day during the deadliest pandemic in a century, plutocrats and their businesses are thriving like never before, in no small part due to a system rife with profiteering, opportunism, and worker exploitation. So says the report, entitled Billionaire Wealth vs. Community Health: Protecting Essential Workers from Pandemic Profiteers, which focuses on 12 of the most egregious pandemic profiteers—the "Delinquent Dozen"—who include the owners of Walmart and the CEOs of Amazon and Target.

These companies and their owners and executives have benefited from their "monopoly positions," the report states, but their success "hasn't translated into better pay or safer working conditions for the employees showing up to work in a pandemic." - Common Dreams

Look forward, and back, and investigate, and indict

I don’t expect President-elect Biden to make it all about investigating and prosecuting Trump and Trumpers, either. But he can do nothing better for this country than anything that advances the political destruction of right-wing conservatism. Full accountability, no mercy.

In some ways, it makes perfect sense that Biden doesn't want his entire presidency consumed by probes into Trump, his minions, and an inevitable cycle of recriminations. But Donald Trump so misused and abused the federal government that his entire tenure represents an assault on American democracy itself, not to mention a series of crimes against humanity, ranging from literally ripping children away from their parents and caging them to intentionally slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Americans through coronavirus denialism and weaponization of disinformation.

For those reasons, Trump and those who did his bidding must be held to account through both criminal inquiries and uncovering information that could mar the reputations of certain individuals for life. This is absolutely critical to preserving the integrity of our republic moving forward. Using the U.S. government to commit crimes against humanity cannot be tolerated at any level.

Biden can preach unity all he wants, but it is incumbent upon the incoming administration to make it glaringly clear that efforts to subvert our democracy and use the federal government for malign political purposes carry with them a steep cost for everyone involved. This is a fundamental part of safeguarding our democracy. Otherwise, the next autocrat—who will surely be far more competent than Trump—won't think twice before trodding the same paths Trump did, but with greater efficacy and fervor. - Daily Kos

Undoing disastrous Trump farm/food policies

A very informative and helpful guide.

In January 2021, President-elect Biden will have the opportunity to roll back the rollbacks, to re-regulate the de-regulated. These are changes he can make without the aid of Congress; Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell may slow down the process of confirming his Secretary of Agriculture, but his reach doesn’t extend to the rulemaking process.

In many cases, Biden won’t have to do much to ensure the Trump administration’s most controversial food and farming policies never see the light of day. In others, he’ll need to go to court or issue executive orders. Still more will require Congressional action or a lengthy rulemaking process.

Here’s your guide to the Trump administration’s signature rollbacks—and our predictions on their survival in 2021. - The Counter

President-elect Biden needs to follow through on Yemen

What better way to get started, than to get going on ending a crime against humanity?

One thing Biden can do, start­ing on day one, is end U.S. involve­ment in the Yemen war — involve­ment that he helped ini­ti­ate. ​“By exec­u­tive order, Biden could get the Pen­ta­gon to end intel­li­gence shar­ing for the Sau­di coali­tion airstrikes, end logis­ti­cal sup­port, and end spare parts trans­fers that keep Sau­di war­planes in the air,” Has­san El-Tayyab, lead Mid­dle East pol­i­cy lob­by­ist for the Friends Com­mit­tee on Nation­al Leg­is­la­tion, a pro­gres­sive orga­ni­za­tion, tells In These Times. ​“He could restore human­i­tar­i­an assis­tance to north­ern Yemen. He could use his pow­er as pres­i­dent to put pres­sure on oth­er nations that are sup­port­ing the Sau­di coali­tion — like France, the Unit­ed King­dom and Cana­da — and get them to fol­low suit. He could have the State Depart­ment put a stop on all arms sales to Sau­di Ara­bia unless they meet cer­tain benchmarks.” - In These Times

The best boot-on-Trump's-ass rant I've seen yet

There are a lot of progressives who write with high excellence. Three of my favorites (though they're stylistically quite different from one another), at national websites, are David Dayen at The American Prospect, William Rivers Pitt at Truthout, and Hunter at Daily Kos.

Most importantly, we must look forward, not back. Instead of dwelling on the past, we should instead dwell on the clusterf--k that will be the future if Trump's unending list of white nationalists, professional liars, and eager criminals does not receive our public revulsion, our contempt, and the fullest possible prosecutions. Our nation depends on coming together, here and now, to wipe every last incompetent Republican sycophant from our politics and our televisions.

This means all those that stood by Trump, as he careened through our "norms" and revealed us to be an autocracy in waiting. The pundits. The Republican lawmakers. The "conservative" think tankers. The appointees. Every last one of them has betrayed this nation, has shown themselves to be supporters of even this, and the damage done has been incalculable. It is unforgivable. There is no possible repentance. They must be purged—or the next Republican autocrat may be successful where this incompetent, addled fart of a man was not. - Daily Kos

Military basically says if Trump orders them to do something crazy, they won't

I think that's pretty clear, here. The article spins it a little differently.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley held an off-the-record video call with top generals and network anchors this weekend to tamp down speculation about potential military involvement in the presidential election, two people familiar with the call tell Axios.

Why it matters: The nation's top military official set up Saturday's highly unusual call to make clear that the military's role is apolitical, one of the sources said — and to dispel any notion of a role for the military in adjudicating a disputed election or making any decision around removing a president from the White House. - Axios

More indicators that the end of Big Oil could be sooner than people think

I find myself wondering whether vulture funds and the like will try to get involved. Or already are.

But the pandemic has had a material impact, hastening Exxon’s decline, but the company has been gliding downward for years. Part of its problem has been doubling down on oil, which has made the economy hum along for decades (thanks in part to Exxon’s aforementioned lying). A Carbon Tracker analysis released on Wednesday shows the company’s investment in exploration and resource- and carbon-intensive projects played a role in Exxon’s decline since 2014. The report notes investors “would have been better off putting their cash under the mattress” over the past six years. Climate change means the world needs to rapidly sunset the use of oil or face unspeakable horrors, and will further constrain Exxon’s future as long as it focuses on oil as its main means of making money.

Exxon is hardly alone in layoffs, though its overall totals are among the steepest in the industry. Earlier this year, BP announced it would lay off 10,000 workers as it transition to an “energy” company, a new fresh hell of greenwashing. At the time, the CEO called it the “right thing” to do. With the end of oil now coming up over the horizon, it’s more vital than ever to have a plan for affected workers who are about to or already are losing their livelihoods. - Gizmodo

How Trump's SCOTUS is paid for

Disgraceful, that this is legal, and happens. And imagine the freakouts on the right, and the corporate media attention, if progressives did this kind of shit.

A close informal advisor to President Trump who has been deeply involved in all three of his Supreme Court nomination battles is the sole trustee of a mysterious group that brought in more than $80 million in 2018, according to a previously unreported tax return uncovered by CREW. The filing vastly expands the amount of money known to be flowing into the growing constellation of dark money groups tied to Federalist Society co-chairman Leonard Leo and provides new details about his role in a secretive firm that was responsible for one of the largest donations received by President Trump’s inaugural committee.

What makes Rule of Law Trust (RLT) particularly interesting is that despite its $80 million haul, the group seems remarkably hollow. It claimed it had no employees and no volunteers in its first year and listed what appears to be a virtual office in Virginia as its main address. Its stated mission is “to advance conservative principles and causes through communications, research, strategy and assistance to other organizations,” but there’s no apparent public information to demonstrate what that work entails, not even a website. - CREW

Trumpers are burying clean energy studies

I don't know whether President-to-be Biden will be able to quickly reverse a lot of what Trump has done by blanket executive orders and the like, or whether it will have to be an arduous, one-at-a-time process.

In all, the DOE has blocked reports for more than 40 clean energy studies. The department has replaced them with mere presentations, buried them in scientific journals that are not accessible to the public, or left them paralyzed within the agency, according to emails and documents obtained by InvestigateWest, as well as interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees at the Energy Department and its national labs.

Bottling up and slow-walking studies is already harming efforts to fight climate change, according to clean-energy experts and others, because Energy Department reports drive investment decisions. Entrepreneurs worry that the agency’s practices under the current White House will ultimately hurt growth prospects for U.S.-developed technology. - InvestigateWest/Grist

Young voters have little use for Trump and Republicans

You have to click the link, and check out the "18-34" box, to get the gist.

There are only five states in the U.S. where voters younger than 35 embrace President Trump over Joe Biden, and none are swing states, according to new 50-state SurveyMonkey-Tableau data for Axios... The data also serves as a warning for the Republican Party in nearly every state as it looks beyond one presidential contest. - Axios

I'm not the biggest believer in SurveyMonkey polling. But this is actually just another dump into a sea of data confirming how progressive young voters are. My own take is that we'll know after 2022 if we can start counting on young'ns to turn out, in every election, in numbers large enough to make a big difference. They did in 2018, and very likely are doing so this year, and that's encouraging.

U.S. trade policy is frankly in turmoil

This is actually a pretty comprehensive look at where we're at.

The picture that emerges is complex. Even critics of the administration said that Lighthizer had a point when he argued that the gentler tactics of his predecessors had not been effective. And they acknowledge that the once-obscure USTR is more powerful than it’s ever been, its mission reoriented from easing corporate investment barriers overseas to erecting hurdles that might force those companies to keep jobs in America after decades of manufacturing decline.

Along the way, Lighthizer has bent the rules of the international trading system and thrown businesses into turmoil as they race to comply with changes to import costs. He’s ruptured international relationships, maintained tariffs on $350 billion worth of imports, and constructed a series of piecemeal and delicate agreements with trading partners that are as good as the next president’s dedication to enforcing them.

So far, the promised benefits of this upheaval are hard to see. The gap between American imports and exports of goods is as big as it’s ever been, while manufacturing output and job growth flatlined in 2019. To the extent that manufacturers have pulled out of China, they’ve shifted to countries like Vietnam and Mexico, rather than set up factories in the U.S. And Lighthizer has failed to achieve his most ambitious goals, as a tempestuous president’s abrupt twists and turns sabotaged the patient, insistent approach on which his trade representative had built his reputation. - ProPublica

Public opinion has come around on climate change

Would that said public opinion actually has much to do with driving policy. Poll after poll, year after year, shows strong public support, often 2:1 or better, for progressive policies like strong environmental protections, reproductive choice, making the thieving, parasitic rich man pay up, etc., etc. But it's so much easier to block positive, lasting change, than it is to make it happen.

Today, the Alarmed (26%) outnumber the Dismissive (7%) nearly 4 to 1. More than half (54%) of Americans are either Alarmed or Concerned, while the Doubtful and Dismissive are only 18% of the population. However, because conservative media organizations prominently feature Dismissive politicians, pundits and industry officials, most Americans overestimate the prevalence of Dismissive beliefs among other Americans. - Yale Program on Climate Change Communication

The IEA is sanguine about solar

This has to piss off Big Filthy Fossil Fuels, whether they'll admit it or not.

Solar output is expected to lead a surge in renewable power supply in the next decade, the International Energy Agency said, with renewables seen accounting for 80% of growth in global electricity generation under current conditions.

In its annual World Energy Outlook on Tuesday, the IEA said in its central scenario - which reflects policy intentions and targets already announced - renewables are expected to overtake coal as the primary means of producing electricity by 2025. - Reuters

Debt collectors are more than making up for lost time

With bloated, entitled parasites so dependent on a system of debt servitude, what else could you expect?

In recent months, the only real bad news for debt buyers was that local courts across the country temporarily shut down. Debt collection lawsuits provide a key source of revenue for the companies, a way to extract payment from consumers, typically low-income, who don’t offer it up.

But now even that hiccup is over. After a bit of a lull in the spring, Encore and other debt buyers are back at it, filing suits by the thousands every week, according to ProPublica’s analysis of state court filings. - ProPublica

Trump EPA shenanigans will be a public health and environmental disaster

An even more right-wing SCOTUS will make this all that much harder to try to fix.

The Covid-19 pan­dem­ic has ush­ered in a wave of wor­ri­some and need­less reg­u­la­to­ry relax­ations that have increased pol­lu­tion across the Unit­ed States. Recent report­ing by the Asso­ci­at­ed Press and oth­er out­lets has doc­u­ment­ed more than 3,000 pan­dem­ic-based requests from pol­luters to state agen­cies and the U.S. Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency for waivers of envi­ron­men­tal require­ments. Numer­ous state gov­ern­ments, with the tac­it encour­age­ment of the EPA, went along with many of those requests. All too often, those waivers — request­ed, osten­si­bly, to pro­tect Amer­i­can work­ers from expo­sure to the coro­n­avirus — were grant­ed with lit­tle or no review, notwith­stand­ing the risks the result­ing emis­sions posed to pub­lic health and the environment…

These reg­u­la­to­ry fail­ures have occurred against the back­drop of a steady decline in both fed­er­al and state envi­ron­men­tal enforce­ment. The num­bers of gov­ern­ment sci­en­tists and attor­neys whose work focus­es on enforc­ing envi­ron­men­tal laws has dropped sig­nif­i­cant­ly in recent years. There have also been sub­stan­tial decreas­es in the num­bers of in-per­son gov­ern­ment inspec­tions of pol­lu­tion sources, the vol­ume of enforce­ment actions pur­sued, the num­ber of envi­ron­men­tal crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tions, and the amount of mon­ey that pol­luters have been com­pelled to spend on pol­lu­tion con­trol as a direct result of enforce­ment activ­i­ties. EPA has all but aban­doned its long­stand­ing over­sight of state enforce­ment work. And the fed­er­al agency has craven­ly deferred to state enforce­ment (or nonen­force­ment) pri­or­i­ties, even though quite a few states lack the resources and/​or polit­i­cal will to effec­tive­ly enforce envi­ron­men­tal standards.

Howls of protest and a fed­er­al law­suit prompt­ed EPA to ter­mi­nate its Covid pol­i­cy as of Aug. 31. But too much dam­age has already been done. - In These Times

The best take I've seen on Trump's taxes

Getting into the psychology.

If Trump loses this election, he loses his access to the spigot of federal money he’s using to hose down his inferno of debt, and his personal financial Armageddon is only a few scant years away.

If that happens, Trump would have no money to pay the kind of lawyers he will need to keep a roof over his head. His humiliation before the world would be complete and absolute, and that, right there, is the fate he has manifestly dreaded for the term of his life.

That is what Trump is fighting to avoid on November 3. Not so much for the money or the freedom, but to avoid the disgrace. A man with such a towering yet fragile ego, in possession of awesome political powers, now faces a final confrontation with what appears to be his greatest fear: shame. - Truthout

The activists where George Floyd was murdered

This is about people who have been gathering there, and what they want. I think it may have been Howard Zinn who said something to the effect that whenever you get really down in the dumps, that nothing good seems to be happening, remember all the activists who are still out there every day, working for a better world.

At 8:15 a.m. at George Floyd Square, 16 people — mostly women — are perched on chairs, benches and couches in between the idled pumps at the Speedway, which is covered in graffiti and serves as a gathering space now.

They have met twice a day, every day, since Floyd died on the street under a cop’s knee just steps away.

Meet on the Street, they call it...

After Floyd died and protests erupted in Minneapolis, and then spread across the globe, the city put up cement barricades about a block from the scene in every direction to keep mourners safe. It’s proving much more difficult to remove those barricades, however. These community activists are demanding something new after decades of mass incarceration, which followed a century of Jim Crow, which followed centuries more of slavery. - Minnesota Reformer

10 Days Free From Violence 2020

The virtual event starts tomorrow. You can check things out at twincitiesnonviolent.org. (Sorry, hyperlinks don't appear to be working yet, in the "New Blogger" platform.)

You might be a democrat or a republican. We won’t be distracted by that.

You might be for guns or against guns. We won’t be distracted by that.

We also won’t be distracted by your race, your religion, your sexual orientation, who you voted for, your views on healthcare and taxes, whether you own a home or how much money you have in your bank account.

The one thing we’re committed to is stopping violence. Violence in all forms, structures and systems.

Trump has also expressed scorn and contempt for evangelicals, plenty of times

I personally know at least three die-hard Trumpers who respond to everything like this with "But he's just joking!" That's how motivated reasoning works.

Trump loathes Christians and mocks their faith, but pretends to believe if it suits his purposes.

In Disloyal, published (September 8, Michael) Cohen shows how Trump is a master deceiver. He quotes Trump calling Christianity and its religious practices “bullshit,” then soon after masterfully posing as a fervent believer. In truth, Cohen writes, Trump’s religion is unbridled lust for money and power at any cost to others.

Cohen’s insider stories add significant depth to my own documentation of Trump’s repeated and public denouncements of Christians as “fools,” “idiots” and “schmucks.” - DC Report

The Trump tax giveaway is exactly what many of us thought

The numbers have been crunched.

The first data showing how all Americans are faring under Donald Trump reveal the poor and working classes sinking slightly, the middle class treading water, the upper-middle class growing and the richest, well, luxuriating in rising rivers of greenbacks.

More than half of Americans had to make ends meet in 2018 on less money than in 2016, my analysis of new income and tax data shows.

The nearly 87 million taxpayers making less than $50,000 had to get by in 2018 on $307 less per household than in 2016, the year before Trump took office, I find.

That 57% of American households were better off under Obama contradicts Trump’s often-repeated claim he created the best economy ever until the pandemic. - DC Report

Charters find yet another way to screw Black communities

Distressing, if unsurprising.

The charter school industry has done much during the COVID-19 pandemic to add to systemic inequities that afflict Black communities by hijacking small business relief aid originally intended for minority-owned businesses and redirecting these funds to schools that further isolate Black families...

It’s far from clear whether charter schools actually needed the funding...

The harm charter schools may have inflicted by sopping up relief funds that could have gone to Black-owned small businesses is in addition to the industry’s already troubling track record of isolating Black communities. - Jeff Bryant/Pressenza

Trump Farmers to Families program is delivering mixed results at best

To be clear, plenty of food is getting to where it needs to be, somehow. But things would be so much better without such incompetence and corruption, starting at the top.

In reality, though, some of the program’s core promises have gone unmet. That’s due at least in part to the fact that many of the companies awarded the lucrative contracts are ill-equipped to handle food in any real quantity. Food bank operators report having to pay the bill for delivery from their own budgets, receiving boxes that are leaking or falling apart, and that arrive full of commercial-grade bags of meat with no instructions for how to prepare it.

Despite these failures, new public records reviewed by The Counter indicate that the boxes have cost well above what USDA typically pays farmers and manufacturers for food it buys for food banks and schools—and, in some cases, well above what they’re actually worth. Multiple food-aid professionals we interviewed for this story said they could provide the same service for a fraction of the price by purchasing food through their existing networks, even after accounting for the costs of cardboard, transportation, and labor. Even so, the Trump administration has doubled down on support for the program. Just last week, it announced an additional $1 billion in funding. - The Counter

The plutocrats are screwing us maybe worse than ever

Great current summary, well worth saving for reference.

When Dr. Jonas Salk was asked about a patent on his polio vaccine in 1955, he said, “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” When Gilead Sciences recently developed an anti-Covid drug for about $12 per treatment, they set the price at $3,200.

As Republicans and business leaders decry the word ‘social’ as anti-American, they continue to promote the free-market “winner take all” philosophy that has caused over half of our nation to try to survive without adequate health care and life savings and job opportunities. Our richest corporations are much to blame. A review of the facts should make this clear. - Nation of Change

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

How inexpensive can renewable energy get?

This is headlined "Offshore Wind Is on the Brink of Becoming So Cheap, the UK Will Pay People to Use It." I don't know about that, but it is an intriguing and positive read.

The fossil fuel industry and its allies love saying that renewable energy increases utility bills. But in the UK, new research shows that coming offshore wind farms could actually make bills more affordable.

In the short term, previous renewable energy projects have increased bills because they’ve been built with government subsidies. But a study published in Nature Energy on Monday found that the country’s latest approved offshore wind projects will be built so cheaply that they’ll actually be able to pay money back to the UK government. That money will go towards reducing household energy bills.

“Energy subsidies used to push up energy bills, but within a few years, cheap renewable energy will see them brought down for the first time,” Malte Jansen, research associate at the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London, said in a statement. “This is an astonishing development.” - Earther

How loathsome can the greedheads get?

Exceedingly loathsome indeed. And it needs to be made right.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed deep inequalities and massive failures in our economic system, leaving tens of millions of people in the United States without jobs, devastating public services, and bankrupting countless small businesses,” Irit Tamir, director of the private sector department at Oxfam America, said. “Yet at the same time, thanks to a combination of government assistance and pure luck, a handful of corporations are raking it in and making already rich shareholders even richer.”

“...Profit is not a four-letter word, but when such dramatic and excessive profits are made during a time of global crisis and distributed to the wealthiest, the situation is not just fundamentally unjust, it is also economically inefficient,” Niko Lusiani, senior advisor on corporate advocacy at Oxfam America, and lead author of the analysis, said. “Corporations like Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, Facebook, Pfizer, and Visa, flush with billions in pandemic profits and disproportionately benefiting from taxpayer-funded economic relief, now have the opportunity to gobble up smaller companies and deepen their market power at the expense of true competition. Taxing these windfall profits is a fair, time-tested way to rebuild better.” - Nation of Change

Whimpering, groveling servitude to the war pigs

Some may find that title offensive, but at times you just gotta tell it like it is.

Anti-war groups vowed to keep fighting to slash the bloated Pentagon budget after the House of Representatives on Tuesday rejected a proposal to cut U.S. military spending by 10% and invest the savings in housing, healthcare, and education in poor communities.

The final vote on the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) amendment sponsored by Reps. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) was 93-324, with 139 Democrats joining 185 Republicans in voting no. The failure of the Lee-Pocan amendment means the final version of the House NDAA will propose a $740.5 military budget for fiscal year 2021, a more than $2 billion increase from the previous year. - Common Dreams

What a great time to change our food system for the better

Unfortunately Big Ag, Big Meat, etc., still hold way too much political power. But there are grounds for hope.

Community groups and small enterprises have stepped up during the pandemic, utilising their networks to look after the vulnerable, and generally strengthening the fabric of social safety nets. This has happened despite years of cuts.

Organisations and initiatives, are going beyond their original purposes to deliver services and care, including food. Community supported agriculture schemes, food banks, and food hubs can do this because they are already networked locally and can rely on emergency helpers. Their adaptability means they are fleet-footed, and capable of picking up the slack of an inflexible, industrialised food system.

This is not to say that supermarkets should not be applauded for their recent actions. But they are inexorably linked to industrial agriculture systems. These pose a dual risk, potentially both triggering global crises and failing to deliver provisions. For our own welfare, we should ensure that there is more to the food landscape than industrial agriculture, large-scale processing, and mega-retail. - In These Times

Child care money crisis

Though this is potentially a huge thing, there hasn't been much about it in corporate media.

Workers in the U.S. are staring down the precipice as lawmakers fail to address the economic ravages of the pandemic. Even as some 21 million people remain unemployed, the $600 per week in additional unemployment insurance created by Congress’s coronavirus relief package, the CARES Act, is set to expire on July 31. Student debt payments will resume on October 1 for the 34 million federal student loan borrowers whose loans were suspended by CARES. But perhaps no cliff is as steep as the early care and education sector, which may be cut in half by the time the pandemic is over. To save it, the sector will need an infusion of at least $50 billion. But so far, despite how essential child care is to restarting the economy, Congress has been unwilling to meet the crisis with the resources required to stave off a crisis. - Truthout

So now, underpaid, disrespected teachers are supposed to save the economy for Trump

Potentially risking their lives in the process. It would be good if corporate media would more frequently note that Betsy DeVos and Donald Trump are remarkably ignorant, foolish people.

What’s sadly ironic about all this sudden newfound appreciation for teachers as essential to the economy is that government leaders and policy makers, from both major political parties, have spent years attacking the economic well-being of public schools and teachers.

School districts have never recovered from budget cuts states imposed during the Great Recession that started at the end of 2007. In an article for the Progressive, Nicholas Johnson from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted, “School districts have never recovered from the layoffs… [states] imposed back then. When COVID-19 hit, K-12 schools were employing 77,000 fewer teachers and other workers—even though they were teaching two million more children, and overall funding in many states was still below pre-2008 levels.”

Teachers now make 4.5 percent on average less than they did more than 10 years ago, according to the National Education Association, and public school teachers earn 17 percent less than what comparable workers earn, according to the Economic Policy Institute. - Jeff Bryant/Citizen Truth

DeVos contemplates grotesque, despicable abuse of power

If she does follow through, this would likely quickly fall to legal challenges. But that it's being considered is another indicator of what loathsome sociopaths are now running the federal executive branch.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said Tuesday that she is “very seriously” considering withholding federal funding from schools that don’t reopen in the fall...

She told (Tucker) Carlson on Tuesday that fears of coronavirus transmission from public health officials was an example of “fearmongering.” - The Hill

"If schools reopen this fall, more people will likely die. Full stop." - Truthout

Put responsibility for plastics pollution where it belongs

The misinformation, and outright propaganda, fomented by the greedheads on this issue is ubiquitous.

In the midst of a mounting plastic crisis, the biggest plastic polluters keep pushing better consumer recycling behaviors as the solution. The plastic waste problem is not going to be solved by doubling down on our efforts to educate the public to recycle better. It can be solved by policies that prevent hard-to-recycle items from ever being created and requiring producers to take responsibility for the waste their products become...

These companies have been shifting responsibility for their waste onto consumers since the 1970s by publicly blaming litterbugs and emphasizing personal responsibility to recycle while quietly squashing legislation that could actually help reduce waste, like bottle bills that would require companies to collect, reuse, or otherwise process the containers they sold. Public outcry over waste in public spaces is also not new. The mounting accumulation of packaging and disposable goods prompted more than 1,000 legislative attempts to ban, tax, or incentivize the return of disposable items in the 1970s. The beverage and packaging industry successfully spent millions of dollars fighting these regulatory efforts, saddling us with the problem of dealing with the waste their products inevitably become. If this sounds familiar, it’s because these companies have simply taken a line out of Big Tobacco and Big Oil’s playbook: addict, deny, obfuscate. - Earther

Nationalizing Big Filthy Fossil Fuels

This is an idea that’s been around for a while. In any rational, real-world context, there are a great many things to be noted in its favor, versus zero against.

For that reason, probably the best way to defeat the fossil fuel companies, at least in the U.S., is for the federal government to buy them. That would bring the companies under public scrutiny and control, which should, in turn, create a clear path for giving them more than what they actually deserve — which is a well-thought-out plan for a relatively painless death over the next 20 years or so. - Truthout

BLM uses COVID-19 cover to assault public lands

Under Trump, these sorts of things were picking up before the pandemic. (They were hardly absent under previous presidents, of both parties.) But as with much else, despicable land-use policies seem to be accelerating.

The Bureau of Land Management has spent the pandemic churning out rapacious public land projects at breakneck speed. This includes egregious grazing decisions drastically increasing livestock numbers for powerful ranchers. After complaints, Idaho BLM Director John Ruhs responded that ranching was an essential service. At the same time, an avalanche of BLM deforestation projects hit. Ely BLM’s Long and Ruby Valley Watershed Restoration EA decision arrived by certified mail, authorizing more grotesque pinyon-juniper carnage and smashed roller-beaten sagebrush across 136,000 acres of public land. That’s 213 square miles laid to waste within a nearly half million-acre landscape, plus blanket tree removal around all springs. It’s the latest in a dismal series of cookie cutter projects tearing apart the Great Basin. - CounterPunch

Brutal education job losses

You’ve probably seen that many of the billionaires have become even more glutted beyond the dreams of avarice, during the pandemic. There is a long list of far better uses to which that money should be put. If you ask me, preventing this would be #1.

It has been well documented that fiscal austerity was a catastrophe for the recovery from the Great Recession. New estimates show that without sufficient aid to state and local governments, the COVID-19 shock could lead to a revenue shortfall of nearly $1 trillion by 2021 for state and local governments. In lieu of substantial federal investments, budget cuts are certain. But I, for one, did not expect to see the losses as soon as April. As of the latest jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), state and local government employment fell by 981,000, with the vast majority of losses found in local government. And the majority of those local government losses are in the education sector, with a loss of 468,800 jobs in local public school employment alone. - EPI

Growing opposition to Israel annexation plans

Israel is the world’s 17th most crowded country. But Palestine ranks 7th, and unilateral, criminal seizure of another nation’s territory is not the way to deal with population/resource issues, or anything else, in any case.

There has been remarkable news in the last few days: much of the Israel lobby in the United States is in open revolt against the Israeli government to try and stop annexation of the West Bank.

The rightwing group AIPAC has for once given politicians a green light to criticize Israel over annexation; hardliners such as Robert Satloff, David Makovsky and Democratic Majority for Israel are urging Israel not to annex West Bank lands, and the Democratic group J Street is pushing a letter to Netanyahu signed by 28 Democratic senators saying it would “betray our shared democratic values” by denying the possibility of a Palestinian state, along with statements from nine Senate candidates. - Mondoweiss

Righteous, but at least for now it’s unlikely to be enough (read the whole Mondoweiss article). Among other things, the proposed record-sized package for Israel’s war machine probably won’t be significantly diminished, even in the U.S. House.

Meanwhile, a recent illegal settlement has been named "Trump Heights." No doubt a certain wretched, imbecilic buffoon is thrilled.

Private equity goons poised to strip-mine retirement funds

This is horrifying.

To the casual onlooker, the information letter from the Employee Benefits Security Administration reads like every other impenetrable passage of stereo instructions that fills the Federal Register -- but this was no routine piece of paperwork. The guidance to Switzerland-based investment firm Partners Group effectively changed the enforcement of federal law protecting workers’ retirement savings.

While longstanding worker-protection regulations have prevented 401k plans from investing in high-risk private equity firms, the letter now permits corporations to funnel that money to those firms, which charge notoriously giant fees. 

Trump’s administration argued that workers should feel fortunate and thankful that the administration will now let employers turn their savings over to private equity barons. - TMI 

The following is from a great overview article, about p. equity, that I read earlier this year. It’s aptly titled “Misery Makers.”

Many news outlets have published stories lately describing this destructive force, a force so powerful that it controls the livelihoods of 5.8 million employees. That’s how many people work in the thirty-five thousand companies private equity firms own in the United States. And some of those articles angrily mock what looks like the ineptness of executives, who buy a company, say they’re going to improve it, then ruin it instead. It seems like repetitious failure. But when private equity executives trot out the line that they are going to improve a company, understand that what they mean is: improve it for their own interests. And when ministrations result in the company’s collapse, understand that that’s private equity working as intended. - The Baffler

Party of Trump keeps its recession streak going

I hadn’t known, myself, off the top of my head, that the correct answer is “40 years.”

The slow and inadequate reaction to the COVID-19 crisis, and Donald Trump's continued total lack in intent in responding to it further, makes it likely it's only going to get worse. So, once again, a Democrat is going to have to clean up this mess starting in January 2021. Because fact: for the last 40 years, every recession has begun with a Republican president and ended under a Democrat's watch. - Daily Kos

The pending hunger crisis

In relative terms, that is. Given the vast quantities of overproduction and waste in our corrupt food system, any hunger, anywhere in the U.S., is a crisis that shouldn’t be happening.

A poll released by the U.S. Census Bureau (last) week revealed that at least nine million American households that include children are unsure whether they'll be able to access enough food in the next four weeks and millions more are experiencing housing insecurity during the coronavirus pandemic.

The bureau's weekly Household Pulse Survey, taken between May 14 and 19, asked respondents about their loss of employment, food security, overall health, and other issues they are facing during the pandemic. - Common Dreams

Trump finds another way to hurt renewables and foment climate change

I'm primarily looking to draw attention to the retroactive rent part. The whole article, though, is a well-documented summary of just how criminally awful the Trumpers are on all things environmental.

“Don’t waste a crisis.” This somewhat cynical political axiom has been attributed to many different people, but arguably none have exemplified it quite like President Trump and his allies. Taking advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic, they’ve ramped up efforts to dismantle environmental rules, giving away natural resources and undercut the tools of government that ordinarily allow the public to have some say in what happens to the land, water and air around them...

The Department of the Interior is making it easier for oil and gas companies to avoid making royalty payments when they drill on public lands. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), in particular, has moved to effectively give away publicly held oil by helping companies pause their leases and avoid royalty payments. 

Meanwhile, the BLM is charging retroactive rent to wind and solar energy producers, which have been decimated by the recent economic slump. Trump has a long record of antagonism toward renewable energy. - The Wilderness Society

Unconscionable Trump plans for National Guard deployments

As of this writing there appears to be a decent likelihood that Trumpers will yield to pressure from multiple places, and extend the assignments so personnel get their benefits. But the fact that this was even being considered, as the saying goes, "speaks volumes."

The more than 40,000 National Guard members deployed to states to help in coronavirus relief may end up one day short of qualifying for federal benefits under the Post-9/11 GI bill once President Trump’s executive order deploying them expires on June 24.

An official with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) said in an interagency call on May 12 reported on by Politico that the guardsmen will face a “hard stop” on June 24 to prevent them from reaching the 90 days of duty credit needed to qualify for early retirement and education benefits. - The Hill

A pending spike in small farm bankruptcies

I'm not saying this is absolutely bound to happen. Neither, actually, are the authors of this. But their rational deduction from the evidence seems to me to have a great deal of validity.

But Barber has only to look a few weeks down the road to see bad news coming. The current model won’t survive the peak summer harvest, says Barber, who for 16 years has run the farm and restaurant Blue Hill at Stone Barns, about 30 miles northeast of New York City, in addition to the 20-year-old Blue Hill, in Manhattan. Unfortunately, he has numbers to back him up. ResourcED, a project he and his colleagues created to sell market boxes at both restaurants, has launched a survey of small farmers, concentrated at first in the Northeast but expanding coast to coast. Between 30 and 40 percent of them predict that they won’t be able to keep up with increasing volume. They will lose the extra, essential revenue that always comes with a bountiful seasonal harvest. And while most of the farmers grow produce, the same dark predictions hold true for respondents who grow grain and raise animals. The current boom is a sweet illusion; the bust is coming fast.

Where do they expect this to end? Bankruptcy, from which many will not recover. - The Counter

Of course the Trumpers are screwing up farms to food banks

Yes. Whenever and wherever right-wingers get in charge, they do nothing but fuck up everything they touch. That’s a fundamental fact of contemporary life that everyone should understand.

Buying food from farmers who might otherwise be forced to dump it and sending it to people who need food sounds like a win-win. Trust the Trump administration to find a way to insert some lose into it. A program to distribute fresh food boxes to people in need is facing sharp criticism from produce companies after the Trump administration gave big contracts to a number of companies with no real food distribution experience while leaving out many companies that do have the relevant experience.

A Texas event-marketing company named CRE8AD8 (“create a date”) got the seventh-largest contract in the program for $39.1 million. A California “business finance solutions” company got a $16.6 million contract. A company that sells hand sanitizers and lotions in airports got a $12 million contract. Meanwhile, many of the top produce distributors didn’t get contracts. “This deal is destined to crash before it takes off,” a Houston produce distributor who didn’t get a contract told Politico. - Daily Kos

Farmers can try for SBA loans, now, but it won't be enough

It is something, though, and that is a positive.

Last week the federal Small Business Administration (SBA) opened an online portal exclusively for “agricultural enterprises” (read: farmers) to apply for a Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL). For decades prior, farmers had been barred from accessing this low-interest, long-term loan program...

PPP also quickly ran out of funding (since replenished), and many expect the same fate for EIDL given the backlog of requests and the scale of need. Chastang said, “The SBA cannot speculate on when those funds will be exhausted.”

“It’s helpful but it’s not enough,” said NFFC’s Treakle. “This program is going to run out of money and there aren’t enough resources in this particular program to help farmers in need.”

He also expressed concern that farmers who don’t fit the commodity mold—independent, diversified, or organic producers, who sell directly into local and regional markets—will be left out. - The Counter

Gates education "reform" has been a wretched, miserable failure

This article goes on to discuss just what a scam billionaire "philanthropy" is in general.

One of the myriad problems with billionaires like Bill Gates pouring tons of money into reshaping our education system is that people like Bill Gates are not educators. They rarely have even a small amount of education in what education is and should be. The way people like Gates have gone about financing and promoting “education reform” is a good example of their rudimentary misunderstanding of what public education should be. The billionaire philanthropist has used his “charity” to force legislation to filter taxpayer money away from traditional public schools and into the privately funded and run charter school systems that promise better education.

The Washington Post's Valerie Strauss reports that a new report, studying a partly Gates-funded initiative to use student test scores to evaluate teacher effectiveness, is out. That report says what almost every single education expert without a MBA predicted: you can’t, because test scores are not a good way to evaluate educators. The “project” cost municipalities participating in the educational dead end around $360 million. - Daily Kos

Trump threatens Social Security

For some reason we have not really been able to get through to people, seniors in particular, with the realities of this, even as the greedheads have been looking to destroy earned benefits for decades. There has to be a way.

Grassroots advocacy groups representing millions of retirees and seniors across the United States are speaking out against and urging Congress to oppose President Donald Trump's threat to block desperately needed Covid-19 relief legislation if it does not slash the payroll tax, which funds Social Security and Medicare...

"We're not doing anything unless we get a payroll tax cut," Trump said Sunday, just days after vowing to protect Social Security and Medicare.

Max Richtman, president and CEO of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, said in a statement Monday that Trump's remarks "set off alarm bells for America's seniors and their advocates."

"Make no mistake: by pushing to cut off the program's funding stream, President Trump is taking the first step toward dismantling Social Security," said Richtman. "The president's campaign to eliminate payroll taxes is a violation of his patently false promises to seniors 'not to touch' Social Security. This proposal goes way beyond 'touching.' Choking off Social Security's funding stream is an existential threat to seniors' earned benefits." - Common Dreams

Update: The U.S. Senate isn't into this. The GOP caucus there has terrible ideas of their own.

Small farms are last in line for help, again

Given the Trump/Perdue track record - actually, that of our "governing elites" in general, going back decades - of course they are.

Now, with the global pandemic closing factories and restaurants and disrupting supply chains, already stressed farms are grappling with lower demand and fewer markets to sell in, as well as a presidential administration that favors relief for big businesses over small. Small farmers in particular — those who sell directly to farmers markets, schools, and other local food hubs — are facing an existential crisis, as they face slim odds of accessing competitive federal stimulus money...

“Bailout money always goes to the big farmers, the people who produce soy and crops and sell into commodity markets,” said John Peck, executive director of Family Farm Defenders, a national organization that supports sustainable agriculture. “This is all part of our country’s cheap food policy where we basically subsidize capital-intensive, large-scale industrial farming.”

Farmers who sell directly to consumers or participate in regional food hubs typically don’t rely on federal subsidies.

“Small diversified farmers are pretty effective at doing what they do, which is finding markets and filling them, and haven’t required a lot of support,” said Deeble. “But the flip side is if you’re usually good in normal times and don’t rely much on the government, it can be harder to get government help when you need it.” - The Intercept

School privatization movement looks to go shock doctrine

Entirely predictable, but nonetheless disgusting.

COVID-19 has shuttered public schools across the nation, state governments are threatening to slash education budgets due to the economic collapse caused by the outbreak, and emergency aid provided by the federal government is far short of what is needed, according to a broad coalition of education groups, but the charter school industry may benefit from its unique status to seek public funding from multiple sources and expand these schools into many more communities traumatized by the pandemic and financial fallout. - Jeff Bryant/Raw Story

Trump's brilliant oil deal sure worked out well

You may recall the purportedly glorious agreement that Trump allegedly created between Russia, Saudi Arabia, and others, that would prop up oil prices and indeed the world economy as a whole. I would go so far to rate what has subsequently happened as Trump’s second biggest personal humiliation so far, behind only the way he got played by Kim Jong Un. (Incidentally, there are reports today that Kim may be dying.)

May contracts for West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil went as low as -$37.63 on Monday. So report Jillian Ambrose and Martin Farrer at The Guardian. The price, well below zero, was a first for the US oil market, and showed the conviction of traders that the economy would not in fact start back up in May. Millions of gallons of oil are being stored on giant supertankers around the world, which costs money, and the below-zero price for a barrel reflected that storage cost.

There was a bit more confidence about the June situation, with prices skyrocketing to all of $1.10 a barrel in Tuesday morning trading in East Asian markets, according to Reuters. That is about the price of water. - Informed Comment

School shootings suddenly plummet to zero?

As a matter of fact, yes. I have nothing more to add to this one.

The nationwide lockdown to stem the rise of the coronavirus has had one silver lining—March 2020 was the first March since 2002 without a school shooting...

Washington Post reporter Robert Klemko made the observation Monday (April 13) on Twitter.

Schools around the country were ordered or recommended closed in mid-March to attempt to stem the spread of the disease, which (as of April 13 had) already infected a reported 576,695 Americans so far and killed 23,068.

"All it took was a pandemic and closing all the schools," tweeted Bloomberg editor Mark Gongloff. - Common Dreams

Private equity will never, ever stop screwing the rest of us

Not until it’s crushed. Obliterated. Annihilated. So that’s what needs to happen.

It’s tough to pull a really representative blockquote from this one. I can only respectfully ask that you take my sincere word that you should click and read it all.

It is part of a growing trend of private equity investment in health care in the United States. 

The pandemic has put into stark relief how these billionaire investors have fundamentally weakened the health care system...

Hospital acquisitions were popular among private equity firms from 2000 to 2012. But many firms struggled to make money from those acquisitions and have turned their attention to more profitable slices of the health care economy. 

In particular, private equity has been gobbling up staffing service for emergency rooms and then taking the doctors out of the hospital’s insurance network. As a result, many people return home from the emergency room with massive bills they thought would be covered by their insurance company. This phenomenon is known as “surprise billing.” - Popular Information

Keystone XL starts construction - Update

Update: Construction has been righteously blocked again.

Original story: Bad news. Specifically, at a site on the Montana/Canada border. Also, I hadn’t been aware that the government of Alberta, Canada, ended up funding it because private lenders wanted no part.

Alberta's recent announcement that it was investing more than $1 billion to build the Keystone XL pipeline gave a boost to a project that has faced more than a decade of delays and uncertainty.

But by dedicating government money to a pipeline the private sector has been reluctant to fund, the decision highlights how vulnerable Canada's oil sands industry has become, even before the coronavirus pandemic crashed global oil demand.

Last week, Alberta announced it would invest $1.1 billion in the pipeline and provide an additional $4.2 billion in loan guarantees to help developer TC Energy start construction immediately. Premier Jason Kenney said his government had been negotiating with the company for months, and that no private sector bidders were ready to finance the project. - Inside Climate News

On the same general subject, though this one is righteous:

Globally, renewable energy sectors including wind, solar, and hydropower are booming. The world is using more renewable energy than ever before. Over one third of the world’s electricity comes from renewable sources, according to data released by the International Renewable Energy Agency, or Irena, on Monday.

From 2018 to 2019, new renewable energy capacity construction slowed down slightly. But since the world also built less new fossil fuel infrastructure, renewables share in energy expansion grew. A record-breaking 72 percent of all the new electricity sources the world installed in 2019 were renewable. - Earther

Prognostications as to what the Trump Crash will mean for renewables are all over the place, from what I’ve seen.

Big problems for small-business loan program

It’s hard to believe that the Party of Trump would dare, politically, to not get this worked out. But we’ll see.

Under the policy, any business (or nonprofit, veterans organization, or tribal concern) with 500 or fewer employees is eligible for a government-backed loan equivalent to eight weeks of its prior average payroll, plus an additional 25 percent of that sum (unless that grand total adds up to more than $10 million, which is the cap for any individual firm). And these loans are really more like grants, which means free money: Firms don’t need to make any payments on their loans for six months — and if they maintain their workforces, then the government will forgive almost all of the loan (more fine details on this point below). The idea is to keep the small-business sector frozen in place, so that it can rapidly defrost once the coronavirus pandemic has passed.

But you can’t freeze something for later if it’s already spoiled. And many small firms directly impacted by social-distancing measures were already collapsing by the time Congress finally passed legislation. For these reasons, the Trump administration was eager to get the PPP up and running as quickly as possible. To that end, the administration has (1) made it possible for small-business owners to secure government-backed loans at any federally insured lender that wishes to participate in the program, regardless of whether such banks or credit unions are affiliated with the Small Business Administration, and (2) officially launched the program April 3.

Unfortunately, the small-business bailout season is off to a shaky start — and for entirely predictable reasons. - New York Magazine

Farmers are not being prioritized, to say the least, in COVID-19 response

This article summarizes a bunch of issues related to the pandemic. It’s from March 25, and “a slush fund type bailout for global corporations and Wall Street” is pretty much what was in fact delivered.

Farmers were already struggling to make ends meet prior to the COVID-19 crisis. For more than six years, farmers have been managing low incomes, rising costs, increasing debt and bankruptcy, volatile export markets (exacerbated by President Trump’s tariff fights) and a series of extreme weather events tied to climate change. Now, the fast-moving, unprecedented COVID-19 situation is creating new disruptive challenges for farmers and our food system. - IATP

This is from an email I got from Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN), specifying some of what's in the package. You can decide for yourself, how much is actually likely to help traditional farmers, and how much is just more handouts to Big Ag.

 $9.5 billion dedicated disaster fund to help farmers who are experiencing financial losses from the coronavirus crisis, including targeted support for specialty crop farmers, dairy and livestock farmers, and local food producers.

$14 billion to fund the Farm Bill's farm safety net through the Commodity Credit Corporation.

Eligibility for farmers and agricultural and rural businesses to receive up to $10 million in small business interruption loans from eligible lenders, including Farm Credit institutions, through the Small Business Administration. Repayment forgiveness will be provided for funds used for payroll, rent or mortgage, and utility bills.

$3 million to increase capacity at the USDA Farm Service Agency to meet increased demand from farmers affected by the coronavirus crisis.

Here's a take on the "farmers or Big Ag" query.

Trump has screwed up worse than anyone, anywhere

A righteous, and totally accurate, screed.

The United States is in a very bad place in the novel coronavirus pandemic. With more cases than any other nation on the planet, health care systems under strain in cities across the nation, and a rising case fatality rate to accompany that growth, the outlook is nothing less than dire. As Dr. Anthony Fauci has warned, the U.S. could be looking at between 100,000 and 200,000 deaths related to COVID-19 before the primary pandemic is past. And there are reasons to believe those numbers may be optimistic.

No matter what Donald Trump says, that does not mean he did a “good job.” It means that, with months of warning and near-infinite resources, he did a worse job than every other government on the entire planet—a job so awful that when a decade from now someone is unlucky enough to think of Trump, this is what they will remember. This is all they will remember. There was a crisis, Trump failed the nation, and the cost was many, many times worse than 9/11. - Daily Kos