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

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

Chicago public school teachers have great ideas

But they still face massive opposition from, among others, corporate Dems.

There was an ironic moment in former President Barack Obama’s speech at the 2024 Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago when he brought up the passing of his wife Michelle’s mother Marian Robinson who, he noted, was raised in the South Side of Chicago and attended Englewood High School.

He likely brought up the details of Robinson’s upbringing as bona fides of her roots in a big city Black community. But the irony was that Englewood High School was closed in 2005 by Obama’s basketball friend—who later served as his secretary of education—Arne Duncan when he was the CEO of Chicago Public Schools from 2001 to 2008. That moment, as obscure as it was, came across as yet another signal—not lost to other astute observers—of how the Democratic Party is struggling to turn from its love affair with neoliberal policy to embrace a new politics of progressive populism that claims to care about families and workers.

That struggle is especially tricky in the education policy arena where Democrats have a lengthy history of imposing neoliberal policy ideas such as charter schools, vouchers, and standardized testing that led to labeling public schools as failures, closing them down, and ramping up charter school industry corruption. - Nation of Change

Democrats bear some responsibility for the farm crisis, too

The whole system is messed up, though Trump and his allies are certainly making it worse than it's ever been. Or at least since the era of wholly unregulated exploitation, leading up to the Dust Bowl days.

In recent years, consolidated agribusinesses have translated their rising profits into formidable political power. They have successfully weakened or killed many measures that would have limited their control over farmers’ lives and livelihoods, including fighting laws that would give farmers the right to repair their own equipment, something that overzealous copyright protections have prevented them from doing. When these and other nasty practices get too much attention, Big Ag wields its considerable weight to silence critics, whether that means getting a newspaper cartoonist fired or suing the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency to close a public comment period on a proposed merger.

Over the past few decades, Democrats have too often either supported the policies that got us here, or fallen short in resisting them. - AlterNet