One of the good things Pres. Biden is doing

Lately I've been passing along items critical of the Biden administration, all of them justified and righteous. But it hasn't been total disappointment. Actually, it's been pretty much the mix of good and bad that I and many others expected.

Along with Khan, the Biden administration now has antitrust advocates with a track record of actually pursuing antitrust in powerful positions, rather than former toadies ready to engage in the corporate capture that has been the norm under recent presidents, both Republican and Democrat.

Both will need some help from Congress. Staff attorneys at the FTC and the Justice Department have been leaving the government, not only because of differences of opinion with the new regime, but because Big Tech firms are throwing money at them. Enticing new talent will require money, and a bill that recently passed the Senate which would increase merger fees to fund enforcement agencies will help. Expect a much younger and less experienced crop of more aggressive lawyers at both agencies.

Biden in some sense tipped this move with his sweeping July executive order, which directed the Department of Justice to pursue a litany of competition-enhancing antitrust measures, everything from consideration of unwinding past mergers to a patent policy reform to expanding competition in air transportation. - The American Prospect

It's decades past time to end the Cuba blockade

Imagine how much better things could be, if the U.S. would maintain only friendly, supportive relationships with small countries. That could be done without being seen as "endorsing" authoritarian governance, if the U.S. would maintain political leadership that was a lot quicker on its own intellectual feet.

The corporate media have been bashing the Cuban government in response to the recent protests in Cuba, while President Joe Biden claims, “We stand with the Cuban people.” But they ignore or minimize the leading cause of economic suffering in Cuba: the U.S.’s illegal and punishing economic blockade that Biden has left in place...

“The embargo is absurdly cruel and, like too many other U.S. policies targeting Latin Americans, the cruelty is the point,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) said in a statement. “I outright reject the Biden administration’s defense of the embargo. It is never acceptable for us to use cruelty as a point of leverage against every day people.” - Truthout

A Green New Deal for public schools?

It would be great if this gets into the package. Although, deformers are fond of claiming that their charters are "public" schools, and the article doesn't get into that whole issue as it might relate to this.

Democratic congressman and longtime educator Jamaal Bowman unveiled legislation Thursday morning that would invest $1.43 trillion over 10 years in transforming the nation's public schools in line with what experts say is needed to combat the climate emergency and reverse the harm inflicted by decades of disinvestment...

Bowman presented his legislation as a remedy to longstanding education crises stemming from years of cuts to public school funding in states across the country, which have disproportionately impacted the poor and people of color. The deadly coronavirus pandemic has placed massive additional strain on the nation's public schools, and some states have resorted to pursuing further education cuts to cover budget shortfalls.

"What this comes down to is whether we're willing to provide our kids with the resources they need to realize their brilliance and have a livable planet," Bowman said Thursday. "Do we want to continue building a world based on militarization, incarceration, poverty, and destruction of resources? Or will we take advantage of this moment, put our kids and educators first, and treat the climate crisis as the emergency it is? This legislation is what we need to put us on the right side of history." - Common Dreams

Big Food's climate change footprint has likely been hugely understated

It's on the profits way, way over people system.

For nearly three decades, nations have reported greenhouse gas emissions inventories to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), an international treaty aimed at stabilizing the climate. The idea is that by tracking emissions across sectors, the inventories reveal where climate action is most urgently needed. The food system encompasses much more than agriculture, and yet under the reporting guidelines set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), many other factors—such as packaging, transportation, disposal, and agriculture-driven deforestation—haven’t been tallied together. And for that reason, the food system’s overall share of emissions has long been underestimated.

A new analysis aims to change that. Experts from the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York University, and Columbia University have developed an accounting system to capture the food system’s overall role in the climate crisis.

Their paper, recently published in Environmental Research Letters, found that the global food system was responsible for 16 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions in 2018, or a third of all global emissions that year. This is a sharp contrast to the more narrowly defined agriculture sector of the IPCC’s categories for greenhouse gas inventories, which accounted for 5.3 billion metric tons in 2018, or just a tenth of the total. - Civil Eats

Corporate media does the war pigs' bidding on Afghanistan

There's nothing surprising at all about this. Many of the same people who own corporate media, and ultimately determine how it spins things, have also undoubtedly made money off the death and suffering there.

Incidentally, I just read America's War for the Greater Middle East: A History, by Andrew Bacevich. If in some fantasy world I got to pick a book that every American has to read, right now, that would be it.

There are plenty of reasons to criticize the foreign policy of President Biden: his failure to fully end U.S. participation in the Yemen war more than five months after he pledged to; his staffing out of his foreign policy to a shadowy consultant firm called WestExec whose clients include military contractors and powerful corporations; his support for Israel’s brutal bombardment of Gaza.

But when it comes to U.S. press outlets, they’re more likely to critique Biden when he steps away from militarism. This reality was on full display following the U.S. military’s withdrawal from Bagram Air Base, which began in late June as part of the Biden administration’s broader exit from Afghanistan (which, it is important to note, does not constitute a full withdrawal and is likely to result in the farming out of the war to the CIA). - In These Times

Debunking the primary myth about student debt cancellation

Unfortunately this will very likely not suffice to make it more of a priority for Pres. Biden.

In recent years, many centrist economists have claimed that canceling student debt is economically regressive in that it would disproportionately favor higher-income households. Yet, study after study has revealed that this is not the case. In particular, a new study by the Roosevelt Institute explains that the “regressive myth rests on a series of misleading methodological foundations,” demonstrating that, contrary to these regressive claims, student debt cancelation at each proposed level of cancelation — Biden’s $10,000 proposal, Warren and Schumer’s $50,000 proposal, or the Institute’s own proposal of $75,000 — would see those most economically marginalized benefiting the most...

By looking at the share of wealth, not just student debt in absolute numbers, it becomes clear that borrowers in the lower percentiles are much more burdened than their counterparts in the higher percentiles. In other words, student debt makes up a larger share of their annual household incomes or share of household wealth compared to higher percentile households which makes repayment difficult and almost impossible. This is precisely why the study finds that the greatest benefits of student debt cancelation accumulate to those in the bottom 40 percentile for all racial groups. Moreover, by examining the distribution of student debt by wealth and race instead of the standard income variable, cancelation provides ample evidence that the racial wealth gap would narrow in the process. - Truthout

Pres. Biden's horrifying "defense" budget

As bad a gift to the war pigs as we’ve ever seen.

President Biden’s first Pentagon budget, released (in late May), is staggering by any reasonable standard. At more than $750 billion for the Defense Department and related work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy, it represents one of the highest levels of spending since World War II — far higher than the peaks of the Korean or Vietnam wars or President Ronald Reagan’s military buildup of the 1980s, and roughly three times what China spends on its military.

Developments of the past year and a half — an ongoing pandemic, an intensifying mega-drought, white supremacy activities, and racial and economic injustice among them — should have underscored that the greatest threats to American lives are anything but military in nature. But no matter, the Biden administration has decided to double down on military spending as the primary pillar of what still passes for American security policy. And don’t be fooled by that striking Pentagon budget figure either. This year’s funding requests suggest that the total national security budget will come closer to a breathtaking $1.3 trillion.

That mind-boggling figure underscores just how misguided Washington’s current “security” — a word that should increasingly be put in quotation marks — policies really are. No less concerning was the new administration’s decision to go full-speed ahead on longstanding Pentagon plans to build a new generation of nuclear-armed bombers, submarines, and missiles, including, of course, new nuclear warheads to go with them, at a cost of at least $1.7 trillion over the next three decades. - TomDispatch