Getting it together on inflation

This is really good, from a progressive perspective, on where the issue is at. My only quibble with it is, the first thing I'd like to see is the most egregious corporate players brought up on criminal charges (collusion, market manipulation).

It's worth watching, right now, as to whether Big Oil tries to use the pending hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico to run up gas prices in order to, along with shameless greedhead profiteering, influence the upcoming election.

Yet conservative economic theory, like that trumpeted by Friedman, still drives the story we hear repeated ad nauseam in mainstream discussions of inflation: increased wages and government spending are to blame. Only the Federal Reserve can beat inflation by ​“cooling” the economy. The government’s only role is to refrain from substantive spending.

Biden could have invoked executive powers to institute targeted price controls and invest in production, but he didn’t. Instead, the Federal Reserve is hiking interest rates, and the administration’s landmark social spending bill, Build Back Better, got whittled down and reframed into the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes some positive gains (like corporate taxes and reduced drug prices) but operates within the confines of conservative monetary justifications.

To articulate and fight for an alternative solution to inflation, we need to radically shift the economic discourse to the left. - In These Times

Modern-day indentured servitude in the U.S.

I was surprised to see this, though I suppose that I shouldn’t have been.

Bosses in industries such as retail, health care and logistics are reverting to an old tactic and trapping people in miserable jobs by threatening to saddle them with debt if they quit. Workers across the United States in fields ranging from nursing to trucking have been discouraged from leaving jobs they hate or can’t afford to keep because employers vow to charge them for training costs if they quit before an arbitrary deadline.

The threats are backed by so-called Training Repayment Agreement Provisions (TRAPs) in employment contracts. The practice has been likened by critics to indentured servitude and peonage — formerly common types of debt bondage in which a borrower was bound to perform labor for a creditor.

TRAPs have recently come under fire from policymakers because of class action litigation against the pet store chain PetSmart, and reporting on the restrictive covenants from a watchdog group called the Student Borrower Protection Center. Earlier this month, the Senate Banking Committee held hearings examining the agreements and other forms of employer-driven debt. In June, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau also launched an investigation of employment arrangements that led to workers owing money to their bosses. - Truthout

U.S. military spending is mega-massively out of control

The ultimate in corrupt corporate/government collusion.

U.S. military spending is, of course, astronomically high — more than that of the next nine countries combined. Here’s the kicker, though: the Pentagon (an institution that has never passed a comprehensive financial audit) doesn’t even ask for all those yearly spending increases in its budget requests to Congress. Instead, the House and Senate continue to give it extra tens of billions of dollars annually. No matter that Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has publicly stated the Pentagon has all it needs to “get the capabilities… to support our operational concepts” without such sums.

It would be one thing if such added funding were at least crafted in line with a carefully considered defense strategy. More often than not, though, much of it goes to multibillion dollar weapons projects being built in the districts or states of key lawmakers or for items on Pentagon wish lists (formally known as “unfunded priorities lists”). It’s unclear how such items can be “priorities” when they haven’t even made it into the Pentagon’s already enormous official budget request.

In addition, throwing yet more money at a department incapable of managing its current budget only further strains its ability to meet program goals and delivery dates. In other words, it actually impairs military readiness. Whatever limited fiscal discipline the Pentagon has dissipates further when lawmakers arbitrarily increase its budget, despite rampant mismanagement leading to persistent cost overruns and delivery delays on the military’s most expensive (and sometimes least well-conceived) weapons programs. - TomDispatch

About the politics of California's energy grid

Very well-written and enlightening. What actually happened was in fact a major humiliation for idiot fossil fuels cheerleaders. But like all right-wing pundits they don't have to worry about job security, because their jobs don't involve actually being right about anything. They're about telling target audiences what feeds their motivated reasoning and cognitive rigidity. In the vernacular, what "pushes their buttons," emotionally.

The text message dinged and bleeped and buzzed millions of phones shortly after 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 6, spreading panic across the Golden State. It was the notification that so many Californians had feared and anticipated — the signal that soon the entire state would be plunged into an un-air-conditioned dystopia of its own making, otherwise known as rolling blackouts.

Conservative pundits had prophesied this moment for months, warning that California would pay for forsaking fossil fuels and choosing solar and wind and geothermal power instead. Then the mainstream media piled on with headlines asking: How could the state possibly handle a flood of new electric vehicles draining the grid when it couldn’t keep the lights on now?

...Yet at 5:48 p.m., when demand remained at an unsustainable 50,388 megawatts, state officials sent out another text, this time urging Californians to unplug their devices, ease off on the AC and otherwise do what they could to conserve power. Enough folks heeded the call that in the ensuing hour, demand fell by more than 3,000 megawatts — or almost one-and-a-half Diablo Canyon nuclear plants’ worth.

It did the trick. At about 9 p.m. Californians’ phones dinged and buzzed and chirped yet again with another message from CAISO, the grid operator: The emergency was over, crisis averted, put away the candles and get back to your binge-watching. A few days later, the heat finally eased. There were no statewide rolling outages, the grid stood up to extreme weather, and fossil fuel advocates’ attempt to politically weaponize the predicted blackouts fell flat. - High Country News

The U.S. Africa Command is a counterproductive mess

Some people in the U.S. are getting very wealthy because of it, though. Or more accurately even more beyond-the-dreams-of-avarice wealthier.

AFRICOM has not created the “safety and stability” invoked by U.S. leaders, but it has expanded the U.S. military’s footprint. During the Obama administration, AFRICOM quickly expanded its reach and influence on the continent through military-to-military trainings, joint counterterrorism operations, foreign aid, and other surreptitious methods that created dependence on AFRICOM for the defense needs of African states. Despite the fact that the U.S. is not at war with any African country, there are 46 U.S. military bases and outposts spanning the continent, with the greatest concentration in the Horn of Africa. Camp Lemonnier, the U.S. base in Djibouti, a small East African nation with a poverty rate of 79 percent, serves as the current home to AFRICOM in the Horn. In 2014 the U.S. government secured a 20-year lease for $63,000,000 a year.

As AFRICOM’s presence across the continent grows, so does the terrorism it is meant to curb. The 2006 U.S.-backed overthrow of the Union of Islamic Courts in Somalia paved the way for a more militant group, al-Shabab, to grow in rank and reach. This is just one example of how power vacuums caused by U.S. military intervention fortify the political will and strength of terrorist groups. - Truthout

Workers at risk because of failure to enforce pesticide rules

An effect of the extreme pesticide overuse relentlessly promoted by Big Ag. The insect apocalypse is another.

At the core of the lawsuit, filed by attorneys Trent Taylor at Farmworker Justice and Anna Hill Galendez at the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, is the claim that Reyes Saucedo and about 200 other farmworkers were exposed to dangerous pesticides because Mastronardi Farms failed to provide the kinds of training, proper protective gear, and ventilation required by federal laws.

And those workers are far from alone. According to several experts and evidence compiled in multiple new reports, those laws are inadequate and there’s very little incentive across the industry to follow them. Furthermore, the EPA is tasked with enforcing the rules while the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)—the agency usually in charge of protecting workers from on-the-job hazards, including pesticide exposure in other industries—is out of the loop.

“The very fact that the agency in charge of approving pesticides is the same one that’s in charge of establishing and enforcing worker standards is troubling, to say the least,” a team of experts wrote in an analysis on pesticides and environmental injustice published in the journal BMC Public Health in April.

Records show states conduct very few inspections to make sure farms are meeting the requirements; and while the inspections that are completed reveal high rates of violations, farms are rarely penalized for those violations. - Civil Eats

A busy jobs shuttle between Big Ag lobbying and the U.S. Ag Dept.

This organization has been looking into it, in detail. The American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) is Big Ag's predominant lobbying outfit.

Investigate Midwest found records of several federal government appointees with Farm Bureau ties, ranging from former state Farm Bureau presidents to state lawmakers who received awards or endorsements from the organization.

Seventeen current state directors of the USDA’s Farm Services Agency have a connection to the AFBF or its state and local counterparts, Investigate Midwest found in an analysis of FSA director bios, social media accounts and news clips. Under the Trump administration, 16 state FSA directors had a Farm Bureau connection before being appointed. - Investigate Midwest

Most Americans support real climate action, and most Americans don't know that

I found this surprising, myself. Not that people underestimate the support, given that corporate media propaganda is still ultimately most people's source, to the extent that they're paying much attention at all. But at how wide the margin is.

It can be hard to guess what others are thinking. Especially when it comes to climate change.

People imagine that a minority of Americans want action, when it’s actually an overwhelming majority, according to a study recently published in the journal Nature Communications. When asked to estimate public support for measures such as a carbon tax or a Green New Deal, most respondents put the number between 37 and 43 percent. In fact, polling suggests that the real number is almost double that, ranging from 66 to 80 percent.

Across all demographics, people underestimated support for these policies. Democrats guessed slightly higher percentages than Republicans, but were still way off. “Nobody had accurate estimates, on average,” said Gregg Sparkman, a co-author of the study and a professor of psychology at Boston College. “We were shocked at just how ubiquitous this picture was.” - Grist