SCOTUS screws farmworkers

From June 23. No matter how this court rules on major social issues, it will remain fundamentally what SCOTUS has almost always been - a tool of the plutocrats.

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court published its decision in Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, a case involving an employer challenge to a California regulation that allows union representatives to visit the property of agricultural employers—in narrowly tailored and time-limited circumstances—to carry out efforts to organize the hundreds of thousands of California farmworkers who work in hazardous and low-paying jobs, and who suffer disproportionately high rates of wage and hour violations.

In a disappointing 6-3 decision, the Court’s conservative justices ruled that the California regulation constitutes a per se physical taking of the employer’s property, which in practical terms means union organizers will no longer have the right to access the farms where farmworkers are employed.

The vast majority of farmworkers across the country are not protected by the National Labor Relations Act—the federal law that enshrines the right of workers to join and form unions. - EPI

CRP acreage has been going in the wrong direction

There's an effort to change that, but I'm not sure that enough "oomph" will be put behind it.

Since 2007, the number of acres the government has paid farmers and ranchers to conserve has declined.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Conservation Reserve Program subsidizes the removal of environmentally sensitive land from agricultural production.

But, between 2007 and 2016, the enrollment cap set by the farm bill shrank, allowing fewer farmers to participate, according to an agency report. Most of that land was returned to producing crops.

In April, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced that the USDA will expand this program, among other measures, in an effort to mitigate climate change. - The Counter

U.S. sanctions on Venezuela are horrific, and criminal, and need to end

The correct description is "a crime against humanity." And given that sanctions, which fail to change governments or policies, but "succeed" at destroying the lives of millions who've done nothing wrong, have been an integral part of U.S. practice for a long time, it's not just Trumpers who are to blame.

Advocates for more a more humane U.S. foreign policy are urging President Joe Biden to embrace Rep. Jim McGovern's call for an end to "all secondary and sectoral sanctions imposed on Venezuela by the Trump administration."

In a letter sent to Biden on Monday, McGovern (D-Mass.), chair of the powerful House Rules Committee, cited estimates that more than seven million Venezuelans are "in need of humanitarian assistance," and that the nation's poverty rate surged "from 48% in 2014 to 96% in 2019, with 80% in extreme poverty."

...Under former President Donald Trump, who sought to topple the elected government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the U.S. in August 2017 began to unilaterally impose sanctions on Venezuela in violation of international law as well as the charter of the Organization of American States and other international treaties the U.S. has signed.

While Trump's attempt to force a regime change in the South American country ultimately failed, U.S. economic sanctions "killed tens of thousands of Venezuelans in just their first year (2017–18), and almost certainly tens of thousands more since then," according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), a progressive think tank based in D.C. - Common Dreams

The U.S. is behaving disgracefully in Colombia as well.

The realities of the alleged "labor shortage"

This really expertly takes down the crap about “labor shortages” being frantically bellowed by the rich man’s whimpering, groveling propagandist curs, including in political office.

Longtime labor organizer and senior scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies Bill Fletcher Jr. explained to me in an email interview that claims of a labor shortage are an exaggeration and that, actually, “we suffered a minor depression and not another great recession,” as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. In Fletcher’s view, “The so-called labor shortage needs to be understood as the result of tremendous employment reorganization, including the collapse of industries and companies.”

Furthermore, according to Fletcher, the purveyors of the “labor shortage” myth are not accounting for “the collapse of daycare and the impact on women and families, and a continued fear associated with the pandemic.”

He’s right. As one analyst put it, “The rotten seed of America’s disinvestment in child care has finally sprouted.” Such factors have received little attention by the purveyors of the labor shortage myth — perhaps because acknowledging real obstacles like care work requires thinking of workers as real human beings rather than cogs in a capitalist machine. - LA Progressive

Big Beef will finish off small ranchers, if changes aren't made

After reading this, I don't know what might happen.

In the last three decades, this has become more acute. Economic consolidation across the beef industry has made the once comfortable livelihood of small- and medium-sized ranchers nearly untenable. In Nebraska, Wright described watching young farmer after young farmer squeezed out of the cattle industry and forced to drive semitrucks or work at fertilizer plants to pay off debts. He says nearby farmers were pushed to abandon their cattle and farms after being priced out by the same culprit: Big Beef.

The stranglehold on the beef industry can be traced to the processing and packing companies at the center of the market. Ranchers and legislators say that the four major meatpacking companies—the “Big Four,” as ranchers call them—are to blame. Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and National Beef purchase and process 85 percent of beef in the United States, giving them immense economic control. They operate at the nefarious nexus of being both regional monopsonies and monopolies, having a significant sway on both the price of cattle bought off the ranch and the price of beef bought at the supermarket. These four middlemen firms are both the buyers and sellers. - The American Prospect

Suppression tactics put water protectors and others at high risk

If this sort of crap is allowed to continue, people will be seriously injured. Or worse.

The largest civil disobedience yet against new pipeline construction in Minnesota was met by a furious response — and a cloud of debris. A Department of Homeland Security Border Patrol helicopter descended on the protest against the Enbridge Line 3 tar sands pipeline, kicking up dust and showering demonstrators with sand, in an unusual attempt to disperse the crowd.

“I couldn’t see because it got in my eyes,” said Big Wind, a 28-year-old Northern Arapaho organizer with the anti-pipeline Giniw Collective, who was there when the helicopter swooped over the civil disobedience action. “After it pulled up there were a lot of people who were ducking, who were in the fetal position, just because they didn’t know what was going to happen and were trying to protect themselves from the sand.”

The low-flying federal helicopter is an early signal of how law enforcement in Minnesota will deploy more than a year’s worth of training and preparations against what pipeline opponents have promised will be a summer of resistance. The tactic — which was criticized because of the extremely low flyover — suggests that the multiagency law enforcement coalition overseeing the police response is willing to bend safety standards in order to break up demonstrations. - The Intercept

Some things shouldn't go back to "normal"

I seem to have unthinkingly taken for granted that everyone would realize now that many don't have to, for example, waste irreplaceable hours of their lives sitting in traffic every damn day, any more. Silly me.

But the problem with “getting back to normal” seems to be two-fold. One problem is that some people don’t want to go back to normal. As Anders Melin and Misyrlena Egkolfopoulou noted in Bloomberg, “A May survey of 1,000 U.S. adults showed that 39% would consider quitting if their employers weren’t flexible about remote work.” Working from home has created a culture of families that eat lunch together, of pets that enjoy midday strolls, of life that is just a little bit calmer. My husband, who used to spend one week a month in California for work, no longer makes his regular cross-country trips. As Sigal Samuel writes for Vox, “The pandemic has proven that remote work is totally feasible for many jobs, validating people’s suspicions that our standard model of office work is arbitrary, unnecessarily taxing, and ultimately exploitative, sometimes forcing people to choose between their well-being and their career.” Why go back to the elements of normal life which were, in themselves, completely pointless? - Vogue

Collection agencies are gouging student debtors

This is atrocious, and not widely known. I hadn't really been aware of the details, myself.

To the surprise of many students and parents, public colleges in every state in the country except Louisiana use for-profit debt collection agencies to retrieve overdue tuition, library fees and even parking fines. (Louisiana, like several other states, sends students’ debts to the attorney general’s office, which can charge fees as high as 33 percent of the original bill.) Many universities add late fees to students’ bills, and when debt collectors add another 30 or 40 percent, students can end up owing thousands of dollars more than they did originally.

As tuition has risen astronomically, one child care or medical crisis can push students over the edge and force them to choose between household bills and tuition payments. The extra fees and interest can make it impossible for them to get back on track, ruining their credit and imperiling their financial futures.

Public colleges have sent hundreds of thousands of students around the country to private debt collection agencies, and the spiraling debt held there now totals more than half a billion dollars, a Hechinger Report investigation has found through more than 60 inquiries with agencies in every state and more than 120 inquiries with individual institutions. For many students, the financial burden makes it impossible for them to return to college and earn degrees that could get them good jobs. State officials often bemoan a lack of college-educated workers for their economies, yet very few states track this problem. Most states cannot provide figures on how often their colleges use these companies, how many students are affected or how much in additional fees and interest is being charged. - The Hechinger Report