Even for corporate "news," the hypocrisy on Afghanistan is a nadir

I know that I'm far from the only one who saw this coming, during the corporate media hysterics over the withdrawal of U.S. ground forces.

As the United States withdrew militarily from Afghanistan in August, US TV news interest in the plight of the country’s citizens spiked, often focusing on “the horror awaiting women and girls” (CNN Situation Room, 8/16/21) to argue against withdrawal (FAIR.org, 8/23/21).

Four months later, as those same citizens have been plunged into a humanitarian crisis due in no small part to US sanctions, where is the outrage?

...Since November 1, well into the worsening crisis, FAIR identified only 37 TV news segments from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox and MSNBC that mentioned “humanitarian” in the same sentence as Afghanistan. That’s 37 segments in seven weeks.

For perspective, as the US withdrew in August, journalists from those shows mentioned “women’s rights” in the same sentence as Afghanistan more often—42 times—in just seven days. Today, as those women and girls face starvation, the deeply concerned TV reporters are virtually nowhere to be seen. - FAIR

How bloated can the Pentagon budget get?

I'm passing this along because it's a thorough look at the current reality.

Where are you going to get the money? That question haunts congressional proposals to help the poor, the unhoused, and those struggling to pay the mortgage or rent or medical bills, among so many other critical domestic matters. And yet — big surprise! — there’s always plenty of money for the Pentagon. In fiscal year 2022, in fact, Congress is being especially generous with $778 billion in funding, roughly $25 billion more than the Biden administration initially asked for. Even that staggering sum seriously undercounts government funding for America’s vast national security state, which, since it gobbles up more than half of federal discretionary spending, is truly this country’s primary, if unofficial, fourth branch of government...

Why, then, does each year’s NDAA rise ever higher into the troposphere, drifting on the wind and poisoning our culture with militarism? Because, to state the obvious, Congress would rather engage in pork-barrel spending than exercise the slightest real oversight when it comes to the national security state. It has, of course, been essentially captured by the military-industrial complex, a dire fate President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about 60 years ago in his farewell address. Instead of being a guard dog for America’s money (not to mention for our rapidly disappearing democracy), Congress has become a genuine lapdog of the military brass and their well-heeled weapons makers.

So, even as Congress puts on a show of debating the NDAA, it’s really nothing but, at best, a political Kabuki dance (a metaphor, by the way, that’s quite common in the military, which tells you something about the well-traveled sense of humor of its members). Sure, our congressional representatives act as if they’re exercising oversight, even as they do as they’re told, while the deep-pocketed contractors make major contributions to the campaign “war chests” of the very same politicians. It’s a win for them, of course, but a major loss for this country — and indeed for the world. - AlterNet

Big Ag's ongoing push to control the narrative

This article is actually wide-ranging, with plenty of positive stuff in it. It just so happens that I’m quoting this:

Industry representatives took that messaging and ran with it. Multiple panelists repeatedly referred to an amorphous “them” to refer to an uneducated public without their hands in the dirt. As a result, the conversations often felt politicized and at odds with other discussions happening around the country, in which politicians are calling for shifts away from classes of pesticides or experts are recommending Americans reduce meat consumption (which is currently much higher than dietary guidelines recommend) to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

This framing was most prominent on a panel devoted to the U.N. Food Systems Summit, which almost immediately turned into a narrative of industry efforts to thwart what they saw as an “anti-animal-ag agenda” driving it. One of the major criticisms scientists and activists had of the U.N. event was that it gave powerful food and agriculture corporations too much of a voice. And, panelists at the Sustainable Ag Summit from the meat, dairy, and animal feed industries laid out, step by step, how they came together to ensure that their interests were represented, specifically by preventing any recommendations to reduce meat consumption. - Civil Eats

The real roots of the Ukraine problem

This article steps back and analyzes the big picture, like it or not. Which is not what corporate media does.

More importantly, the media fail to mention U.S. responsibility for the current tempest, which can be attributed to the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush that unwisely expanded NATO, bringing Russia’s immediate neighbors and even former Soviet republics into an alliance that now has 30 members. NATO expansion is the major irritant in Russian-American relations and the leading cause of what appears to be the start of a new Cold War. Gorbachev’s willingness to accept German reunification without security guarantees explains the Russian vilification of Gorbachev and Foreign Minister Shevardnadze to this day. U.S. wholesale exploitation of Russian weakness in the 1990s explains Putin’s adamant insistence on calling a halt to the Western advance.

The United States has taken additional gratuitous steps on Russia’s doorstep over the past two decades. The administrations of Bush and Obama deployed an advanced surface-to-air missile system in Poland and Romania, arguing that it was needed to counter a possible Iranian missile attack in Eastern Europe. Such nonsense! The U.S. and British navies continue to deploy naval combatants in the Black Sea that threaten to enter Russian territorial waters. Various NATO members in East Europe and the Baltics are requesting additional Western military systems as well as a permanent U.S. military presence. The presence of Germany military forces in the Baltics is a particular affront to Russia’s legitimate concerns about its safety and sovereignty.

President Joe Biden appears no wiser than his four predecessors. - CounterPunch

Big dams pose big risks worldwide

Not long ago I posted about the Glen Canyon Dam, which for all that is wrong with it isn't at near-term risk for catastrophic failure. That's not the case for plenty of dams in the world.

Both dams exemplify the potentially dangerous mix of structural decay, escalating risk, and bureaucratic inertia highlighted in a pioneering new study into the growing risks from the world’s aging dams, published in January by the United Nations University (UNU), the academic and research arm of the UN. It warns that a growing legacy of crumbling dams past their design lives is causing a dramatic increase in dam failures, leaks, and emergency water releases that threaten hundreds of millions of people living downstream. Meanwhile, safety inspectors cannot keep up with the workload. - E360

Why the Great Resignation is happening

We'll see how it plays out. Hopefully a lot of good will come of it.

This trend has been characterized as the Great Resignation, and just about every economist and pundit has taken their crack at teasing out why it’s happening. Explanations have included health and safety fears, child care needs, a tight labor market, boosted savings from stimulus funds or reduced ability to spend money on bars and movies, enhanced unemployment benefits, increases in business formation, desire to work from home, early retirements, restrictions on immigration, demographic shrinking of the prime-age workforce, and my personal favorite, expectations of a labor shortage creating a labor shortage.

Some of these ideas have merit, though none can quite explain everything. In these moments, it’s best to actually ask the workers themselves. I did that, talking to dozens of people who have recently quit their job, or experts who closely track workers who have. And some patterns emerged.

Work at the low end of the wage scale has become ghastly over the past several decades. With no meaningful improvements in federal labor policy since the 1930s, employers have accrued tremendous power. Workers were afraid to voice any disapproval, taking whatever scraps they could get. “The U.S. needs a reset, needs a big push, to get to a place where work is more secure and livable for a lot of the population,” said MIT economist David Autor, who has tracked the misery of American deindustrialization and the shock of China’s rise as a manufacturing powerhouse. - The American Prospect

The infrastructure bill isn't all great

They had to do this, to get "bipartisan" support. That is, the votes of many legislators that were provided only at the behest of their corporate masters. I'm not just referring to Party of Trumpers, either.

The recently passed $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill will provide desperately needed federal dollars to fix our roads, water systems and other public infrastructure. But the bill is not all sunshine and rainbows.

A provision in the bill incentivizes state and local governments to hand control over some of the new projects to corporations and private investors. And that will create opportunities for bad things to happen.

Much of the new federal spending will go to fill potholes, repair bridges, lower the cost of high-speed internet, and build other things our communities need. But for large, federally supported transportation projects, state and local governments will be required to consider additional funding from private investors.

The danger is that this additional funding comes with strings attached. The private investors negotiate contracts — called “public-private partnerships” — that allow them to profit from raising water rates or hiking tolls on highways, or from charging the government expensive lease payments.

These contracts are not only more expensive than if the state or locality used traditional public financing, but they also often empower private investors to shape public policy. - The Progressive

Some cities really are reducing emissions

Decent news, in context.

After the Cop26 conference ended in Glasgow, many activists and climate scientists felt the agreement didn’t go far enough and that the US government was among those who had not backed strong words with enough actual deeds.

But action on a smaller level in the US – in cities and states – is gaining traction and beginning to make a significant difference. Smaller-scale initiatives to cut emissions have been the significant way that America has made climate progress in the last few years, in the absence of stronger federal leadership.

Researchers at the Brookings Institution calculated that in 2018, these climate action plans generated 6% emissions savings for the country – the equivalent of removing 79m cars from the road that year.

“These are significant benefits,” says Mark Muro, a senior fellow and policy director at Brookings Metro. “None of this is large enough, but they add up to a meaningful trend of emissions reductions. Those are real contributions.” - The Guardian

Enbridge is not slowing down

These arrogant greedheads need to be stopped.

As Indigenous Water Protectors and allies in northern Minnesota are stuck with legal and environmental fallout of Enbridge Energy’s Line 3 tar sands pipeline’s construction and operation, Enbridge is already moving on — eyeing ways to streamline and further expand its ability to deliver Canadian tar sands to the Gulf Coast for export to global markets.

The Canadian oil giant is looking to increase capacity across its fossil fuel infrastructure systems that connect to the Texas Gulf Coast, including potentially building a pipeline linking the Houston area to its newly acquired crude-export hub at the Port of Corpus Christi in order to accommodate Line 3’s ramped up capacity, according to reporting by S&P Global Platts.

The company is also looking at ways to expand its capacity across its Southern Access Extension and Flanagan South pipelines, corporate officials reportedly said on its third-quarter earnings call. It’s just waiting on a major Canadian regulatory decision later this month that will determine whether Enbridge can overhaul the way it awards space on its biggest tar sands pipeline network into the U.S., allowing it to contract up to 90 percent of its capacity on its Mainline system by signing long-term deals with potential shippers, rather than operating as a so-called “common carrier.” Corporate officials say they will provide more details on future projects at a December investors event. - Truthout

Food waste and climate change

The Project Drawdown website actually has information on a great many climate change emissions issues, and ways of mitigating them. I'm noting this one in particular, here.

A third of the food raised or prepared does not make it from farm or factory to fork. Producing uneaten food squanders a whole host of resources—seeds, water, energy, land, fertilizer, hours of labor, financial capital—and generates greenhouse gases at every stage—including methane when organic matter lands in the global rubbish bin. The food we waste is responsible for roughly 8 percent of global emissions.

Losing food to one waste heap or another is an issue in both high- and low-income countries. In places where income is low, wastage is generally unintentional and occurs earlier in the supply chain—food rots on farms or spoils during storage or distribution. In regions of higher income, willful food waste dominates farther along the supply chain. Retailers and consumers reject food based on bumps, bruises, and coloring, or simply order, buy, and serve too much. - Project Drawdown

Big changes are needed for a big dam out West

I found this article fascinating. In the bigger picture, it's a high-profile example of how water management practices in general need to change, at an accelerated rate.

Nearly 25 years later, the campaign to bypass Glen Canyon Dam has never been stronger. Now may seem like an odd time to make the case for draining the second-largest reservoir in the country, with the West in the depths of a megadrought unmatched since the Medieval Period. Tree ring cores and remote sensing data indicate a paucity of soil moisture unseen in at least 1,200 years. Lake Powell itself, along with reservoirs across the West, are at record lows, and climate change is set to exact an even more severe toll with rising temperatures killing the snowpack that feeds them, evaporating what are essentially ponds in the middle of the desert. Yet it is the drought itself that has revealed precisely why now is the moment to execute Dominy’s plan to bypass his dam, lower Lake Powell to river level, and restore Glen Canyon. - Earther

The U.S. child care system needs a lot more resources

This article has a lot of good info.

The irony, of course, is that modern child care is far from free. But that’s not because the workers are making high wages — or even living wages, in many instances. It’s because of the comparative lack of public investment.

The average European Union country spends $4,700 per child from infancy to age 5 — a number that climbs to $7,400 in France — compared with just $2,400 in the United States, according to a new US Department of the Treasury report.

“Every ‘civilized’ country has some system of early care and education regardless of [family] income,” Sykes says. “We do not have that commitment.” - The Hechinger Report

Biden food/ag policy is mostly the same old

It's well past time to get going on big changes, but that doesn't look likely.

The federal government appears not to have learned from the experience. At the U.N. Food Systems Summit held on 23 September, U.S. Secretary for Agriculture Tom Vilsack announced a new “Coalition of Action on Sustainable Productivity Growth for Food Security and Resource Conservation.” The accompanying document succinctly presents the current global food security challenge as one of a growing population, a deteriorating natural resource base, an urgent need to reduce and cap climate emissions, and for farmers and food workers to earn more from agriculture to reduce global poverty. It’s a decent list of the challenges. From there, though, the document makes a leap to claim that “increasing agricultural productivity growth” is the only solution to all these problems. The proposed solution is to grow (a lot) more food using less water, soil and labour, with the help of genetic manipulation.

Secretary Vilsack’s call for a new coalition follows a long line of U.S. agriculture leaders who have boasted that U.S. agricultural productivity "feeds the world”. As ever, that boast does not spare a glance to the problems — including hunger — at home. The Biden administration has promised to tackle persistent systemic racism, including environmental racism, to end child poverty, and to make sharp, real cuts to climate emissions. Instead of confronting these problems, the secretary is pushing to globalize an agricultural system that has impoverished rural communities, polluted waterways, stripped soils, and created such surpluses that we don’t just feed most of our production to animals, but also to fuel tanks and methane-producing landfill. The share of U.S. productivity given over directly to food is shockingly small. - IATP

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

Nuclear power is a lost cause

Fusion, maybe, someday. Maybe. But fission needs to just end.

This kind of colossal waste of time and money on failed nuclear power projects is, of course, the more typical story than the myths spun in the press about the need for “low carbon” nuclear energy, a misleading representation used to argue for nuclear power’s inclusion in climate change mitigation.

In reality, the story of nuclear power development in the US over the last 50 years is beyond pitiful and would not pass muster under any “normal” business plan. How the nuclear industry gets away with it remains baffling. - CounterPunch

Finding new wars post-Afghanistan

It's what too many people have their sick, dark hearts set upon.

Why are so many otherwise sane people, including Joe Biden’s foreign policy team, already rattling sabers in preparation for a new faceoff with China, one that would be eminently avoidable with judicious diplomacy and an urge to cooperate on this embattled planet of ours?

...Looking at the U.S. from across an ocean, a British friend of mine was bemused by this country’s propensity for turning rivals into dangers of the worst sort. He asked me whether the very unity of the United States hinges on hyping and then confronting external enemies, an “artificially contrived military commonality,” as he put it, that may serve to prevent this country’s states from performing their own little “Brexits.”

He has a point. What is it about this country that makes our leaders so regularly revel in inflating threats to our well-being? War profits, of course, as well as the kinds of dangers that seem to justify an ever more colossal military. Still, I suggested to my friend that inflating such dangers hasn’t induced a sense of national unity, though it has, at least, provided a major distraction from what, so late in the game, can still only be called class warfare...They also, of course, offer our oligarchs and kleptocrats yet more opportunities to plunder taxpayer dollars. - TomDispatch

Nitrate fertilizer overuse is poisoning poor people's water

That of people who aren't poor as well. But as usual the effects are disproportionate.

Fairmont is far from unique. A study by the Environmental Working Group published on June 23 found that nitrate pollution in tap water is more likely in lower-income communities. In Minnesota, 73% of water utilities with elevated nitrate were in areas that fell below the average state income...

Nitrogen contamination is linked to livestock production as the tons of nitrogen-rich manure produced by animal feeding operations is used as fertilizer in crop fields...

While livestock operations must account for nitrogen levels in the soil and in the manure when applying manure to crop fields, the manure combined with commercial fertilizer can result in too much nitrogen being applied to the ground. - Investigate Midwest

Everyone owes mega-gratitude to indigenous resisters

Even though a whole lot of people don't have the sense to realize that. As is the case with so much else.

Indigenous rights and responsibilities, the report explains, “are far more than rhetorical devices — they are tangible structures impacting the viability of fossil fuel expansion.” Through physically disrupting construction and legally challenging projects, Indigenous resistance has directly stopped projects expected to produce 780 million metric tons of greenhouse gases every year and is actively fighting projects that would dump more than 800 million metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every year.

The analysis, which used publicly released data and calculations from nine different environmental and oil regulation groups, found that roughly 1.587 billion metric tons of annual greenhouse gas emissions have been halted. That’s the equivalent pollution of approximately 400 new coal-fired power plants — more than are still operating in the United States and Canada — or roughly 345 million passenger vehicles — more than all vehicles on the road in these countries. - Grist

The Texas abortion ban is not an Islamic thing

A lot of people should know better. And I acknowledge that I really didn't, until I read this article.

It was no surprise to me that the extreme abortion ban that went into effect in Texas last week led to Islamophobic hashtags and media conversations. After all, contrasting the United States to Islam is part of an age-old imperialist way of thinking that stems from Orientalism, which seeks to differentiate between what is “right” in the West and “wrong” in the “Other.”

...It’s Islamophobic to assume that Muslim countries love banning abortion. It’s also ignorant to present misogyny as a “foreign” problem that should be expected in the supposedly “less progressive” nations of the East, but is a shock in the United States.

In Islam, abortion is permitted in cases such as rape, incest, socioeconomic difficulties, impact on the pregnant person’s mental or physical health, and fetal impairment. Texas SB 8 does not permit abortion in any of these situations, except for a life-threatening physical condition. Out of 47 Muslim-majority countries, only 18 have abortion laws as restrictive as Texas SB 8, according to a 2014 study in the journal Health Policy and Planning. - Rewire News Group

The horrifying, disgraceful reality/legacy of the U.S. in Afghanistan

It so happens that I'm currently reading James Risen's book, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War. It kicks ass, same as this article.

This month, as the Taliban swiftly took control of Kabul and the American-backed government collapsed, the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the government’s watchdog over the Afghan experience, issued his final report. The assessment includes remarkably candid interviews with former American officials involved in shaping U.S. policy in Afghanistan that, collectively, offer perhaps the most biting critique of the 20-year American enterprise ever published in an official U.S. government report.

“The extraordinary costs were meant to serve a purpose,” the report notes, “though the definition of that purpose evolved over time.”

Released in the days after Kabul fell, the report reads like an epitaph for America’s involvement in Afghanistan. - James Risen/The Intercept

The new reality on abortion rights

I never seriously believed that even this SCOTUS wouldn't block the Texas vigilante law. They may still be working on how to block that part of it, while also providing a guide for a six-week ban they will uphold. But, hell, I don't know.

Still, the work remains. And today, at West Alabama Women’s Center, and in clinics across the country, it was mostly business as usual. Looking ahead, (Robin) Marty is already reflecting on how people will likely step up in really incredible ways, which she ironically worries could serve as a defense for future abortion litigation. “If we as activists, and as clinic workers, and as the movement itself manage to help people get care, that is obviously good for pregnant people. But in the grander scheme of things legally, that actually then serves to show that, ‘Hey, this law did not have nearly the devastating impact that people claimed that it would,’ and the courts are going to use that as an excuse to say, ‘Look, it can stay in effect. Look, more states can pass this,'” she says. “So our choices right now are to either mitigate as much damage as we can, and then hope against hope that the courts don’t see that as, ‘Hey, look, it’s really not that bad,’ or just watch people harmed and forced into pregnancies or into dangerous situations or sued or fined or in jail. There’s no win for us.”

Marty’s book, which lays out how to get care if you need an abortion and cannot access it, is quite literally a guide to what happens next in this country. It’s also a call to action. “It’s a to-do list of how to protect yourself during civil disobedience and, more importantly, how to figure out if you’re the sort of person who should do civil disobedience because it is privileged people who need to step up and do it,” she says. - Mother Jones

Internet trolls aren't assholes just because it's the internet

Per a recent study.

The team considered the mismatch hypothesis, which in the context of online behavior refers to the theory that there is a conflict between human adaptation for face-to-face interpersonal interaction and the newer, impersonal online environment. That hypothesis more or less amounts to the idea that humans who would be nicer to each other in person might feel more inclined to get nasty when interacting with other pseudonymous internet users. The researchers found little evidence for that.

Instead, their data pointed to online interactions largely mirroring offline behavior, with people predisposed to aggressive, status-seeking behavior just as unpleasant in person as behind a veil of online anonymity, and choosing to be jerks as part of a deliberate strategy rather than as a consequence of the format involved. - Gizmodo

A superlative takedown of the contemptible pro-war cowards in corporate media

My take is that this won’t have a lasting political impact. But I’m noting that I could be wrong, and that the last time corporate “news” media behaved this despicably, pandering to the most misinformed and gullible segment of the population, Trump ended up in the White House.

Mainstream coverage of Kabul’s fall and its aftermath has been anything but circumspect. Attempts to weigh the benefits of America’s withdrawal (e.g., the humanitarian gains inherent to the cessation of 20 years of civil war) against its costs have been rare; attempts to judge Biden’s execution of that withdrawal against rigorous counterfactuals have been rarer still. Instead, ostensibly neutral correspondents and anchors have (1) openly editorialized against the White House’s policy; (2) assigned Biden near-total responsibility for the final collapse of the proto-failed state his predecessors had established; and then (3) reported on the potential political costs of Biden’s actions, as though they were not actively imposing those costs through their own speculations about just “how politically damaging” the president’s failures of “competence” and “empathy” would prove to be...

One can critically report on concrete failings in the Biden administration’s withdrawal plans. But one cannot presume Biden’s responsibility for every negative consequence that follows from ending a misbegotten war and deserve the title journalist. By privileging the victims of American military withdrawal over those of American military engagement — while presuming the U.S. president’s capacity to decisively shape events in foreign lands — the media has rendered itself objectively pro-war. In allowing personal attachments to dictate its humanitarian concerns, mainstream reporters have concentrated moral outrage on an injustice that the U.S. can’t resolve without resort to violence (the Taliban’s conquest of Afghanistan), while enabling mass indifference to a much larger injustice that the U.S. can drastically mitigate without killing anyone (the global shortfall of COVID-19 vaccines). - New York Magazine

Line 3 protesters are seeing it all the way through

It’s just a matter of time, until the miserable boondoggle is sitting there empty except for a few vile remnant puddles of tar sands sludge. I suppose then Enbridge will demand some sort of compensation from American taxpayers.

The dog days of summer have been bittersweet for “water protectors,” as members of the fight against Line 3 call themselves. Moments of joy like these take place even as a devastating reality sinks in: The pipeline is weeks away from completion, and they won’t be able to stop it.

Many feel betrayed by a governor and president who pledged to prioritize tribal relations and environmental issues, then remained silent as construction barreled ahead. They’re considering how to use lessons learned for future fights, even as they mourn the loss of this one.

“It’s like that David and Goliath story, but this time, Goliath still won,” said Jaike Spotted Wolf, a member of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Sahnish Nation. “But when the pipeline is over, there’s a lot of other Indigenous issues that need to be addressed. We can’t just walk away.” - Minnesota Reformer

Something righteous happened re: trade and labor

It's been a long, long time coming, and hopefully there will be a lot more of it.

Last week, something revolutionary happened in the history of U.S. trade policy. The government used trade law to help labor, not to help capital.

Government switching sides gives a whole new political meaning to globalization. Global trade, with the right politics and policies, doesn’t have to produce a race to the bottom. It can even start a race to the top. Who knew?

The specific case involved an auto parts company called Tridonex, located in the border town of Matamoros, Mexico. Tridonex is owned by a Philadelphia outfit called Cardone Industries—which in turn is owned by a Canadian hedge fund! Tridonex makes things like reconditioned used brakes. It sends most of its products to the U.S., and is a classic case of offshoring jobs to Mexico, as enabled by NAFTA.

But in 2019, the Democrats in Congress and Trump trade chief Robert Lighthizer rewrote NAFTA. The successor agreement, called USMCA, includes tough, enforceable labor rights provisions, guaranteeing workers in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada the right to organize and join unions free from harassment. - The American Prospect

Afghanistan withdrawal shows U.S. corporate "news" media at its worst

OK, not its absolute, all-time worst; that goes to all it did to put Trump in the White House. And the lasting effects of this “journalistic” debacle will be few, if any, because in a week most people will care about as much about Afghanistan as they did a week ago. But it’s still atrocious.

Treating the Taliban’s seizure of Afghanistan’s capitol over the weekend as a shocking event in the wake of U.S. troops withdrawing from the war-torn country, the press eagerly jumped into the blame game. In the process, they diligently did the GOP’s bidding by omitting key context in its rush to pin the blame for a 20-year, extraordinarily complex and heartbreaking military and foreign policy failure on a single man who took office just seven months ago...

In truth, the Republican policy is to leave U.S. troops there forever and spend untold billions in the process. Yet the only Republican perspective journalists focused on in recent days was that Republicans were very mad at Biden. (Yes, many of them were stalwart supporters of the Iraq War and stood by Bush’s botched handling of the war for years.)

When Biden announced earlier this year that all U.S. troops were coming home from Afghanistan, 70 percent of Americans supported the move, including 56 percent support from Republicans.

Would those polling results be different today, given the collapse of Kabul and the Taliban’s newfound control of Afghanistan? It’s possible. But after the U.S. fought a losing war there for two decades, my guess is that most Americans will not swing their positions and urgently demand that U.S. forces return to mountainous fighting.- Crooks and Liars

An Afghanistan post-mortem

Prof. Juan Cole's take, with which I largely agree. Though I think the U.S. stayed in Afghanistan more because war pigs like Rumsfeld psychologically "get off" on it all. And of course some truly loathsome, despicable assholes got richer.

The US in 2002-2003 had a good outcome in Afghanistan. We should just have left then. I can’t imagine why we didn’t. I think then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wanted to surround Russia so it couldn’t reemerge as a peer power. It had nothing to do with Afghanistan.

The US lost Afghanistan in part by trying to occupy it militarily. In 2005 US troops used flamethrowers to burn poppy crops of Afghan farmers, who had nothing else to live on. One in 7 as a result had to sell a daughter. I doubt they have forgiven the US.

If you occupy a country, you have to suppress insurgents. Insurgents come from towns and villages and have friends and relatives there. When insurgents hit a US outpost, the US troops had to go into the nearby village and shake it down, looking for the guerrillas. They’d go into Afghan homes at night, with the women folk rustled from their sleep and standing there bare-faced and in their bed clothes before 18-year-old strangers from Alabama and South Carolina. After a thing like that, the men of the family would have had at least to try to kill some Americans. Search and destroy missions gradually turned people against the US, just as had happened in Vietnam. - Informed Comment

Tell your Republican friends to watch out for the "pre-checked box."

I remember back when online petitions were a bigger deal. I saw where Republicans started demanding a phone number, so they could later hassle you for money, before they’d include your “signature.” I indulged righteous indignation, until Democrats soon started doing that as well. Hopefully that won’t be the case with this.

Concerns around Trump's donation scheme first emerged in April, when a Times investigation found that the former president's campaign operation had routinely been signing up contributors for monthly — or even weekly — recurring contributions, through deliberately bewildering online forms and pre-checked authorizations. In the weeks before Election Day last fall, the Trump campaign rolled out an increasingly opaque array of these boxes, which featured huge blocks of boldface or all-caps text, full of aggressive phrasing, evidently intended to distract donors from the opt-out language in smaller, fainter type below.

This tactic, the Times reported, "ensnared scores of unsuspecting Trump loyalists — retirees, military veterans, nurses and even experienced political operatives. Soon, banks and credit card companies were inundated with fraud complaints from the president's own supporters about donations they had not intended to make, sometimes for thousands of dollars."

Trump's campaign was forced to refund $122.7 million as a result of 200,000 disputed transactions in 2020. Refunds to donors who exceed legal limits are not infrequent in political campaigns, but that was a vastly higher sum than the amount refunded by Joe Biden's campaign. This captured the attention of the Federal Election Commission (FEC), which in May sent a formal recommendation to Congress, asking for an outright ban on pre-checked recurring donation boxes.

That doesn't appear to have had made any meaningful impact on Trump's fundraising effort. In fact, Salon's reporting reveals that dozens of other Republican candidates and organizations now rely on pre-checked boxes to keep the money flowing, so much so that it can essentially be regarded as standard operating procedure on conservative fundrasing. - Salon

YouTube is probably not driving right-wing extremism

Among other things far-right fanaticism has been around, and very problematic, since long before YouTube, or for that matter the internet, came to be.

We've all seen it happen: Watch one video on YouTube and your recommendations shift, as if Google's algorithms think the video's subject is your life's passion. Suddenly, all the recommended videos—and probably many ads—you're presented with are on the topic.

Mostly, the results are comical. But there has been a steady stream of stories about how the process has radicalized people, sending them down an ever-deepening rabbit hole until all their viewing is dominated by fringe ideas and conspiracy theories.

A new study released on Monday looks at whether these stories represent a larger trend or are just a collection of anecdotes. While the data can't rule out the existence of online radicalization, it definitely suggests that it's not the most common experience. Instead, it seems like fringe ideas are simply part of a larger self-reinforcing community. - Ars Technica

It's no surprise that corporate "news" is back to the same old

I question, myself, to what real extent they could ever be said to have moved away from it.

After January 6, we noted (FAIR.org, 1/18/21) that many in corporate media finally found the courage to cast aside their commitment to false equivalence. Presumably shocked by what they had witnessed, reporters began using words like “sedition” and “incitement” without having to put them in the mouth of a source who could then be balanced by an opposing view. News outlets directly stated that Donald Trump “set in motion” (New York Times, 1/6/21) or was responsible for “inciting” (CNN.com, 1/12/21) the deadly attack on democracy.

Yet we also noted that Trump’s lack of support at the time from within the establishment, Republicans and Democrats alike, made that honesty easier for reporters—some of whom nevertheless couldn’t shake their old habits as a debate began over whether Trump should be impeached yet again for inciting the insurrection.

Six months later, Trump has solidified his grip on the right, and elite journalists have largely returned to their perfunctory both-sides reporting. - FAIR

Corporate Ag fails badly in Africa

This is no surprise. Indeed, sadly predictable.

According to an anonymous inside source, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) is preparing a campaign to raise $1 billion in the coming months to fund its promotion of industrialized agriculture through 2030. The organization, which has spent $1 billion since its founding in 2006, is reportedly counting on the September United Nations Food System Summit as a key platform for its fundraising. AGRA’s president, Agnes Kalibata, was named Special Envoy last year by U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres to lead the summit. The simultaneous fund drive raises immediate questions about her conflicts of interest.

The reported funding campaign comes one year after our research documented that AGRA was failing on its own terms. Our review of national-level data from 13 AGRA focus countries showed that Green Revolution programs were falling far short of stated goals of doubling productivity and incomes for 30 million small-scale farming households while reducing food insecurity by half by 2020.

AGRA’s fund drive is sure to intensify calls from African farm, environmental and community organizations to demand that donors shift their funding from expensive Green Revolution programs to more affordable and sustainable approaches such as agroecology. Ecological agriculture received another vote of confidence earlier this month when the U.N. Committee on World Food Security approved a set of policy recommendations supporting such measures. - IATP

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

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

How the plutocrats get out of paying taxes

This provides good explanations of their favorite current schemes.

With taxes due this week, it’s an apt time to consider some of the ways our federal tax code favors America’s wealthiest, and how a subset of those fortunate folks will use every trick in the book to game the system even further to their advantage.

Much of it revolves around the way the IRS taxes long-term investment profits—a.k.a. capital gains. President Joe Biden is asking people to pay a lot more on these profits. For decades, after all, the tax code has rewarded investors, particularly those at the very top of the nation’s wealth and income distributions, with very favorable rates. This policy is based on the long-debunked notion that the benefits of giving rich people even more money to invest will eventually trickle down and lift up the masses via job creation and so forth...

In other words, the tax code favors passive investment gains over actual work. This stands in opposition to the longstanding—perhaps mythical—American ideal that not only is hard work honorable, something to be encouraged and rewarded, but that all Americans should have equal opportunities. In fact, most Americans own little to no stock, while asset ownership soars as one moves up the wealth and income ladders. A proprietary analysis published by Goldman Sachs last year estimated that, as of late 2019, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans owned a staggering 56 percent of all public and private equity held by US households. Since March 2020, meanwhile, America’s billionaires, despite the pandemic—and also because of it—have seen their collective wealth grow by more than $1.6 trillion.

The disparity in tax rates for work earnings versus investment earnings, which Biden hopes to eliminate, has been a major factor in the rapid growth of the wealth and income gap in recent decades. The disparity also drives financial behavior by wealthy individuals and corporations alike. - Mother Jones

The big "backlash" vs. tech has unfortunately gone nowhere

There needs to be a lot more, and much better focused, effort.

After three and a half years, the U.S. backlash against tech's biggest firms has failed to dent or daunt them.

The big picture: Today, Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook are massively richer, more powerful and more determined to push their products and services deeper into our lives than they were in January 2018, when Axios first used the term "techlash."

Since then, the companies have run a gauntlet of withering criticism and government complaints that they violate users' privacy, dull kids' brains, cheat their competitors, and undermine American democracy. - Axios

Big Meat's big Covid-19 con

I should have suspected this all along, though I didn't.

Last year, as the meatpacking industry’s frontline workers were infected with Covid-19 and the industry pushed claims of a meat shortage, companies in the U.S. exported more than $22 billion in meat products, continuing an upward trend in foreign sales since 2016.

Trade data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that in 2020 the value of American meat exports reached its highest level since 2014. Companies exporting meat products from the Midwest also fared well, increasing sales by about $500 million from 2019 to 2020. - In These Times

Where the VA is at

Trump & Co. didn't get too far with their heinous effort to open the Veterans Administration to being strip-mined for profit by the greedheads, aka "privatization." But that doesn't mean everything's cool. This is a comprehensive recent overview.

Denis McDonough, the new secretary of Veterans Affairs, is only the second nonveteran to take the helm of the VA since it became a Cabinet-level department in 1988 and only the second person whom Congress did not confirm unanimously for the post.3 He will have his work cut out for him. Not only does Secretary McDonough have to manage a large and complex organization, but he is also facing a series of unprecedented challenges—all compounded by the fact that the VA’s top leadership is in turmoil following the Trump administration, which had five deputy secretaries4 during the former president’s four-year term.

Secretary McDonough’s challenges may be placed into seven categories:

- Addressing the ballooning VA budget
- Expanding veterans’ access to disability benefits
- Reducing the veteran suicide rate
- Slowing the privatization of veterans’ health care
- Prioritizing the women and LGBTQ people who have and still serve in the military
- Rebuilding the department’s infrastructure and staffing
- Helping veterans transition into civil society - Center for American Progress

Care work needs to be treated as as important as it gets

The way things are now is not indicative of a well-functioning economy or society.

Care isn’t a burden for women and families to shoulder alone. It’s the foundation of our economy, and it deserves to be treated as such. For the tens of millions of workers with care responsibilities related to, for example, young children or elderly parents, having stable, high-quality care services available is what makes it possible for them to hold a job. Put simply, care services are needed for the functioning of our modern labor market.

Workers with care responsibilities need a strong care system in place in order to participate in the workforce. As it stands, our care infrastructure is fragmented and inadequate, which cuts off opportunities for millions of workers. The burdens of our inadequate care infrastructure disproportionately fall on women, who still perform the bulk of care work in this country. Those care burdens are a primary cause of low labor force participation among prime age women in the U.S. relative to our peer countries around the world, even before the pandemic. Poor care infrastructure comes at great economic costs.

While workers with caregiving needs rely heavily on care services, care jobs are historically underpaid and undervalued. And because of things like occupational segregation, discrimination, and other labor market disparities related to structural racism and sexism, women and people of color are concentrated in these jobs. - EPI

Regarding the "worker shortage"

This provides excellent historical context.

The current blizzard of stories about a “worker shortage” across the U.S. may seem as though it’s about this peculiar moment, as the pandemic fades. Restaurants in Washington, D.C., contend that they’re suffering from a staffing “crisis.” The hospitality industry in Massachusetts says it’s experiencing the same disaster. The governor of Montana plans to cancel coronavirus-related additional unemployment benefits funded by the federal government, and the cries of business owners are being heard in the White House.

In reality, though, this should be understood as the latest iteration of a question that’s plagued the owning class for centuries: How can they get everyone to do awful jobs for them for awful pay?

Employers’ anxiety about this can be measured by the fact that these stories have erupted when there currently is no shortage of workers. An actual shortage would result in wages rising at the bottom of the income distribution to such a degree that there was notable inflation. That’s not happening, at least not now. Instead, business owners seem to mean that they can’t find people who’ll work for what the owners want to pay them. This is a “shortage” in the same sense that there is a shortage of new Lamborghinis available for $1,000.

To understand what’s truly going on, it’s necessary to look back at how this question has been settled in different ways through the history of capitalism. - The Intercept

How badly might the new NAFTA screw things up?

This is a comprehensive analysis.

Unfortunately, the now-paused trade negotiations with the U.K. and Kenya started from the flawed new NAFTA/TPP template. Tai and the Biden administration are right to pause and review these negotiations and should consult with civil society before developing an entirely new template for trade negotiations. In addition to the “worker-centric” approach that Tai has outlined, a new model must incorporate important principles that President Biden articulated in his Jan. 20, 2021 executive order on modernizing regulatory review.

Biden’s order has been called “game-changing” because instead of focusing review of regulations primarily to reduce business costs it calls for promoting “public health and safety, economic growth, social welfare, racial justice, environmental stewardship, human dignity, equity and the interests of future generations.” In a significant about-face, Biden’s regulatory reform order tasks the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) — which has been a primary force for deregulation and a roadblock to lifesaving regulations for decades — with proactively encouraging agencies to develop rules that benefit the public.

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) should be a first stop on this regulatory review train. The new NAFTA is out of step with the Biden administration’s expressed priorities and cannot be the model for future agreements. Instead of promoting the interests of future generations, racial justice and environmental stewardship, the new NAFTA’s so-called “good regulatory practices” chapter increases opportunities for corporate meddling to slow down, weaken and roll back protective standards. Provisions throughout call for regulatory impact statements, cost-benefit analysis, a rush to market without safety studies, limited labeling of hazards and harmonization of standards with those of other countries or weak corporate-influenced international standards. While the text includes lip service to the importance of public interest regulations, the new NAFTA includes multiple deregulatory provisions that instead fuel a race to the bottom. - IATP

Maybe a harbinger of the Trump SCOTUS's plans

Or maybe not. I do think the far-right majority continues to serve the rich man, first and foremost, and that might - might- keep them from getting too out of control. But it will continue to be bad.

Take a walk with me inside the mind of Brett Jones. He was the plaintiff in Jones v. Mississippi, the United State Supreme Court case I told you about (April 26). In a 6-3 opinion, written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the court rolled back two previous rulings regarding lifetime imprisonment without parole for minors. The previous rulings, called Miller and Montgomery, held that lifetime imprisonment for juvenile offenders was justified only in the worse of the worse cases—when a convict is "permanently incorrigible." In Jones, Kavanaugh said nah. Life in prison's fine even if corrigible.

I want you to take this walk with me to understand more fully the complex layers of cruelty in Kavanaugh's opinion. By understanding that his point is not punishment in the service of democracy and justice but instead punishment in the service of impunity and power, I hope you will understand the need for calling this barbarism instead of what we usually call it. Conservatism seems like something debatable. Barbarism isn't...

In this, the Supreme Court affirmed what every single survivor of childhood trauma secretly believes but fights every single day: the idea that the weak in this world are the playthings of the strong, and that democracy, equality, freedom, morality and all the rest have nothing to do with it. In deciding Jones, the court, led by Kavanaugh, said yeah, you're right. What matters began long before you came into being, so that Boy Kavanaugh can commit crimes with impunity while rising to the pinnacle of judicial power to sit in judgment of Boy Jones who can now only curse the day he was born. - AlterNet

Passing the PRO Act would be a good deal

As usual, these days, the obstacle is the Senate filibuster.

A coalition of over 40 progressive organizations on Saturday rallied online and in person to support the PRO Act—legislation that would strengthen workers' right to organize among other pro-worker provisions.

Groups behind the May Day actions include MoveOn, Indivisible, Democratic Socialists of America, and the Working Families Party...

In a fact sheet released in February, EPI summarized the proposal's benefits:

The Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act addresses many of the major shortcomings with our current law. Passing the PRO Act would help restore workers' ability to organize with their co-workers and negotiate for better pay, benefits, and fairness on the job. Passing the PRO Act would also promote greater racial economic justice because unions and collective bargaining help shrink the Black–white wage gap and bring greater fairness to the workplace.

EPI also joined Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the AFL-CIO, and the National Employment Law Project this week in releasing a document that "examines the challenges of unionizing in the U.S. and explains how the PRO Act would be a corrective." - Common Dreams

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