Local Economy

this category refers to local non-corporate "alternative" economy

buffer resilience? de-centralized?

SEE MONOPOLY EXTRACTION

see small biz entrepreneur

see local regs (also kinda generic?)

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AN 12 25

On Friday, a nonprofit forced the Trump administration to unseal a damning complaint lodged by the Biden-era Federal Trade Commission against Pepsi for colluding with Walmart to raise food prices across the nation. New un-redacted information claims FTC Chair Ferguson and his colleague Mark Meador (both Trump appointees) were hiding the mechanics of Pepsi’s and Wal-Mart’s price fixing.

Pepsi is a “must-have” product for grocery stores, and Walmart is also massively powerful,” reports BIG Newsletter writer Matt Stoller. Critics say Pepsi allegedly engages in price discrimination to maintain the approval of Walmart, its biggest buyer — even going so far as to police prices at smaller rival stores. And it prepares reports for Walmart showing them their pricing advantages on Pepsi products.

When the “price gap” between Wal-Mart and its tiny rivals narrow too much, Pepsi tracks where consumers were buying Pepsi products outside of Walmart. It keeps logs on stores who would “self-fund” Pepsi product discounts, nicknaming them “offenders” and then raise their stock price, forcing them to carry those costs down to their customers.

“This dynamic is why independent grocery stores are dying,” said Stoller. “… It’s led to less competition, fewer local grocery stores, and higher prices. … To the end consumer, it creates an optimal illusion. Walmart appears to be a low-cost retailer, but that’s because it induces its suppliers to push prices up at rivals.”

Much of this information was redacted by Trump officials, however, including Ferguson and Meador. Normally, when the government files an antitrust case, the complaint gets redacted to protect confidential business information. Then the corporate defendant and the government haggle over what is genuinely confidential business information and complaints are eventually unsealed with some minor blacked out phrases, and the case goes on.

“In this case, however, … Ferguson abruptly dropped the case in February after Pepsi hired well-connected lobbyists,” said Stoller. “… Ferguson ended it the day before the government was supposed to go before the judge to manage the unsealing process. And that kept the complaint redacted. With the complaint kept secret, Ferguson, and … Meador, then publicly went on the attack.”

Ferguson released a “bitter and personal” statement against Biden-era FTC Chair Lina Khan — who had brought the complaint against Pepsi — implying that she was lawless and partisan, that there was “no evidence” to support key contentions, and that Ferguson had to “clean up the Biden-Harris FTC’s mess.” Fellow commissioner Mark Meador later echoed his comments on on X.

“And that was where it was supposed to stay, secret, with mean-spirited name-calling and invective camouflaging the real secret Ferguson was trying to conceal,” said Stoller. “That secret is something we all know, but this complaint helped prove that the center of the affordability crisis in food is market power. If that got out, then Ferguson would have to litigate this case or risk deep embarrassment. So, the strategy was to handwave about that mean Lina Khan to lobbyists, while keeping the evidence secret.”

But anti-monopoly group The Institute for Local Self-Reliance filed to make the full complaint public, and Judge Jesse Matthew Furman agreed to hear ILSR’s case, with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Pepsi bitterly opposed.

“Last week, Furman directed the FTC unseal the complaint. So we finally got to see what Ferguson and Meador were trying to hide,” Stoller said.

Read the full BIG report at this link

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Click. Scroll. Surrender. Tim Wu Warns Against The Rise of Big Data in 'The Age of Extraction' | KQED

Our digital lives are increasingly dominated by a handful of powerful tech platforms. Once promising prosperity and democracy, the internet has instead allowed companies like Google, Amazon and Meta to extract money, data and attention from users on an unparalleled scale. Tim Wu, a former technology advisor to President Biden, argues that the government is failing us while tech monopolies deepen wealth divides and enable authoritarianism. We talk to him about how we can take back power from Big Tech. Wu’s new book is “The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity.”

Guests:

Tim Wu,professor of law, Columbia Law School

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an 4 25

Anna Pesek saw a federal program supporting local food purchases as much more than a boost to her Iowa pork and poultry farm.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture grant program that allowed schools and food banks to buy fresh products from small farms helped her forge new business relationships. It allowed her to spend more with local feed mills and butchers, and was starting to build a stronger supply chain of local foods.

But now that the Trump administration has yanked the funding, she worries that rural economic boost might end too.

“With the razor-thin margins on both sides, those partnerships are just really hard, if not impossible, to sustain,” she said.

The co-owner of Over the Moon Farm, Pesek said her operation was never entirely reliant on the local food programs; it represented about 10% of her business. While she knew the federal money wouldn’t last forever, she was planning on the funding lasting through 2028 — but then the Trump administration last month nixed more than $1 billion for local food programs.

The federally funded Local Food Purchase Assistance and the Local Food for Schools programs, both begun during the pandemic, focused on small, local farms in aims of building stronger domestic food supply chains. Grants allowed schools and food banks to buy meat, dairy and produce from small farms — including many healthy products that are often too expensive for those institutions.

USDA’s local food programs specifically aided some of the nation’s most disadvantaged farmers and ranchers, including newcomers, small farmers and those who have faced racial discrimination.

Federal cuts squeeze already-struggling food banks, school lunch programs

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The local food programs were initially funded by 2021’s American Rescue Plan Act but were later expanded by the Biden administration. The Trump administration, though, has cut the funding that went to thousands of small farms, saying that it’s instead “prioritizing stable, proven solutions that deliver lasting impact.”

Pesek noted that the federal government has subsidized commodity agriculture like corn and soybeans for more than a century.

“It’s not a novel idea, right? This is how the relationship between the federal government and farmers has looked,” she said. “And so all this program did was allocate some of the funds to go to different kinds of farmers versus just commodity farmers.”

Just after cutting the local food programs, USDA announced it was expediting $10 billion in direct payments to commodity farmers through the Emergency Commodity Assistance Program, which helps farmers offset high input prices and low sale prices for crops. The White House isreportedly considering billions more in farm subsidies as President Donald Trump escalates global trade wars.

Andy Ollove, food access program director at Fresh Approach, a California nonprofit that works on building a healthier and more resilient food system, said the government’s long-standing farm subsidies flow to some of the nation’s biggest operators. Conversely, the local food programs benefited small farmers and communities directly.

“The economic multiplier to this program just seems way more impactful than the traditional subsidy model of the USDA that the administration is continuing to invest in,” he said. “It’s just a giveaway.”

Fresh Approach has helped administer the food bank program in California. While implementation delays mean farmers won’t lose access to the program as quickly as in other states, he expects elimination of the program to put small farmers out of business across the country.

Some states have launched their own local food programs, but nothing on the scale of the federal investment. That’s left advocates for small farmers, local foods and food banks pushing for reinstatement of the federal program or getting it included in the next round of farm bill negotiations, when Congress outlines a five- or six-year spending plan for the nation’s food policy and agriculture sector.

Ollove expects philanthropists will fund parts of California’s program after federal money is depleted. But it won’t have the same reach.

“I do feel confident that these types of programs will continue in California … sporadically and piecemeal,” he said. “But not in the way that we’re administering it, in a way that I think is changing a lot of things and improving the food system.”

A mixed response from states

The noncompetitive USDA local food grants allowed many new farmers to break into markets. And the aid for food hubs, which link small producers to larger markets, helped farmers distribute products to schools and food banks.

In Wisconsin, for example, more than half of the nearly 300 farmers who benefited from the food bank program were early career farmers,according to state officials.

In Illinois, the state prioritized funds towardsocially disadvantaged farmers, such as those who have faced racial or ethnic prejudice.

“Attacking this program was really an attack on Illinois’ most vulnerable, whether it’s a socially disadvantaged farmer or the food recipient,” said Kristi Jones, deputy director of the Illinois Department of Agriculture.

Her department administered the federal food bank program, which helped beginning farmers get their businesses off the ground.

“A lot of these farmers, they’re living their dreams,” she said. “They are living their goals because of this program.”

Illinois had been planning on nearly $15 million from the next round of funding for the food bank program. Jones said farmers already had begun planning and spending on seeds and equipment.

“You just don’t put something on the ground and have the product the next day,” she said. “ … So that uncertainty was incredibly challenging for farmers who already deal with enough uncertainty.”

Democratic leaders have bashed the Trump administration’s decision: Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, for example, called it “a slap in the face to Illinois farmers and the communities they feed.”

But conservative leaders in other states have downplayed the cuts.

In Texas, Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller characterized USDA’s decision as “a reassessment.”

He said the state was not dependent on the federal funds and would continue its Farm to School and Farm to Food Bank programs, which encourage the local purchase of Texas agricultural products.

“There’s always room for refinement, and we may see a revised version of the policy down the road that is even better for agriculture producers,”he said in a statement last month.

Texas funds programs to help distribute excess food to schools, food banks and charities. But it does not have a grant program like USDA’s to help those organizations purchase local food, said Marshall Webb, spokesperson for the state agriculture department.

Iowa’s agriculture department recently started its own local food program.

The Choose Iowa program has made about $300,000 available to support local food purchases — though the statelost out on about $11.3 million because of the federal cuts.

Don McDowell, spokesperson for the Iowa Department of Agriculture & Land Stewardship, said the agency would continue to ask lawmakers to expand funding for the Choose Iowa program.

“Programs designed to forge relationships between Iowa farmers, food hubs, food banks and schools are important to our farmers and communities,” he said.

Iowa Farmers Union President Aaron Heley Lehman said his organization, which represents family farmers and ranchers, would like to see the state step in to fill the void.

“But we don’t anticipate that that’s going to be an easy thing for the state of Iowa to do,” he said. “So not only is it local farmers that are feeling like they’ve had the rug pulled out from underneath them, but the state of Iowa has, too.”

Creating a new food system

In Southern California, Dickinson Family Farms has worked to gather produce from dozens of small farms across the region, allowing even the smallest operators without distribution capabilities to sell to local food banks.

Democrats and Republicans take on soda, but they’re using different tactics

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Andrew Dickinson, who owns the farm with his father, said the federal local food program also helped reduce food waste. Farmers were able to get fair market prices for vegetables with cosmetic damage or fruits deemed too small or large for grocery store shelves.

Dickinson said the federal program has provided a reliable marketplace for small operators that otherwise depend on more inconsistent sales streams like farmers markets.

“It will create a vacuum,” he said.

About 60 miles east of Los Angeles, sixth-generation farmer Anna Knight said the federal funds were much more than a handout to farmers. To her, they were about creating a new kind of food system.

She said supporting local producers creates more supply chain resilience — something many people didn’t appreciate until the pandemic.

“We don’t want to go back to that world,” she said. “When we invest in our local food system, we’re really investing on onshoring our food production system, on making new food systems local and increasing their resiliency in moments of crisis.”

Old Grove Orange, her California farm, has been supplying citrus to some local school systems for years. But she said the federal funds were the “single biggest changemaker” for pushing schools to buy local for the first time.

To her, that’s key in promoting lifelong healthy eating: Local produce like her freshly picked oranges pack more of a nutritional punch and just taste better than produce that takes weeks to ship from abroad.

“When you are giving a child a delicious piece of fruit, you are really cultivating their palate for life,” she said. “You are setting this expectation of what a fruit is supposed to taste like, and you are sparking this love for fruits and vegetables for the rest of their life.”

Knight said the nation doesn’t have to choose between big and small farms. But small farms are vanishing all around her.

“This is a ticking bomb,” she said. “The clock is running out if we don’t really find a way to help make these small, medium-sized farms sustainable.”

*Stateline reporter Kevin Hardy can be reached at khardy@stateline.org.

YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE. SUPPORT

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.

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11 7 24 thom

Donald Trump is preparing to crash the American economy. He intends to do it by tearing up vital parts of our American government. He may even hire Elon Musk to pull it off. And from his point of view, this is not going to be a bad thing. The farther the economy crashes, the greater the buying opportunity for billionaires. It all has to do with something called the administrative state.

While it’s not sexy or even particularly interesting to the average American voter, having a strong administrative state is essential to a high-functioning economy. A strong administrative state is the only thing that protects entrepreneurs and small businesses from being squashed like bugs by monopolistic behemoths, and small businesses are our nation’s main growth engine.}:

:{For example, over 70 percent of all new jobs created since 2019 were created by small businesses, producing almost 13 million new jobs over the past 25 years. Small business creation is up 50 percent over Trump’s years because the Biden administration has been enforcing the rule of law, including taking on the giant tech monopolies. Small businesses now account for over 43 percent of all American economic activity.

A strong administrative state is also the only thing that can protect the environment from those who’d destroy it for their own profits. It’s the only thing that can protect consumers from defective or even deadly products and food or drug contamination. It our only defense against predatory banks, airlines, and insurance companies, among others. A strong administrative state that follows and enforces the rule of law — as opposed to the kind of grift-driven kleptocracies typical of strongman governments — is essential, in other words, to a functioning national economy.}:

Here in America, we see this best in the contrast between lightly bureaucratic and largely unregulated Red states and more bureaucratic and regulated (and taxed) Blue states and counties. While Red and Blue states are represented in Congress about 50/50, as the Brookings Institution found a few years ago: > “Biden’s winning base in 509 counties encompasses fully 71% of America’s economic activity, while Trump’s losing base of 2,547 counties represents just 29% of the economy.”

But now the administrative state is in the crosshairs of the incoming Trump administration, and their planned assault on it will almost certainly cause a loss of economic vitality, probably even leading to a major recession (every*Republican president since Nixon has had a major recession after tinkering with tax and regulatory policies;none*of the Democratic presidents have created one since Carter, and his started under Nixon). We also see this at the level of the nation-state. As Professor Timothy Snydernotes: > “Now consider the Russian and Hungarian economies. Russia sits on hugely valuable natural resources, and yet is a poor country. The profits from its oil and gas are in the hands of a few oligarchs. > >

“Hungary sits in the middle of the European Union, the most successful trade project of all time. And yet Hungarians are poorer than their neighbors, in part because the Orbán regime corruptly channels EU resources to friendly oligarchs. > > “The lesson is clear. Democracy is a method of checking corrupt rulers. When there is no functioning democracy, corruption is unchecked. And democracy is an element of a more fundamental guarantor of prosperity, the rule of law. In Hungary and Russia, the rule of law has been bent and broken, to the benefit of the few, and to the detriment of the many. Ending the rule of law is the Trump-Vance platform.”

Gutting the administrative state is the first and imperative aspect of ending or weakening the rule of law. Because, as Steve Bannon famously told America, the main goal of the Trump administration is “the ‘deconstruction’ of the administrative state.” He added: > “Every business leader we’ve had in is saying not just taxes, but it is also the regulation. I think the consistent …[thing] is the deconstruction. The way the progressive left runs is, if they can’t get it passed, they’re just going to put in some sort of regulation in an agency. That’s all going to be deconstructed and I think that that’s why this regulatory thing is so important.”

We saw this movie before, during the last Trump administration. He put a coal lobbyist in charge of EPA, an oil lobbyist at Interior, a Telcom lobbyist and lawyer at FCC, a professional union-busting lawyer in charge of the Labor Department, an advocate for replacing public schools with religious ones in charge of the Education Department, etc., etc. But that was more mere corruption than a wholesale destruction of administrative agencies. Since the Chevron deference decision by the Supreme Court this past year, though, it’s now possible that Trump could actually destroy the American administrative state.

Even whenChevronwas still intact eight years ago, the result of Trump’s corruption in his previous administration, just like with Reagan’s and Bush’s deregulatory campaigns, was a massive recession that started*before*Covidcame along. Trump will fire Lena Kahn at the Federal Trade Commission, blowing up the antitrust efforts of the Biden administration; the fat cat billionaires already are eagerly anticipating running amok (which is why they threw billions at Trump’s campaign). The result, predictably, will be another Republican economic disaster for America’s working class.

Interestingly, our country’s most famous investor also seems to be thinking along these same lines. Warren Buffett has recently sold over $325 billion in stock and is simply sitting on that huge pile of cash. Why? Probably the Oracle of Omaha can see the same thing I’m pointing out here: Trump is preparing to turn the economy over to Musk and his billionaire buddies and the result will be a disaster.

A disaster, by the way, that will be very useful to Buffett and other billionaires; recessions and depressions are when America’s largest fortunes are typically made or expanded because they represent great buying opportunities to those with cash, while at the same time the small companies being squeezed are willing to sell for a song.

:{:{ So get ready; we’re in for a bumpy few years as America descends into a strongman-run oligarchy while the Supreme Court and Trump’s toadies rip apart the protections of the administrative state we’ve so carefully constructed in the years since the Civil War and the Republican Great Depression. It may well be a disaster for your 401(k), and millions will lose their jobs in a recession. If Musk cuts $2 trillion from the federal budget, as promised, it will almost certainly impact Social Security and take a huge bite out of programs for veterans, children, and the disabled. It would probably also have to end all subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, and end hundreds of billions in federal aid to infrastructure construction programs. Get ready now, to the extent that you can. Forewarned is forearmed. }:

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an 8 23 $

no lnx

For the next time some idiot tries to tell you the GOP is 'The Party of Business'

Nikki Haley is ‘whitewashing’ her record on Putin while hypocritically attacking Democrats: conservative

Thom Hartmann

August 30, 2023

As predictably as the sun rises and sets, every Sunday sees a commentator or politician on one of the Sunday political talk shows say — without being challenged — words to the effect that the Republican Party understands and supports business better than Democrats. This weekend, as I recall, it was CNN‘s turn.

All my life, in fact, I’ve been told by the media that the GOP is the “party of business.”

It may have once been true when I was a very young child, but today it’s a lie — and has been so in a huge way since the neoliberal Reagan Revolution.

Between 1933 and 2020 there were 14 American presidents, 7 Democratic and 7 Republican.

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The economy during this time grew at an average rate of 4.6% under the Democratic presidents, but only an anemic 2.4% under Republican presidents. For example, the economy has grown three times faster under Biden than under Trump.

Ten of the past 11 recessions began under Republican presidents,although lifelong Republican and Trump Fed appointee Jerome Powell seems hell-bent on producing one for Joe Biden, just in time for the 2024 election.

Republican presidents have exploded the national debt,while the only balanced budgets out of the past 60 years have been presented by Democratic presidents Carter, Clinton, and Obama.

Bill Clinton left George W. Bush a $128 billion surplus (after 4 consecutive years of budget surpluses): Bush immediately squandered it with a massive tax cut for billionaires and two criminal wars.

Just last year, President Biden decreased federal spending by $550 billion and reduced the deficit by $1.4 trillion — the largest one-year deficit drop in American history — all while creating five times more jobs in 2 years than the last three Republican presidents combined.

If not for the Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts for billionaires and the two wars George W. Bush lied us into, our national debt would today be zero instead of over $30 trillion.

The core of American business and thus the livelihood of American communities before Reagan was small- and medium-sized companies.

We enforced anti-trust lawsso aggressively that when Buster Brown and Kinney shoe companies wanted to merge in the 1960s the Supreme Court blocked the merger because the combined company would control about 5 percent of the US shoe market.Nike alone today controls around 20 percent of that market.

Small- and medium-sized companies built America and brought us the American middle class, the first and largest middle class in the world. But in 1983, when Reagan ordered the DOJ, FTC, and SEC to stop enforcing anti-trust laws dating back to the Sherman Act of 1890, giant corporations began a relentless campaign to destroy locally-owned companies.

Strip malls and small-town downtowns that were once mostly home to local retailers are now dominated by giant monopolistic national chains. Big Box stores, spreading across the country unconstrained since Reagan, have been wiping out small towns and rural communities.

One study found, as Reuters reported:

“[T]he closer a store was to the Walmartlocation, the greater the likelihood it would close. Persky and his colleagues found that for every mile closer to the Walmart, 6 percent more stores closed. Close in around the store's location, between 35 and 60 percent of stores closed.”

For most American businesses and the communities they serve, Republican governance has been a disaster since the Reagan 1980s.

In the 1950s, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower championed building tens of thousands of new public schools all across America, an effort supported by the business community because an educated workforce is a productive workforce.

From the early days of the Industrial Revolution, Americans were proud that we had one of the best-educated workforces in the world, and that itself was a huge boost to business.

In 2010, though, when fossil fuel billionaires bankrolled the Tea Party and were looking for an issue to beat up on Democrats in the 2010 and 2012 elections, they seized on the national standards for education program conceived and legislatively initiated by both Republicans and Democrats called “Common Core.”

Although it had been endorsed by the US Chamber of Commerce and GOP presidential front-runner Jeb Bush (among others) and was in place in 45 states, word went out that it was an effort to “indoctrinate” American students.

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The story ran day after day on Fox “News” and rightwing hate radio. Hysteria followed, and Red state after Red state outlawed these new high standards for high-school graduation. Republican grandstanding for political gain actually dumbed down America.

The 2020 version of this was Critical Race Theory, another equally bogus attack on public education. Between this, “Don’t Say Gay,” and banning thousands of books, the Republican war on public education has blossomed into full flower.

Now, Republican states are trying to shut down their public schools altogether via state-wide voucher programs, replacing Eisenhower’s AAA+ education system with state-funded religious and rightwing for-profit schools that refuse to teach actual science, civics, or American history.

Arizona was the first to go statewide with vouchers, and Republican legislators in Texas, Florida, Kansas, and a dozen other GOP-run states are considering the same.It’s quite simply an all-out effort to destroy public education and subsidize religious schools and private all-white academies for upper-middle-class people who can take advantage of a voucher that only covers part of the cost of tuition.

The only option left for the very poorest people will be the few remaining public schools, essentially turning them into ghettos.

Republican President Dwight Eisenhower ran for re-election in the 1956 election by bragging that he’d expanded Social Security across America, and his 1952 election was mostly powered by his enthusiastic endorsement of unionization.

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At a speech before the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1952, Eisenhower noted that the first national legalization of unions in America was signed by Republican President Calvin Coolidge, the 1926 Railway Labor Act.

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“Only a handful of unreconstructed reactionaries harbor the ugly thought of breaking unions,” he told the union group now known as the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest. “Only a fool would try to deprive working men and women of the right to join the union of their choice.”

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Similarly, in September of 1970 President Richard Nixon hosted labor leaders from across America, praising the movement. As The New York Times noted on September 8, 1970:

“When the ‘great issue’ has been whether to support the President and to meet the nation’s responsibilities ‘for defending and protecting the forces of freedom in the world,’ he said, ‘American labor has never been found wanting. It has always been the first in war and in peace.’”

As a result of combined Democratic and Republican support of unions, by Reagan’s election in 1980 about two-thirds of all American workers had a union job or it’s equivalent,with great pay, benefits, and retirement plans, because a third of workers were union members and that set the pay and benefits floor for the non-union employers to compete for another third of workers.

But, following Nixon putting Lewis Powell on the Supreme Court in 1971, the GOP began to adopt the positions in thePowell Memo, which included gutting labor unions so the morbidly rich could become even richer.

Their rationale was that workers having a say in the workplace had “destabilized” America, a point first made in 1951 by Russell Kirkin his book The Conservative Mind that I detailed two years ago here.

President Reagan, however, declared war on organized labor with his attack on the PATCO union. Ever since, the GOP has been fighting efforts to expand unionization.

Combined with Reagan’s massive tax cuts for billionaires and giant corporations, this loss of union representation has led to a$50 trillion transfer of wealthfrom the homes and retirement accounts of working-class people straight into the money bins of the morbidly rich.

Instead of two-thirds of Americans having a middle-class lifestyle like in 1980, today that number is down to around 45 percent of us. As a result, both poverty and homelessness have exploded across the land. And poor and homeless people can’t afford to support a strong economy — and thus American business — the way a prosperous middle class can.

Dwight Eisenhower created the Small Business Administration to “aid, counsel, assist, and protect insofar as is possible the interests of small-business concerns.”

He signed a massive expansion of Social Security to take the pension/retirement onus off small- and medium-sized employers, increased the minimum wage so a prospering working class could purchase the products of American manufacturers, and built low-income housing across the nation to end the homeless “hobo” problem left over from the Republican Great Depression.

Eisenhower created from scratch the Department of Health, Education and Welfare to build a healthy and well-educated workforce, while Richard Nixon signed the Environmental Protection Agency into law to save the lives of American workers being killed by toxic pesticides and other chemicals (the agency’s creation was provoked by Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring).

Today’s GOP opposes all of these programs and agencies. They only support the largest American companies and the richest citizens.

When Trump was president, he rolled back regulation of toxic pesticides known to cause brain damage to children, and one of his first official acts in office was to end the prohibition of coal mines dumping their toxic waste and tailings into America’s rivers, polluting downstream water supplies with cancer-causing chemicals.

Arguably, the best policy possible for American businesses of all sizes is the Medicare For All program promoted for decades by progressive Democrats.

Back in 2004, Toyota announced they’d be opening a new factory in North America. Three southern US states offered them billions in tax advantages and free land, with the Republican governor of Alabama openly bragging about how cheaply his citizens would work for the company.

But in the end, in 2005, Toyota announced they’d be building the factory in Ontario, Canada because US healthcare costs are nearly twice those of Canada, which has had a successful Medicare For All system in place for more than a half-century (as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich).

Since then, as Republicans (and a few bought-off Democrats) continue to fight any effort to establish a national healthcare or health insurance system, the company has built two more North American factories in Canada.

If it wasn’t for Republican obstruction, they would’ve been built here and the jobs would be here.

The simple reality is that Republicans have no coherent plans for the American economy beyond more tax cuts for their morbidly rich donors and more deregulation of the very largest and most polluting corporations.

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To compensate for this deficiency, they push hate against queer people, public school teachers, women, and dark-skinned immigrants. DeSantis has gone so far as to attack Disney, Florida’s largest employer and source of tax revenues, because they had the temerity to respect their gay, lesbian, and trans employees and customers.

Republicans have banned hundreds of books from public schools and libraries, saturated our towns and cities with weapons of war, banned women’s access to reproductive healthcare, and packed our courts with judges who’d be comfortable with the American Nazi movement, the Federalist Society, and the John Birch Society.

Not only are these policies and positions bad for America, they’re also destructive of most American businesses.

So, the next time some idiot tries to tell you that the GOP is “the party of business,” let them know the real facts.

The only businesses Republicans actually support are gun sellers, megachurches, corrupt defense contractors, and giant monopolies. And none of those are good for average Americans, locally-owned businesses, or the US economy.

https://medium.com/team-human/everything-works-better-locally-with-helena-norberg-hodge-ba8e9a8fc715

Team Human today, author, filmmaker, and founder & director of Local Futures, Helena Norberg-Hodge.

Norberg-Hodge joins Team Human to discuss how globalisation doesn’t make things more efficient, and how localism can work to serve real people and real places.

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nfl has rule no city can own, even if pay fair mkt price

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seattle socialist squeak out vic over amazon 1119

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3rd industrial revo non-hier; must be glob-LOCAL; feed-in tariffs let local ppl go to bank and get loan b/c knew could repay

merkel

china big green grid investment 12 wks after mtg w/ Jeremy Rifkin wrote The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earthaudio interview 9/19.

rifkin

the conv 819

Restricting SNAP benefits could hurt millions of Americans – and local communities

[nb in CA ebt ok for farmers mkt, thus CSA

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is trying to restrict access to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits.

SNAP is the primary way the government helps low-income Americans put food on the table. According to the government’s own calculations, an estimated 3.1 million peoplecould lose SNAP benefits, commonly referred to as food stamps, through a new proposalthat would change some application procedures and eligibility requirements.

We are nutrition and food policy researchers who have studied the effects of SNAP on the health and well-being of low-income Americans. Should this change go into effect, we believe millions of Americans, especially children, and local communities would suffer.

Helping families and the economy

SNAP helped 39.7 million Americans buy food in 2018.

Federal research has found that the program reduces hunger, particularly in children – who make up 44% of its beneficiaries.

Hunger and poor nutrition harm children’s health and hinder their development. Kids who don’t get enough to eat have more trouble at school and are more likely to experience mental health problems. One research team found that people who had access to SNAP as children earned higher incomes and were less likely to develop chronic diseases like diabetes once they grew up.

“My eating habits have improved where I can eat more healthy than before,” a Massachusetts woman who had recently been approved for SNAP told us. “It is like night and day – the difference between surviving and not surviving.”

SNAP benefits also ripple through the economy. They lead to money being spent at local stores, freeing up cash to pay rent and other bills. Every US$1 invested in SNAP generates $1.79 in economic activity, according to the USDA.

Trying again and again

The Trump administration has repeatedly attempted to slash SNAP and make it harder for people who qualify for benefits to get them.

Its 2018, 2019 and 2020 budget proposals all called for cutting spending on food stamps by about 25%.

The Trump administration also worked with Republicans in Congress to try to tighten eligibility requirements. Had this policy been implemented, all beneficiaries between the ages of 18 and 59 deemed “able-bodied” would have had to prove they were working at least 20 hours per week or were enrolled in school. According to government projections, some 1.2 million Americans would have eventually lost their benefits as a result.

Congress, which would have needed to approve the change for it to take effect, rejected it in December 2018. The White House then sought to change work requirements through a new rule that has not yet taken effect.

In July 2019, the Trump administration again sought to restrict access to food stamps without any input from Congress, this time by going through Temporary Assistance for Needy Families – a program that gives low-income families with children cash to cover childcare and other expenses.

Currently, most states automatically enroll families in SNAP once they obtain TANF benefits. The new rule would prevent states from doing this. Even though 85% of TANF families also get SNAP benefits, the vast majority of them still live in poverty.

The government is seeking comments from the public about this proposed change through September 23, 2019.

Replacing food stamps with ‘harvest boxes’

Other changes to SNAP could also take a toll.

The Trump administration’s proposed budgets have also called for changing how the government helps low-income families get food they have trouble affording. Its 2019 budget proposal called for replacing half of SNAP benefits with what it called “harvest boxes” of nonperishable items like cereals, beans and canned goods.

According to research we conducted with low-income Americans, 79% of SNAP participants opposed this proposal, with one of the primary reasons being not being able to choose their own foods.

“People who are struggling are already demoralized,” a New Mexico woman who uses SNAP benefits told us. “Being able to make our own food decisions is something that keeps us feeling like human beings.”

Congress rejected the concept but the White House included it again in its 2020 budget draft.

Advocates for food aid fear that recent proposals to change how SNAP works would reduce the share of Americans who get these benefits by making it harder to qualify and enroll in the program. Should this major transformation ever occur, children and families won’t have access to critical benefits that help them avoid going hungry.

Tracking the demand for food stamps

Although the Trump administration has until now largely failed in its effort to cut SNAP spending, the number of people getting food stamps is already declining. This trend began during the Obama administration, in the aftermath of the Great Recession.

Since the economy is doing well overall, the number of people on food assistance programs has fallen. The reason for the decline is that the number of people who are eligible for these benefits rises when the economy falters and falls when conditions improve. As a result, the government is spending less on food stamps without cutting the SNAP budget.

Case in point, 7 million people have already left SNAP due to better economic stability. In parallel, federal spending on SNAP budget has dropped from $78 billion in 2013 to $64 billion in 2019.

If the Trump administration wants to shrink SNAP, reduce costs and have fewer low-income Americans receive benefits, we believe that the best thing it can do is to keep working to improve the economy – particularly for low-income Americans, who have been reaping fewer benefits from the improving economy than others in recent years.

:{

• Children
• Nutrition
• safety net
• spending cuts
• Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)
• Trump administration
• SNAP
• food stamps

}:

mitchell the nation

As it grows, Amazon is exposing the deficiencies of the Reagan-era changes in how we think about corporate concentration. By collapsing antitrust enforcement to consider only prices, we have lost sight of what earlier generations knew about monopolies: that they can harm us as producers of value, not merely as consumers of it. And their control over our livelihoods and the fate of our communities is inherently political: It’s a threat to liberty and democracy.

Economists have recently begun to document a link between corporate concentration and rising inequality. Dominant companies, they’re finding, arefunneling the spoils to a small number of people at the top. And by reducing the number of their competitors, these companies are also making it harder for workers to get a fair wage and for producers to get a fair price. A particularly troubling data point in this research is the loss of a long-standing pathway to a middle-class life: starting a business. The number of new firms launched each year has fallen by nearly two-thirds since 1980, and many economists believe that corporate power is to blame. This lack of start-ups is fueling a broader decline in the ranks of small business:Between 2005 and 2015, the number of small retailers fell by 85,000, a drop of 21 percent relative to population..

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In the left-behind towns and neighborhoods, the despair that has set in stems from more than just economic hardship. There is a pervasive sense of powerlessness that is toxic to democracy. In 1946, the sociologist C. Wright Mills and the economist Melville J. Ulmer published a detailed study of several matched pairs of cities. The cities in each pair were similar in all respects except for one main difference:One city’s economy was composed of many locally owned firms, while the other’s was largely controlled by absentee corporations. The cities that possessed a degree of local economic power had a bigger middle class and a greater variety of jobs, Mills and Ulmer found. But their most important findings had to do with civic health. The cities with a robust local economy invested more in public infrastructure and services, and their residents were involved in community affairs in greater numbers.

The Everything Store: The growing share of online shoppers who start their search on Amazon

Today, using large-scale statistical techniques, sociologists have confirmed Mills and Ulmer’s broad conclusions, finding, for example, that communities that possess more local economic power are better able to solve problems. But these ideas are no longer reflected in policy. Now, instead of actively seeking to disperse economic power, policy-makers encourage its concentration. Many elected officials are as enthralled with Bezos as his investors are, and they’ve been equally willing to fund Amazon’s growth. Congress has repeatedly declined to pass legislation that would allow states to require out-of-state retailers to collect sales taxes. This allowed Amazon to largely avoid collecting sales taxes for nearly two decades, giving it a price advantage that research shows helped drive shoppers to its site. Then, as Amazon’s warehouse expansion began to compel its compliance with sales taxes, the company started angling for local development incentives. It’s raked in more than $1.1 billionthrough these deals, according to Good Jobs First, and more than half of the warehouses that Amazon built between 2005 and 2015 received public subsidies....

// race to the bottom on outsourcing? the most desperate cities are willing to go deeper into debt, make a bigger bet?

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The surprising success of local currencies reveals the power of small banks

Valerie Vande Panne / Independent Media Institute

Time really is money with increasingly popular cooperative time banks

Valerie Vande Panne / Independent Media Institute

Jennie Weakley is a time bank enthusiast with Unity in Our Community TimeBank in Southwest Detroit. For nearly 10 years, she’s used time banking to get the windows of her…

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/this-peer-to-peer-lender-left-big-finance-behind-to-invest-in-community/

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2018 wrap

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/26122018/climate-change-solutions-obstacles-2018-year-review-oil-lawsuits-clean-energy-urban-planning

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https://www.ecowatch.com/time-banks-2528644485.html

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ties to corp personhood:

Well, some people, realizing that in the long run local communities prosper withlocally owned businesses, have tried to limit the corporate chain's right unlimited expansion. In the case of Liggett v. Lee [288 U.S. 517 (1933)] the State of Florida had imposed a filing fee for licenses for stores that was progressive: a person opening one store would pay a $5.00 fee, whereas a large chain was required to pay $30.00 per store. J. C. Penny Company challenged the law and the Supreme Court of the U.S. ruled that this law violated the 14th Amendment's principle of equal protection. This was at a time when the Jim Crow system of discrimination against blacks was at its height; blacks were still not considered persons protected by the 14th Amendment, but corporations were. Judge Brandeis's dissent in the case is well worth reading for anyone interested in a critique of the growth of corporate power up to 1933.

If terrorists had tried to bomb independent bookstores out of existence in the 1990's, people would have been demanding police protection for our neighborhood bookstores. Instead the independents, which had survived fairly well against the earlier versions of bookstore chains, were bombed (economically) by Barnes & Noble and Borders. Now independent book publishers, who had long struggled to survive against the big corporate publishing empires, can have their books effectively censored by two "buyers", one working at each of the chains. Now the dream of owning a small bookstore and carrying the books that you love has been replaced by the nightmare of being a low-paid clerk in a chain bookstore. Corporate personhood offers little or no advantage to small, local stores and businesses: it is of advantage only to the national and international corporations.

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related http://www.alternet.org/economy/why-community-banks-are-dropping-flies-across-america

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http://grist.org/climate-energy/california-communities-seize-control-of-their-energy-futures/

An energy revolution is breaking out in California and a few other states, one that could radically increase the amount of renewable energy available to citizens and end the tyranny of foot-dragging utilities. Outside of the rapidly falling costs of solar power, it’s just about my main source of domestic optimism these days.

I’m talking about community choice, or, in the horrid legalese, “community choice aggregation.” I’ve discussed it before in passing, but it’s starting to seriously catch on, so I want to take a closer look.

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Say a town, city, or county is dissatisfied with the power it gets from its utility — it’s too expensive, or too dirty. One option would be for each municipality to leave its utility and form its own “municipal utility.” That has its advantages, but it’s a pretty huge step, since the municipality would have to take over not only power procurement but grid operation and maintenance, billing, customer service, etc. In many smaller towns, it’s not practical.

The other, emerging option is community choice aggregation, whereby a county or municipality takes over only the job of buying and selling power, leaving grid management and billing to the utility. It aggregates customers from every participating city, town, and county and uses their collective purchasing power to procure exactly the kind of electricity it wants.

The two main motivations to opt for CCA are cheaper power and cleaner power. At least to date, those two goals have not come into conflict. In most cases, CCAs get power that’s cheaper and cleaner than what they were getting from their utility. (Whether those goals conflict in the future will be of keen interest.)

CCA must be enabled by legislation and it has been in six states: California, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Ohio, and Rhode Island. According to the websiteLocal Power, which tracks these things:

Today, 5% of the U.S. population is under CCA service for electricity in 1300 municipalities, including well-known population centers like City of Chicago, Cincinnati, Cape Cod, Sonoma County as well as hundreds of less known small towns and rural counties. CCA formation by municipal ordinance or local election is allowed and provided for under state laws governing 25% of the U.S. electricity market.

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California has been particularly on the ball. Marin County started the state’s first CCA program — it now serves 125,000 customers. Sonoma County has followed suit. San Mateo County is considering it; county supervisors just voted to do a study of the proposal. The mayor of San Francisco, who’s running for reelection this year, has reversed his previous opposition to the city joining a CCA. Now he says his only objection was that there wasn’t enough local power required!

Perhaps the most interesting battle is happening in San Diego. Whereas San Francisco represents only about 5 percent of utility giant PG&E’s customer base, San Diego represents over 40 percent of San Diego Gas & Electric’s. That’s a big chunk to lose!

CCA is a key part of San Diego’s Climate Action Plan, which among other things commits the city to a legally binding target of 100 percent renewables by 2035. There is effectively no way for it to hit that target if it has to accept whatever power SDG&E sees fit to buy for it.

There have been various efforts to kill CCA at the state level, some supported by the state chapter of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), many of whose members work for utilities. The local San Diego chapter of IBEW, however, supports the city’s 100 percent renewables target. The fate of the San Diego’s climate plan, or at least CCA’s place in the plan, remains uncertain. It if did go through, it would represent something of a watershed for the CCA movement.

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CCAs vary from place to place, but Cali’s share a few common features. They are opt-out rather than opt-in — customers can choose to remain with the utility, but they have to affirmatively indicate as much. That alone ensures high participation rates (readers of *Nudge* will understand why).

There are tiers of participation: in Marin, you can choose a base level 50 percent renewables or pay a premium for 100 percent renewables; in Sonoma, it’s 33 percent or 100 percent. Some also include a premium option for 100 percent localrenewables. The tiered system allows low-income customers to choose an affordable option while more eco-minded or well-off residents can indulge their aspirations.

CCA can also give a huge boost to a bunch of other policies that utilities typically fight or slow-walk, including net metering, feed-in tariffs, and efficiency programs. This post by Woody Hastings lists a few of the benefits that came along with the Sonoma County CCA. In addition to the basic benefit — giving those consumers more choices in energy — it also has 30 percent lower emissions than the utility, and it boasts rates that are 5 to 8 percent lower than the utility’s (depending on the tier).

Sonoma’s CCA features a robust net metering program, “NetGreen,” that compensates solar customers better than the utility. It features a version of my own favorite policy, feed-in tariffs, in the form of “ProFiT,” which guarantees clean energy developers favorable terms for the power they feed into the grid. It has doubled the amount of solar in Sonoma County’s energy mix and establishedpower purchase agreements for 70 megawatts of new solar. And it will bring the level of geothermal in the county’s mix up to around 23 percent by 2018.

Perhaps best of all, enrollment in the plan’s phase-one rollout was much higher than expected: 85 percent of customers stayed with the CCA.

Not every CCA is going to spur all those policies. But that’s kind of the point: they will enable the exact mix of policies that best expresses the needs and values of their customers. It will give consumers some power and agency in the process, something they haven’t had for some time.

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Is CCA power really cheaper? At least in California, at least so far, yes. These charts come via San Diego reporter Lisa Halverstadt:...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/04/this-is-how-to-take-on-bi_n_3867003.html?ir=Green

xcel power