Biden's foreign policy is mostly a wretched disgrace

Except for getting ground forces out of Afghanistan, most of what's been going on has been a neocoward dream come true.

Before it’s too late, we need to ask ourselves a crucial question: Do we really — I mean truly — want a new Cold War with China?

Because that’s just where the Biden administration is clearly taking us. If you need proof, check out last month’s announcement of an “AUKUS” (Australia, United Kingdom, U.S.) military alliance in Asia. Believe me, it’s far scarier (and more racist) than the nuclear-powered submarine deal and the French diplomatic kerfuffle that dominated the media coverage of it. By focusing on the dramatically angry French reaction to losing their own agreement to sell non-nuclear subs to Australia, most of the media missed a much bigger story: that the U.S. government and its allies have all but formally declared a new Cold War by launching a coordinated military buildup in East Asia unmistakably aimed at China.

It’s still not too late to choose a more peaceful path. - TomDispatch

Why hasn't Pres. Biden dealt with DeJoy yet?

Perhaps he thinks the justice system will take care of the problem, instead. Maybe he's right. Maybe not.

The United States Postal Service seriously mismanaged Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s conflicts of interest from the start, according to documents obtained by CREW via a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The documents show that USPS’s initial decision to allow DeJoy to recuse from matters involving his former company XPO Logistics rather than divesting from the conflict-creating assets was clearly insufficient, given DeJoy’s role as the head of the agency and his later divestment. - CREW

Workers are righteously quitting and striking everywhere you look

Certainly many, of the ultra-entitled in particular, are aghast and horrified, at the temerity of what they see as the "peasantry." Tough.

If such a high rate of resignations were occurring at a time when jobs were plentiful, it might be seen as a sign of a booming economy where workers have their pick of offers. But the same labor report showed that job openings have also declined, suggesting that something else is going on. A new Harris Poll of people with employment found that more than half of workers want to leave their jobs. Many cite uncaring employers and a lack of scheduling flexibility as reasons for wanting to quit. In other words, millions of American workers have simply had enough.

So serious is the labor market upheaval that Jack Kelly, senior contributor to Forbes.com, a pro-corporate news outlet, has defined the trend as, “a sort of workers’ revolution and uprising against bad bosses and tone-deaf companies that refuse to pay well and take advantage of their staff.” In what might be a reference to viral videos like those of McGrath, Ragland, and the growing trend of #QuitMyJob posts, Kelly goes on to say, “The quitters are making a powerful, positive and self-affirming statement saying that they won’t take the abusive behavior any longer.”

...The resignations ought to be viewed hand in hand with another powerful current that many economists are ignoring: a growing willingness by unionized workers to go on strike. - LA Progressive

Biden's Middle East policy shows little, if any, improvement

The demonizing of China is really bad, too. But this is even worse, for now.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken is shaping up to be as much of a disaster as secretary of state as Mike Pompeo. He appears to have nothing to say about Israel’s outrageous new plans to steal more Palestinian land and to further divide Palestinians into Bantustans as was done by Apartheid South Africa to the Bantu population.

He is hobnobbing with the foreign ministers of the United Arab Emirates and Israel, celebrating the “Abraham Accords” that marginalized the Palestinians, and rattling sabers against Iran. He won’t give Iran guarantees of an end to the crippling US financial and trade blockade on Tehran, then blames Iran for declining to give up its civilian nuclear enrichment program in return for nothing. As for Israel’s nuclear arsenal, that bit of proliferation goes unmentioned and never has attracted any sanctions. - Informed Comment

The federal judiciary has a big credibility crisis

Actually, what many of us have long known is now being openly affirmed. And it's not just Bush/Trump-appointed "judges," either.

But it’s not just our highest court that is mired in a well-earned legitimacy crisis; it’s all of them. The corruption of the federal judiciary system, both ideological and financial, has become so total that Alito’s comments were barely the most scandalous or incendiary that the country’s justice system sustained (two weeks ago).

In an incredible report from The Wall Street Journal, the paper found “more than 130 federal judges have violated U.S. law and judicial ethics by overseeing court cases involving companies in which they or their family owned stock … judges have improperly failed to disqualify themselves from 685 court cases around the nation since 2010.” Two-thirds of all federal district judges disclosed stock holdings, the report found, and 1 in 5 of those “heard at least one case involving those stocks.” These were judges appointed by Democratic and Republican presidents alike, a bipartisan affair spanning appointees from LBJ to Trump. - The American Prospect

Natural gas price spikes are here to stay

The industry's trying to put blame elsewhere is based on some royal BS.

Already, the natural gas industry and its backers have begun casting blame on others for the gas market’s upheaval, suggesting that consumers hold the industry’s proposed villains responsible for the industry’s price issues.

In reality, a wide range of factors — starting with a blast of LNG exports that now consumes roughly 10 percent of the United States’s total gas production — have launched prices higher in the U.S. And shale drillers themselves have proved reluctant to drill more wells even as prices lurch up — a fact that stems far more from drillers’ own wild overspending during the shale rush (and the resulting wave of bankruptcies and cratered stocks) than from anything related to, say, proposed-but-not-implemented climate policies or a small but growing shift to renewable power...

Attempts to pin the blame for natural gas price swings on renewables drew immediate pushback from the International Energy Agency (IEA). “Recent increases in global natural gas prices are the result of multiple factors,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said in a September 21 statement, “and it is inaccurate and misleading to lay the responsibility at the door of the clean energy transition.”

The reality too is that natural gas has long suffered from wild price swings and volatility that — while tamped down in the recent past by the shale gas glut — just might be re-emerging into a pandemic-pressured world. - DeSmog

Massive corporate media "crime wave" misinformation

Yeah, Third Way is a bunch of "centrists," that is, Conservadem corporate tools. But the facts and analysis in this report are clearly valid.

Our findings are as follows:

- Contrary to the media narrative, overall crime decreased in 2020 compared to 2019.

- A spike in homicides in 2020 is unique to homicides and is an outlier when compared to all other crimes.

- There appears to be no difference in crime trends between Republican-led and Democrat-led states.

- There appears to be no difference in crime trends between states that enacted police reforms and those that did not. - Third Way

What's the current deal with lab-grown meat?

To be clear, this long, comprehensive article leans toward "billion-dollar boondoggle." And it makes a compelling case, if you ask me.

Who’s right? Is cultured meat our best hope to save the climate, a billion-dollar boondoggle, or something in between? Will it ever make sense to produce food the way we currently make our drugs?

The stakes couldn’t be higher. In August, the United Nations released a nearly 4,000-page report amounting to what it called a “code red for humanity”: Unless the world’s nations make a vast, coordinated effort to stop burning fossil fuels and razing forests, we’ll find ourselves locked into an even more dire, unforgiving future than the one we’re facing now. At a time when bold environmental solutions are needed, we can only afford to direct public and private investment toward solutions that actually work. But without looking more closely at the fundamentals—something media has largely declined to do—we can’t know whether cultured meat is our salvation or an expensive distraction. - The Counter

Conservation programs for farmers need to be massively increased

For the sake of all of us.

According to data from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), between 2010 and 2020, just 31% of farmers who applied to the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) and only 42% of farmers who applied to the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) were awarded contracts. Overall, EQIP turned down 946,459 contracts and CSP denied 146,425 contracts, at least partially for lack of funds. These numbers vary widely by state, but some of the lowest approval rates occurred in major agriculture states. The practices supported by EQIP and the whole farm approach supported by CSP help farmers reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to emerging and extreme climate-related changes. Right now, Congress has a unique opportunity in the budget reconciliation process, and later in the next Farm Bill, to dramatically increase spending for CSP and EQIP, which would have an immediate, tangible impact on farmers’ ability to respond to the climate crisis...

Farmers are often on the front lines of climate change. While climate change affects everyone’s livelihoods, it does so for farmers in an immediate, visceral way. Whether it is through droughts, floods, extreme heat, megafires or any other weather extremes, climate change can ruin a crop or devastate animals in the blink of an eye. According to experts at USDA’s Economic Research Service, climate change is expected to increase the cost of the federal crop insurance program from 3-20% or more, depending on how quickly we respond to the climate crisis. - IATP