A sharp rise in U.S. poverty

This article has it all. Note that it's not based on "official" U.S. poverty figures, which are grounded in obsolete metrics.

The facts and numbers from numerous sources reflect the reality of deprivation in America, and help to confirm what has been called the “sharpest rise in the U.S. poverty rate since the 1960s.”

The Washington Post summarizes: “According to Nielsen data, the American Payroll Association, CareerBuilder and the National Endowment for Financial Education, somewhere between 50 percent and 78 percent of employees earn just enough money to pay their bills each month….[this was] before the coronavirus pandemic….[since then] the number of first-time unemployment claims has exceeded 1 million per week, an unprecedented number in U.S. history.”

There’s much more evidence of Americans in trouble. An NPR review states that “survey after survey for years has found that most people in the U.S. live paycheck to paycheck.” One of these is a survey reported by CNBC, which concluded that “63 percent of Americans have been living paycheck to paycheck since Covid hit.” Both Schwab’s 2020 Modern Wealth Survey and a recent Harris Poll found that a sizable majority of Americans are suffering financial stress during the pandemic. The American Psychological Association concurs. In Bankrate’s latest polling numbers, 6 out of 10 Americans would be unable to afford an unexpected $1,000 expense. - Nation of Change

President Biden should get rid of ethanol fuel

It is of course extremely unlikely that he'll do anything of the kind. That said, growing insane amounts of corn is bad. It's bad for the environment, for the climate, for farmers, and ultimately for everyone.

President Joe Biden campaigned on an ambitious plan to tackle climate change with a “clean energy revolution,” including incentives to phase out gas-powered cars in favor of electric ones. The growing consensus among climate experts is that to slash carbon emissions quickly enough, we need to eliminate as much air-fouling combustion as possible while expanding wind and solar energy to power the grid. But a key aspect of Biden’s agenda contradicts this push: He’s vowed to “promote ethanol and the next generation of biofuels,” declaring them “vital to the future of rural America—and the climate.” Biden tapped longtime ethanol champion Tom Vilsack—former governor of Iowa, the fuel’s Saudi Arabia—to run the Department of Agriculture, a post he held under Obama.

In doing so, Biden is doubling down on a bad idea that has flourished since the days of President George W. Bush...

From a greenhouse gas emissions perspective, the renewable fuel standard has been a bust, says Jason Hill, a professor at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Bioproducts and Biosystems Engineering. By displacing petroleum, the ethanol mandate made conventional gasoline cheaper, which made people drive more while buying less-fuel-efficient vehicles. As a result, Hill and two colleagues found in a 2016 paper, the net effect of the law was to increase greenhouse gas emissions from cars by about 22 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, equivalent to the output of nearly six coal-fired power plants.

The environmental footprint of industrial-scale corn farming is another stain on ethanol’s claim to be a green fuel. Corn typically covers about 90 million acres of farmland—an area nearly the size of California. Fertilizing the crop emits nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas nearly 300 times more potent than carbon, as well as nitrate pollution that fouls water from the upper Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico, where it generates a low-oxygen dead zone larger than Connecticut. Hill and his colleagues have found that nitrogen fertilizer applied to corn also results in emissions of ammonia, a powerful pollutant, that have been associated with a staggering 4,300 premature deaths yearly in the United States. - Mother Jones

Current reality re: Biden and progressives

This is a solid, objective look at what's really going on. I don't like it any more than you do.

The left has viewed Joe Biden with skepticism throughout his presidential campaign and the transition to the White House. But a popular story in recent weeks has been this idea that Biden has tamed the left, through outreach and hiring of certain personnel and adoption of certain agenda items. I think the transition was relatively smooth, and the large relief package has kind of overshadowed everything else going on.

But this marriage, if you could even call it that, was never going to last. Progressives simply want more than Biden is willing to give. Yes, Biden positions himself in the center of the party, and that center has shifted left. But that’s not going to be good enough for a lot of people, and there’s still decades of reflexive recoiling from aggressive policy to cut through.

We have seen this most directly in the debate over student debt cancellation, which I think we can say that Biden really doesn’t want to do. - The American Prospect

Pres. Biden needs to pardon non-violent marijuana "offenders"

Biden's pardons/expungements would only apply to those convicted of federal crimes. But in addition to being the right thing to do, in and of itself, it would set a great example.

A coalition of drug reform advocates on Monday urged President Joe Biden to follow through on his campaign promises and signal the nation is "truly taking a new course" by expunging the records of those with non-violent marijuana convictions.

In a letter (pdf) sent Monday, the groups—including National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) and the just-launched U.S. Cannabis Council (USCC)—pointed to a national criminal justice system "in urgent need of reform" and called for a general pardon of those currently and formerly incarcerated.

"Cannabis prohibition ruins lives, wastes resources, and is opposed by a large majority of Americans," the group wrote. - Common Dreams

Trump's handouts to the corporate greedheads

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy crunched numbers regarding the Trump corporate tax cut, often noted as his only signifiicant legislative "achievement."

ITEP’s examination of Fortune 500 companies’ financial filings identifies 379 companies that were profitable in 2018 and that provided enough information to calculate effective federal income tax rates, which is the share of 2018 pretax profits they paid in federal income taxes in that year. This report only includes companies that were profitable in 2018 and would thus be expected to owe income tax for that year. (The corporate income tax is a tax on profits.)

For most of these companies, their effective federal income tax rate was much lower than the statutory corporate tax rate of 21 percent. This is by design.

When drafting the tax law, lawmakers could have eliminated special breaks and loopholes in the corporate tax to offset the cost of reducing the statutory rate. Instead, the new law introduced many new breaks and loopholes, though it eliminated some old ones. The unsurprising result: Profitable American corporations in 2018 collectively paid an average effective federal income tax rate of 11.3 percent on their 2018 income, barely more than half the 21 percent statutory tax rate. - ITEP

Food insecurity in Minnesota

I find it useful to visualize numbers like 1 in 10, and 1 in 6, in the context of my own neighborhood. Then I sort of mentally expand that, to try to get a better grasp of what such numbers really entail.

Then I think of the harvested fields I drove by, out in the country yesterday, and how much of that goes to waste because it's the greedheads' interests that of course need to be prioritized, in our dysfunctional, profits-over-people food system.

(Second Harvest Heartland CEO Allison) O’Toole said more than 1 in 10 Minnesotans are food insecure — meaning they lack regular access to quality, affordable food — and that 1 in 6 kids in the state is considered food insecure.

“It’s never been closer to any of us, and we are seeing record numbers of people who need help who have never had to ask for help,” O’Toole said. “And that’s why we’re really asking this entire community to help us make it OK for people to ask for help.”

And O’Toole said a hunger divide breaks along racial lines like never before.

“That is the fact that populations of color — African American, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian populations — are experiencing twice the levels of hunger that our white neighbors are, and that is getting worse every day,” she said. “It is unconscionable, and we are doing everything we can to reach the community in the highest need.” - MPR

Big changes that ag policy needs

But unfortunately probably won't get, any time soon. Worth trying for, though.

But then came the somehow inevitable yet untenable claim: “We are convinced the science and data-based, technology-focused US model that has helped propel modern agriculture to incredible levels of sustainable productivity will be a critical piece in the broader strategy to continue feeding a growing world.”

The assertion is all too familiar. The Trump and Obama administrations differed in so many fundamental ways that finding similarities feels a bit shocking. Yet the arrogance of U.S. assumptions about the role of US agriculture in the world have not changed for decades.

The myth that US food feeds the world, for instance, and that barriers to U.S. exports must be eliminated. The insistence that US agricultural technologies (complete with monopoly-granting patents) must be adopted everywhere, even though US regulatory systems are deeply flawed, underfunded, neglected, and inadequate.

The fact that other cultures and economic ideals have led to sufficient food, far better environmental outcomes, more nutritious diets, and more prosperous rural communities is not acknowledged. Nor are the deep divisions within the US over the future of domestic food and agriculture.

The government shuts down challenges to fossil-fuelled agriculture in international negotiations. It does not discuss how US food systems are failing. Yet the country suffers from world-leading levels of obesity coupled with rising food insecurity. - Euractiv