The shutdown’s effects on food and ag

This explains the myriad ways in which consumers and farmers continue to be affected.

Now that the shutdown is over, SNAP is returning to its typical operations, said Katie Bergh, senior food assistance policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Most households have received their full November benefits, following delays from the Trump administration during the shutdown.

But for many households, getting full benefits will not erase the impact of the shutdown. Without assistance, SNAP recipients may have opted to buy groceries in lieu of paying an electric bill or car payment, for example, and are now potentially falling behind in their bills.

“All of that chaos and disruption is going to have long-term impacts for the households that were struggling to follow what was happening and waiting on their benefits in the interim,” Bergh said. - Civil Eats

The Israeli government is back to doing just what they want

Which was obviously the plan once they got the hostages returned. Anyone with any sense saw this coming. Trump is so easily played and suckered with flattery and bribes.

Amnesty International concludes that, over a month after a ceasefire was agreed upon in Gaza and all living Israeli hostages were returned, the Israeli authorities continue to pursue the textbook definition of genocide “by continuing to deliberately inflict conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction.” Moreover, Israeli leaders continue openly to affirm that this course of action is intentional on their parts…

The Secretary General of Amnesty International, Agnes Calmard, observed that “Palestinians remain held within less than half of the territory of Gaza, in the areas least capable of supporting life, with humanitarian aid still severely restricted.” Amnesty says that the Israeli military continues to occupy on the order of 55% of the Gaza Strip. There has been no move to rehabilitate the farmland that has been deliberately destroyed by the Israelis over two years or rebuild livestock. The Israelis routinely shoot at Palestinian fishing boats, preventing them from harvesting protein from the sea. The report concludes, “Palestinians are left virtually totally deprived of independent access to forms of sustenance.” - Informed Comment

COP30 didn't get much done

Though it wasn’t all failure, and it was probably a pipe dream to expect major breakthroughs to begin with.

The Brazilian president’s forceful remarks at the outset of negotiations in the Amazonian city of Belém were meant to set the stage for a new chapter in international climate diplomacy. On the 10th anniversary of the Paris Agreement, the time had come, according to Lula, to stop arguing about what the historic agreement requires and instead focus on implementation — actually taking the steps required to both reduce greenhouse gas emissions and protect countries against the coming economic and public health consequences wrought by climate change…

But the Brazilian delegation, which was responsible for overseeing COP30 negotiations and ultimately brokering a new deal, was confronted by a different truth than the president envisioned. The viability of the planet may come down to a few degrees Celsius of warming, but in Belém’s fluorescently-lit negotiating rooms, everything ultimately came down to dollars and cents…

The most substantial new agreement negotiated at the conference reflected this realism. The delegations agreed that, by 2035, the world would triple international funding provided to help developing nations adapt to the consequences of a warmer world. - Grist

Montana looks to get around Citizens United

Given how corrupt our governance, including the judiciary, now is, the odds may not be great for this becoming and staying law in a lot of places, or for that matter any at all. But it’s very well worth a try.

The idea comes from Tom Moore, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and a former chief of staff to Federal Election Commission Commissioner Ellen Weintraub. In a white paper released on September 15, 2025, Moore explained that “The states’ authority is absolute in terms of how they define their corporations and which powers they decide to give their corporations.” He described this as “basic foundational corporation law,” noting that most states have historically issued very broad charters to corporations but are not required to do so…

In June, the framework became the foundation for “The Montana Plan,” which now sits at the center of a proposed constitutional amendment asking voters whether Montana should redefine corporate charters to prohibit corporate spending in elections.

The initiative has broad support. An October 2025 poll by Issue One found that 74 percent of Montana voters support the measure, including majorities of Republicans and independents. Moore pointed to the significance of this political setting, stating, “It’s a red state, which is useful, I think,” because it shows that “it’s not just lefty liberals who don’t like dark and corporate money in their politics.” - Nation of Change

The real costs of plastics

It’s quite a number, wherever within the range your take falls.

From our coffee cups and cutting boards to toys and synthetic clothing, plastic may feel convenient—even cheap. But a new report from Duke University reveals that the true cost of plastic is staggering.

The report entitled “The Social Cost of Plastic to the United States” estimates that Americans face $436 billion to $1.1 trillion in annual social costs associated with plastics. This is the most comprehensive analysis to date, examining the full lifecycle of plastics—from fossil fuel extraction and production to use, disposal, and mismanagement. To put the scale of this cost into perspective, you would need to spend $33.8 million every single day for 81 years to reach $1 trillion! - Surfrider

Huge costs for privatized Medicare and Medicaid

This is not meant to be critical of seniors who choose Medicare Advantage plans. They have the right to find the best deals for themselves. But the current system is clearly not viable for much longer.

US President Donald Trump and his Republican allies in Congress took a sledgehammer to Medicaid over the summer, justifying the unprecedented cuts by falsely claiming the program that provides health coverage to tens of millions of low-income Americans is overrun with waste and abuse.

But a new paper published Friday in the journal Health Affairs argues that if the administration actually wanted to target waste, fraud, and abuse, it would have been much better off taking aim at Medicare Advantage (MA) and Medicaid privatization.

The paper’s authors estimate that overpayments to MA plans—which are funded by the government and run by for-profit insurers—and private Medicaid managed care will likely cost US taxpayers a total of $1.92 trillion over the next 10 years. - Common Dreams

A big fat under-the-radar nuclear energy scam

The Trumpers' efforts to promote nuclear are every bit as bad as what they're doing to try to keep coal alive.

On (October 28), the White House announced an $80 billion deal with Westinghouse to finance construction of eight large new reactors in the U.S. There is not enough in the way of actual details about the deal, resulting in even more unanswered questions. But the promise of a large, direct investment in a pack of new reactors has predictably revved up talk of yet another “Nuclear Renaissance” and made it look like the DJT 2.0 administration is making good on big nuclear power goals from a group of executive orders issued in May.

$80 billion sure sounds like a lot! And the news that the announced $80 billion is going to come from Japanese taxpayers and not U.S. taxpayers sounds like a sweet deal!

…But $80 billion is only enough to build, at most, four Westinghouse AP1000 reactors. That’s because the cost of building nuclear reactors is four to 10 times more than wind, solar, or geothermal power. Even wind and solar paired with battery storage are still several times cheaper than new nuclear reactors.

But where would the other $80+ billion for eight reactors come from? U.S. taxpayers? Ratepayers? In this case, probably taxpayers. The reactors would probably receive low-interest loans from the Department of Energy’s (DOE) loan guarantee program, and, following construction, they would be eligible to claim the Clean Energy Investment Tax Credit, which provides a 30-50% subsidy for the cost of a new energy project. That would mean $80 billion or more in loans up front, and, later, $48-80 billion in rebates from U.S. taxpayers. - NIRS

$44B in projected farm losses

As many have been pointing out, Trump-voting farmers will be bailed out essentially by blue state taxpayers, including Minnesota’s. It would be great if they’d get their shit together when it comes to their politics.

Soybeans sit in storage, farm bankruptcies are rising, and total farm debt continues to climb. By nearly every measure, American farmers are struggling.

Experts say financial pressures are expected to continue mounting.

Due to rising costs, low crop prices and the effects of the trade war, economists project that growers could see roughly $44 billion in net cash income losses from their 2025–26 crops. - Investigate Midwest

A ceasefire is supposed to mean no more shooting

But corporate media has been desperate for a reason, no matter how spurious, to heap praise on Trump.

On October 10, a ceasefire was declared in the Gaza Strip, where more than 67,000 Palestinians were officially killed in just over two years of Israel’s United States-backed genocide. With an estimated 10,000 bodies still buried under the all-consuming rubble, and indirect deaths unaccounted for, this number is almost certainly a drastic underestimate. Shortly after the ceasefire took effect, US President Donald Trump pronounced the war in Gaza “over,” proclaiming that “at long last we have peace in the Middle East.”

In the ten days following the implementation of the ostensible truce, the Israeli military reportedly killed at least 97 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded 230, violating the ceasefire agreement no fewer than 80 times. One might have expected, then, to see a headline or two along the lines of, I dunno, “Israel Violates Ceasefire”—or maybe “So Much for ‘Peace’ in Gaza.”

No such headlines turned up in the Western corporate media—not that there weren’t some pretty spectacular violations to choose from. - FAIR

This year's Social Security bump won't come close to cutting it

Yet far too many seniors impacted by all this will remain part of the Trump cult. But we don’t need all that many to just stay home, to help contribute to a couple of blue wave elections along the lines of 2006 and 2008.

The Social Security Administration on Friday announced a 2.8% cost-of-living adjustment for beneficiaries, a small increase that advocates said would be mostly or entirely offset by surging healthcare premiums and other price hikes fueled by President Donald Trump’s erratic tariff policies and Republican legislation passed earlier this year.

The 2.8% raise—the second-smallest since 2021—will amount to just over $50 extra per month for the average Social Security recipient. The projected 11.6% increase in Medicare Part B premiums next year would wipe out around 40% of the COLA increase for seniors…

“ACA premiums are projected to skyrocket next year, with those over 50 hit hardest,” (Nancy Altman, president of the progressive advocacy group Social Security Works) said. “For many of these beneficiaries, the COLA increase won’t come close to covering their increased healthcare premiums.”

Another factor that could eat into the Social Security COLA is the impact of Trump’s tariffs on prescription drug prices, which are already far higher in the US than in other wealthy nations. - Common Dreams

Have fun giving AI your credit card

To be clear, the title of this post is deliberate sarcasm.

As marketing researchers who study how AI affects consumer behavior, we believe we’re seeing the beginning of the biggest shift in how people shop since smartphones arrived. Most people have no idea it’s happening…

For three decades, the internet has worked the same way: You want something, you Google it, you compare options, you decide, you buy. You’re in control…

Soon comes “autopilot AI,” where AI makes purchases for you with minimal input from you. “Order flowers for my anniversary next week.” ChatGPT checks your calendar, remembers preferences, processes payment and confirms delivery.

Each phase adds convenience but gives you less control. - The Conversation

States can make up for some Trump cuts

Even some of the reddest states are doing so, believe it or not. Which isn't to suggest that the federal cuts shouldn't be reversed, at the earliest opportunity.

In March, the Trump administration pulled the rug on $1 billion in funds for the Local Food for Schools (LFS) and Local Food Purchase Assistance (LFPA) programs. The two programs provided funding to schools and food pantries to purchase fresh fruits, vegetables and meats from local farmers.

For the farmers, schools, community organizations and tribal nations involved, the programs were a win-win situation. Small farmers earned reliable income through government contracts. Schools could provide children with fresh, local and oftentimes organic produce that would usually be out of budget for a school cafeteria…

Nineteen states operate farm to school food purchase programs similar to LFS. After the federal program was cut in March, states, including Vermont, Connecticut, Alabama, Oklahoma and Minnesota stepped in to increase their funding. - Barn Raiser

Crypto concerns are likely driving a lot of Trump “policy”

By Paul Krugman. I very much share his entirely well-grounded suspicions.

By now it’s obvious that Donald Trump suffers from CBS — Cowardly Bully Syndrome.

On Friday, Trump blasted China’s new export controls on rare earths, declaring them a “moral disgrace” which were “obviously a plan devised by them years ago.” And he threatened to impose 100 percent tariffs on China, on top of the already high existing tariffs.

Less than a day later he was groveling…

This was the largest one-day crash crypto has experienced so far. My question, however, is why the prospect of an intensified trade war caused a crypto crash…

The answer, I believe, has little to do with economics and everything to do with politics. These days crypto derives its value largely from the support of politicians and government officials — in particular, officials who can be bribed. As a result, at this point crypto is largely a Trump trade. And crypto fell because the backlash against the potential trade war threatened to weaken Trump politically. - The National Memo

China's clean tech exports are crushing US filthy fossil fuels

The gap will likely only widen. Works for me.

Recent reports out of think tank Ember on China’s record-breaking $20 billion in August clean technology exports and the underlying data have stimulated discussion online. Electrek focused on the EV exports that are driving much of the growth. Meanwhile, Bloomberg put the numbers together with DOE and EIA data to show how China’s cleantech exports are outpacing US fossil fuels (reposted in Energy Connects). We also published a piece on it a few hours ago: “Renewables Drive A Stake Through The Cold, Dark Heart Of King Coal.”

…Of course, comparing fossil fuel exports to cleantech exports is like comparing apples to oranges. The two categories are significantly different. However, the differences indicate a substantial shift in how the world approaches energy and the global dynamics that drive trade. - CleanTechnica

The EPA is being gutted even worse than you think

This is of course being underreported in corporate media because its owners are loving it.

Combining EPA data on staffing changes with conservative estimates of the pending cuts, the initiative has calculated that 25% of EPA staff are already out of the agency.

That calculation does not include other announced cuts, including a third round of deferred resignations taking effect at the end of September 2025 and December 2025. Those cuts may see the departure of similar numbers of full-time equivalents as in the past two rounds – approximately 500 and 1,500.

The agency has also reportedly planned to be cutting as much as two-thirds of research staff.

With those departure figures included, the initiative estimates that approximately 33% of staffers at the agency when Trump took office will be gone by the end of 2025. That would leave, at the start of 2026, an EPA staff numbering approximately 9,700 people, a level not seen since the last years of the Nixon and Ford administrations. - The Conversation

Profiteer rapacity knows no limits

Or ethical standards. If, for example, you search “private equity news” you can see for yourself how they’re predictably running amok, these days.

“Investors in for-profit entities see that as an opportunity to make money,” she said, “in a space that had not historically been seen as super profitable.”

Shields and other researchers have repeatedly flagged concerns about lower quality of care at mental health facilities owned by for-profit corporations, in part due to efforts to cut staff and reduce costs. Companies have defended the quality of care they provide.

ProPublica reported (September 22) that over 90 psychiatric hospitals across the country have violated the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act in the past 15 years. The vast majority of them — around 80% — are owned by for-profit corporations. - ProPublica

Dems, watch where you send your money

I think this generated considerable controversy. But on the whole I agree with the author. I only donate directly to candidates, myself.

Nearly $678 million was raised by scam PACs during the 2024 election cycle, yet less than $11 million of that sum went to Democratic candidates or the party’s national committee. That devastating finding, from data scientist Adam Bonica, makes it clear: This is theft—pure and simple—bleeding the progressive movement dry while the right builds real power.

In July 2024, I warned readers to beware of scam PACs as the Kamala Harris campaign itself urged donors to be cautious. These are fundraising operations that pledged to “take the fight” to Donald Trump, only to funnel the donations into their own coffers. - Daily Kos

Big-time CEOs think Trump is failing, too

They're right, but, cry me a river, you know, after they did so much to put him there. They're not the ones having their lives wrecked.

The Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute’s CEO forum gathers top political leaders with Fortune 500 CEOs for a Chatham House rules discussion where direct quotes are off the record… senators from both parties and some top Trump administration officials joined us. They had to face down the near unanimous verdict from over 100 top business leaders, representing some of the world’s largest companies and most iconic brands: Trump’s policies aren’t working.

Business leaders at our forum worry that Trump is undermining an economic system that took decades to build and has long benefited the U.S. more than any other country, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, all for short-term gains…

This widespread sentiment is directly counter to the heavily trumpeted “Dear Leader” tributes of just a handful of tech titans, who are decidedly not representative of the leadership class. - MSN

FEMA employees tell it like it is

This is a gutsy, principled thing.

Nearly 200 employees and ex-employees of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) signed an extraordinary letter sent to Congress on August 25, denouncing the current administration’s erosion of their work and warning that it risks the occurrence of another Hurricane Katrina-sized disaster. More than 30 provided their names; the rest signed anonymously.

Named the Katrina Declaration, the letter was one of the most powerful written so far by beleaguered federal employees attempting to salvage their agencies from a predatory administration seemingly intent on bulldozing basic government functions. They have followed up on this by asking people around the country to join them in their protest by endorsing the letter…

The authors didn’t pull punches, arguing that the administration is violating the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act, which Congress passed in 2006 to improve FEMA’s performance after the agency’s dismal failures following the devastation the hurricane wrought upon New Orleans twenty years ago this week. The Trumpified Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the parent department to FEMA, is slashing funding to vital FEMA services. And the department is insisting that all grants and spending in excess of $100,000 be personally approved by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem — a choice that has created a huge backlog in contracts. - Truthout

Trump follows Argentina in demanding cooked data

But, hey, it’s Trump’s America, and honest, ethical behavior is for those pathetic losers who deserve to be used and exploited. Right?

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump accused a civil servant of sabotaging him without evidence and summarily fired her. In doing so, he stole a page from an emerging market that cycles through inflation surges and debt crises as if it were a national sport. Enter Argentina.

Danish economist Lars Christensen — who has researched emerging economies in Latin America and beyond — dubbed Trump’s outburst as “the Argentinisation of American data.” It’s referring to an instance almost two decades ago in which the Argentine government ousted statistician Graciela Bevacqua. The nonpartisan official had refused to go along with their ploy to doctor inflation figures to shore up the ruling government's odds of triumph in upcoming national elections.

That episode in Argentina’s never-ending economic novella has rippled anew in the U.S. after Trump booted Dr. Erika McEntarfer from helming the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It puts a spotlight on the independent statistics critical to decisions flowing through every level of U.S. society. Diminishing the reliability of such data risks dealing a blow to the U.S. economy that snowballs with unpredictable consequences…

At INDEC, credibility that took generations to build was lost in just a few years. The Economist magazine stopped publishing INDEC’s statistics and labeled them “bogus.” Argentines treated the data as no better than garbage. Investors fumbled in the dark, driving up borrowing costs…

Arturo Porzecanski, a research fellow at American University who has closely tracked Argentina's economy, said its society is still paying the costs from a near-decade of financial blindness: Citizens, businesses, and investors alike. - Quartz

Talks on a plastics treaty keep going nowhere

This was predictable, these days. Big Plastics is a powerful entity, and like all the Bigs is ethically bereft in every way.

Diplomats from around the world concluded nine days of talks in Geneva — plus a marathon overnight session that lasted into the early hours of (August 15) — with no agreement on a global plastics treaty…

Signs of a logjam were apparent even within the first few days of the talks, however, as countries hewed to the same red lines they’d stuck to during previous negotiations. A so-called “like-minded group” of oil-producing countries said it would not accept legally binding obligations and opposed a wide range of provisions that other nations said were essential, including controls on new plastic production, as well as mandatory disclosures and phaseouts of hazardous chemicals used in plastics. - Grist

It's hard to see the economy not tanking

I generally agree with David Dayen, and I certainly do so here.

Most of this picture is mixed and influenced by a bunch of different factors. But we can say one thing definitively: Hiring has been relatively dormant since Trump took the oath of office. Only 597,000 jobs have been added in the first seven months of the year, a 44 percent drop from the first seven months of 2024, as former Biden economist Heather Boushey notes. The year has seen low hiring and a low quit rate, as people hunker down in the jobs they have. There are fewer entry-level positions and Americans aren’t moving very much for work. That’s a housing story but it’s also a job security story, and the expectations are even worse: The University of Michigan survey shows expectations for a higher unemployment rate next year at the highest level since the Great Recession…

The insecurity gripping American workers has kept wages stagnant, up just 0.1 percent last month. (It took the Wall Street Journal editorial board, of all places, to point this out.) That means that wages aren’t keeping pace with prices, which is what really matters with the cost of living.

On top of this, a host of nontariff policy changes are squeezing or poised to squeeze ordinary Americans. The Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker now estimates that the median health insurance plan in the Affordable Care Act marketplaces is going up 18 percent in 2026, and that understates the impact, because the expiration of enhanced ACA premium subsidies will make this feel much worse. Student loan payment resumption bites so deep for the millions of student borrowers that many are just ignoring the bills, which is likely to lead to intrusive collections and garnishing of wages. The Big Tech obsession, fueled by the Trump administration, to frantically build data centers (and keep the stock market high) is leading to soaring electricity prices, which Trump’s policy to kill any renewable source of energy will only worsen. - The American Prospect

Lots of job cuts are planned

The article does include the appropriate caveats. But this looks highly likely to happen.

Companies based in the U.S. announced in July that they plan to eliminate a record number of jobs, more than double the amount announced in the same month last year, according to a new report.

The report, from recruitment firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, tracks U.S.-based employers’ announcements about layoffs, which do not indicate the number of job losses that have occurred or when the positions will be eliminated. The estimates can change based on a variety of factors, including, in the case of government layoffs, litigation, explained Gbenga Ajilore, chief economist at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

“These are job cut announcements versus actual people losing a job,” Ajilore told Truthout…

So far this year, employers have announced plans to cut more than 800,000 jobs, the highest number since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which has eliminated thousands of federal jobs, was the number one reason cited by employers for their planned job cuts. Experts estimate that DOGE’s actions may end up costing the United States billions of dollars. - Truthout

US pushes dirty LNG on Europe

This is an ongoing thing.

UPDATE 7/29/2025: On July 28, the U.S. and EU announced a framework trade deal. It involves the EU pledging to buy $750 billion in U.S. oil, LNG, and nuclear fuel by 2028. Energy analysts have called that goal unrealistic, with unclear implications for the EU’s methane pollution standards.

As Europe races toward a U.S. trade deal, lobbyists for America’s biggest natural gas exporters are pushing to carve a major loophole in the EU’s methane rules, using ongoing trade and tariff disputes in a campaign to weaken Europe’s climate standards.

“It’s very clear that the industry and the State Department are putting a lot of pressure on the EU to just give us a pass on this methane rule and commit to our dirty LNG,” said Lorne Stockman, research co-director for Oil Change International and co-author of a new report detailing climate impacts from five U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects.

“And we certainly hope the EU does not buckle to that pressure. But it’s extremely concerning because there’s a lot at stake.” - DeSmog

Health insurance greedheads have it their way

Given that there’s no good reason for these companies to even exist…

The seven largest publicly traded U.S. health insurance companies made a collective $71.3 billion in profits last year, and their CEOs took home a total of $146.1 million in compensation, according to an analysis released Wednesday by an ex-industry executive.

Wendell Potter, a former vice president for corporate communications at Cigna who now leads the nonprofit Center for Health and Democracy, compiled the data ahead of his recent testimony before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.

As Potter detailed for his newsletter, Health Care un-covered, the companies—UnitedHealth, CVS/Aetna, Cigna, Elevance, Humana, Centene, and Molina—boosted their profits by more than half a billion dollars from 2023 to 2024. - Common Dreams

Trump's tariff stupidity and small businesses

Most media attention is focused on big corporations, but this arguably matters more.

As of 2023, of those U.S. companies that import goods, more than 97% of them were small businesses. For these companies, tariff uncertainty isn’t just frustrating – it’s paralyzing…

The data backs up our anecdotal experience: More than 70% of small-business owners say constant shifts in trade policy create a “whiplash effect” that makes it difficult to plan, a recent national survey showed.

Unlike larger organizations with teams of analysts to inform their decision-making, small-business owners are often on their own. In an all-hands-on-deck operation, every hour spent focusing on trade policy news or filling out additional paperwork means precious time away from day-to-day, core operations. That means rapid trade policy shifts leave small businesses especially at a disadvantage. - The Conversation

The EPA is headed beyond the pale

As far as where they got those numbers, I suspect that they just made them up.

On Tuesday, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced a proposal to rescind the agency’s 2009 “endangerment finding,” a critical Obama-era scientific decision about the human health costs of greenhouse gases that allows the EPA to regulate emissions…

In its press release on Tuesday, the EPA said that rolling back the endangerment finding would “undo the underpinning of $1 trillion in costly regulations” and “save more than $54 billion annually” by repealing rules like the Biden administration’s tailpipe emission limits. “With this proposal,” Zeldin said in a statement, “the Trump EPA is proposing to end sixteen years of uncertainty for automakers and American consumers.”

It’s not clear where the agency got these numbers. In 2023, as CNN reported, researchers estimated that climate-driven extreme weather events—which are only expected to get worse—cost the US $150 billion per year. - Mother Jones

USFS firefighting is badly understaffed

It’s not all DOGE’s fault, but some of it is.

More than one-quarter of United States Forest Service (USFS) firefighting positions are vacant, creating shortages as extreme conditions lead to wildfires across the country, internal data reviewed by The Guardian has revealed…

“The agency saying it is ‘fully staffed’ is dangerous,” a squad leader who is familiar with the data said. “Maxing out 19-year-olds with no qualifications isn’t the best strategy.”

…In recent years, the USFS has had a hard time recruiting and retaining qualified firefighters due to low pay and increasing job hazards. The agency lost almost half its permanent employees from 2021 to 2024.

The issue has been exacerbated by the Trump administration, which has slashed budgets and reduced support staff. - EcoWatch

ACA premiums will likely take their biggest jump in a while

No surprise here.

Next year, Americans who buy health insurance through the Affordable Care Act exchanges are set to pay significantly more for coverage—and experts say policies advanced by President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans are at least partially to blame.

An analysis released Friday by the health policy research organization KFF and the Peterson Center on Healthcare found that across a sample of more than 105 ACA marketplace insurers in 19 states and the District of Columbia, companies are set to increase premiums by a median of 15%.

The analysis noted that insurers have cited a number of factors to justify pushing up premiums, including Trump's tariffs—which could drive up drug, equipment, and supply costs—and the expectation that the Republican-controlled Congress will not extend ACA tax credits that are set to expire at the end of the year. - Common Dreams

Establishment Democrats and "distraction" claims

This blockquote is from a very righteous screed well worth reading in full.

All of that said, there's some idiot camped out near the very center of Democratic strategy circles who has convinced the party that American voters are stupid, the Democratic base is malevolent, and that the party can and should brush off the vast sweep of authoritarian cruelties being inflicted on the country to focus instead on the real issue, which is whatever one thing the strategists have finally cobbled together talking points for. Everything else? Deploying the military to American cities to allegedly "liberate" them from the political opposition? Countless illegal impoundments of congressionally mandated funds? Mass deportations, and extralegal renditions to foreign prisons? White House corruption so vast that it now accounts for the majority of Trump's wealth?

All of that is a distraction, goes the party-issued talking points. Everything is a distraction from everything else, and you're the fool for spreading your alarm around. Like a sucker…

Calling up the United States military against American citizens is not a distraction. The nullification of congressional budgeting powers is not a distraction. A president selling a memecoin transparently designed to be a vehicle for bribery is not a distraction. An orchestrated strategy of seizing immigrants who dare show up for their own immigration hearings is not a distraction. Whirling tariff policies that seem to have little purpose other than one man's self-aggrandizement are not a distraction. None of it is a distraction, not rampant D.O.G.E. lawbreaking or defiance of court orders or the pardoning and elevation of violent seditionists or the installation of a page-long list of transparently incompetent cranks and corruption-enablers as top government officials. - Uncharted Blue

Abortion bans and restrictions are costing $133B/yr and counting

Obviously some will quibble about the precise figures and about how much can really be attributed to the effects of Dobbs. But that there is a big economic cost is beyond any legitimate dispute.

A new analysis by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR), a DC-based think tank, estimates that the 16 states with total or near-total abortion bans have sustained more than $64 billion in economic losses annually since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in June 2022. That’s enough to cover the average estimated health care costs related to pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum period for nearly all of the 3.6 million births that occurred in the US last year, the IWPR fact sheet says.

Nationwide, the Dobbs decision that overruled Roe has led to a staggering $133 billion in economic losses each year, IWPR estimates. Beyond the 16 state bans, the loss of federal protections that Roe offered, plus restrictions in other states that reduce abortion access—such as mandatory pre-abortion counseling and waiting periods, restrictions on providers, and gestational limits—have had an enormous economic toll, the think tank says. The restrictions keep more than a half million women out of the labor force each year, with Black women and Latinas suffering the greatest impacts, according to IWPR’s analysis.

This is not the first indication that Dobbs has shrunken the workforce and stunted the economy. Recent research from both IWPR and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), for example, shows that young, highly educated people are moving out of states with abortion bans. And another recent NBER paper found that abortion restrictions increased rates of intimate partner violence by 7 to 10 percent, contributing to a projected increase of $1.24 billion in social costs, including health care and lost productivity for victims. But the new IWPR fact sheet provides some of the timeliest analysis of the economic impacts of Dobbs, and helps quantify the overall costs of rising abortion restrictions nationwide. “This is not just a women’s crisis, it’s really a national economic crisis of significant magnitude,” says Melissa Mahoney, senior research economist at IWPR and lead author of the report. - Mother Jones

What Trump is doing, or is trying to do, to colleges and universities

This is a good overview. My own take is that since Trump himself is incapable of independent thought and action, what “policies” go out in his name depend on who has his ear at any given time.

The first six months of the Trump administration have brought a hailstorm of changes to the nation’s colleges and universities. While the president’s faceoffs with Harvard and Columbia have generated the most attention, students on campuses throughout the country are noticing the effects of the administration’s cuts to scientific and medical research, clampdown on any efforts promoting diversity equity and inclusion (DEI), newly aggressive policies for students with loan debt, revoking of visas for international students and more.

Many of the administration’s actions are being challenged in court, but they are influencing the way students interact with each other, what support they can get from their institutions — and even whether they feel safe in this nation. - Hechinger Report

Research cuts would hurt everyone, sooner or later

Even those who support such cuts, largely due to their own fear of real intelligence and scientific knowledge, will pay a price.

Large cuts to government-funded research and development can endanger American innovation – and the vital productivity gains it supports.

The Trump administration has already canceled at least US$1.8 billion in research grants previously awarded by the National Institutes of Health, which supports biomedical and health research. Its preliminary budget request for the 2026 fiscal year proposed slashing federal funding for scientific and health research, cutting the NIH budget by another $18 billion – nearly a 40% reduction. The National Science Foundation, which funds much of the basic scientific research conducted at universities, would see its budget slashed by $5 billion – cutting it by more than half.

Research and development spending might strike you as an unnecessary expense for the government. Perhaps you see it as something universities or private companies should instead be paying for themselves. But as research I’ve conducted shows, if the government were to abandon its long-standing practice of investing in R&D, it would significantly slow the pace of U.S. innovation and economic growth. - The Conversation

Atmospheric CO2 just keeps on climbing

Another “milestone,” of a very problematic sort.

The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere peaked above 430 parts per million in 2025—the highest it has been in millions of years—according to data released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego on Thursday…

The last time that atmospheric CO2 concentrations topped 430 ppm was most likely more than 30 million years ago, Ralph Keeling, who directs the Scripps CO2 Program, told NBC News.

"It's changing so fast," he said. "If humans had evolved in such a high-CO2 world, there would probably be places where we wouldn't be living now. We probably could have adapted to such a world, but we built our society and a civilization around yesterday's climate." - Common Dreams

Trump tariffs worsen the "pink tax"

Certainly because of their general ideology this is about the last thing the pro-tariff crowd is likely to worry about.

The pink tax is the extra price women pay for products that are also marketed to men — think shampoo or clothing. Back in 2015, the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs found that across five industries, women were paying more for everyday products than men:

- 7 percent more for toys and accessories

- 4 percent more for children’s clothing

- 8 percent more for adult clothing

- 13 percent more for personal care products

- 8 percent more for senior/home healthcare products

Although recent evidence suggests that the pink tax doesn’t apply to every product, it was already more expensive to import items for women than it was for men. Experts have dubbed this the “pink tariff.” As of 2022, US clothing tariff rates were more than three percentage points higher for women (16.7 percent) than they were for men (13.6 percent). When I heard the news that more tariffs were on their way, my immediate thought was the following: Being a woman in America is about to get a whole lot more expensive, especially because of the beauty industry. - Public Notice

Trump is enabling greedhead crooks with a vengeance

This is far from unexpected, but the scope of it is nonetheless startling. Literally everyone is at risk.

The first Trump administration didn’t pay much attention to white-collar civil and criminal enforcement, but this term is off the charts. Investigations into any business executive with even a passing relationship to Trump have been scotched, with beneficiaries ranging from the richest man in the world to the husband of the education secretary. Over 100 active enforcement actions have been either paused or dropped across the executive branch. In March, Trump donor Trevor Milton was pardoned after being sentenced for lying to investors; in April, Trump issued a corporate pardon to BitMEX, a crypto exchange that had pled guilty to failing to prevent money laundering.

Entire areas of the law, from prohibitions on U.S. companies bribing foreign countries to crackdowns on public corruption to bans on workplace discrimination, have essentially vanished. An orgy of deregulation, mainly benefiting corporate activities, is being planned. About $50 million in donations for Trump’s inauguration festivities came from companies under active federal investigation or lawsuits, and it’s hard to believe that any of those cases will see the light of a courtroom, or that any of those executives will be held accountable. - The American Prospect

Stopping IRA subsidies is incredibly foolish in many ways

This is a really good presentation of those ways.

How can you be a world leader when you are a laggard in the hottest, most important industries of the future? How can you attract the best people and businesses to the US when you have flip-flopping policies that kill incentives for these critical industries just a few years after enacting them?

If a company can cost effectively make battery-grade lithium, batteries, EVs, and solar panels in the US and make a profit selling them, they are going to do that. If their business plan is sabotaged by an anti-progress administration full of goons and corrupt cronies, are they even going to consider coming back here after shutting down shop, construction jobs, or even early-stage plans? - CleanTechnica

Ending sanctions on Syria is a very rare positive for Trump

If he doesn't change his addled "mind," that is. Undoubtedly the neocowards are trying to get him to do so.

Syrians are rejoicing at the announcement on Tuesday by President Donald J. Trump that he will lift U.S. economic sanctions on Syria, at the advice of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman and Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, among others. Saudi Arabia gave Trump the quid pro quos he wanted for such a favor, including a pledge of $600 billion in investments in the US and the purchase of military equipment worth over $100 billion.

Regardless of why Trump is taking the step, it is a welcome one, though it is attended by dangers. Economic sanctions have not been demonstrated to have any significant success in overthrowing governments or substantially changing their behavior. They have been shown, however, to drive ordinary civilians in the sanctioned country into poverty and to worsen their health. Since middle-income countries (and above) are more likely to be democracies, crashing a country’s economy probably dooms it to dictatorship. The US government is obsessed with sanctions, having slapped them on fully one third of the world’s population. Sanctions creep is driven in part by politicians who want to be seen as doing something dramatic about some problematic government but who do not wish to actually do anything. Sanctions are the bravado of the pusillanimous. - Informed Comment

Big cities are sinking

It's hard to think of a quick, easy remedy for this. I certainly can't suggest one.

A new study has revealed that 28 of the most populated cities in the U.S. are sinking, which can increase flood risks and weaken infrastructure. Further, researchers determined that 80% of total sinkage could be attributed to groundwater withdrawal for human use.

According to the study, published in the journal Nature Cities, about 34 million people in the biggest cities in the U.S. are being impacted by sinkage, with at least 20% of all the urban areas studied showing signs of subsidence…

In 25 of the 28 cities in the study, at least two-thirds of the urban area is sinking. Houston is the most affected, with 42% of the city sinking by more than 5 millimeters per year and 12% of the city sinking by more than 10 millimeters per year. Some parts of the city are sinking by up to 5 centimeters, or around 2 inches, each year. - EcoWatch

Who needs endangered species anyway?

I'm not sure how this will play out in the courts, if it happens.

The Trump administration is proposing a significant change to one of the country’s most important—and contentious—environmental laws, which could give farmers more leeway to use pesticides without regard to their impact on critical habitats.

In a proposed rule change announced on March 17, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service want to change the way they interpret the Endangered Species Act (ESA), which they collectively administer, by rescinding the definition of “harm.”

…Under the proposed rule change, habitat would not be protected, which could have huge consequences. It would open more of the United States to drilling, logging, and other industries. And it would represent a significant development for farmers, ranchers, and other food producers, affecting the ways they use land, make decisions about conservation, and treat crops. That’s especially true of pesticide use. - Civil Eats

Billions stolen in Bitcoin scams

Sadly this is probably just a taste of what's going to happen in coming years with crypto in general.

The FBI’s latest annual report reveals a sharp rise in Bitcoin-related fraud, with U.S. victims losing $9.3 billion in 2024 — a 66% increase from the previous year.

Total cybercrime losses reached $16.6 billion across more than 859,000 complaints filed to the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3)...

Of particular concern is the impact on older Americans. Victims aged 60 and above reported 33,369 Bitcoin-related fraud cases, amounting to more than $2.8 billion in losses.

The average loss per senior victim was $83,000 — more than four times higher than the average across all cybercrime. - BiTBO

No fluoride in water equals bad teeth in kids

Trump's HHS boss RFK Jr., who like Trump himself is clearly clinically insane by any legitimate standard, wants fluoride out of drinking water.

Warren Loeppky has been a pediatric dentist in the Canadian city of Calgary for 20 years. Over the last decade, he says, tooth decay in children he’s seen has become more common, more aggressive and more severe. Many of his young patients have so much damage that he has to work with them under general anesthesia…

Loeppky notes that many factors can contribute to tooth decay in children, including their diet and genetics. Still, he believes part of the problem is linked to a decision made in the halls of local government: In 2011, Calgary stopped adding fluoride to its drinking water. - Science News

People underestimate the level of support for real climate action

I think this is true for a lot of issues, though generally not quite to this extreme.

A staggering 89 percent of people worldwide believe their governments should be doing more to combat climate change. Yet current policies across nations are putting the planet on track for a catastrophic 3.1°C of warming. That disconnect—between near-universal public demand and government inaction—is what Covering Climate Now (CCNow) calls a “deficit in democracy.” It’s also the focus of its new yearlong initiative: the 89% Project.

Launched to coincide with Earth Day, the 89 Percent Project aims to break what experts describe as a dangerous spiral of silence around climate action, one perpetuated by misperceptions, media neglect, and political indifference. Despite overwhelming evidence that climate concern is both widespread and intensifying, many people continue to feel isolated in their worry—an illusion that disempowers individuals and lets leaders off the hook…

“Almost everybody dramatically underestimates the level of concern and support for action on climate change,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. “It basically refers to the fact that most of us don’t know what’s in other people’s heads.”

This phenomenon—what researchers call “pluralistic ignorance”—is fueling what sociologist Cynthia Frantz describes as a “self-fulfilling spiral of silence.” As she put it, “Currently, worrying about climate change is something people are largely doing in the privacy of their own minds.” - Nation of Change

Trump inadvertently screws US LNG exporters

I actually think this won't last long. Once he realizes that his trade war's a disaster for his own public standing Trump will back down. Probably with the "help" of some quiet, though very substantial, corporate bribes.

China has just suspended all LNG imports from the United States. No warning, no phasedown, just an apparent state directive that Chinese buyers, including the national oil companies, were no longer to sign, lift, or receive U.S. liquefied natural gas. The decision comes in the wake of a rapidly escalating trade war, reignited by a second Trump presidency that wasted no time imposing steep new tariffs on Chinese technology and industrial goods. The result is a gaping hole in the U.S. LNG export market, one that undermines years of investment assumptions and exposes the growing fragility of fossil fuel infrastructure in a changing geopolitical landscape…

Ironically, Trump’s trade war — by freezing China-bound shipments and halting new terminal progress — may have delivered an unexpected climate silver lining: a substantial brake on future emissions from fossil gas infrastructure that would otherwise lock in decades of high-carbon export activity. In trying to punish a geopolitical rival, he has accidentally slowed the expansion of one of America’s most emissions-intensive energy sectors.

The final irony is political. U.S. oil and gas executives spent heavily during the 2024 election cycle, once again backing Trump in the hopes of favorable policies, looser regulations, and accelerated fossil fuel exports. Billions were spent on lobbying, campaign donations, and friendly media to amplify the message that fossil fuels meant freedom and prosperity. - CleanTechnica

Big Oil is privately freaking out over Trumpism

You'd think that they of all people would be "walking on air," these days.

“Chaos.” “A disaster.” “Uncertainty.” “Very negative.”

That’s a sample of the reactions to Trump’s first few months published in the latest Dallas Fed Energy Survey, which gives executives from nearly 200 oil companies headquartered in Texas the chance to speak anonymously about burning issues inside the oil industry…

Big oil poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Trump’s re-election campaign and down-ballot GOP candidates last year, including an $80 million advertising spree — not counting undisclosed “dark money” funding. Fossil fuel fortunes have funded Project 2025 and its backers, alongside even more extreme far-right Trump-era policy blueprints.

But Trump’s tariffs, rising steel prices, and his sledgehammer approach to the administrative state are starting to unnerve oil and gas executives — at least in the anonymous survey conducted quarterly by the Dallas Fed. - DeSmog

Trump pardoned a corporation

A largely overlooked item among the veritable flood of corrupt and disgraceful things that he's been doing. And note which kind of company was granted "mercy."

In what may have been a first, Trump pardoned a corporation. The company to earn that distinction was a cryptocurrency exchange sentenced to a $100 million fine for violating an anti-money laundering law.

The move surprised scholars of presidential pardons, which have traditionally been considered the domain of human beings. Several experts contacted by The Intercept said Trump appears to have acted within his powers, but they were unaware of any prior instances of corporations granted full pardons.

“There have been plenty of cases where presidents have remitted fines or forfeitures, or something else like that,” said Margaret Love, who served as U.S. pardon attorney from 1990 to 1997. “As far as I know, the president has never granted a full pardon to a corporation.” - The Intercept

Nasty, naughty words being banned by Trumpers

This is going on all across government thanks to that miserable witling at the top and the ridiculous boobs he has around him. I’m highlighting this example due to my interest in rural issues. ARS stands for Agricultural Research Service.

ARS is the division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) tasked with providing the agricultural research, education and economic analysis that protects the health of the nation’s farmland, ensures the safety of the food we eat and develops solutions for diseases, disasters and other threats to the food supply. Most recently, it was operating over 600 research projects in 95 locations and had a $1.7 billion budget, which like the words it uses could now be on the chopping block and could significantly hamper the division’s ability to do its job…

The climate-related key terms being banned by the ARS include:

climate, climate change, climate-change, changing climate, climate consulting, climate models, climate model, climate accountability, climate risk, climate resilience, climate smart agriculture, climate smart forestry, climatesmart, climate science, climate variability, global warming, carbon sequestration, GHG emission, GHG monitoring, GHG modeling, carbon emissions mitigation, greenhouse gas emission, methane emissions, green infrastructure, sustainable construction, carbon pricing, carbon markets - Barn Raiser

Repealing the IRA will cost Americans plenty

I'm not even going to try to predict how much "repeal" is or isn't likely, at this time. But even the fact that so much spending is being hindered is a big problem.

The Trump administration insists that renewables are making energy more expensive and that more fossil-fueled power will reduce utility bills. But those claims are false — and if congressional Republicans succeed in repealing key tax credits supporting the growth of clean energy, Americans will suffer the consequences in higher electric bills.

So finds a report released Thursday by think tank Energy Innovation warning lawmakers of the costs of repealing the clean-energy tax credits created by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration’s signature climate law.

The fate of those tax credits remains highly uncertain. Some Republican lawmakers have voiced support for keeping them in place, but others have criticized the incentives, which could channel hundreds of billions of dollars to solar and wind power, batteries, electric vehicles, and other carbon-free technologies over the next decade. President Donald Trump has also vowed to repeal the IRA. - Canary Media

Why right-wingers are having some success with voters of color

I don't agree with everything in this interview. But a lot of it does seem to me to be valid, though it does reflect an unfortunate, unpleasant reality that I certainly wish wasn't happening.

We’re witnessing the cumulative impact of much deeper developments that have been underway for longer than a decade. The deep ambivalence with institutional politics and institutions themselves, across the political spectrum, is at the heart of this. I’ve recently been doing interviews with conservatives of color, and there’s little sense right now of buyers’ remorse. Instead, the alienation and sheer disgust with what they perceive as the stasis of contemporary politics is so sharp that they’re alongside much of the hardcore MAGA base in being quite willing to watch things get dismantled and attacked.

In the conference we recently organized on the multiracial Right, we tracked the many inroads this is happening through — religion, gender, militarism, immigration enforcement, appeals to entrepreneurship and frustrations over public institutions. There’s not one story that accounts for the turn of many people of color toward the Right. - In These Times

Hegseth's racist motives are clear

I've actually seen some corporate media here express apparent pride that this worthless disgrace is a Minnesota native.

Peter Hegseth is charging forward on the promise to De-Woke The Military, codified in Trump’s executive order to purge “DEI” from the ranks. Among their targets are Black soldiers, who have been a center–and many times a catalyst–of the broader anti-racist struggle for well over a century.

Some of Hegseth’s orders so far have left little doubt that “DEI” is a code word…

We’re expected to ignore the context: that Hegseth is deep in a Christian nationalist community led by far-right theologian Doug Wilson, who wrote an entire book defending slavery in the American South. Hegseth bears tattoos associated with white supremacists. He has a long history of rhetoric clearly tapped into the far-right internet ecosphere, dominated by anti-Black content. Hegseth even took known neo-Nazi collaborator Jack Posobiec along with him on his first international trip as Secretary of Defense. - CounterPunch

Working from home is still very much an option

With all the headlines about people being pointlessly - indeed, worse than pointlessly - forced back into workplaces, you may have gained a different impression.

Five years after the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted office life, American workplaces are settling into a new rhythm. Employees in remote-friendly jobs now spend an average of 2.3 days each week working from home, a research team that tracks remote employment has found. And when you look at all workers – and not just those in remote-friendly positions – they’re working remotely 1.4 days a week, or 28% of the time.

That’s a huge change from 2019, when remote work accounted for only 7% of the nation’s paid workdays, even if it’s down from the height of the pandemic in 2020, when 61.5% of all work was remote. And it’s a giant leap from 1965, the dawn of telework. At that time, fewer than 0.5% of all paid workdays were out of the office, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

As management professors who study remote work and collaboration, we’ve learned a lot about remote work’s challenges and its often underappreciated advantages. In analyzing the latest data, we’ve observed that employers and employees are still trying to strike the balance between working from home and at the office. That’s why employers’ requirements for in-person work don’t always align with their employees’ preferences. - The Conversation

Private equity plans to run wild under Trump

In the longer term, the consequences of this will be among the worst aspects of Trumpism's effects on a lot of lives, including for many that voted for him or didn't vote.

Private equity has a well-deserved reputation as a ruthless industry that specializes in stripping and flipping companies to extract profits for wealthy investors and enrich its own billionaire CEOs. It’s an industry that increasingly dominates our lives. Private equity’s tentacles stretch across nearly every sector, including housing, hospitals, energy, prisons, retail and sports.

With a new corporate-friendly Trump administration, leaders of private equity firms are hoping for tax breaks, weakened regulation and access to trillions in 401(k) savings — all of which could broaden their sector’s reach over our society, increase financial risk for millions, and further supercharge billionaire wealth.

“It’s not only that private equity firms are exploiting the tax code to make themselves billionaires,” Eileen O’Grady, director of programs at Private Equity Stakeholder Project, told Truthout. “They’re also eroding health care, the climate and the quality of jobs across almost every industry.” - Truthout

Tech bros grovel for military contracts

Actually there are a lot of reasons that many billionaires have been debasing themselves. But this is undoubtedly among the most compelling.

Donald Trump’s power has thrived on the economics, politics, and culture of war. The runaway militarism of the last quarter-century was a crucial factor in making President Trump possible, even if it goes virtually unmentioned in mainstream media and political discourse. That silence is particularly notable among Democratic leaders, who have routinely joined in bipartisan messaging to boost the warfare state that fueled the rise of Trumpism…

While President Trump has granted Elon Musk unprecedented power, many other tech moguls have rushed to ingratiate themselves. The pandering became shameless within hours of his election victory last November…

Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and smaller rivals are at the helm of corporations eager for government megadeals, tax breaks, and much more. For them, the governmental terrain of the new Trump era is the latest territory to navigate for maximizing their profits. With annual military outlays at 54% of all federal discretionary spending, the incentives are astronomical for all kinds of companies to make nice with the war machine and the man now running it.

While Democrats in Congress have long denounced Trump as an enemy of democracy, they haven’t put any sort of brake on American militarism. Certainly, there are many reasons for Trump’s second triumph, including his exploitation of racism, misogyny, nativism, and other assorted bigotries. Yet his election victories owe much to the Democratic Party’s failure to serve the working class, a failure intermeshed with its insistence on serving the industries of war. Meanwhile, spending more on the military than the next nine countries combined, U.S. government leaders tacitly lay claim to a kind of divine overpowering virtue. - TomDispatch

USDA, and therefore farmers, hit hard by DOGE cuts

I am so sick of a certain megalomaniacal twerp from South Africa who thinks he’s God Almighty.

Mass terminations at the U.S. Department of Agriculture are “crippling” the agency, upending federal workers’ lives and leaving farmers and rural communities without needed support, according to interviews with 15 recently fired employees stationed across the U.S.

Since taking power Jan. 20, the Trump administration has quickly frozen funding and fired federal workers en masse. USDA terminations started Feb. 13, the day Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins was sworn in. Rollins welcomed the quasi-governmental Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, led by billionaire Elon Musk, to find parts of the USDA budget to cut.

Terminated employees helped farmers build irrigation systems, battled invasive diseases that could “completely decimate” crops that form whole industries and assisted low-income seniors in rural areas in fixing leaky roofs. That work will now be significantly delayed — perhaps indefinitely — as remaining employees’ workloads grow, the employees said. - Investigate Midwest

Backdoor Trump/DOGE attacks on Social Security

I think it's important to understand that due to his worsening dementia Trump doesn't really remember what he said to whom, from one day to the next. Before too long it could be more like one hour to the next. It's all about who has his ear at any given time.

President Donald Trump was asked at a press conference this month if there were any federal agencies or programs that Elon Musk’s newly formed Department of Government Efficiency wouldn’t be allowed to mess with.

“Social Security will not be touched,” Trump answered, echoing a promise he has been making for years. Despite his eagerness to explode treaties, shutter entire government agencies and abandon decades-old ways of doing things, the president understands that Social Security benefits for seniors are sacrosanct.

Still, the DOGE team landed at the Social Security Administration (last) week, with Musk drawing attention for his outlandish claims that large numbers of 150-year-old “vampires” are receiving Social Security payments. DOGE has begun installing its own operatives, including an engineer linked to tweets promoting eugenics and executives with a cut-first-fix-later philosophy, in multiple top positions at the Social Security Administration. - ProPublica

Trump climate change denial reaches frantic extremes

Because if you just live in total denial it ultimately works out, right?

The United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has placed new restrictions on scientists that those inside the agency have said could hamper the availability and quality of global weather forecasts.

Current and former high-level scientists with the federal agency said the new rules have created unease and caused alarm with partners at European agencies, reported The Guardian.

“My expectation is that it’s going to be a crackdown on climate,” said a senior NOAA scientist who wished to remain anonymous. “People are just somewhere between disturbed and terrified.” - EcoWatch

Trump blocks on farm funding still in limbo

Some of the funding will probably be allowed to happen before much longer. But other farmers could well end up permanently screwed.

On inauguration day, President Trump signed a series of executive orders that included directives to roll back Biden-era climate policies and projects. A subsequent broad pause in funding was stopped by a judge and later rescinded, and a judge ruled yesterday that the administration had failed to comply with the court order.

It’s unclear exactly how that process is linked to what’s happening at USDA, but farm groups across the country report that the agency has stopped their disbursements and has been silent about when the pause might end. Policy pros in D.C. say the assessment of grants and programs for links to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives is likely part of the reason for the delay, while other farm grants are tied to Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which Trump is specifically targeting.

For example, farmers who received Renewable Energy Assistance Program (REAP) grants to install solar arrays on their land are left in limbo; so are those with conservation grants through popular programs including the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, which got an infusion of cash through the IRA.

But the pause in Climate-Smart Commodities grants is having particularly wide-reaching impacts, since the investment was so large, the program was just getting off the ground, and thousands of farms—from small dairies in the Northeast to large commodity grain operations in the Midwest—are involved. - Civil Eats

The future of Israel in the wake of its governing failures

Its far-right, criminal warmonger government, that is. Parts of this discuss possible parallels between now and the time of the Crusades, and I don’t totally buy stuff like that. But I found the rest very realistic.

Israel faces a further disadvantage. The knights of the Kingdom of Jerusalem could go off to war, wars that at most lasted a few months, while their serfs stayed home to tend the crops, but Israel is reliant on a small professional army supported during a crisis by mass callups of reserves. Given that the Arabs of the occupied territories are not going to step in to replace teachers, factory workers, office managers, and the like, the Israeli economy grinds to a halt for the duration of a serious conflict. The current siege of Gaza entered its second year with a mobilized Israeli army unable to secure a territory about a third the size of a Midwestern American county and Hamas re-emerging to resume governing the territory. The conflict with the much better prepared Hezbollah in Lebanon was surprisingly successful for Israel, but Hezbollah still exists. Continued conflict, especially conflict like the current Gaza war, shows the inability of the State of Israel to protect its citizens and provide peaceful life and is likely to lead to more emigration. Finally, even Israel’s nuclear weapons cannot ensure its security. As one Israeli general remarked, there are only two times to use nuclear weapons: too soon and too late. - Informed Comment

Many more want to join unions, as actual membership declines

The “powerful forces blocking the will of workers” are not going to weaken by themselves.

Interest in union organizing is surging in the United States. Since 2021, petitions for union elections at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) have more than doubled. And public support for unions is near 60-year highs — at 70%. This growing momentum around union organizing — aided by the Biden administration’s support for worker organizing and appointment of strong worker advocates in critical agencies like NLRB — signals a powerful push by workers to improve wages, working conditions, and workplace rights. But despite this groundswell of support, new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reveal a puzzling trend: Unionization rates continue to decline.

Research shows that 60 million workers would join a union if they could. The disconnect between the growing interest in unionization and declining unionization rates can be explained by the fact that there are powerful forces blocking the will of workers: aggressive opposition from employers combined with labor law that is so weak that it doesn’t truly protect workers’ right to organize. Decades of attacks on unions both on the federal and state levels have made it hard for workers to form and maintain unions. Further, weaknesses in federal labor law have made it possible for employers to oppose unions, contributing to this decline. - EPI

Rural areas could suffer critical shortages of immigrant workers

This gets into some of the longer-term issues.

In other words, it’s not likely the government is about to reform immigration policy or open the floodgates to a new wave of workers anytime soon.

And yet math may trump campaign rhetoric. Baby Boomers are leaving the workforce in droves, and the generations following them are smaller. At the same time, these retirees are entering a phase of life where they will soon need more assistance and medical care, while senior facilities already struggle to meet the needs of the population.

Under this pressure, will we start to argue about the best ways to attract more legal immigrants? It’s already happening, especially in senior care.

“In the decades to come, migration is likely to be driven largely by the needs of destination countries, which will compete for a shrinking pool of qualified workers,” a 2023 report by the World Bank concluded. - Barn Raiser

The bottom line regarding the AI market panic

This summarizes, very well, a lot of things.

Now that a company has figured out a way to produce an AI app that’s just as effective at producing satisfactory output as the big American companies, at a sliver of the cost, a $500 billion data center facility in the desert suddenly seems like an offensive boondoggle…

It’s worth underlining a couple things here. First, generative AI long seemed destined to become a commodity; that ChatGPT can be so suddenly supplanted with a big news cycle about a competitor, and one that’s open source no less, suggests that this moment may have arrived faster than some anticipated. OpenAI is currently selling its most advanced model for $200 a month; if DeepSeek’s cost savings carry over on other models, and you can train an equally powerful model at 1/50th of the cost, it’s hard to imagine many folks paying such rates for long, or for this to ever be a significant revenue stream for the major AI companies. Since DeepSeek is open source, it’s only a matter of time before other AI companies release cheap and efficient versions of AI that’s good enough for most consumers, too, theoretically giving rise to a glut of cheap and plentiful AI—and boxing out those who have counted on charging for such services.

Second, this recent semi-hysterical build out of energy infrastructure for AI will also likely soon halt; there will be no need to open any additional Three Mile Island nuclear plants for AI capacity, if good-enough AI can be trained more efficiently. This too, to me, seemed likely to happen as generative AI was commoditized, since it was always somewhat absurd to have five different giant tech companies using insane amounts of resources to train basically the same models to build basically the same products.

What we’re seeing today can also be seen as, maybe, the beginning of the deflating of the AI bubble, which I have long thought to only be a matter of time, given all of the above, and the relative unprofitability of most of the industry. - Blood in the Machine

The corporate "bigs," climate denial, and social media

Many of us didn't need a study to know full well this is happening. But it's good to have it documented and proved.

From 2008 to 2023, nine of the nation’s largest oil, agrichemical, and plastics trade groups and corporations posted thousands of tweets on the social media platform X, and their messaging on environmental issues was strikingly “obstructive” for climate policy and action, a study published (in January) in the journal PLOS Climate concludes.

The study found that all of the organizations, including the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), were mentioned by at least four of the other groups – helping to essentially create an echo chamber for similar messages. The groups also frequently tagged regulators and the media in their posts, with researchers finding the Environmental Protection Agency was tagged 795 times and the Wall Street Journal, the most mentioned media organization, tagged 517 times out of more than 125,000 X posts.

“Our study suggests that climate obstruction in different industries is more coordinated than is generally recognized,” said co-author Jennie Stephens, professor of Sustainability Science and Policy at Northeastern University and of Climate Justice at the National University of Ireland Maynooth.

“Combined with the high engagement of the petrochemical derivative and fuel sectors with government regulatory, policy, and political entities in the energy and environmental in particular, this suggests strategic attempts to undermine and subvert climate policy through social media,” the authors wrote. - DeSmog

Almost 1/3 of US may have contaminated drinking water

And many probably believe that that only happens in "poor" countries.

More than 97 million United States residents have been exposed to contaminants in their drinking water that are unregulated and could affect their health, a new analysis by Silent Spring Institute has found.

Hispanic and Black communities have a higher likelihood of their water being contaminated by unsafe levels of toxic chemicals, a press release from Silent Spring said. They are also more likely to live close to sources of pollution.

The findings add to increasing concern about U.S. water quality and contamination’s disproportionate impact on communities of color. - EcoWatch

New report on Big Pharma price gouging

I've long considered Big Pharma to be one of the three absolutely worst "Bigs" of all, along with Big Ag and Big Weapons.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday published the second part of its investigation into how prescription drug middlemen are marking up the prices of specialty generic drugs dispensed at their affiliated pharmacies by hundreds—and in some cases, thousands—of percent, underscoring what advocates say is the need for urgent action by policymakers.

The FTC's second interim staff report on consolidated pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) found that the three largest of these middlemen—CVS Health's Caremark Rx, Cigna Group's Express Scripts, and UnitedHealth Group's OptumRx—"marked up two specialty generic cancer drugs by thousands of percent and then paid their affiliated pharmacies hundreds of millions of dollars of dispensing revenue in excess of estimated acquisition costs for each drug annually." - Common Dreams

The ultra-privileged have already blown through their carbon budget

Not that the rest of us can do much about it, at this time.

An Oxfam analysis published Friday shows that the richest 1% of the global population has already blown through its global carbon budget for 2025 — just 10 days into the New Year. The figures, which arrive amid catastrophic fires in Los Angeles that may turn out to be the costliest in U.S. history, highlight the disproportionate role of the ultra-wealthy in fueling a climate emergency that is causing devastation around the world.

Oxfam calculates that in order to keep critical climate goals in reach, each person on Earth must have a CO2 footprint of roughly 2.1 tons per year or less. On average, each person in the global 1% is burning through 76 tons of planet-warning carbon dioxide annually — or 0.209 per day — meaning it took them just over a week to reach their CO2 limit for the year

By contrast, the average person in the poorest 50% of humanity has an annual carbon footprint of 0.7 tons per year — well within the 2.1-ton budget compatible with a livable future. - Truthout

Relying on AI in healthcare invites disaster

More totally irresponsible, and dangerous, crap from the tech greedheads.

Every so often these days, a study comes out proclaiming that AI is better at diagnosing health problems than a human doctor. These studies are enticing because the healthcare system in America is woefully broken and everyone is searching for solutions. AI presents a potential opportunity to make doctors more efficient by doing a lot of administrative busywork for them and by doing so, giving them time to see more patients and therefore drive down the ultimate cost of care. There is also the possibility that real-time translation would help non-English speakers gain improved access. For tech companies, the opportunity to serve the healthcare industry could be quite lucrative.

In practice, however, it seems that we are not close to replacing doctors with artificial intelligence, or even really augmenting them. The Washington Post spoke with multiple experts including physicians to see how early tests of AI are going, and the results were not assuring...

The problem with tech optimists pushing AI into fields like healthcare is that it is not the same as making consumer software. We already know that Microsoft’s Copilot 365 assistant has bugs, but a small mistake in your PowerPoint presentation is not a big deal. Making mistakes in healthcare can kill people. Daneshjou told the Post she red-teamed ChatGPT with 80 others, including both computer scientists and physicians posing medical questions to ChatGPT, and found it offered dangerous responses twenty percent of the time. “Twenty percent problematic responses is not, to me, good enough for actual daily use in the health care system,” she said. - Gizmodo