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