Pentagon looks to be undercounting how many civilians it kills

Not a shocker. Presumably they set the bar about as high as it goes, for what "officially" counts as a civilian death or serious injury caused by U.S. military action.

As U.S. military forces continue to kill and wound civilians in multiple countries during the ongoing 21-year War on Terror while chronically undercounting such casualties, a pair of Democratic lawmakers on Monday asked the Pentagon to explain discrepancies in noncombatant casualty reporting and detail steps being taken to address the issue.

"The report did not admit to any civilian deaths in Syria, despite credible civilian casualty monitors documenting at least 15 civilian deaths." In a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)—who have both led calls to hold the military accountable for harming noncombatants—said they are "troubled" that the Pentagon's annual civilian casualty report, which was released in September as required by an amendment Warren attached to the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), again undercounts noncombatants killed by U.S. forces...

"Every time Congress is briefed about an instance of civilian harm, we are almost always told that the service member followed the proper protocol and processes," Jacobs told Politico earlier this month. "So I think it's clear that it's an institutional not an individual problem."

While it is notoriously difficult to track how many civilians have been killed by a military that, in the words of Gen. Tommy Franks, doesn't "do body counts," researchers at the Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs estimate that combatants on all sides of the U.S.-led War on Terror have killed as many as 387,000 civilians as of late last year. - Common Dreams

Israeli violence against Palestinians sets a new record

This horrific new mark could well be broken next year, the year after, and so on, unless something changes.

The UN Officer of the High Commissioner on Human Rights has issued a press release detailing the views of its experts on the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians during the past year, which they say has seen the worst death rate among the Occupied population since the organization began systematically tracking fatalities in 2005.

The experts rebuked Israel for the excessive use of force deployed by Israeli forces against Palestinians and the unbridled violence of Israeli squatters on Palestinian land in the West Bank, which have left 150 Palestinians dead this year in the Occupied West Bank, including 33 children...

Fanatical Israeli squatters who have built on land owned by Palestinian families and walk around armed are a particular concern for the UN human rights experts. They say that:

“Armed and masked Israeli settlers are attacking Palestinians in their homes, attacking children on their way to school, destroying property and burning olive groves, and terrorising entire communities with complete impunity.”

Each year has seen more Israeli squatter attacks than the year before since 2016. Ironically, it was in 2016 that the UN Security Council had passed a resolution demanding an end to such Israeli squatting. - Informed Comment

How Big Oil plans to stay on top

I wouldn't describe our corporate overlords as generally intelligent, in meaningful ways. But they often do display remarkable cunning.

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee recently released internal fuel company documents providing an insider’s view of what they say is a multi-year effort by four leading fossil fuel firms to greenwash their public image. The documents show employees and executives discussing climate policies and pledges they knew would do more to protect their business model than secure a meaningful reduction in pollution.

At first glance, the committee’s accompanying report on the climate disinformation is a partisan project and somewhat unsurprising given the fossil fuel industry’s history of misleading the public. However, a closer look reveals that the largest oil and gas companies are leveraging the climate crisis to further entrench their domination of energy markets across the world. The documents raise thorny questions for climate-minded Democrats, who found that industry groups will support liberal climate priorities such as methane regulation if that keeps oil and gas relevant and protects profits in the long run. Oil companies also “resist and block” environmental rules for pollution control they don’t like, as one employee of BP America observed in a 2016 email to executives obtained by the committee. - Truthout

Believe it or not, the right really is coming after birth control

Probably this judge will get the same kind of public rebuke that Aileen Cannon got, if he goes through with it. Probably. But like the story says, this is just for openers.

Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas, recently released an opinion that “the Title X program violates the constitutional right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children.” Title X is a federal family planning program that provides services including contraceptives, pregnancy testing, testing for sexually transmitted infections, infertility help, and more. It offers services to adolescents as well as adults—and that’s where the right-wing challenge, and Kacsmaryk’s decision, comes in...

This is a really, really weak case, in other words. There’s a decent chance that, if Kacsmaryk goes ahead and tries to block Title X funding, he will be overturned at the appellate level, even given that the case would be appealed to the very conservative Fifth Circuit. Even the Trump-McConnell Supreme Court might not be willing to go this far yet. But either way, Kacsmaryk could at least temporarily mess up a vitally important health care program. And he’s showing that, yes, the right-wing legal movement, up to and including a federal judge, has its sights set on birth control rights. - Daily Kos

The shale oil "boom" has seen better days

A good example of how motivated reasoning and cognitive rigidity rule in big corporate America.

It appears that the U.S. fracking boom is ending far earlier than many industry experts and CEOs predicted. After an understandable dip in 2020 due to the pandemic, oil production still has not regained the record levels achieved in 2019, and predictions that the industry would set new records this year have not materialized, despite 2022’s high oil prices...

There’s a saying in the oil industry: “The rocks don’t lie.” It means that regardless of what is predicted, geology calls the shots on how much oil can be extracted.

Although rocks don’t lie, it is becoming increasingly evident that the shale oil industry greatly over-promised how much oil it could produce and knowingly relied on flawed models. These faulty models inflated the amount of oil production promised to investors by up to 30 percent. - DeSmog

There actually is a global treaty on plastics

But, unfortunately and predictably:

Last March, environmental advocates celebrated a landmark victory when United Nations negotiators agreed to write a binding global treaty on plastic pollution. As the meeting concluded, diplomats emotionally declared that multilateralism is “still alive,” and called the intergovernmental environmental deal the most significant since the 2015 Paris Agreement. The treaty couldn’t be more urgent, as the production of plastic — made primarily from fossil fuels — is expected to soar over the coming decades, adding millions of tons of waste to the oceans and greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere.

Now comes the hard part: hammering out the details of the treaty. Representatives from 135 countries spent last week in Punta del Este, Uruguay, at the first of five sessions of an “intergovernmental negotiating committee,” or INC, that is expected to produce a final treaty by the end of 2024.

If last week’s negotiations are any indication, reaching that end goal will be an arduous, divisive process, with some countries pursuing a comprehensive agreement to phase down plastic production while others seek to water down the treaty’s ambition. Observers noted with frustration that negotiators failed to agree on virtually any of the conference’s main agenda items, including the election of a body to organize future sessions and the resolution of questions related to the treaty’s scope and objectives. - Grist

Emmer and colleagues play mega-CYA on crypto

I despise cryptocurrencies and I think they should be banned. But I'm not in charge of such matters, nor am I ever likely to be. Anyway:

Nearly nine months after a bipartisan group of U.S. House members sent a letter questioning the Securities and Exchange Commission’s investigation into cryptocurrencies, including the failed FTX exchange, the lawmakers are maintaining their position that the agency’s approach to regulating crypto is deeply flawed.

In public comments since FTX’s collapse last month, the congressmen, led by Minnesota Republican Tom Emmer, have largely called FTX’s demise a singular issue that deserves scrutiny.

They argue the episode only reinforces their point that the SEC’s regulation of cryptocurrencies is arbitrary and ineffective.

FTX co-CEO Ryan Salame was a major campaign contributor to the Congressional Leadership Fund, the political action committee Emmer controlled as the head of the House Republican campaign arm in the 2022 election cycle. - Minnesota Reformer

Another failed Pentagon audit, another record Pentagon budget

Both have become automatic, and grossly underreported in corporate "news" media.

In response to news of the proposed $847 billion Pentagon budget, the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies issued the following comment:

“This month, news broke that the Pentagon once again failed to pass a basic audit showing that it knows where its money goes. And instead of holding out for any kind of accountability, Congress stands ready to give a big raise to an agency that failed to account for more than 60 percent of its assets.

This is a sign of an agency that is too big, plain and simple. Other major government agencies have long since passed audits. But the Pentagon, with its global sprawl of more than 750 military installations, and a budget increase that alone could more than double the diplomacy budget at the State Department, is so big and disjointed that no one knows where its money goes.

Here’s one solution: the Pentagon needs to be a lot smaller. After twenty years of war, and in a time when government spending is desperately needed elsewhere, the Pentagon’s fifth failed audit in as many years (and having never, ever passed) should be the last straw." - Institute for Policy Studies

Too much crap about a "worker shortage"

You've undoubtedly seen, from the greedheads' vast kennel of whimpering, groveling propagandist curs in corporate media and elsewhere, about how unemployment is "too low," the retirement age needs to be raised, etc. Despicable.

A so-called ​“labor shortage” in the United States has quickly become a catch-all justification for policies that prevent workers from gaining too much power on the job, or collectively organizing by forming unions.

Not enough applicants for low-paid jobs packing meat, or working the cash register at Dairy Queen? Better crank up the Federal Reserve’s interest rates (a policy explicitly aimed at spurring a recession and putting people out of work), so that we have a larger reserve of the desperate unemployed. Pandemic-era social programs ever-so-slightly redistributing wealth downward? Better shut them down, lest we eliminate the supposed precarity needed to incentivize work.

The concept of a labor shortage can be used to effectively justify any anti-worker policy under the sun. From reading the financial press or listening to business elites, the shortage may seem like an economic fact — a material reality that is beyond dispute. But, in reality, the framing of a ​“labor shortage” is at its heart ideological. As long as we’re talking about a labor shortage, we’re not talking about a shortage of good, dignified union jobs. As long as we’re talking about how people ​“don’t want to work,” we’re not talking about how bosses don’t want to treat their employees with basic fairness and respect. And as long as we’re talking about how it’s bosses who are supposedly hurting, we’re not talking about what it would take to build an economy that doesn’t perpetually harm the poor and dispossessed. - In These Times

Corporate media misrepresented the facts on crime

To say the very least. Of course "if it bleeds it leads" has always been central to news outlets. But recently it's taken on undeniable elements of a deliberate effort to influence voter behavior, on behalf of the Party of Trump. This is the most comprehensive, yet relatively concise, thing I've seen online regarding corporate media's appalling behavior, here.

Fearmongering about crime in Democratic states and cities was certainly central to the Republican Party’s midterm elections strategy, although at this point it is hard to say how effective it was...

What is certain is that the Republican obsession with crime received major attention in the media, and the subject was not always handled with the proper context, often tipping the balance to the conservative partisan narrative...

Of course, the realities of crime data never stopped Republicans from painting Democrats as soft on crime, or blaming crime spikes—real or imaginary—on Democratic policies. In 2022, rather than combating such distortions, various media helped to amplify a simplistic depiction, becoming de facto propaganda arms for the Republican campaigns. - FAIR

Online fundraising methods piss off progressives

Maybe with the biggest progressive website highlighting this there will be some changes. But that’s probably just wishful thinking.

Overwhelmingly voters said they wanted out: 57% of all of the surveyed voters said if there was a universal way to opt out of all these unsolicited contacts, they would use it; a full 72% of independents and 67% of 18- to 34-year-olds (the people who got Democrats elected this time around) said they would (choose) to stop receiving all political campaign emails and texts if they could.

The survey didn’t get into the content of the messages, the never-ending “DOOM” and “THE END IS NEAR” and “WE’RE IN CRISIS MODE” subject lines screaming across the internet to land in your inbox, multiple times. It would be helpful to see as well just how motivating — or not — that is. But based on conversations with all the people I know who follow campaigns closely and give money, they hate them.

But the message from this group of Democratic voters is clear: Being inundated by spam fundraising requests is at best annoying and at worst angering enough to make them tune out. “Democratic campaigns are demoralizing their supporters, annoying potential donors and driving independents away by inundating Americans with unsolicited fundraising emails and texts,” said Nelson. “If Democrats want to preserve their major advantage in grassroots online fundraising, they must stop spamming and scamming potential supporters.” - Daily Kos

Will the latest election in Israel change things in the U.S.?

One can hope.

The importance of Tom Friedman’s article saying the Israel we knew is gone is not about Palestinians. No, the Israel Palestinians know (it) is the same. It is about American Jews. They are finally catching a clue. That is the importance of (early November's) election, the Itamar Ben-Gvir election, in which his fascistic Religious Zionism party took 14 seats, and hard right wing parties took 74 (per Dahlia Scheindlin). The new ugly Israel will alienate American Jews, as Israel lobbyists Dennis Ross and David Makovsky openly fretted in an Op-Ed...

The disarray is a good thing. Zionism — the ideology Ben-Gvir and Netanyahu embody, one of Jewish supremacy in the Jewish land – is at last becoming problematic for American Jews. They are up to their chins in a discriminatory ideology, and so we begin a war over Zionism that will bring down the Israel lobby in the next ten years. Because Zionism destroys everything in its path. - Mondoweiss

Coal ash rules are being dangerously flouted

I don't know what it's going to have to take, for real enforcement to happen.

More than nine out of 10 coal ash impoundments nationwide are contaminating groundwater in violation of federal rules, according to environmental groups’ comprehensive analysis of the latest industry-reported data.

Even as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has stepped up enforcement of federal coal ash rules this year, the groups say more urgent action is necessary, including mandates that companies test all drinking water wells within a half-mile of coal ash impoundments, and that companies cease storing coal ash in contact with groundwater.

Coal ash contains arsenic, mercury and other toxins that have been linked to a range of health impacts. And drinking water wells near coal plants, unlike municipal water systems, do not typically undergo regular testing. - Energy News Network

Medicare Advantage fraud spikes

There is a wide range of opinions about, and experiences with, Medicare Advantage. I'm not prepared to condemn the whole program, outright. But it absolutely needs to be under far more strict and enforceable regulation.

Insurance companies and other brokers are making false or misleading claims to dupe senior citizens into purchasing Medicare Advantage plans, according to a report published (November 3) by the U.S. Senate Finance Committee.

The report, which comes midway through this year's Medicare enrollment period—described last year by healthcare writer Susan Jaffe as "open season for scammers"—reveals that the number of Medicare beneficiary complaints about dubious private sector marketing tactics more than doubled from 2020 to 2021...

Dr. Jessica Schorr Saxe, a retired family physician, noted in a recent Charlotte Observer opinion piece that "earlier this year, the federal government reported that 13% of denials in Medicare Advantage would not have been refused under traditional Medicare," while "Medicare Advantage plans are also increasingly ending nursing home and rehabilitation care before providers consider patients ready to go home." - Common Dreams

Nuclear's decline needs to be hastened

The World Nuclear Industry Status Report for 2022 was recently released. It's by an independent organization.

As its principal author, Mycle Schneider, pointed out during the rollout, the report’s authors are big fans of empirical data. Indeed, many of the findings in the report are taken from the nuclear industry itself. Facts and physics are pretty much immutable when it comes to nuclear power, and neither favor the industry very well. No amount of nuclear industry aspirational rhetoric can hide the truth about a waning and outdated technology.

The over-riding finding of the 2022 edition of the report is that nuclear power’s share of global commercial gross electricity generation in 2021 dropped to below 10 percent for the first time ever, sinking to its lowest in four decades. - Beyond Nuclear

Republicans, including Minnesota's, offer nothing

In fact, for most people in this country what they've "delivered" when in power is worse than nothing. Recessions, wars, assaults on rights, mega-corruption...

But on the very rare occasions when Republican candidates for office are required to articulate exactly what their policies would be if elected, that dominant, exclusive goal of tax cuts for corporations and the nation’s uber-wealthy is oddly never mentioned. Instead, we are treated to a seemingly never-ending litany of imagined Democratic evils and appeals to voters’ base fears and grievances (which, for the most part, boil down to racism and xenophobia).

When a Republican candidate loudly declares we must “Close the borders,” for example, he’s not talking about denying Texas businesses the 1.1 million undocumented workers those same businesses eagerly hire to reduce their operating costs and obligations to pay a living wage to their employees. Because that would swiftly wipe out Texas’s service, agricultural, and construction economy which, along with the economies of most Southwestern states, relies on exploiting those undocumented workers so its businesses can stay afloat. In this way, “immigration” simply serves as a shiny object for their voters to angrily focus on while Republicans drain the nation’s treasury for the benefit of their corporate donor base.

Beyond the “close the border” tripe (and fear-mongering about guns and abortion, hot-button topics trotted out in service of the same end goal of gutting corporate taxes) what exactly do Republicans have to offer Americans that will actually, tangibly make their lives better? The answer is: literally nothing. - Daily Kos

Current reality in the Palestinian West Bank

As is noted, people aren't getting much reality on this, from U.S. corporate "news" media.

The Palestinian West Bank, which is militarily occupied by Israel and which is being steadily colonized by Israeli squatters on Palestinian-owned land, is a seething cauldron. Some sort of gag rule appears to deter American television “news” from covering these dramatic events, which are pregnant with sinister implications for American security. Veteran newsman Tom Fenton once argued that the poor coverage on television news of international events actually forms a security threat to the United States, a republic that depends for its smooth functioning on an informed public.

Far right Israeli politicians such as Binyamin Netanyahu and Naftali Bennett, the two most recent ex-prime ministers, have assiduously cultivated equally far right squatters in the Palestinian West Bank, giving them carte blanche to arm themselves and to terrorize Palestinian townspeople.

When you encourage fascism, you should not be surprised when you get the equivalent of Mussolini’s black shirts, or Trump’s Oath Keepers. - Informed Comment

There's still a long way to go on fixing health care in this country

I suspect that just continuing to allow greedheads to run amok is not what most people support.

In what advocates call a “grotesque display of corporate profiteering,” the health insurance giant formerly known as Anthem reported making $2.3 billion in net profit off its policyholders over the past three months as analysts predict a dramatic spike in the cost of health insurance premiums in 2023.

Elevance Health, the largest for-profit company within the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, surpassed Wall Street expectations on Wednesday and reported nearly $40 billion in revenue during the third quarter of 2022. Returns to shareholders increased by 7 percent, generating $1.6 billion in profits for investors. Elevance provides health coverage for 118 million people across multiple states.

Elevance claims its profits are the result of offering more service to more customers. However, health care activists who help patients fight for coverage from their insurance providers say a chunk of this profit undoubtably comes from denying insurance claims from sick people who cannot afford proper care otherwise. Denying claims, they say, is a “regular business practice” for squeezing out extra profits. Insurers know the vast majority of patients do not exercise their right to appeal when claims are denied and are often unsure how to do so. - Truthout

Beating down SLAPP lawsuits

Minnesota is a state that still needs anti-SLAPP legislation that can survive court challenges.

(Krystal) Two Bulls is just one of many victims of the fossil fuel industry’s use of SLAPPs — strategic lawsuits against public participation — to silence and intimidate its critics. A report released last month by legal advocacy nonprofit EarthRights International identified 152 instances of legal and judicial harassment by fossil fuel corporations to suppress dissent in the United States over the past 10 years, including 93 SLAPP lawsuits.

Just (two weeks ago), a California oil industry trade association paid nearly $650,000 in fees to the city of Los Angeles and several environmental advocacy groups the company had targeted in court for years following the city’s implementation of new environmental safety requirements for drilling applicants. After declaring bankruptcy, the California Independent Petroleum Association was allowed to pay only a fraction of a judgment initially awarded to the city and groups by a trial court that ruled the lawsuit was a SLAPP.

“With the strengthening of our movements, the revelation of how long the fossil fuel industry has been aware of how their practices impact and contribute to climate change, and the rise of legal cases against oil and gas corporations, these companies are becoming more desperate to silence the voices of their critics,” said Deepa Padmanabha, deputy general counsel at Greenpeace USA. - DeSmog

Most parents still like, even love, their kids' public schools

In spite of the deformers' "best" efforts, and those of deformer allies in corporate media.

Right-wingers' real beef with public schools, though they themselves don't even realize it, is that they're doing too good a job compared to what wingnuts want. A large majority of contemporary public school graduates just plain know better than to be right-wing conservatives. And they especially know better than to be Trumpers.

Who would have imagined that after the past two tumultuous years, when so much was written and said about how the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic had convinced American parents that public schools were “failing” institutions, that as the 2022-2023 school year begins, “Americans’ ratings of their community’s public schools reached a new high dating back 48 years.” That’s the stunning finding in the highly respected annual survey conducted by PDK.

The finding aligns with a history of survey results showing parents are generally pleased with the public schools their children attend. Even during the height of the pandemic, in 2020 and 2021, Gallup reported that parent satisfaction with local schools declined only slightly, and “more than seven in 10 parents” still expressed satisfaction.

Puzzling over this phenomenon, Chalkbeat national reporter Matt Barnum judged the widespread assumption of parent dissatisfaction with local public schools to be one among a number of “common, fear-inducing claims about the state of American schooling [that] are inaccurate or unproven.” He concluded, “It’s not entirely clear what’s going on.”

In an attempt to explain what’s going on, education historian Jack Schneider noted that while most parents rate the schools their own children attend highly, with 70 percent assigning their schools a grade of A or B, a similar percentage grade schools in general C or D.

In considering what might be causing this “perception gap,” Schnider argued, “One obvious factor is the rise of a national politics of education.” - LA Progressive

Holding up students for their transcripts

This has been going on for too long. Should never have been able to happen at all.

Colleges that lend directly to their students cannot later refuse to release students’ transcripts as a way of forcing them to make payments, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced on (September 29), calling the practice “abusive” and a violation of federal law.

The loans made directly by a college, rather than a traditional lender, are used to pay for classes, but they don’t come with the same protections as federal student loans do. Hundreds of thousands of students at for-profit colleges have taken these loans, known as institutional loans, and some public and nonprofit institutions also offer them.

The consumer bureau’s ruling was aimed at stopping the colleges from withholding transcripts from students who haven’t repaid the debt. Some colleges refuse to release a student’s transcript until the full amount has been repaid, even when even when students had entered into a payment plan and is making regular payments. - Hechinger Report

Climate smart commodities?

Give 'em a way to greenwash...we'll see how it works out.

When Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack first announced USDA would spend $1 billion to support projects that produce “climate smart commodities” in February, there was confusion. What exactly is a “climate smart commodity” (CSC)? There is no current market, label or recognized standard. USDA suggested only that a CSC must reduce greenhouse gas emissions or sequester carbon. No details about how much GHG must be reduced, how long carbon must be sequestered, or how efforts might be measured and by whom. Last week, the USDA expanded the program and awarded $2.8 billion in an initial round of 70 grants (more to come) for CSC projects, with an upcoming second round to reach $3.5 billion in total.

Now 70 different projects, all with different definitions and approaches, can claim the USDA-approved “climate smart commodity” moniker. The mushiness of positive words without clear definition, standards, goals or independent verification has long been used by agribusiness and food companies to their own ends From labels like “natural,” “sustainable,” and more recently “regenerative,” companies frequently make claims about farm and food products without having to meet clear standards or independent verification. Such terms stand in contrast to strong protocols and standards established under certified organic, for example...

As a result, it wasn’t surprising that a who’s who of agribusiness and food companies jumped at the USDA’s open invitation to define a “climate smart commodity.” - IATP

The evidence for criminal levels of profiteering is conclusive

Something serious needs to be done about this. And the public will certainly respond positively, if that happens.

Progressive demands for congressional action to curb corporate monopoly power were renewed Friday after federal data confirmed that certain heavily consolidated industries are continuing to rake in massive profits while working households struggle under the weight of high prices.

The latest figures from the Bureau for Economic Analysis show that the profits of the U.S. coal and oil industry increased 340% between the first and second quarters of 2022. Companies selling petroleum and coal products made an estimated $49.7 billion in profits from April to June, compared with $11.3 billion from January to March.

Meanwhile, executives in the nation's transportation and warehousing sector enjoyed a nearly 40% increase in profits during the same time period, pocketing $124.4 billion in the second quarter after taking home $89.4 billion over the first three months of the year.

"We've heard directly from executives in the sectors that families depend on—from oil, to auto shops, to airlines—that inflation has been good for business," Rakeen Mabud, chief economist and managing director of policy and research at the Groundwork Collaborative, said in a statement.

"The latest corporate profit data shows their price strategies are bearing fruit," she added. - Common Dreams

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

A real effort to deal with orphaned oil and gas wells

If Big Filthy Fossil Fuels had any measure of responsibility or integrity, they'd pick up the tab. But, yeah, that's a laugh.

The Biden administration has awarded $560 million to plug orphaned oil and gas wells across 24 states, the largest single investment in oil field cleanup in history, officials said (August 25).

The funding is part of a $4.7 billion orphaned well program greenlighted by last year’s Infrastructure, Investment and Jobs Act. The bipartisan program offers grant dollars to qualifying states to pay for finding abandoned wells, tracking their methane releases, plugging them to stem polluting gases and restoring the land at the surface...

All told, states have flagged more than 10,000 high priority wells for cleanup, the first in line of a nearly 130,000 backlog of unreclaimed known well sites, Interior reported...That number is expected to rise as federal funds bolster state efforts to identify hidden or lost orphans. - E&E News

U.S. jobs are coming back

With plenty of caveats.

Thanks, Joe Biden! The Wall Street Journal is reporting that U.S. companies are moving nearly 350,000 overseas jobs back to the United States this year—a new record—as companies become a wee bit more wary about chasing cheap labor overseas and look to move infrastructure a bit closer to home. Again: Thanks, Joe Biden!

I'm kidding, mostly. The ability of presidents to shift global economic patterns is marginal at best, and business trends 18 months into a presidency may still likely be the result of corporate decisions made even earlier. There's really only one way for a U.S. president to dramatically reconfigure worldwide capitalism in a short period of time, and that's to screw something up to near-apocalyptic levels. To so botch world markets that they're on the brink of collapse. So what we really should be saying here is: Thanks, Donald Trump! - Daily Kos

Fracking is an enemy of humanity

For example:

Adding further evidence of the negative public health impacts associated with planet-heating fossil fuel pollution, new research published Wednesday found that children living in close proximity to fracking and other so-called "unconventional" drilling operations at birth face significantly higher chances of developing childhood leukemia than those not residing near such activity.

The peer-reviewed study, published in Environmental Health Perspectives, examined the relationship between residential proximity to unconventional oil and gas development (UOGD) and risk of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), the most common form of childhood leukemia...

The new study adds to a growing body of literature documenting the deleterious health and environmental consequences of fracking and other forms of fossil fuel extraction. - Common Dreams

Expect a boom in ever-more-flagrant greenwashing

A particularly odious example.

A major exporter of U.S. liquefied natural gas is “seeking to greenwash” its operations in order to portray gas exports as a climate solution and clear the way for further expansion, according to a new report...

In recent months, Cheniere Energy, the largest LNG exporter in the United States, has begun providing emissions data, which it calls “carbon emissions tags,” or CE tags, for its gas.

The tags quantify the greenhouse gas emissions of a given LNG cargo, with the aim of easing buyers’ concerns. The CE tags include emissions from where the gas is drilled upstream, all the way down to the point of export on the coast. The logic is to offer transparency to buyers overseas by disclosing the emissions of each shipment, which would help to clean up the supply chain over time.

But a new report from Oil Change International and Greenpeace USA says the program is riddled with flaws and is broadly aimed at portraying LNG as a clean fuel, rather than actually cleaning up the supply chain, at a time when gas developers are hoping to take advantage of the war in Ukraine to expand operations. - DeSmog

Pentagon contractors cleaned up, via fraud and graft, in Afghanistan

This sort of thing has actually been taken for granted, in U.S. military spending, for a very long time. That needs to change, and there's no good reason that it can't do so.

Pentagon contractors operating in Afghanistan over the past two decades raked in nearly $108 billion—funds that "were distributed and spent with a significant lack of transparency," according to a report published Tuesday.

"These contracts show the shadowy 'camo economy' at work in Afghanistan," said report author Heidi Peltier, director of programs for the Costs of War Project at Brown Univesity's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.

"Military contracting obscures where and how taxpayer money flows, who profits, and how much is lost to waste, fraud, and abuse," she added. "It also makes it difficult to know how many people are employed, injured, and killed through military contracting." - Common Dreams

The reality of right-wing tin god Orban

That would be Viktor Orban, current boss of Hungary. Like every right-winger he's stupid and incompetent when it comes to actual governing.

To the cowboy fascists, Orban must sound like one tough hombre — except that he is currently on his knees before the European authorities, ten-gallon hat in hand, as he pleads for their financial assistance. Years of his incompetent rule have inflicted fiscal and monetary disaster on Hungary, and he is begging the "globalists" to bail him out. But his admirers in the West are much too polite (and dishonest) to mention these embarrassing realities...

In Brussels, meanwhile, the European Union leaders have given Hungary's finance ministry a long list of demands that Orban must meet before any bailout funds will be released. The conditions include restoring the rule of law, curbing the government's dictatorial tendencies and dealing more transparently with Hungary's rampant corruption. Rather than defying the EU as he suggested in Dallas, Orban meekly stopped baiting Brussels over LGBTQ issues — and has instead proclaimed his eagerness to make a deal.

Yes, like most bullies, he retreats when anyone his own size hits back. - National Memo

Blue hydrogen is turning into a dud

Which is good.

The oil and gas industry’s plan to convince the world to switch from natural gas to hydrogen made from natural gas is being upended by an unexpected cause: economics.

As the climate emergency has gotten more and more impossible to ignore and the world has started moving away from natural gas, the industry has hyped a new technology: so-called blue hydrogen. Blue hydrogen produces no carbon emissions when burned or converted into electricity, but the main component in producing blue hydrogen is methane, the most potent greenhouse gas.

...In Europe, green hydrogen is now cheaper than liquefied natural gas. And oil and gas companies, in turn, are increasingly investing in green hydrogen instead of using methane to produce blue hydrogen.

This is a remarkable development. As recently as September 2020, oil major Shell was making the case that “blue hydrogen can help create the demand and transport networks for hydrogen whilst green hydrogen costs fall.” In an article this month in the New Statesman that claimed green hydrogen wasn’t viable, Bethan Vasey, energy transition manager for Shell’s Upstream U.K. division, stated that blue hydrogen technology was “ready for deployment at scale now.” Meanwhile, Shell just announced that it is building the largest green hydrogen production facility in Europe. Shell could have built a blue hydrogen facility, but it chose green. - The Intercept

Companies are already selling info on who's pregnant

As if surveillance capitalism wasn't bad enough before.

And thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision to overthrow Roe v. Wade, a good chunk of the nation’s police and private citizens can go after people seeking abortions and the doctors that would serve them if there’s enough evidence.

And in 2022, there is plenty of data to go around and plenty of players willing to pawn it off if the price is right. A Gizmodo investigation into some of the nation’s biggest data brokers found more than two dozen promoting access to datasets containing digital information on millions of pregnant and potentially pregnant people across the country. At least one of those companies also offered a large catalogue of people who were using the same sorts of birth control that’s being targeted by more restrictive states right now.

In total, Gizmodo identified 32 different brokers across the U.S. selling access to the unique mobile IDs from some 2.9 billion profiles of people pegged as “actively pregnant” or “shopping for maternity products.” Also on the market: data on 478 million customer profiles labeled “interested in pregnancy” or “intending to become pregnant.” You can see the full list of companies for yourself here. - Gizmodo

WIC could use a bit of an overhaul

It's a very good and necessary program. An excellent example of government done right, in fact. But there's always room for improvement.

Many federal programs vary across the country due to differences in the way each state administers them. But unlike Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which aims to reduce overall hunger, WIC is restrictive by design. Using analyses done by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASM), the program targets specific nutrient deficiencies among American infants and their parents.

Advocates say the focused nature is what makes it effective. For example, evidence that the program reduces the risk of preterm birth, low birth weight, and infant mortality is strong. But the strict nutrition requirements and hyper-specificity of WIC-approved food shopping lists from state to state can also be confusing for those doing the shopping.

Nearly half of the people eligible for WIC don’t enroll, and a 2019 Food Research & Action Center (FRAC) report identified frustration with the limited range of approved foods and brands in some states as one of the main barriers to participation. In 2020, when the pandemic led to shortages of many items in grocery stores, WIC participants struggled to find approved foods on shelves. The complicated requirements can also shut out smaller food companies, since only the most well-resourced food companies tend to have the resources necessary to manage (and lobby around) the requirements. - Civil Eats

New merger guidelines could help with a lot of things

Like, you know, fairness, justice, and in general over time a better deal for almost everyone.

A major shift is afoot in the federal government’s stance on big business. Earlier this year, the two agencies in charge of enforcing the antitrust laws, the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice, announced that they plan to revise their merger guidelines. That may sound like a minor technicality, but in fact, it heralds a sea change in the workings of antitrust law. The new guidelines, expected later this year, will likely make it much harder for large corporations to amass power by buying other companies. Over time the guidelines will also shape how judges understand and apply the antitrust laws in their rulings.

Had this shift in enforcement policy come about years ago, Americans wouldn’t be contending with a host of debilitating problems caused by consolidation. Mergers in the food industry, for example, have allowed dominant meatpackers and other processors to slash the incomes of farmers and food workers, while raising grocery prices. Mergers among manufacturers of everything from appliances to beer cans have led to the shuttering of plants, costing communities thousands of jobs. Hospital mergers have sent health care costs soaring, while dozens of rural communities have lost their hospitals altogether, as big hospital chains bought and then closed small facilities. Meanwhile, Amazon, Facebook, and Google have used acquisitions to thwart potential competition and lock in their dominance, to the detriment of small businesses, local newspapers, and others seeking to communicate or sell products online.

New merger guidelines hold the promise of putting a stop to these kinds of domineering moves by powerful corporations. But their potential isn’t limited to simply preventing America’s monopoly problem from getting worse. Strong merger enforcement would create a fairer playing field for small businesses and allow more startups to gain a toehold, deconcentrating industries over time. And as we’ve noted, the merger guidelines provide a framework for understanding the antitrust laws that history shows can significantly influence how the courts apply the law, and not only in merger cases. - ILSR

The CHIPS Act is probably just another mega-corporate giveaway

Perhaps you've seen this extolled in corporate "news" media as a wonderful example of "bipartisanship" on behalf of the American people. That's not the real story.

Millions of children are living in poverty, the planet is warming, and inflation is reaching new heights. Now, a bipartisan coalition in Congress has come together — to push for $76 billion in subsidies to the highly-profitable domestic computer chip industry.

(On July 20), the Senate voted to advance the CHIPS Act by a 64-34 vote. Those voting in favor included 49 Democrats and 15 Republicans. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and 33 Republicans were opposed.

The bill includes a combination of grants and tax credits for chip manufacturers designed to encourage domestic production. The money would subsidize the creation of new plants, known as fabs, and the retooling of existing facilities. The corporations expected to benefit the most are Intel, Texas Instruments, Micron Technology, Global Foundries, and Samsung...

Will $76 billion in subsidies incentivize these companies to build new fabs? Or will this money simply be a windfall for companies that are already expanding their capacity in the United States? - Popular Information

The EPA can still do plenty about emissions

It just needs the gumption, and/or a good kick in the butt.

Even as the EPA resists taking action in Utah, it has a wide range of regulations already on the books or currently planned that are aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It has proposed rules limiting methane emissions from oil and gas facilities and is targeting vehicle tailpipe emissions. The Supreme Court ruling expressly leaves the EPA with the authority to regulate pollution from the electricity sector — as long as it doesn’t order plants to switch from coal to renewable energy the way it would have under Obama’s plan.

(EPA chief Michael) Regan said that his agency also plans to tighten regulations that would force power plants to clean up pollution — in many cases, an expensive undertaking. He made it clear that he hopes that the owners of coal-fired power plants will decide to close dirty facilities rather than spend the money to clean them up. “They’ll see it’s not worth investing in the past,” Regan said. - Mother Jones

O brave new world of worker surveillance

This is atrocious, at least in my view, and I don’t know of a ready fix.

Technological incentives are a new adversary in the long history of workers trying to keep the tentacles of corporate America out of their personal lives. But unlike the precipitating causes of the bloody 1886 Haymarket Riot, where Chicago workers protested the blatant incursion of longer working hours despite their legal entitlement to an eight-hour workday, modern employer surveillance is restructuring the lives of workers in gradual and nearly imperceptible ways. The lines of what is work and what is life in the consecrated “work-life balance” are blurring because of the way surveillance technologies are proliferating. What began in the workplace is leaking its bile across your lap as you sit at home...

The physical workplace may be where employer surveillance started, but it’s not where it ends. The days of surveillance being technologically limited to physical spaces and analog tools like building cameras are slipping away. In their place are more accurate and ubiquitous technologies that run on hardware that employees already use, like computers and phones. And as more employees do their work outside of physical offices, the employer surveillance apparatus has mutated to keep them ensnared. The forecast is that soon at least 70 percent of companies will be using software that tracks worker productivity via their computers. This tracking might include keylogging, location tracking, web and email monitoring, or even in some cases, taking images of workers through their webcams at random intervals throughout the day. The expansion of these tracking technologies was another flare-up that the Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated, and the logics of tracking that were established for remote work are here to stay. “Here,” in this case, meaning the home office, the living room, or any personal space where one uses digital devices. - The Baffler

There's nothing much that's "green" about Amazon

From yesterday. Certainly it is preferable to buy legitimately eco/climate-friendly products, when you can. But don't buy the hype.

You’ve probably heard: Amazon Prime Day is happening today and tomorrow (July 12 and 13). There are deals galore, and the internet is alive with timely listicles of Amazon products for every niche—including “eco-friendly” Amazon deals. But the problem is, there’s no such thing. For all its promises and posturing, Amazon is a company with massive negative environmental impacts, and Prime Day embodies some of its worst traits.

First off, there’s all that packaging and waste. Then there’s the transportation emissions ramped up by super-fast delivery. Adding insult to injury are the company’s half-measure, corporate carbon pledges, a flawed emissions self-reporting strategy, and fossil fuel partnerships. So, before you buy into the hype and add a ‘green’ products wishlist into your shopping cart, know that Amazon’s climate track record isn’t so prime. - Earther

Women take the lead in labor organizing

On a related matter, if it was up to me women would hold all political offices in this country, at least for a while. There's no question, from any rational standpoint, that things would be a lot better if that was to happen.

Over the course of the pandemic, the majority of essential workers were women. The majority of those who lost their jobs in the pandemic were women. The majority of those who faced unstable care situations for their children and their loved ones were women.

And now the majority of those organizing their workplaces are women.

Kroger workers are part of a surge in organizing led by women, women of color and low-wage workers impelled by this once-in-a-century pandemic. Many said they feel the pandemic has unmasked the hypocrisy of some employers — they were ​“essential” workers until their employers stopped offering protections on the job, good pay and commensurate benefits.

Among them, a deep recalibration is happening, dredging up questions about why they work, for whom, and how that work serves them and their families. For many it’s the chance to define the future of work. - In These Times

An effort to reform the appallingly corrupt charter industry kicks in

As of July 1. Hopefully this is a first step to entirely snuffing out the charter industry, along with any and all other efforts to destroy public education. Which is a big goal, and it won’t happen quickly or easily to say the very least.

Here are the significant gains.

The Department will make it difficult or impossible for charters run by for-profits to get grants...

There will be greater transparency and accountability for charter schools, state entities, and CMOs that apply for grants...

Regulations to stop white-flight charters from receiving CSP funding and ensure the charter is needed in the community...

Making progress on holding charters accountable and reducing waste, fraud, and profiteering is an extraordinarily difficult task. The goal of the charter lobby is to create as many charters as possible, make schools a marketplace, and eventually overtake our democratically governed schools. We have a long way to go in stopping that. But these regulations are an important first step. - Diane Ravitch's blog

ALEC is still at it

You don't see as much, on the progressive internet, about the American Legislative Exchange Council as you used to. It's still out there, and it's still despicable, and this is a good, current story about what it's still up to.

The Energy Discrimination Elimination Act is just one of the thousands of pieces of legislation ALEC has disseminated nationwide since its formation in 1973. According to a two-year investigation of “copycat” bills published in 2019 by USA Today, the Arizona Republic and the Center for Public Integrity, state lawmakers introduced nearly 2,900 bills based on ALEC templates from 2010 through 2018. More than 600 of them became law.

What explains ALEC’s track record? A big piece of the answer lies in the way the group spreads disinformation and hides its activities from the general public...

ALEC’s disinformation starts with how the group describes itself.

Originally called the Conservative Caucus of State Legislators, ALEC falsely claims it is a “nonpartisan” organization that enables private sector members to collaborate with legislators on policies and programs promoting what it calls “Jeffersonian principles of free markets, limited government, federalism, and individual liberty”—a classic libertarian mantra.

Nonpartisan? Hardly. Virtually all of the roughly 2,000 state lawmakers, officials and staffers who pay a token fee of $200 for a two-year ALEC membership are Republicans.

Likewise, despite ALEC’s positive gloss, the principles it espouses would establish a corporatocracy. By “free markets,” ALEC means giving free rein to corporations by rolling back public health, environmental, consumer and voting protections; by “limited government,” it means radically downsizing the federal government; and by “federalism,” it means transferring authority from the federal government to governors and state legislatures, which corporations can more easily dominate. - Independent Media Institute

Doing something about dark money

This article gets into some recent efforts.

Politicians would be much more responsive to their constituents if these dark money donors had to show their game faces to the world instead of surreptitiously subverting the public’s health, fortunes and wellbeing.

But here’s good news. A workable strategy is emerging that can rip the masks from the faces of would-be oligarchs and force their deeds into the sunlight, the best disinfectant. Change for the better has already begun to work without the help or hindrance of Congress...

Eventually, citizens working together can find cracks in the campaign finance system and keep adding pressure until something gives way. This is precisely what democracy needs in this country now—added pressure so that campaign finance and our political system can work for all of us, not as a gamed system driven by the demands of the greedy among the wealthy. - DCReport

School deformer arrogance took a hit in 2021

I saw about the SCOTUS call on Maine. Not good, but it was no surprise, and it probably won't have wide practical effect. Opposition to school privatization in fact runs wide and deep.

But what voucher proponents had not counted on was the pushback—not just from the usual coalition of teachers’ unions, progressives, and grassroots public school advocates, but from bipartisan lawmakers in politically “red” states...

“The fact that private school voucher bills fail even in states where Republicans have full control shows that these schemes are not nearly as popular as Betsy DeVos and others say they are,” says Jessica Levin, the director of Public Funds for Public Schools, a national campaign that uses litigation, advocacy, and research to oppose vouchers and other forms of school privatization.

“There are multiple reasons for these failures,” she says, “including that Republicans representing rural areas know vouchers won’t benefit their constituents because of the lack of private schools in these areas and because public schools often are important for jobs and community-building.” - Jeff Bryant/The Progressive

78 trillion from ditching coal

Obviously, assumptions were made, in projecting out to a number like this. But, and unlike what you see from, say, right-wing propaganda mills (sorry, “conservative think tanks‘), they’re legitimate, fact-based assumptions.

The world would generate $78trn in net ‘social benefits’ by replacing coal with renewable energy, according to a new working paper from Imperial College Business School.

The net gain in switching from coal to renewable energy sources would be equivalent to about 1.2% of global GDP per year until the end of the century, according to the study. Per tonne of coal, that would represent a net gain of around $125 and $55 per tonne of avoided coal emissions. - Energy Monitor

Those "little" oil spills really add up

And there are a lot of them.

On (June 9), an oil spill into the St. Mary’s River at the Ontario, Canada-Michigan border halted boat traffic between Lake Superior and Lake Huron for about three hours. This spill is small, relative to the massive incidents that usually make the news. Spills of this scale rarely make headlines, and that’s a problem: Small events are the large majority of oil spills, and together they have a big impact.

5,300 gallons of oil originating from Algoma Steel fell into the river at around 10:30 am, according to a press release from the U.S. Coast Guard.

...Spills like this happen all the time. The overwhelming majority of oil spills don’t show up in headlines at all. There are thousands of instances of oil leaking, oozing, pouring, and, yes, spilling into U.S. waters every year...

Sure, the St. Mary’s River spill is no Deepwater Horizon. But maybe all these small(er) spills should be big(er) news. It’s difficult to find reliable and comprehensive data on smaller spills. As far as Gizmodo can tell, there is no centralized tracker that shows volumes for all oil spill incidents that occur in the United States. But NOAA does keep tabs on a lot of spills via its incident tracker, which covers “selected oil spills off US coastal waters and other incidents.”

So far, in 2022 alone, NOAA has recorded more than 50 recorded oil incidents. Of that 50, the 45+ below both the ITOPF and NOAA thresholds have cumulatively spilled a potential 234,220 gallons of oil into our waterways. - Earther

Big corporate donors demand ag school influence

That this has been going on with economics programs is well documented. It's not ending there.

Since 2010, corporations have given at least $170 million in donations to public university agricultural programs, according to data collected by Harvest Public Media and Investigate Midwest in four states.

The figure likely undercounts the impact because it represents just four schools: University of Illinois, Iowa State University, Oklahoma State University and University of Missouri. The media organizations were denied records sought from several other universities that cited state privacy laws shielding donor information.

That corporate money has paid for research centers and specific studies at universities. That influence might limit the scope of what areas of research universities tackle, said Gabrielle Roesch-McNally, who advocates for women’s ownership with the American Farmland Trust. As an Iowa State doctoral student, McNally worked on a large federally funded research project.

”Corporate influence has that kind of much more tacit control over the research agenda,” she said. “It’s a way for people to say, ‘Well, they’re not controlling us. They’re not our puppet masters.’ But we only research the crops that they’re heavily investing in.” - Investigate Midwest

Methane as a "bridge fuel" is pure propaganda

This is replete with disturbing facts that are not being widely reported.

Perhaps the confusion over the motivation for the latest petroleum war is an unfamiliarity with natural gas, whose main component, methane (CH4), is a potentially worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (CO2). Associated hydrocarbon gases are typically found wherever there is oil, mostly methane (70-90%), with some ethane, propane, butane, and hexane. [2] Combusting at roughly the same temperature of about 2000 °C in air, methane and ethane are sold on as natural gas, considered a better fuel than coal or coal gas. Since both are invisible, odourless gases, the foul-smelling, sulphur-based odorant mercaptan is added to warn about leaks and potential explosions.

After 70 years of interventions in the Middle East, we’re used to the black stuff gushing from the ground, but fighting over an invisible gas is new. Most of us also know about the toxicity of oil and its main refined product, gasoline, yet we readily burn natural gas in our homes for heating and cooking, unaware of the dangers from noxious by-products and leaks. Methane comes with good PR too, thanks to a Madison Avenue style makeover. Brought ashore for the first time to the United Kingdom in 1967 near Hull, North Sea gas was given the more environmentally and commercial friendly “natural gas” moniker to distinguish it from coal gas, which is much dirtier to produce and very unnatural. Customers quickly absorbed the conversion costs for heating and cooking. Celebrity cooks swear by it.

Alas, natural gas is just as dirty and unnatural as coal gas when burned, producing all sorts of toxic waste from incomplete burning, chiefly carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulphide, ammonia, volatile organic components, and particulate matter, as well as carbon dioxide and water vapour. Incomplete burning of methane is bad in the same way that burning any petroleum product is bad. We get the same toxic waste and respiratory damage from burning gasoline, plastic, vinyl, or asphalt, smells not easy to forget. - CounterPunch

There's nothing "empowering" about "school choice"

A thorough takedown.

Furthermore, school choice likely won’t empower parents because the parents are making these choices without being able to access all of the relevant information. This is a clear example of asymmetric information, a phenomenon in marketplace transactions where a seller knows more than the buyer.

In theory, consumer regulations are designed to balance this division. But, in the world of school choice, there’s almost nothing in place to require a charter school to disclose how it compares to other schools—other than, of course, school-wide scores from the annual Big Standardized Test. For private schools, the information gap is even wider, as what they choose to disclose is usually crafted by the school itself. Plus, third-party rankings for both, such as the list put out by GreatSchools and U.S. News & World Report, typically nudge families toward whiter, more affluent schools.

Parents, as a result, have few sources of reliable information when making a choice that is supposedly transparent. This is especially true in states like Michigan, where there are fewer rules around what charter or private schools need to disclose.

School marketing is also largely unregulated, allowing charter and private schools to make whatever claims they choose about everything from programming and the financial stability of the school to the very use of the word “public” in their title. Public schools, by contrast, may be reluctant to be as transparent as parents would like, but the law is on parents’ side when it comes to requirements for district transparency. - The Progressive

Israeli assassination of journalist gets the standard U.S. corporate media treatment

Most U.S. Jews don't support Israeli extremism. You'd never know that based on the behavior of our corporate "journalism."

Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, a well-known and much-loved Al Jazeera reporter who covered Palestine for two decades, was shot and killed by an Israeli sniper May 11 while documenting an Israeli raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the Occupied West Bank...

The context of escalating Israeli attacks on freedom of the press and on journalists in the Occupied Territories did not enter the frame of most US news coverage. Instead, many used a back-and-forth blame frame for reporting the murder of a veteran war correspondent who knew well how to negotiate crossfire in the field of battle. This was acknowledged by Ali Samoudi, who said from his hospital bed, if there had been crossfire, they wouldn’t have been there.

Amidst the debunking of the Israeli messaging, by late Wednesday some news outlets, including NBC (5/11/22), noted that Israel “appeared to step back from that claim” that Abu Akleh may have been killed by Palestinian gunmen.

Yet most big media would continue to include Israeli messaging in their reporting, while failing to disclose any of the factchecking done on the Israeli video. They “balanced” on-the-ground testimony with Israeli statements, keeping the propaganda story alive. - FAIR

Facts about the food price crisis

This explains it, succinctly yet thoroughly, as well as anything I've seen does.

At the center of this crisis is the fact that the production of the world’s staple crops destined for export is concentrated in a small number of countries, and they are shipped around the world by a handful of trading firms. Much of this globally traded food is grown from a narrow range of seed varieties, using uniform industrial agricultural methods.

So, is it any wonder that a war involving two countries that specialize in producing two of these staples should spark a major global food crisis?

As we detail in the latest report from the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food), the world’s food security is built on a house of cards—the whole edifice can tumble when one card falls. The concentrated nature of the global food system creates vulnerabilities, which can have cascading consequences when there are disruptions to any part of it. These economies of scale might be designed for profitable efficiency, when things operate according to plan. But they’re neither stable, resilient, nor dependable in the face of risks, especially for vulnerable people.

Add to this concentrated global food system the financial markets, which can further exaggerate the effects of price shocks. - Civil Eats

Tuesday's primaries were solid for progressives

Most of the results seem to be leaving Conservadems at a loss. But that's their problem.

Tuesday’s primary elections were defined by historic super PAC spending attempting to quash a number of progressive candidates and an attempted hostile takeover of the Democratic primary process like we’ve never seen. At last count, just a handful of super PACs had dumped $18 million to influence the outcome in favor of moderates.

The expectation in politics is that the person with the most money wins. And that played out in several races Tuesday night. In numerous races, massive super PAC money backed moderate candidates with institutional endorsements and little enthusiasm. But surprisingly, progressives largely won the argument that voters want to see their representatives fighting for an agenda rather than fighting to stop it. The candidates most tied to trying to slam the brakes on progress were defeated. The candidates who organized their communities in favor of getting things done for the people were successful. And in one incredible instance, voters saw through the hollowness of millions of outside dollars. - The American Prospect

Also worth noting is that attempts by MAGA kooks to take over school boards mostly failed. The author of that correctly points out that this is clearly a winning issue for Democrats, and many should make more effective use of it.

Rather intriguing, the most extreme Party of Trumpers did markedly better in races east of the Mississippi River. Maybe just an anomaly, maybe not.

The U.S. is the worst financial secrecy enabler of all

Because the greedhead plutocrats want it this way.

A global index published Tuesday ranks the United States as the world's leading perpetrator of financial secrecy, citing the country's refusal to share key information with the tax authorities of other nations and its status as a generous tax haven for foreign oligarchs, rich executives, and other elites.

The ranking comes despite U.S. President Joe Biden's campaign-trail pledge to "bring transparency to the global financial system, go after illicit tax havens, seize stolen assets, and make it more difficult for leaders who steal from their people to hide behind anonymous front companies." - Common Dreams

Young workers fuel the new labor movement

An upbeat take. Works for me.

This year, May Day was celebrated during a historic moment for the American labor movement. Nearly every day, news reports announce another example of workers exercising their rights as nonprofit professionals, Starbucks workers, and employees at corporations like Amazon, REI and Conde Nast announce their union drives. The approval rating for labor unions has reached its highest point in over 50 years, standing at 68 percent, and petitions for new union elections at the National Labor Relations Board increased 57 percent during the first half of fiscal year 2021.

Three years ago, we wrote an op-ed about how young workers in historically unorganized occupations — such as digital journalism, higher education and nonprofit organizations — were beginning to rebuild the labor movement. Today, Covid-19 has changed the way that we relate to work and created new sources of economic anxiety, while exacerbating old ones. Yet, young workers continue to fuel the new labor movement as they form new unions to win back a degree of control over their futures in a world fundamentally altered by a global pandemic. With momentum in union organizing and worker activism still growing, it is important to recognize the ways that workers in every industry are helping the labor movement live up to its values and reverse the years-long decline in union density. - In These Times

Death to private equity!

The article I'm quoting from is just one in an issue of Mother Jones largely devoted to explicating p. equity's foulness.

If you were to sit down with a focus group and a whiteboard, you would have a hard time coming up with a policy with less populist appeal than the nearly three-decades-old loophole that cuts private equity billionaires’ tax rate almost in half.

The carried-interest loophole, Barack Obama said, upset “the balance between work and wealth.” Donald Trump claimed the fund managers who availed themselves of this tax break were “getting away with murder.” Joe Biden, like both of his predecessors, ran for president on a pledge to end it.

“People get this really easily—we’re giving a whole lot of rich people more money for no reason other than them being rich,” says Mandla Deskins, advo­cacy manager at Take on Wall Street, an organization pressuring members of Congress to jettison this tax break.

On paper, it’s an idea that almost nobody says they want. Polls show the public is overwhelmingly against it. Mitt Romney lost his bid for the presidency in part because of it. Tax experts think it’s unfair. Carried interest has no real constituency outside certain corners of Nantucket. But for a decade and a half, private equity’s favorite tax break, which delivers hundreds of millions of dollars annually to the guys in blue button-downs and matching fleeces who bought your company and laid you off, has been the most unkillable bad idea in a town with no shortage of them, a testament to the unstoppable combination of money and inertia.

Well, money mostly. - Mother Jones

Big corporations are predictably mum on abortion rights

We may see some change on this, but probably not much.

In the days since a Supreme Court draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade leaked, corporate America has offered a familiar response: silence.

It mirrors the days following Texas’ implementation of its six-week abortion ban last September — silence from the many companies in the state. But in the weeks after Texas’ ban went into effect, some companies started to speak publicly and implement policies to assist employees who wanted to get an abortion out of state. That response to the Texas law, then the most restrictive abortion ban in the country, created a precedent that corporations could draw on now that it seems imminent that Roe will be overturned. So far, they have not. - AlterNet

A big rise in global hunger

American corporate media coverage of the Ukraine war could be worse. At least most of them aren't pro-Putin. But you don't see much about this.

While international news headlines remain largely focused on the war in Ukraine, little attention is given to the horrific consequences of the war which are felt in many regions around the world. Even when these repercussions are discussed, disproportionate coverage is allocated to European countries, like Germany and Austria, due to their heavy reliance on Russian energy sources.

The horrific scenario, however, awaits countries in the Global South which, unlike Germany, will not be able to eventually substitute Russian raw material from elsewhere. Countries like Tunisia, Sri Lanka and Ghana and numerous others, are facing serious food shortages in the short, medium and long term...

While the thousands of sanctions imposed on Russia are yet to achieve any of their intended purpose, it is poor countries that are already feeling the burden of the war, sanctions and geopolitical tussle between great powers. As the west is busy dealing with its own economic woes, little heed is being paid to those suffering most. And as the world is forced to transition to a new global economic order, it will take years for small economies to successfully make that adjustment. - Middle East Monitor

The latest education-based way of manipulating frantic wingnuts

So many of the right-wingers I know are actually really good people in the most important ways, that is, as parents, community members, etc. They’re just foolish and very, very gullible, when it comes to their politics and worldviews, generally because they grew up in families and communities where that’s mostly how it was. So I think the situation is more complex and nuanced than it’s often presented to be, even by really good progressive writers. But this article does make very valid points.

Republicans are suddenly furious now about another educational bit of jargon: "Social-emotional learning," typically shortened to "SEL." Conservatives are complaining that kids are learning social and emotional skills like learning to say "please" and "thank you." Yes, you read that right. Being reminded to share and to clean up after yourself is being equated with communism. Telling little kids to play nicely together is the end of civilization itself...

In reality, of course, the kids are still expected to get the right answers. The debate is about the journey to the right answer. Are they simply told the answer and expected to parrot it back? Or are they being taught how to think through problems? The latter is a far more valuable skill, of course. But it's also threatening to authoritarians, who prefer an unthinking citizenry that simply follows the commands of their right-wing leaders. The battle is not over whether two plus two equals four. It's over whether students know why that equation works. If they do, then they are less likely to believe Trump or DeSantis when they push alternative facts.

The Republican loathing of the larger social and emotional parts of SEL isn't exactly mysterious, either. For the kids themselves, of course, lessons in working well with others, active listening, and exhibiting empathy all cultivate invaluable skills. Kids who learn those skills are far likelier to grow into successful, well-adjusted adults. But successful, well-adjusted adults are the GOP's kryptonite. They need voters to be maladjusted miscreants, the kind of people who think that someone like Trump or Tucker Carlson is worth following. So of course they object to any school lessons that put kids on the pathway to being decent adults. They need a voting population of assholes to keep holding power. - Salon

Nuclear bailouts are a big mistake

I think that on the whole the infrastructure package is a positive thing. I'd have done plenty of it differently, but I'm not in charge, nor will I be. Anyway, yeah, this:

The misguided but predictable decision by the Biden administration to waste $6 billion in taxpayer dollars propping up US reactors that were scheduled to close, further detours from and delays urgently needed action on the climate crisis...

Renewable energy is the fastest growing job sector in the US and would quickly provide a greater number of longer term, well-paying and obviously safer jobs for Americans. Equally, applying the $6 billion to the renewable energy growth sector instead of the financially failing nuclear power industry, would reduce more carbon faster for the same price.

As Stanford physicist, Amory Lovins, has repeatedly pointed out: “Most US nuclear reactors now cost more just to run – including big repairs that trend upward with age – than their output can earn. They also cost more just to run than providing the same services by building and operating new renewables, or by using electricity more efficiently.” - Beyond Nuclear

Update 4/30/22: The word now is that this may be too late to keep some old reactors going. I certainly hope so.