The Cuba blockade has always been a vicious, disgraceful disaster

We have got to get the warmongers out of government, once and for all.

The Cuban revolution against the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship has survived 64 of its 67 years under what U.S. officials call an “embargo.” Cubans call it “el bloqueo” (the blockade), arguing that its impact has been just as physically isolating as a military blockade. Suffering aside, the amount of money that the United States has spent on enforcing this policy of economic isolation—the longest blockade in history—could instead have been used to address pressing social needs throughout the United States. This raises the question: Was the blockade worth the cost? And if so, for whom?

…Most countries have consistently supported U.N. resolutions opposing U.S. actions against Cuba. U.N. experts call the blockade an “extreme form of unilateral economic coercion” that violates international law. They say it obstructs the “Cuban people’s right to development while undermining their rights to food, education, health, and water and sanitation.” For 34 consecutive years, since 1992, the U.N. General Assembly has overwhelmingly passed resolutions demanding an end to the U.S. economic blockade of Cuba, citing the violation of international law. Annual votes consistently see over 180 countries opposing the U.S. stance, with only the United States and Israel typically voting against.

The U.S. public has been skeptical of the blockade for decades. A 2016 Pew Research Center poll revealed that 73% of Americans favored ending the blockade. More recently, a February 25, 2026 poll by YouGov shows that not even a third of people in the United States approve of the blockade, and only 13% support attacking Cuba. Just 5% of Americans view Cuba as a serious threat. To put this in perspective, 4% of Americans view Canada as a threat, too. A 2024 Data for Progress poll shows that only roughly a quarter of Americans oppose lifting travel restrictions to the island. - CounterPunch

How cyclospora got going

And how outbreaks of food contamination will keep going, until corporations are forced to change their ways.

To maximize returns, these companies aggregate and process harvests from multiple farms in a few central production and distribution hubs, before shipping across the U.S. This process, where contaminated produce from potentially just one field was mixed into thousands of fresh-cut salad bags, is likely how the outbreak has affected so many people, while the scale of the relatively uncompetitive distribution market resulted in it reaching so many states. In this cyclospora outbreak, the scale and concentration of the contemporary produce market has become a public health hazard.

In the United States, money translates to political power, and the produce industry has used that to kill food safety regulation and monitoring across administrations. The Food Traceability Rule passed by Congress and scheduled to be implemented at the start of this year would have enabled a much quicker and surgical public health response but was delayed to 2028 following coordinated industry lobbying by the Global Cold Chain Alliance, the Food Industry Association, and the National Grocers Association. In 2024, regulations requiring the testing of irrigation water for pathogens like cyclospora were replaced by what is essentially an honor system. During the Obama administration, fierce lobbying by the United Fresh Produce Association (now the International Fresh Produce Association) killed the Microbiological Data Program. This was a cheap and effective program run by the USDA from 2001 to 2012 for about $5 million a year, which pulled and tested samples of high-risk produce. In its last two years alone, this trip-wire triggered 23 product recalls.

In sum, the way that this outbreak has spread through a concentrated production and distribution network that has steadily eroded federal safeguards indicates a systemic problem of a few larger corporations controlling market governance itself, with the ability to cut costs and get rich at peoples’ expense. - IATP

More Trump anti-immigrant viciousness

This is also another way of trying to demonize immigrants in the public mind.

The Trump administration finalized a new “public charge” rule set to take effect (June 25) that gives immigration officers broader authority to deny permanent residency to immigrants lawfully present in the country who have used certain public programs, such as Medicaid, food, or housing assistance…

Under the outgoing policy, established in 2022 by the Biden administration, immigration officers could only consider whether green card applicants had used cash assistance or had gotten nursing home care through Medicaid.

By removing that concrete language, the finalized rule opens the green card review process to arbitrary denials and political bias. It also allows DHS to reject green card applications based on obesity or any other personal characteristic the administration elects to consider.

A similar Trump public charge regulation, implemented in 2019, was ruled illegal by a federal court and struck down. While that rule’s technical application was limited to a small number of lawfully present immigrants applying for green cards, its chilling effect was far broader, leading millions of immigrants and their family members to avoid seeking assistance and care they were legally eligible to receive. - CIPC

Trump and explosive diarrhea

How very fitting.

A big problem for trust in government is that high-quality governance is usually invisible. When the various agencies designed to protect the American people from all manner of threats are working perfectly, most potential disasters are detected and prevented before they happen. A lot of highly trained government workers do diligent and difficult work for little pay and less recognition, heading off crisis after crisis, and the ignorant swing-voting layman assumes that all his tax dollars are being squandered.

So one hopes that the voting public is learning a hard—or I should say watery—lesson about how important good government is, by way of the manifold consequences of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Robert Kennedy hacking away at American state capacity. The latest consequence can be heard in the groaning emanating from thousands of bathrooms across the country: the worst cyclosporiasis outbreak in American history. It deserves a name, so I’m calling it the MAHA Trots. - The American Prospect

New Medicaid rules published

As this notes the intent is clearly to kick as many people with serious health issues off of Medicaid as possible. They can die in agony for all that the Trumpers care.

Frail. That’s a word that a lot of people use to describe people like me who use wheelchairs.

That’s not a word that I would apply to myself. It sounds like I’m made of delicate glass or something, and if the wind blows the wrong way, I’ll fall to pieces. And that just ain’t me.

But the day is coming when all sorts of people may be scrambling to dig up any bit of evidence they can to support their claim that they are frail—because they have to in order to be exempted from the federal government’s Medicaid work requirements.

On June 3, the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services published an Interim Final Rule in the Federal Register that spells out the specifics of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act…

Under the new regulations, according to KFF Health News, “having a medical condition alone isn’t sufficient to exempt someone from the work requirements. States must assess ‘the severity of an individual’s condition’ to determine whether they can stay on Medicaid without working—a standard that makes it more difficult for enrollees to meet the criteria.” - The Progressive

Of course Trump is politicizing disaster aid

I suppose one could argue that red states’ need is vastly greater, as their governance is so incompetent and corrupt. But that’s clearly not what this is about.

Lawmakers are condemning President Donald Trump for politicizing disaster aid after he denied Democratic-led Rhode Island’s request for blizzard recovery assistance last week while approving millions in funds for Republican-leaning states.

In a series of Truth Social posts on June 30, Trump announced more than $846 million in disaster aid to states that voted for him in the 2024 presidential election. Such aid — granted in response to several extreme weather-related disasters, including wildfires, severe storms, and flooding — is generally approved by presidents and administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) on a nonpartisan basis.

According to an Urban Institute analysis examining disaster aid approvals since Trump began his second term in office, over 84 percent of requests from states that voted for him in the 2024 election have received approvals, while only 41 percent of requests from states that voted for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris have been approved. Red states also appear to receive approvals twice as fast as blue states do, the analysis found. - Truthout

New bill would worsen exploitation of migrant farmworkers

I don’t know whether this would have much chance of getting through the Senate. But it’s worth knowing about.

House Agriculture Chairman G.T. Thompson (R-Pennsylvania) introduced a bill (June 30) that would transform the country’s agricultural guestworker program, allowing migrants to work year-round on H-2A visas while significantly lowering costs for farmers and wages for workers.

The bill, called the Securing Agriculture’s Workforce Act of 2026 (SAWA), writes into law several changes the Trump administration has already made through agency rulemaking. But it also goes further to make it easier for farmers to hire workers under the H-2A program...

“It’s a wish list for H-2A employers on the backs of workers,” said Diego Lopez, director of government affairs for the United Farm Workers Foundation (UFW).

Lopez said the bill will effectively lower wages for farmworkers twice, by changing how the government calculates something called the Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR) and by allowing farms to charge workers for housing. - Civil Eats

Right-wing Americans have worse health outcomes

But it’s more complicated than you might think, given that the disparity started to show only fairly recently.

“Public health disparities provide an important lens for understanding social and political change in the USA,” a recent study in the journal Nature concludes. “Using individual-level medical data and death records, this study shows that conservative Americans experienced worsening health and higher mortality than liberals during the 2010s.”

…Liberals and conservatives had roughly equal health outcomes as recently as the early 2010s. But by the mid-to-late 2010s, researchers saw a “substantial” divide emerge with heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and strokes. COVID didn’t create the phenomenon. It just made it impossible to ignore…

The authors identify two possible causes for the recent disparity. First, less healthy people have increasingly found their way into the conservative side of the aisle. That makes sense, given how the right responded when former first lady Michelle Obama suggested that maybe children should eat a vegetable now and then. You’ll pry their Arby’s from their cold, dead hands. Literally.

But that’s only half the story. The other half is even more disturbing: Conservative politics itself may now be a health risk.

The authors frame political belief as a possible “social determinant of health,” alongside things like income, education, geography, and access to care. In plain English: Your politics may now help predict whether you get treated, whether you listen to your doctor, whether you trust medicine, and ultimately whether you live longer. - Daily Kos

Most US workers just aren’t into it

Just working for the weekend. For those who get one.

In the U.S., only about 30% of part-time and full-time employees say they are engaged at work, according to an annual Gallup survey. That’s the lowest level in more than a decade.

Determining whether an employee is engaged boils down to a single question: Does the work matter to the person doing it? Engaged employees are invested in the outcome of their work. Disengaged ones have stopped caring…

And I believe that when more than two-thirds of the workforce is checked out, it’s evidence of a widespread leadership failure. - The Conversation

SNAP taken from 776,000 kids and counting

Trumpers are f*ckng proud of this.

As a House committee debated President Donald Trump’s signature domestic policy bill last year, Republican backers repeatedly emphasized that its changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps, wouldn’t affect vulnerable people…

But nearly a year after the measure was signed into law, the number of children receiving food assistance has plummeted by at least 776,000, according to a ProPublica analysis. At least 12 states break down program participation by age, and of the 1,670,011 people who are no longer receiving benefits in those states, 776,134, or 46%, were children. - ProPublica

Corporations shamelessly buy exemption from taxes

This is far from startling to anyone who has been paying attention.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) found that at least 88 of the nation’s largest corporations paid zero federal corporate income tax in fiscal year 2025, despite reporting a combined $105 billion in US pretax income.

The federal income tax for corporations is 21%, meaning that these 88 companies collectively avoided $22.1 billion in taxes for FY 2025. On top of that, they collected $4.7 billion in tax rebates, bringing their total tax breaks to about $26.7 billion…

Using data from OpenSecrets, which compiles and publishes campaign finance and lobbying data, we found that from the 2020 election cycle through the 2024 cycle, these 88 companies have spent nearly $852 million on lobbying and campaign contributions. - Public Citizen

Trump oil lease sale is a pitiful bust

On a related note, Big Oil hasn't for the most part been doing what Trump wants in Venezuela. (The linked article's good, though the headline's misleading.)

The oil lease sale on (June 5) raised just $3.7 million, resulting in five leases between two small Alaskan companies, according to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). That’s less than the price of some Manhattan penthouses. While previous, successful lease sales in other BLM-managed areas of Alaska, New Mexico, and Texas suggested the oil industry remained interested in drilling on public lands, Big Oil snubbed this sale.

Environmental organizations and some Democratic lawmakers celebrated the blow to the Trump administration’s fossil-fuel-focused “Unleash American Energy” agenda. Still, they warned that the new leasing threatens to destroy globally significant wildlife habitat. - Gizmodo

Trump has wrecked local food/small farm initiatives

This administration is a pitiful failure in every conceivable way.

In March 2020, as pandemic lockdowns began, Americans accustomed to the most abundant, available food supply in history encountered empty shelves in supermarkets. With international supply chains scrambled, the narrative around “local food” shifted from “yuppie pipe dream” to “food security necessity.”

…While the (Biden) administration did little to upend the structure of the dominant commodity agriculture system, officials started listening to farmers and advocates that operate outside of it. They talked about the need for not just efficiency, but also redundancy and resilience, in case of another crisis.

In collaboration with lawmakers in Congress pushing through huge pandemic relief packages, Biden’s USDA then made historically large investments in new programs intended to support small farms and local food systems…

“The last administration was making a concerted effort to try to level the playing field to some extent for those smaller farmers, and a lot of farms and local food systems ramped up in response to that influx of funding,” said Farm Aid’s Tremblay. So, when things changed, many had already made investments they couldn’t simply cancel. Now, they’re stuck. - Civil Eats

Getting a righteous deal on a used EV

Useful tips.

The market for used EVs is surging; their average cost of $35,895 is now competitive with that of used gas cars (average $34,799)...

Figure out what range you actually need, based on how much you typically drive and how frequently you’ll charge, recommends Desiree Moore, program manager at Drive Clean Colorado, a state program that aims to reduce greenhouse gas pollution from vehicles…

InsideEVs, U.S. News & World Report, and Recurrent, a company that aggregates data on vehicle battery health, are a few of the sources that list their top used EV picks, which will give you a sense of the best range for your buck…

But the most important EV research might be what you do in person. ​“Drive as many as you possibly can, because there’s such a difference in driving style and acceleration and turning radius — all of the things that you would expect from any used car,” said Andrew Garberson, Recurrent’s head of growth and research. - Canary Media

Stock market and consumer sentiment diverge more than ever

Well, since consumer sentiment has been measured, anyway. This is not at all surprising.

Multiple polls and surveys released in recent days have shown US consumer sentiment cratering—and all the while, the US stock market keeps hitting record highs.

…up until around 2020, consumer sentiment matched stock market performance closely, although there was a large divergence between the two leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, where stocks briefly outperformed consumer sentiment before crashing downward as the housing bubble burst.

But throughout the last six years, the graphic shows, the S&P 500 has produced an almost continuous upward surge even as consumer sentiment spirals downward.

“Absolutely incredible,” commented Kobeissi Letter. “Over the last six years, the S&P 500 has risen +130% while US Consumer Sentiment has collapsed by -55%, to its lowest since data began in 1952. We are witnessing the formation of the biggest wealth divide in modern history.” - Common Dreams

Little has changed in Gaza

US "mainstream" media is happily using Iran in order to avoid giving Israel's continuing behavior much coverage.

The raft of condemnations by Western governments of Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir’s taunts of flotilla volunteers whom the Israeli military illegally kidnapped from international waters was attended by a good deal of hypocrisy, since the US government despises them as well, and few European governments support them.

What much of the reporting ignores, however, is how necessary the aid flotilla still is, since the Israelis have gone back to blockading key foodstuffs, medicine and fuel, and continue to shell and bomb people in Gaza. In other words, the genocide continues under the cover of the Hormuz crisis. - Informed Comment

“Corporate Social Responsibility” is pretty much dead

Not that it ever showed much life. In any case it will only be resurrected if it’s forced on them. I don’t doubt that plenty of business school grads start with some measure of idealism. But current corporate culture gets them ditching that in a hurry.

It’s 15 years since Michael Porter and Mark Kramer galvanised the stodgy world of Corporate Social Responsibility with their report in the Harvard Business Review, ‘Creating Shared Value’, with the not unambitious sub-title of: ‘How to Reinvent Capitalism and Unleash a Wave of Innovation and Growth’...

Nobody talks about Shared Value these days. Back then, the idea that the surplus value created by companies could be shared more equitably between shareholders, employees, suppliers, communities and other stakeholders did indeed present itself as an imaginative way of rescuing capitalism from its own worst tendencies, moving beyond ‘self-defeating trade-offs between business and society’.

Well, yes – depending on how much faith you have in the idea of companies acting voluntarily for the ‘common good’– in the absence of legislation. In retrospect, Porter and Kramer were staggeringly naive in their expectations of the so-called ‘voluntary principle’. - Beyond Nuclear

Corporate health care gouging is worse than ever

An excellent presentation of what’s been going on for a while.

The largest corporate health care hospitals in the country are consolidating their power and using it to rip off patients, a new study from Families USA shows. Released amid the GOP’s manufactured affordability crisis, the study shows that health care executives at a handful of corporations are setting “high and irrational prices” in every state and charging patients almost three times what Medicare pays for the exact same service.

The 15 largest systems charged an average of 282 percent more than the Medicare rate, the study found, resulting in $22 million in profit per hospital per year…

The reason hospital executives can do this is because they are consolidating at a rapid clip, buying up independent providers, and jacking up prices at will. Five or fewer corporations in 42 states and the District of Columbia “controlled at least half of all hospital care in 2023,” researchers found. In almost half of all states, just three corporations controlled the majority of hospital care. Hospital executives have no competition or regulations to discipline their price-gouging, so they “can charge basically whatever they want, because they can,” said Anthony Wright, executive director of Families USA. - Tha American Prospect

More ICE cruelty to detainees

Conditions in facilities are no secret. And there’s this:

On October 3, 2025, the Trump administration abruptly stopped paying third-parties for medical care provided to detainees in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Third-party providers are used to provide “medically necessary” care including “dialysis, prenatal care, oncology, [and] chemotherapy,” according to ICE…

The decision to stop reimbursing third parties for the medical care of ICE detainees has coincided with a significant spike in deaths, according to data released by the agency.

From 2018 to 2024, the average number of people who died in ICE custody annually was 8.9. That includes a spike in 2020 related to the onset of the COVID pandemic. In 2025, 33 people died in ICE custody, including 12 after the medical reimbursements stopped.

The trend is accelerating. In the first four months of 2026, 18 people have died in ICE custody. Since ICE stopped medical reimbursements on October 3, 2025, people have been dying in ICE custody at a rate of 51.7 people annually. This is more than five times the death rate before the policy was implemented. - Popular Information

Energy-efficiency programs are absolutely not the problem

This is foolish, ridiculous, and politically playing into the Trumpers’ hands.

A handful of Democratic-led states are targeting energy-efficiency programs in an attempt to provide relief on soaring utility bills.

It’s surprising, given the broad support energy-efficiency programs have among Democrats — and the fact that these incentives produce energy savings that benefit both the climate and all consumers. The short-term savings may be tempting, advocates say, but chasing them is misguided.

“The subject of affordability is a serious one across many states across the country. People are hurting, and energy costs are too high,” said Forest Bradley-Wright, state and utility director for the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. ​“Energy efficiency did not cause the energy affordability crisis, and the problem can’t be solved by cutting energy efficiency.” - Canary Media