Big Meat's big Covid-19 con

I should have suspected this all along, though I didn't.

Last year, as the meatpacking industry’s frontline workers were infected with Covid-19 and the industry pushed claims of a meat shortage, companies in the U.S. exported more than $22 billion in meat products, continuing an upward trend in foreign sales since 2016.

Trade data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that in 2020 the value of American meat exports reached its highest level since 2014. Companies exporting meat products from the Midwest also fared well, increasing sales by about $500 million from 2019 to 2020. - In These Times

The Fed is worsening inequality

This is actually the latest manifestation of what's been going on for a long time. Especially the part about interest rates.

Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the Federal Reserve has gotten plenty of kudos for moves that have helped stabilize the economy, kept house prices from tanking and supported the stock market. But those successes have obscured another effect: the inadvertent impact the Fed’s ultra-low interest rates and bond-buying sprees are having on economic inequality.

Longstanding inequality in the U.S. has been exacerbated by the Fed’s role in touching off a multi-trillion-dollar boom in stock markets — and stock ownership is heavily skewed toward the wealthiest Americans...

“Inequality is a cumulative process,” said Karen Petrou, author of “The Engine of Inequality: The Fed and the Future of Wealth in America” and managing partner of the Washington-based consulting firm Federal Financial Analytics. “The richer you are, the richer you get, and the poorer you are, the poorer you get, unless something puts that engine in reverse,” she said. “That engine is driven not by fate or by untouchable phenomena such as demographics but most importantly by policy decisions.” - ProPublica

They're still going ahead with those idiotic standardized tests

I blogged before about this. This is kind of an update.

So who believes we need the tests?

One of the congressional Democrats who signed Bowman’s letter to Cardona, Rep. Mark Takano of California, previously gave me an interesting explanation for that...

When I asked Takano about what he called the federal government’s “test and punish” approach to education policy, he stated that the testing mandate, which began when No Child Left Behind was signed into law in 2002 but still dominates today, wasn’t “designed for the types of realities in [his] school.”

What do colleagues in Congress say when he tells them this? He told me the problem in Congress is that there are two types of people who tend to dominate Beltway ideology and the philosophy that drives problem-solving.

Most people, he explained, are either from the worlds of business and finance or they’re attorneys. The former, due to their work experiences, tend to be driven by numbers and production outputs, while the latter, due to their advocacy interests, want to remedy societal problems, including those that are obvious in the education system, by “putting into place a law with all these hammers” to make someone accountable for any statistical evidence of injustice and inequality.

Neither “mentality [is] going to work in education,” he told me, because at the heart of the education process is teachers being able to build trusting relationships with students and strategizing with other teachers on how to engage students. Having to hit a mark on the annual test or worry about an accountability measure closing your school or ending your employment just gets in the way. - Jeff Bryant/LA Progressive

COVID-19 as an excuse to slash humanities and screw up college in general

If I had a chance to do it over again, I'd major in philosophy, not engineering. But, no point in wallowing in regret. What matters is the here and now.

Although fiscal concerns are undeniably real, the proposed austerity measures — opposed by faculty unions and education activists who cite bloated administrative budgets and excessive spending on sports arenas and new construction — fit into a larger right-wing playbook that has long pressed for the restructuring of higher education.

Richard Kent Vedder, an adjunct scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and a senior fellow at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), lists these goals in his 2019 book, Restoring the Promise: Higher Education in America. Among them: dismiss “old rules” such as tenure and summer breaks; increase teaching loads; end affirmative action and related diversity programs; end or revise the federal student financial aid program; and give departments and professors a share of revenue based on student enrollment in their classes...

The result is the elevation of accounting, business, computer science, culinary and engineering programs over the liberal arts and humanities. - Truthout

The pandemic is costing some way more than others

It's the same deal in Minnesota, as everywhere else.

When it comes to the front lines of the pandemic, Asian women, Native American women, and Black women are disproportionately employed in high-risk essential health care, retail, and service jobs in Minnesota, according to researchers at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs.

At the same time, pandemic-related layoffs have disproportionately affected women, Native Americans, and Blacks, compared to other groups. And differences in demographic composition across jobs categories and industries explain only a fraction of these job losses.

New research published by the Center on Women, Gender, and Public Policy this week highlights the ways that different groups of workers were unequally impacted as the pandemic tightened its grip on Minnesota over the spring and summer months. - Humphrey School of Public Affairs

Debt collectors are more than making up for lost time

With bloated, entitled parasites so dependent on a system of debt servitude, what else could you expect?

In recent months, the only real bad news for debt buyers was that local courts across the country temporarily shut down. Debt collection lawsuits provide a key source of revenue for the companies, a way to extract payment from consumers, typically low-income, who don’t offer it up.

But now even that hiccup is over. After a bit of a lull in the spring, Encore and other debt buyers are back at it, filing suits by the thousands every week, according to ProPublica’s analysis of state court filings. - ProPublica

Trump's USDA is something else

A very bad something else.

The Department of Agriculture (USDA) has doubled down on its refusal to let schools serve free meals to all students this fall—despite rising food insecurity and pleas from anti-hunger advocates, school nutrition officials, and lawmakers...

Then in March, as the economy contracted and unemployment soared, USDA issued regulatory waivers permitting all schools to serve free breakfast and lunch to all children, including those not of school-age or enrolled in private institutions. School nutrition officials welcomed the move, which allowed many districts to serve as de facto hunger relief organizations within their communities. USDA said that initial waivers were possible thanks to a boost in funding from the Families First coronavirus relief bill, but that it needed another infusion of cash to extend them.

This means that schools will soon have to begin charging for meals again and tracking meal debt among kids who can’t pay. - The Counter

Update: A bunch of Republicans, including Rep. Jim Hagedorn (R-MN), signed on to a letter asking the USDA to reconsider. They are however apparently making little, if any, effort to see that more money is forthcoming.

Update #2: Schools will now be allowed to offer free lunch to everyone, "as funding allows."

Small farms are last in line for help, again

Given the Trump/Perdue track record - actually, that of our "governing elites" in general, going back decades - of course they are.

Now, with the global pandemic closing factories and restaurants and disrupting supply chains, already stressed farms are grappling with lower demand and fewer markets to sell in, as well as a presidential administration that favors relief for big businesses over small. Small farmers in particular — those who sell directly to farmers markets, schools, and other local food hubs — are facing an existential crisis, as they face slim odds of accessing competitive federal stimulus money...

“Bailout money always goes to the big farmers, the people who produce soy and crops and sell into commodity markets,” said John Peck, executive director of Family Farm Defenders, a national organization that supports sustainable agriculture. “This is all part of our country’s cheap food policy where we basically subsidize capital-intensive, large-scale industrial farming.”

Farmers who sell directly to consumers or participate in regional food hubs typically don’t rely on federal subsidies.

“Small diversified farmers are pretty effective at doing what they do, which is finding markets and filling them, and haven’t required a lot of support,” said Deeble. “But the flip side is if you’re usually good in normal times and don’t rely much on the government, it can be harder to get government help when you need it.” - The Intercept

School privatization movement looks to go shock doctrine

Entirely predictable, but nonetheless disgusting.

COVID-19 has shuttered public schools across the nation, state governments are threatening to slash education budgets due to the economic collapse caused by the outbreak, and emergency aid provided by the federal government is far short of what is needed, according to a broad coalition of education groups, but the charter school industry may benefit from its unique status to seek public funding from multiple sources and expand these schools into many more communities traumatized by the pandemic and financial fallout. - Jeff Bryant/Raw Story

School shootings suddenly plummet to zero?

As a matter of fact, yes. I have nothing more to add to this one.

The nationwide lockdown to stem the rise of the coronavirus has had one silver lining—March 2020 was the first March since 2002 without a school shooting...

Washington Post reporter Robert Klemko made the observation Monday (April 13) on Twitter.

Schools around the country were ordered or recommended closed in mid-March to attempt to stem the spread of the disease, which (as of April 13 had) already infected a reported 576,695 Americans so far and killed 23,068.

"All it took was a pandemic and closing all the schools," tweeted Bloomberg editor Mark Gongloff. - Common Dreams

Private equity will never, ever stop screwing the rest of us

Not until it’s crushed. Obliterated. Annihilated. So that’s what needs to happen.

It’s tough to pull a really representative blockquote from this one. I can only respectfully ask that you take my sincere word that you should click and read it all.

It is part of a growing trend of private equity investment in health care in the United States. 

The pandemic has put into stark relief how these billionaire investors have fundamentally weakened the health care system...

Hospital acquisitions were popular among private equity firms from 2000 to 2012. But many firms struggled to make money from those acquisitions and have turned their attention to more profitable slices of the health care economy. 

In particular, private equity has been gobbling up staffing service for emergency rooms and then taking the doctors out of the hospital’s insurance network. As a result, many people return home from the emergency room with massive bills they thought would be covered by their insurance company. This phenomenon is known as “surprise billing.” - Popular Information

Big problems for small-business loan program

It’s hard to believe that the Party of Trump would dare, politically, to not get this worked out. But we’ll see.

Under the policy, any business (or nonprofit, veterans organization, or tribal concern) with 500 or fewer employees is eligible for a government-backed loan equivalent to eight weeks of its prior average payroll, plus an additional 25 percent of that sum (unless that grand total adds up to more than $10 million, which is the cap for any individual firm). And these loans are really more like grants, which means free money: Firms don’t need to make any payments on their loans for six months — and if they maintain their workforces, then the government will forgive almost all of the loan (more fine details on this point below). The idea is to keep the small-business sector frozen in place, so that it can rapidly defrost once the coronavirus pandemic has passed.

But you can’t freeze something for later if it’s already spoiled. And many small firms directly impacted by social-distancing measures were already collapsing by the time Congress finally passed legislation. For these reasons, the Trump administration was eager to get the PPP up and running as quickly as possible. To that end, the administration has (1) made it possible for small-business owners to secure government-backed loans at any federally insured lender that wishes to participate in the program, regardless of whether such banks or credit unions are affiliated with the Small Business Administration, and (2) officially launched the program April 3.

Unfortunately, the small-business bailout season is off to a shaky start — and for entirely predictable reasons. - New York Magazine

Farmers are not being prioritized, to say the least, in COVID-19 response

This article summarizes a bunch of issues related to the pandemic. It’s from March 25, and “a slush fund type bailout for global corporations and Wall Street” is pretty much what was in fact delivered.

Farmers were already struggling to make ends meet prior to the COVID-19 crisis. For more than six years, farmers have been managing low incomes, rising costs, increasing debt and bankruptcy, volatile export markets (exacerbated by President Trump’s tariff fights) and a series of extreme weather events tied to climate change. Now, the fast-moving, unprecedented COVID-19 situation is creating new disruptive challenges for farmers and our food system. - IATP

This is from an email I got from Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN), specifying some of what's in the package. You can decide for yourself, how much is actually likely to help traditional farmers, and how much is just more handouts to Big Ag.

 $9.5 billion dedicated disaster fund to help farmers who are experiencing financial losses from the coronavirus crisis, including targeted support for specialty crop farmers, dairy and livestock farmers, and local food producers.

$14 billion to fund the Farm Bill's farm safety net through the Commodity Credit Corporation.

Eligibility for farmers and agricultural and rural businesses to receive up to $10 million in small business interruption loans from eligible lenders, including Farm Credit institutions, through the Small Business Administration. Repayment forgiveness will be provided for funds used for payroll, rent or mortgage, and utility bills.

$3 million to increase capacity at the USDA Farm Service Agency to meet increased demand from farmers affected by the coronavirus crisis.

Here's a take on the "farmers or Big Ag" query.

Trump has screwed up worse than anyone, anywhere

A righteous, and totally accurate, screed.

The United States is in a very bad place in the novel coronavirus pandemic. With more cases than any other nation on the planet, health care systems under strain in cities across the nation, and a rising case fatality rate to accompany that growth, the outlook is nothing less than dire. As Dr. Anthony Fauci has warned, the U.S. could be looking at between 100,000 and 200,000 deaths related to COVID-19 before the primary pandemic is past. And there are reasons to believe those numbers may be optimistic.

No matter what Donald Trump says, that does not mean he did a “good job.” It means that, with months of warning and near-infinite resources, he did a worse job than every other government on the entire planet—a job so awful that when a decade from now someone is unlucky enough to think of Trump, this is what they will remember. This is all they will remember. There was a crisis, Trump failed the nation, and the cost was many, many times worse than 9/11. - Daily Kos

What's with the panic buying, and so on?

The best thing I've seen on the topic.

“The thing about panic-buying is that it gives us a sense of control at a time when we’re lacking that,” says Deborah Small, a psychologist who studies consumer judgment and human decision-making at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. She adds that things get harried when “people hear that other people are buying something, and they say, ‘Oh, I need that too.’ And it just spirals to this level where we have none.”

But seeing what’s being left behind at grocery stores, like all that unloved Skippy the couple passed over, also tells a compelling story. As beleaguered systems like healthcare, immigration, and labor practices buckle under the weight of an unparalleled pandemic, the cracks being exposed are the ones that have actually always been there—if you knew where to look. The same is true for what the average consumer can now learn about the American food system, plain as day. - The Counter