At The New Republic, Nick Martin writes—American Farming Runs on Exploitation. Climate change isn't the only reality the USDA's been slow to grapple with:
On Tuesday, Politico published a feature on the Department of Agriculture’s failure to prepare the nation’s farmers for climate change. Of the USDA’s $144 billion budget, Politico reported, just 0.3 percent is dedicated to helping farmers adapt to the increasingly volatile climate conditions.
The devastating truth that permeated the piece—that the most powerful government in the world is actively turning a blind eye to those situated on the economic front lines of the encroaching disaster—prompts a number of questions. How has pervasive top-down climate denial persisted in the USDA for this long? Could Democrats in 2020 capitalize on this moment to retake the agriculture vote they so painfully bled over the last half-century?
But there are other urgent questions one could also ask about modern American agriculture. While Politico’s piece offered an insightful analysis of the future of farmers, it focused on business owners. The viewpoint was that of the employers charged with balancing and capitalizing on their annual budgets, who are now worried because their politicians of choice continue to refuse to take proactive measures. As is typical in mainstream coverage of agriculture, there was not a single line about the effects on the workers and laborers that fill the fields, or how climate change will affect the places they hail from. [...]
TOP COMMENTS • HIGH IMPACT STORIES
QUOTATION
“Feminism is, of course, part of human rights in general--but to choose to use the vague expression "human rights" is to deny the specific and particular problem of gender. It would be a way of pretending that it was not women who have, for centuries, been excluded. It would be a way of denying that the problem of gender targets women. That the problem was not about being human, but specifically about being a female human.”
~~Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists (2015)
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2006—How Do We Get Out Of Iraq?
While we and the rest of the world digest the micro and the macro environment, the rapidly approaching election is driving the discussion in interesting directions. For example, if Iraq is killing the GOP in the polls (which apparently bothers them far more than the Iraq death toll ever did), what should they (and we) do about Iraq? It's helpful to sample the discussion in Right Blogistan to see where things stand. The interesting thing is finding agreement but watching the ideologues squirm, trying to justify doing the right thing but for reasons that (by definition) cannot be allowed to agree with ours. Why bother? Because sometimes interesting ideas may pop out. Of course, sometimes, like in the case of Jonah Goldberg, it's simply a pleasure to see him try to justify his position and fail.
We now know that myriad criticisms of the Bush Administration by the left were totally accurate and proven correct (which, by the way, makes conservatives completely incorrect in virtually every assessment of Iraq from the get-go). But as many on the left have observed, conservatives think they own the word "right" and only they can use it. The Left cannot be permitted to be right, only the Right can be right (or some such nonsense).