The Fed is worsening inequality

This is actually the latest manifestation of what's been going on for a long time. Especially the part about interest rates.

Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the Federal Reserve has gotten plenty of kudos for moves that have helped stabilize the economy, kept house prices from tanking and supported the stock market. But those successes have obscured another effect: the inadvertent impact the Fed’s ultra-low interest rates and bond-buying sprees are having on economic inequality.

Longstanding inequality in the U.S. has been exacerbated by the Fed’s role in touching off a multi-trillion-dollar boom in stock markets — and stock ownership is heavily skewed toward the wealthiest Americans...

“Inequality is a cumulative process,” said Karen Petrou, author of “The Engine of Inequality: The Fed and the Future of Wealth in America” and managing partner of the Washington-based consulting firm Federal Financial Analytics. “The richer you are, the richer you get, and the poorer you are, the poorer you get, unless something puts that engine in reverse,” she said. “That engine is driven not by fate or by untouchable phenomena such as demographics but most importantly by policy decisions.” - ProPublica

Public education is being assaulted more frantically than ever

This is from an interview included in the linked item. The interview originally appeared in the Washington Post. What jumped out at me is the shameless, ultra-cynical manipulation that is going on. Page Amendment, anyone?

BURRIS: What were some of the tricks of the trade, so to speak. Were there certain individuals you searched out to carry the message?

SILER: We would seek out people with sympathetic stories, families or individuals with sincere struggles. The goal was to find people with whom the general public could empathize.

When Florida's voucher program faced a lawsuit by the teachers union there in 2014, I flew to meet with a handful of families who had children with disabilities to create a video series promoting the value of the voucher program. I met with a single mom whose daughter had Down syndrome and needed highly individualized care and therapy. I met with a home-school mom who taught her five kids, but one had severe autism, and she struggled to meet his needs on her own. I met with other families hoping to enroll their kids in special schools that focused on their kids' specific needs. These people were part of the campaign's public face around the legal defense of the voucher program.

Also, if we could ever find minority families willing to speak up about their struggles and desires for school privatization, we'd work to put their faces in as many places as possible. It's one reason privatization advocates focused so heavily on promoting vouchers within the Navajo community recently in a bid to leverage their tribal identity to expand their state's voucher program. In many ways, there's an emphasis on playing identity politics to subvert actual equity efforts, especially when it comes to privatization. - Down With Tyranny

Corporate "junk agroecology" is predictably on the rise

There is a lot of money, and therefore power, at stake. And that's what really matters, right?

Agroecology is at a crossroads. The farming system—which is primarily practiced in the developing world but is gaining some traction in the U.S.—incorporates a suite of ecological growing practices into a wider philosophy rooted in shifting power from global agribusiness companies to peasant farmers.

The approach has received growing global attention in recent years from international organizations, including the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which has repeatedly pointed to agroecology as an effective, cross-cutting strategy to reach its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including climate action, zero hunger, and reduced inequalities.

But with that increased attention has come what some advocates describe as a move toward watering down the political, societal, and civic engagement aspects of the system. - Civil Eats

Many questions about pipeline company "security" practices

This only briefly touches on Minnesota. But it is an essential overview.

The Virginia allegations against Leighton highlight how inconsistently states regulate and monitor private security firms that cater to the fossil fuel industry. Potential penalties are seldom hefty enough to deter companies that have been caught violating licensing regulations in one state from skirting licensing requirements in another. Many substantiated complaints are never prosecuted by state authorities.

“Presently, there is no universal manner in which security companies and their individual security practitioners are handled from state to state,” said Fabian Blache III, the director of Louisiana’s private security licensing board, and president of the International Association of Security and Investigative Regulators (IASIR). “When you have the ones that just blatantly work without a license and you’re constantly chasing them around from place to place to place, it’s very frustrating.” - DeSmog

Is the U.S. war in Afghanistan really going to end?

Depends on how you define "end," I guess.

But will the U.S. be leaving, really? By “the U.S.” of course, I refer to the massive number of private military contractors currently “working” in Afghanistan. In 2010, the contractors outnumbered the troops 2-1. By January 2021, there were more than 18,000 contractors in country. More than 3,814 of them have died over there, almost twice the number of U.S. troop casualties. They are almost invisible to the mainstream news media, and are there for the profit: Not just for themselves, but for the companies seeking to cash in on Afghanistan’s vast natural resources.

“But despite periodic reports and series on contractors by ProPublica and others, the mainstream U.S. media does not regularly pay attention to contractors,” reports The Washington Post. “As a result, they’re subject to political manipulation. These dynamics have contributed to what journalist Dexter Filkins has called ‘The Forever War.’ Which means that U.S. contractors could help sustain hostilities in Afghanistan, even after the U.S. pulls out its troops.” - Truthout

They're still going ahead with those idiotic standardized tests

I blogged before about this. This is kind of an update.

So who believes we need the tests?

One of the congressional Democrats who signed Bowman’s letter to Cardona, Rep. Mark Takano of California, previously gave me an interesting explanation for that...

When I asked Takano about what he called the federal government’s “test and punish” approach to education policy, he stated that the testing mandate, which began when No Child Left Behind was signed into law in 2002 but still dominates today, wasn’t “designed for the types of realities in [his] school.”

What do colleagues in Congress say when he tells them this? He told me the problem in Congress is that there are two types of people who tend to dominate Beltway ideology and the philosophy that drives problem-solving.

Most people, he explained, are either from the worlds of business and finance or they’re attorneys. The former, due to their work experiences, tend to be driven by numbers and production outputs, while the latter, due to their advocacy interests, want to remedy societal problems, including those that are obvious in the education system, by “putting into place a law with all these hammers” to make someone accountable for any statistical evidence of injustice and inequality.

Neither “mentality [is] going to work in education,” he told me, because at the heart of the education process is teachers being able to build trusting relationships with students and strategizing with other teachers on how to engage students. Having to hit a mark on the annual test or worry about an accountability measure closing your school or ending your employment just gets in the way. - Jeff Bryant/LA Progressive

Factory farms and climate change are a bad mix

With suggestions for what to do about it.

Minnesota is off-track to meet its greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction goals set in the 2007 Next Generation Energy Act. An important process for reviewing new projects could help put Minnesota back on track, and the state wants your input by April 9.

Using 2005 emissions as a baseline, the Next Generation Energy Act set a target to reduce emissions by 15% by 2015, 30% by 2025 and ultimately 80% by 2050. Minnesota did not meet the 2015 target and is well behind meeting the 2025 target. Since 2005, Minnesota’s emissions have only reduced 8%, but emissions since 2016 actually have been increasing. While most other sectors, like electricity, are reducing emissions, agriculture and forestry emissions (the state combines the two) are flat and in recent years have risen. Agriculture is responsible for nearly one-quarter of the state’s emissions and is the highest source in the state of two potent GHGs, methane and nitrous oxide. Since 2005, methane emissions from animal agriculture have increased 15% in the state, and nitrous oxide emissions related to both manure and synthetic fertilizer use have increased 12%. Much of that increase in emissions is linked to the state’s continued approval of permits for new and expanding factory farm feedlots.

Previously, Minnesota has not included climate change within its Environmental Review program, which approves permits for major new or expanding projects including feedlots. Now, for the first time, the state is developing rules for how proposed projects will consider climate change within the environmental review process, including estimating emissions, how it will reduce emissions and measures to adapt to future climate-related events.

The state’s Environmental Quality Board (EQB) is seeking public input on how it will incorporate climate into its Environmental Review program. It is critical that the state gets this right and includes a full accounting of climate impacts, considers alternative animal production systems like managed grazing, and incorporates adaptive strategies for the rising number of climate-related events the state will experience. - IATP

COVID-19 as an excuse to slash humanities and screw up college in general

If I had a chance to do it over again, I'd major in philosophy, not engineering. But, no point in wallowing in regret. What matters is the here and now.

Although fiscal concerns are undeniably real, the proposed austerity measures — opposed by faculty unions and education activists who cite bloated administrative budgets and excessive spending on sports arenas and new construction — fit into a larger right-wing playbook that has long pressed for the restructuring of higher education.

Richard Kent Vedder, an adjunct scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and a senior fellow at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), lists these goals in his 2019 book, Restoring the Promise: Higher Education in America. Among them: dismiss “old rules” such as tenure and summer breaks; increase teaching loads; end affirmative action and related diversity programs; end or revise the federal student financial aid program; and give departments and professors a share of revenue based on student enrollment in their classes...

The result is the elevation of accounting, business, computer science, culinary and engineering programs over the liberal arts and humanities. - Truthout