Extinction of animals and plants, #climate disasters, #Desert conditions could spread rapidly from groundwater depletion and plant destruction.

By Erika Schelby

The planet is facing multiple severe challenges that require our immediate attention. Putting an end to the dirty and suffocating fossil fuel emissions may be the most significant global priority, but limiting the misuse of water and restoring degraded land are also essential projects.

These two actions could help put the brakes on extreme weather events and slow down mounting losses in biodiversity, biocapacity, and the economy.

The Seeds of Preparedness

Human encroachment, especially in areas rich in biodiversity, has been one of the major threats to the survival of plants and nonhuman animals.

A 2023 report by NatureServe, a conservation group that networks with and analyzes the research of more than 1,000 scientists in the U.S. and Canada, puts the biodiversity crisis into perspective.

Their findings are worrisome: 40 percent of animals and 34 percent of plants are at risk of extinction in the United States. Many of these species are losing their natural habitats: 41 percent of ecosystems are threatened by collapse.

“At this moment, species are going extinct faster than any time in human history,” the report stated. “Given limited resources available for land management, conservation, and research, we need to make the most effective decisions to ensure the survival of natural communities. Data should be driving these decisions.”

The repercussions of our thoughtless actions are finally catching up with us. They threaten our existence. The United States is already experiencing natural disasters at an unparalleled scale. “The U.S. experienced 23 separate billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in the first eight months of 2023—the largest number since records began,” according to Axios.

Using resilient native seeds to repair “Earth’s Green Mantle” may help support those Americans who are losing everything due to storms, floods, landslides, or fires. It could offer them a fighting chance to start over and rebuild in a safer spot—for keeps, and not in vain.

What use would reconstruction be if the climate crisis deepens and destroys their homes again? “Without native plants, especially their seeds, we do not have the ability to restore functional ecosystems after natural disasters and mitigate the effects of climate change,” states the report, “National Seed Strategy for Rehabilitation and Restoration.”

To keep the human population sheltered, we can get help from something ancient and fundamental: native seeds, “which have adapted to their local environments over the course of thousands of years,” explained NPR. Sadly, we no longer have enough of them to do even the most urgent repairs. Making sure there will be a sufficient supply is the first task.

In January 2023, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) released the report “An Assessment of Native Seed Needs and the Capacity for Their Supply.” It leaves no doubt about the dire shortage of native seeds and the urgency of supplying them to restore damaged natural areas.

“A limited supply of native seeds and other native plant materials is a widely acknowledged barrier to fulfilling our most critical restoration needs,” said Susan P. Harrison, a professor at the University of California, Davis, and chair of the committee that wrote the NASEM report.

The document outlines a detailed course of action, covering topics ranging from federal to state and local governments, tribal uses of native seeds, cooperative partnerships, and the problematic situations seed suppliers face. Another critical study called “Collection and Production of Native Seeds for Ecological Restoration” by Simone Pedrini and her colleagues in 2020 offered an excellent analysis of native seed requirements.

The “just-in-time” inventory business model of late capitalism is a fiasco for seeds and seedlings. Cities want to plant many more trees to mitigate extreme heat. The U.S. Forest Service intends to plant 1.2 billion trees between 2022 and 2032 to restore scorched land. But the ample supply of hardy seedlings to do this is not available.

“Seedling production in the northern U.S. fell by more than half between 2012 and 2020, the researchers found,” stated an August 2023 article in Anthropocene. It takes planning and years of careful work to harvest the desired seeds and grow the seedlings. The limited quantities of baby trees found in nurseries usually belong to vulnerable species that will not survive the harsh conditions resulting from extreme weather conditions.

Evolution: The Ultimate Disaster Proofing

The resilient seeds needed are the end-product of a long evolution. Plants have accomplished much since starting on solid ground some 500 million years ago, and they have gained far more experience on how to persist on this Earth than we have. They’ve endured the harshest conditions and have been tested and retested to the limits. Those plant species that made it know how to hold on even when heat, drought, erosion, and other perils will cause other plants to fail. Insects, animals, and humans depend on these plants for sustenance, shelter, and more.

In fact, plants have been essential for all living things in the planet’s history, and their germplasm will be crucial for the future. Humans are the new kids on the block, and our cavalier attitude toward the genetic richness of this inconspicuous and diverse greenery has gotten us into the current dilemma.

Global Boiling

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA, July 2023 was the hottest month based on NASA’s records dating back to the 1880s. In the United States, a rising percentage of the population has been confronted by extreme weather events: storms, floods, fires, landslides, long-lasting extreme heat, smoke, toxic air pollution, and drought.

To pick just one day: on July 13, more than 100 million people in several states in the United States faced extreme weather alerts. Then, by July 28, nearly 200 million Americans were under extreme weather alerts, and United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres announced that the “era of global boiling has arrived.”

Extreme weather change is no longer something remote and abstract; it is with us, and it is real. We feel it, live it, and must deal with it. It saps energy, sabotages productivity, and destroys livelihoods. The heat boils the human body and precipitates illness and death. Governments, including our own, appear unprepared to deal with the consequences of global warming—their responses look inadequate or sluggish. And to be fair, all this might be too much for our institutions and agencies to handle.

Unprepared to Survive the Climate Catastrophe

A closer look at October 2023 figures provided by the Danger Season map, released by the Union of Concerned Scientists, reveals how the situation is slowly spiraling out of control, as a whopping “96 percent of people in the United States faced an extreme weather alert during Danger Season 2023.”

This climate catastrophe has thrown up a new set of challenges to reckon with at home and globally. While there is a vast Pentagon apparatus in place to protect Americans against threats from abroad—real or invented—we seem unprepared to protect the U.S. population who are being subjected to extreme weather aggression.

Increasingly, images of people who have lost everything in a storm or a wildfire have become common. Often depleted by shock, stress, and the elements, looking worse for wear, they are seen putting on a brave face for the camera, and saying they are thankful to have survived. Then, in tune with their reputation as can-do Americans, they make pledges to rebuild. But the question remains: how? The costs of reconstruction have risen sharply during the last few years. And what about the required homeowners’ insurance that’s far too expensive for many or unavailable altogether?

The big insurance companies, like State Farm General Insurance Company and Allstate Corporation, have stopped providing insurance coverage to new homeowners since June 2023 in climate-stricken states like California and Florida. But these are only the aftermath stories. Just like the people left behind by the weather-related calamities, these stories will rapidly fade away from public attention, when they are no longer deemed newsworthy. But make no mistake: the survivors of these catastrophes are alive. They feel and think.

Desertification of the Sahara

At this point, it is helpful to recall that long ago, the world’s largest hot desert was a lush green place. Between 11,000 and 4,000 years ago, what we now know as the Sahara had rivers, lakes, abundant vegetation, thriving wildlife, and human populations. Later, during Roman times, Tunisia and then Egypt became the breadbaskets of the empire.

Yet today, blending with and bordering on the great Sahara Desert, these countries, which receive little rain, must import much of their wheat to feed their people. What happened? A cyclical change occurred due to the “changing orbital conditions of the [E]arth,” as it has happened since time immemorial.

The Earth’s orbital axis affects climate change. It wobbles. That’s called “the polar motion,” leading to a tilt that alters the angle of solar penetration in the atmosphere. The greater the axial tilt angle, the more extreme our seasons become. This is what happened across the vast Sahara area.

This prompted the desertification of the Sahara, which is “land degradation in arid, semiarid, and subhumid areas, accruing from multiple factors.”

Our continued disregard for nature has led to the expansion of the Sahara Desert, which seems to have grown by 10 percent since 1920. “The results suggest that human-caused climate change, as well as natural climate cycles, caused the desert's expansion,” according to the National Science Foundation.

Ecosystems interact, blend, cooperate, accommodate, get along, and find solutions.

In contrast, humans tend to focus on a problem, plunge in, intervene, and achieve good results in a linear fashion, which may produce unintended side effects and disturbances that can escalate, cause severe difficulties, and even end up in ecological collapse. Projects may succeed in the short term and make a mess in the long term.

These risks shouldn’t scare doers away, but perhaps this could teach us to have far more respect, insight, and even a little awe about the marvelous, interconnected functioning of natural systems. Fit in with it instead of fighting and wrecking it.

Solutions That Become Problems

One instance of how a temporary solution led to more problems comes to mind: the development, use, misuse, and final banning of DDT in 1972. Did we get rid of a bad and toxic habit? Yes, for a while, but then we went a step further and invented neonicotinoid pesticides, or neonics, and these neurotoxins harm the insect’s nerves. Neonics are widely used to coat seeds to protect plants from bugs. But they do much more: they kill pollinators, birds, and butterflies, persist in the environment, and leak into surface water, groundwater, and the soil.

As Amy van Saun of the Center for Food Safety wrote, “Now, almost half of all U.S. farmland is planted with pesticide-coated seeds.” The EPA still permits the use of neonicotinoids. They are super-toxic: one GMO corn seed coated with a neonicotinoid can kill more than 80,000 bees or one songbird, according to Saun. In 2023, scientists discovered that more than half of all species live in the soil, and here we are, saturating that valuable earthly skin with poisons.

It’s not proven that Albert Einstein said it, but he may have done so, and this quote fits the pesticide charade perfectly: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” And that is what we do by holding on to the same bad habits.

How We Tipped the Balance

We have disturbed the equilibrium in nature because of our bad habits, which have caused irreversible damage to the planet. For instance, humanity influenced the Earth’s wobble and made the prolonged transition from wet to arid much faster in some regions than others. They initiated desertification. How? Archeologist David Wright thinks that “humans and their goats tipped the balance.”

Archeological and environmental data show that with the beginning of pastoralism, the raising of domesticated grazing animals, and overgrazing, the elimination of local grasses and plants spread. This changed the albedo, the amount of sunlight reflected off the ground’s surface. Concurrently, subtle orbital changes and atmospheric fluctuations reduced the monsoon rainfall. The result was an unrelenting loss of vegetation, a decreasing albedo, and rising temperatures.

In contrast, an increasing albedo signifies more snow and ice on the planet, and more sunlight is reflected back to space. This allows the planet to stay cooler.

For the Sahara, the combination of human activity decreased albedo, and erasure of the green mantle put regions of this vast terrain on the fast track to desertification.

Another interesting case in point based on the latest research and related to a shift in the Earth’s rotational axis is happening right now—with a focus on water. Anyone not infected by hubris would assume that humans are too inconsequential to initiate momentous orbital alterations, but evidence shows they can do it. Moving and redistributing mass on Earth impacts the planet’s rotation. It makes sense: if you load one side of a vessel—car or boat—with greater weight, there will be a tilt.

Published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters in June 2023 is a study by geophysicist Ki-Weon Seo and his team at Seoul National University that researched the impact of water (which includes shrinking ice sheets, glaciers, and snowpacks in the Rocky Mountains or other mountain ranges) on Earth’s rotation.

Seo’s latest findings show that “among climate-related causes, the redistribution of groundwater has the largest impact on the drift of the rotational pole.” Water is heavy, and the rotational pole “has shifted almost one meter in a 20-year period due to groundwater being pumped from one location.”

If just 20 short years of depleting groundwater can shift Earth’s rotational pole, where does this leave us in the arid U.S. Southwest and West? As long as we insist on extreme and unsustainable practices we can expect more dramatic results.

Examples of such practices include growing large-scale water-thirsty irrigated crops like alfalfa in Arizona to feed cattle and dairy cows in other countries; filling every private swimming pool in water-starved states; ignoring about 13 percent of evaporation from our antediluvian way of storing, moving, and managing water (ancient civilizations had somewhat smarter methods); and allowing some 1.5 million grazing cattle to erase native plants on millions of acres of public land whose forests are scorched by wildfires each year.

It is no wonder that we are facing a climate crisis in response to this abuse. It also becomes clear why our age is called the Anthropocene: geological time now seems to be the bygone past; it’s too slow for contemporary Masters of the Universe. The majority of us tend to shoot first and ask questions later. Is that why we are pumping groundwater like there is no tomorrow, stamping out native vegetation, rushing toward desertification, and endangering the food supply?

Little Steps and Multiplying Seeds

It does not have to be this way. The world is beautiful, and we do not have to passively witness how it gets despoiled. People can vote, volunteer for seed-collecting agencies, tend community gardens, rewild small city plots, and get kids involved locally. Or they can do things alone, as independent individuals. Equally, no one is forced to outwait the endless political jousting and the tiresome struggles with vested interests. After all, we have agency, or don’t we?

By simply multiplying one seed collected, one plant raised, one bee spared, less red meat eaten, no food wasted, and personal fossil fuel use reduced as much as possible, there can soon be some significant positive results. As Eduardo Galeano understood: “Many small people, in small places, doing small things can change the world.”

Author Bio: Erika Schelby is the author of Looking for Humboldt and Searching for German Footprints in New Mexico and Beyond (Lava Gate Press, 2017) and Liberating the Future from the Past? Liberating the Past from the Future? (Lava Gate Press, 2013), which was shortlisted for the International Essay Prize Contest by the Berlin-based cultural magazine Lettre International. Schelby lives in New Mexico.

 This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

 

The only way to steer American democracy to safety is to wrest money out of the claws of the wealthiest elites, who now control finances rivaling the economies of whole nations.

By Sonali Kolhatkar

As we count down toward the 2024 general election, we should expect to hear from media pundits about candidates and their viability, swing states and the electoral college, likely voters and poll results, and much more. Occasionally we may hear about some issues of importance. Most likely, we will hear little about the urgent need for wealth redistribution in the United States. Extreme inequality remains an invisible scourge underlying so much of what ails society and, even when discussed, is touted as an unavoidable and inevitable outcome of our economy.

However, there is abundant evidence that wealth inequality is the product of intentional design and the idea that what is good for billionaires is good for society. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Switzerland-based global bank UBS just released its 2023 Billionaire Ambitions report and concluded, “For the first time in nine editions of the report, billionaires have accumulated more wealth through inheritance than entrepreneurship.” Benjamin Cavalli, Head of Strategic Clients at UBS Global Wealth Management said, “This is a theme we expect to see more of over the next 20 years, as more than 1,000 billionaires pass an estimated [$5.2 trillion] to their children.”

That’s more than the economy of the entire United Kingdom. It’s more than the economies of Canada and Mexico combined.

The UBS report was not a critical one and hardly blinked an eye about the obscenity of wealth being hoarded in dynasties. About half of all billionaires around the world use UBS’s banking services, so the bank merely analyzed the investment habits of its most important clients. It did so candidly, referring to “the great wealth transfer” from one generation to the next, avoiding mention of the wealth transfer from the majority of the public to an elite minority.

The report also declared with pride that intent on “continuing the current family legacy, 60% of heirs want to enable future generations to benefit from their wealth.” Of course, they meant future generations of their own families, not in general.

But this wealth transfer is directly the result of tax codes written to benefit the uber-rich. ProPublica’s 2021 analysis of the tax returns of the richest Americans found that they paid an average of 3.4% in taxes, employing armies of lawyers to exploit every loophole carved out to offer special advantages to wealthy elites. Meanwhile, middle-class and working-class Americans pay double-digit tax rates. What this amounts to is collective theft from government revenues.

It’s time to reverse this trend by resorting to a concerted project of wealth redistribution. It’s time to wrest billions, if not trillions, out of the hands of billionaires and their heirs and pour it back where it belongs: to the rest of us.

Call it socialism—which is what the pro-rich rightwing GOP does—or call it progressive taxation, or economic justice. It doesn’t matter; the nation’s fiscal conservatives will demonize any ideas of wealth redistribution and will attempt to instill baseless fears of creeping communism, no matter what specific language we use around fairness. So, we might as well start spelling it out instead of trying to appease the right. After all, there’s a reason why conservatives and wealthy elites want the public to be afraid of socialism: they’re terrified that Americans might be thrilled to embrace policies such as wealth redistribution through taxation.

And if we need any more reasons to put a bullseye on billionaire wealth, it turns out they are vicious, dangerous fascists, whose children are an even more callous lot than their parents.

Billionaires don’t need the protections that democracy offers: earned benefits like Social Security or Medicare, access to free or affordable health care including abortion, labor and wage protections, and due process (they can buy the best legal help when they get in trouble).

In fact, democracy is a threat to their wealth hoarding, which is why they are backing the most dangerous demagogue to have ever occupied the White House: Donald Trump. Economic analyst and former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich lists the numerous billionaires backing Trump for a second term and cites Trump’s promise to wealthy elites, that he plans to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” Wealthy elites helped bring us Trump’s first term, and they’re itching for a second.

Why wouldn’t billionaires back fascism? It benefits them in ways democracy doesn’t. Indeed, billionaires exist as a design flaw in democracy. The greater the number of billionaires and the greater the wealth they hoard, the weaker the democracy that binds them.

Legislation like Senator Ron Wyden’s Billionaire Income Tax is what they fear if democracy trumps fascism. Wyden’s bill is so modest that it doesn’t target wealth, only income, and would affect fewer than 1,000 Americans, trimming off tiny slivers of their unprecedented hoardings, leaving them as fabulously wealthy as before. After all, is there a real difference between being worth $10 billion versus $9.9 billion?

As to the children of billionaires being worse than their parents, there is a small mention in the UBS report of how heirs of billionaires are far less philanthropic than first-generation billionaires: “while more than [two-thirds] (68%) of first-generation billionaires stated that following their philanthropic goals and making an impact on the world was a main objective of their legacy, less than a third (32%) of the inheriting generations did so.” One could conclude that empathy among children of the ultra-wealthy drops by half each generation. This could be a generation even more determined to fund and fuel fascism in order to protect their riches compared to their parents.

The wealthy are so secure in the protections they have from democratic curbs on their financial power that their biggest worries, as per the UBS report, include “geopolitical tensions,” inflation, recession, and higher interest rates. Fears around a “tight jobs market” and “stricter sustainability rules,” fall low on their list. In other words, they feel secure against threats of wage rebellions and government regulations.

And so, as we hurtle toward authoritarian aristocracy, we must normalize the idea of wealth redistribution. There is no good reason against it, not a single one. We can have either billionaires or democracy, not both.

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

 

A fight over extending provisions of Trump’s tax cuts is at stake in November’s election. Ultimately, the race is about money.

By Sonali Kolhatkar

There are many issues on the line this election year but one that gets little attention is former President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax reform law that cut taxes on the wealthiest Americans and corporations. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanently reduced the tax rate for big corporations from an already-low 35 percent to a ridiculously minuscule 21 percent. It also lowered tax rates for the wealthiest people from nearly 40 percent to 37 percent. Several provisions of that law are set to expire in 2025, making this November’s Congressional and Presidential elections particularly critical to issues of economic fairness and justice.

A few months after Trump signed the bill, he boasted, “We have the biggest tax cut in history, bigger than the Reagan tax cut. Bigger than any tax cut.” It became a common refrain for him when touting his achievements. But, Trump, who was known for breaking all records on lying to the public while in office, conflated many different facts to come up with a positive-sounding falsehood in a nation already primed by the likes of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton to view taxation as anathema. Trump’s tax cuts as a whole were the eighth largest in history. But his corporate tax cut was in fact the single largest reduction ever in that category.

Wealthy corporations have for years lobbied for and won so many carve-outs and loopholes to the U.S. tax system, and hidden so much money in offshore tax havens that their pre-2017 effective tax rates were already far lower than the official rates. Then, Trump lowered them even more. Imagine telling the American public that you are responsible specifically for the biggest tax cuts to the biggest corporations in U.S. history. It wasn’t a good look. And so, he lied, saying that he signed history’s biggest tax cut overall.

In the simplest terms, taxes are a way to pool collective resources so we can have the things we all need for safety and security. Progressive taxation is when wealthier individuals (and corporations) are taxed at higher-than-average rates because the richer one is, the less excess money one needs beyond one’s basic necessities. Progressive taxation ensures that wealth inequality doesn’t spiral out of control and helps ensure money that’s being sucked upwards, gets redistributed downward. When wealthy elites pay fewer taxes, they are effectively stealing from the public.

Since the cuts have been in place, many studies have attempted to assess their impact on the U.S. economy. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities concluded in a March 2024 report that “[t]ogether with the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts enacted under President Bush (most of which were made permanent in 2012), [Trump’s] law has severely eroded our country’s revenue base.”

Trump’s law accelerated the draining of our collective revenues to fund the things we need. Even the fiscally conservative Peter G. Peterson Foundation concluded that, as a result of Trump’s law, “The United States collects fewer revenues from corporations, relative to the size of the economy, than most other advanced countries.”

Trump’s tax cuts were quite literally regressive, rewarding the already rich. A 2021 ProPublica report found that just one last-minute provision to the bill demanded by Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) for so-called pass-through corporations benefited a handful of the wealthiest people in the nation: “just 82 ultrawealthy households collectively walked away with more than $1 billion in total savings, an analysis of confidential tax records shows.” It only cost about $20 million in bribes to Johnson (i.e., donations to the Senator’s reelection campaign) to enact this windfall.

It’s no wonder that the rich were thrilled with Trump’s presidency and that his virulent white supremacy and fascist leanings were not deal breakers.

It’s also unsurprising that wealthy elites are backing a second term for Trump. They want an extension of those tax bill provisions that are expiring in 2025, and perhaps an even bigger tax cut, if they can get it. If those provisions are left to expire, people making more than $400,000 a year—the top 2 percent of earners—will see an increase in taxation in 2025.

This is a demographic that is already prone to tax cheating given the IRS’s recent announcement that 125,000 Americans making between $400,000 and $1 million a year have simply refused to file taxes since 2017.

If the GOP wins control of the Senate and the House of Representatives this fall, and if Trump beats President Joe Biden, those cuts will become permanent. A GOP sweep in November will also usher in a new wave of threats to people of color, LGBTQ people, especially transgender communities, labor rights, and reproductive justice, as well as an escalation to the already-dire Israeli genocide in Gaza that Biden is fueling. It’s hard to believe but many Americans seem to have forgotten the horrors of 2016 to 2020.

But, at its heart, this election will be about money, for it will take a lot of money to fund the GOP’s reelection campaigns in order for moneyed forces to ensure they retain control of more money—democracy, justice, and equity be damned.

For Trump, this is even more important given his legal challenges. He’s relying on small-dollar donations from his base to cover his mounting legal fees and has had to post a $91 million bond to cover the fines he faces from a defamation lawsuit by E. Jean Carroll. The more desperate Trump gets in his bid to secure the White House, the more willing he and his party will be to sell the nation to the highest bidder. And, he will lie to the public by conflating tax cuts for the rich with tax cuts for all.

We ought to think of tax cuts in terms of public revenue theft. When the wealthy win lowered taxes, they are stealing money from the American public as a whole. As per the U.S. Senate Budget Committee, permanently extending Trump’s tax cuts will result in a loss of $3.5 trillion in revenues through the year 2033. That’s highway robbery.

There are many issues on the line this election year but one that gets little attention is former President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax reform law that cut taxes on the wealthiest Americans and corporations. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanently reduced the tax rate for big corporations from an already-low 35 percent to a ridiculously minuscule 21 percent. It also lowered tax rates for the wealthiest people from nearly 40 percent to 37 percent. Several provisions of that law are set to expire in 2025, making this November’s Congressional and Presidential elections particularly critical to issues of economic fairness and justice.

A few months after Trump signed the bill, he boasted, “We have the biggest tax cut in history, bigger than the Reagan tax cut. Bigger than any tax cut.” It became a common refrain for him when touting his achievements. But, Trump, who was known for breaking all records on lying to the public while in office, conflated many different facts to come up with a positive-sounding falsehood in a nation already primed by the likes of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton to view taxation as anathema. Trump’s tax cuts as a whole were the eighth largest in history. But his corporate tax cut was in fact the single largest reduction ever in that category.

Wealthy corporations have for years lobbied for and won so many carve-outs and loopholes to the U.S. tax system, and hidden so much money in offshore tax havens that their pre-2017 effective tax rates were already far lower than the official rates. Then, Trump lowered them even more. Imagine telling the American public that you are responsible specifically for the biggest tax cuts to the biggest corporations in U.S. history. It wasn’t a good look. And so, he lied, saying that he signed history’s biggest tax cut overall.

In the simplest terms, taxes are a way to pool collective resources so we can have the things we all need for safety and security. Progressive taxation is when wealthier individuals (and corporations) are taxed at higher-than-average rates because the richer one is, the less excess money one needs beyond one’s basic necessities. Progressive taxation ensures that wealth inequality doesn’t spiral out of control and helps ensure money that’s being sucked upwards, gets redistributed downward. When wealthy elites pay fewer taxes, they are effectively stealing from the public.

Since the cuts have been in place, many studies have attempted to assess their impact on the U.S. economy. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities concluded in a March 2024 report that “[t]ogether with the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts enacted under President Bush (most of which were made permanent in 2012), [Trump’s] law has severely eroded our country’s revenue base.”

Trump’s law accelerated the draining of our collective revenues to fund the things we need. Even the fiscally conservative Peter G. Peterson Foundation concluded that, as a result of Trump’s law, “The United States collects fewer revenues from corporations, relative to the size of the economy, than most other advanced countries.”

Trump’s tax cuts were quite literally regressive, rewarding the already rich. A 2021 ProPublica report found that just one last-minute provision to the bill demanded by Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) for so-called pass-through corporations benefited a handful of the wealthiest people in the nation: “just 82 ultrawealthy households collectively walked away with more than $1 billion in total savings, an analysis of confidential tax records shows.” It only cost about $20 million in bribes to Johnson (i.e., donations to the Senator’s reelection campaign) to enact this windfall.

It’s no wonder that the rich were thrilled with Trump’s presidency and that his virulent white supremacy and fascist leanings were not deal breakers.

It’s also unsurprising that wealthy elites are backing a second term for Trump. They want an extension of those tax bill provisions that are expiring in 2025, and perhaps an even bigger tax cut, if they can get it. If those provisions are left to expire, people making more than $400,000 a year—the top 2 percent of earners—will see an increase in taxation in 2025.

This is a demographic that is already prone to tax cheating given the IRS’s recent announcement that 125,000 Americans making between $400,000 and $1 million a year have simply refused to file taxes since 2017.

If the GOP wins control of the Senate and the House of Representatives this fall, and if Trump beats President Joe Biden, those cuts will become permanent. A GOP sweep in November will also usher in a new wave of threats to people of color, LGBTQ people, especially transgender communities, labor rights, and reproductive justice, as well as an escalation to the already-dire Israeli genocide in Gaza that Biden is fueling. It’s hard to believe but many Americans seem to have forgotten the horrors of 2016 to 2020.

But, at its heart, this election will be about money, for it will take a lot of money to fund the GOP’s reelection campaigns in order for moneyed forces to ensure they retain control of more money—democracy, justice, and equity be damned.

For Trump, this is even more important given his legal challenges. He’s relying on small-dollar donations from his base to cover his mounting legal fees and has had to post a $91 million bond to cover the fines he faces from a defamation lawsuit by E. Jean Carroll. The more desperate Trump gets in his bid to secure the White House, the more willing he and his party will be to sell the nation to the highest bidder. And, he will lie to the public by conflating tax cuts for the rich with tax cuts for all.

We ought to think of tax cuts in terms of public revenue theft. When the wealthy win lowered taxes, they are stealing money from the American public as a whole. As per the U.S. Senate Budget Committee, permanently extending Trump’s tax cuts will result in a loss of $3.5 trillion in revenues through the year 2033. That’s highway robbery.

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

 This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

A platform of California Climate and Agriculture Network would move billions of dollars into the hands of farmers and ranchers willing to adopt regenerative food and farming systems.

By April M. Short

When it comes to climate change contributors—like greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and water pollution—large-scale farmers and ranchers are among the worst culprits in the U.S. and worldwide. However, these very farmers and ranchers could wind up leading the way out of the ecological nightmare humans have created, and toward an equitable, livable future.

“Farmers and ranchers—with policies and funding that help them take risks and try new approaches—can make the transition to climate resilience,” says Renata Brillinger. She is co-founder and executive director of the California Climate and Agriculture Network (CalCAN), a coalition working since 2009 to advance state and federal policies that support sustainable and organic agriculture to catalyze climate solutions.

“These are ‘no-regrets’ solutions that offer many environmental benefits while improving the health and profitability of farmers and rural communities,” she says. “Investments made now will return huge dividends over time.”

Brillinger is referencing the solutions proposed by the report, “A Climate Platform for California Agriculture,” comprising two parts—State of the State and Tools for Transformation. CalCAN compiled the platform to outline the current ecological issues being faced by agriculture, the enormous potential of the industry to bring about the changes and solutions needed to combat the impacts of agriculture on climate change, and the specific channels of funding necessary for these solutions. The report calls for $1 billion to be invested per year in sustainable, regenerative agriculture in the state.

The platform, guided by a panel of 16 multidisciplinary reviewers, is the result of “a tremendous amount of consultation and listening,” Brillinger says. More than 60 farmers, researchers, agriculture professionals, and advocates weighed in with creative solutions and insights. She says the most rewarding part of the project has been this “community of thought leaders working on multi-beneficial, nature-based approaches to growing food.”

At its outset, the platform’s website invites the state’s “policymakers, journalists and stakeholders” to get involved to support climate-resilient agriculture systems, stating that the platform “is a call to action to work together towards a climate-resilient future.”

A Call for Urgency

As demonstrated by the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic beginning in 2020, our globalized food systems are already fragile and frayed. Scientists agree that climate change will only continue to worsen, which will cause significant additional strain on our food systems. Experts at the World Economic Forum predict that climate change and the problems it creates, including food system collapse, will be the number one crisis humanity faces in the coming decade.

Brillinger says climate change is already “creating widespread disruptions in our food and farming system.”

“Farmers and ranchers face unprecedented challenges with increasingly scarce water, extreme heat, flooding and wildfire events, and unpredictable weather and pest patterns. Even experienced farmers are struggling to stay in business and new farmers face not only climate-related challenges but also a lack of access to affordable, secure land,” she says, noting that this combined with ongoing structural and discriminatory barriers, most heavily impacts farmers of color and communities that are already struggling the most.

“Climate-related crop losses are on the rise, driving up food prices and contributing to an increase in the number of people who are food insecure and hungry,” she says. “Farmworkers are on the front lines, exposed to unhealthy air and facing the reality of working on more dangerously hot days. They and their families and communities are among California’s most economically vulnerable people and also often lack access to healthy food, safe drinking water, and homes that are affordable, air-conditioned, and energy efficient.”

The high stakes of the moment, she says, call for prioritizing an urgent reenvisioning of the way we grow food.

Brillinger says while California has made some relatively significant progress to incentivize farmers and ranchers to adopt practices that benefit the environment, “there is a long way to go to reach the state’s various 2030 climate goals. The [platform] is a call to act with more urgency and ambition.”

About 15 years ago, CalCAN came about as a result of the state’s Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (AB 32), a landmark piece of legislation that established a 2020 greenhouse gas reduction target.

Brillinger says much of the money invested in green solutions following AB 32 focused on solutions in “renewable energy, electric vehicles, and projects in urban areas,” explaining that CalCAN came together as a coalition to make the case for public investments in sustainable agriculture.

Over the years, CalCAN has had notable success; Brillinger notes that since 2009 California has developed various grant programs to fund healthy soils and water conservation practices, alternative manure management technologies that reduce methane emissions from dairies, and a farmland conservation program to limit greenhouse gas-intensive urban sprawl.

Brillinger says that between 2017 and 2023, California invested about $800 million in sustainable agriculture, which she notes is “a good start but insufficient.” She says to date, the money to support sustainable agriculture in California has come from the state’s cap-and-trade program, the general fund, and some from a natural resources bond measure.

In 2023, under the Biden administration, “the federal government finally started to fund agricultural climate solutions, notably through the Inflation Reduction Act that includes $20 billion over five years,” Brillinger says.

In one of the sections of the platform called, “Funding the Transition,” CalCAN delves into the funding sources mentioned above, as well as additional sources that could make up the $1 billion per year the organization has determined necessary to implement strategies outlined in the platform’s report.

“This may sound like a lot of money, so as a reference, consider that California spends about $1.1 billion per year on residential energy efficiency, $3.7 billion on wildfire resilience, and $2 billion on drought and flood management,” Brillinger points out. “We see the money coming from a variety of public, private, and philanthropic sources, including the sources described above that are already being tapped.”

Brillinger shared three examples of the potential funding sources:

1. The state legislature is in the final stages of deliberating over a multi-billion dollar climate bond measure that will likely be on the November 2024 ballot—for three years, we have been part of a coalition advocating that it should include $3.7 billion for climate-smart agriculture, farmworker housing, and regional food infrastructure.
2. The state legislature should assess levying additional fees on fossil fuel-based pesticides and fertilizers to support research, technical assistance, and incentives that transition our farming system away from these GHG-producing inputs.
3. The federal Farm Bill reauthorization process currently underway presents opportunities to increase federal investments that benefit all farmers in the country. CalCAN is co-leading an effort to include $1.5 billion in the Farm Bill to fund alternative manure management practices, modeled on California’s successful program (more on the COWS Act here).

She says the biggest challenge in creating the platform was deciding which recommendations to include.

To “narrow the options,” Brillinger says, CalCAN used the following principles to zero in on the most effective paths to agricultural climate resilience:

Climate Health—Farms and ranches adapt to and recover from climate shocks and are net sinks for GHGs rather than net sources.

Ecological Health—Food is produced in balance with natural resources while maximizing biological diversity.

Economic Health—Farmers and ranchers are profitable and productive, and the economies of rural communities are thriving.

Farmland Health—Productive agricultural land is permanently protected and there is abundant access to land for new and racially and culturally diverse farmers.

Human Health—The people who grow our food have safe working and living conditions and adequate wages and affordable housing, and rural communities have clean air and water and healthy food.

Addressing Inequity

The platform includes more than 50 policy recommendations, a summary of which is provided by an “at-a-glance” sheet. An executive summary of the report lists the “Tools for Transformation” required to develop these policy recommendations, including a section on “Addressing Systemic Inequity.” This part, Brillinger says, is essential to the larger goal of climate resilience in agriculture because we all fare better when the poorest and most vulnerable communities are taken care of.

“In California agriculture, there can be no resilient food production without investing in the health and well-being of the predominantly low-income Latino immigrant farmworkers who plant, tend, harvest, and process our food,” she says. “A truly resilient future must be centered on farming strategies that not only have climate benefits but also improve air and water quality and the health of farmworkers, their families, and rural communities.”

Brillinger adds that it is also the government’s responsibility to “redress past harms.”

“In agriculture as in all other aspects of our society, the current realities such as who owns land and who has rights to water are the result of a historic pattern of systemic racial injustice that includes the genocide of Indigenous peoples, the exploitation of various groups of immigrant laborers, and discriminatory laws that made it difficult or impossible for farmers of color to own farmland,” she says.

“The impact of these injustices continues to this day and has resulted in a vast consolidation of land and water resources that severely limits the ability of farmers of color, farmworkers, and the next generation of small family farmers to thrive and scale up agricultural climate solutions. Our ability to address these constraints and the continued pattern of racial discrimination will determine how meaningfully and quickly we will be able to move toward a future that includes a truly equitable, healthy, and resilient food and farming system.”

Weaving Existing Solutions

Much of what the platform recommends involves connecting people across various fields of expertise, and across different focuses, and creating networks and webs of resilience. Examples of these kinds of cross-pollinating solutions, so to speak, already exist in real-life ways. For instance, Brillinger says she is excited about a network of Soil Health Hubs that began launching in California in 2023, as a result of a collaboration between the California Association of Resource Conservation Districts and the Carbon Cycle Institute (a nonprofit organization and member of the CalCAN coalition). One example of these networks is the North Coast Soil Hub, which connects people working toward soil health in six northern California coastal counties: Humboldt, Lake, Marin, Mendocino, Napa, and Sonoma.

The idea, she says, is that an interconnected set of hubs around the state—connected to the best science, innovative growing techniques, technical expertise, and public funding sources—can bolster farmers already looking to reduce climate impacts.

Brillinger shares that CalCAN is leading a similar effort nationwide: the National Healthy Soils Policy Network, which is a group of farmer-centered organizations in 27 states working on healthy soils practices.

“As in California, this group is working on developing a network of regional hubs, each serving several states, to increase access by underserved farmers to state and federal climate and agriculture funding and programs,” she says.

Brillinger notes that Indigenous peoples have been growing food in regenerative ways for thousands of years, “while staying in balance with natural resource limits and coping with unpredictability, pests and diseases, and weather extremes.”

“They did so without the use of fossil fuel inputs or other practices common in the intensive form of agriculture that has been in use only for the past 70 years or so,” she says. “Organic and biodiverse farming systems most closely resemble these practices, and scaling them up is the best chance we have to transition to a climate resilient food system.”

: April M. Short is an editor, journalist, and documentary editor and producer. She is a co-founder of the Observatory, where she is the Local Peace Economy editor, and she is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute. Previously, she was a managing editor at AlterNet as well as an award-winning senior staff writer for Good Times, a weekly newspaper in Santa Cruz, California. Her work has been published with the San Francisco Chronicle, In These Times, LA Yoga, Pressenza, the Conversation, Salon, and many other publications.

 This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Known by its brand name Roundup, glyphosate is a clear and present danger to human health.

By Caroline Cox

Glyphosate, known by its famous brand name, Roundup, is a widely used herbicide (a pesticide designed to kill plants). It is a broad-spectrum herbicide that kills or damages all plant types: grasses, perennials, vines, shrubs, and trees. Glyphosate has been sold as an herbicide since 1974. Its use dramatically increased in the 21st century as its patents expired and genetically modified crop varieties that tolerated exposure to glyphosate became popular.

Experts now believe it is the “most heavily” used herbicide globally. In 2015, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen.

Glyphosate: Widespread Use and Exposure

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimated glyphosate usage in 2019—based on data collected between 2012 and 2016—and concluded that almost 300 million acres of farmland were treated with about 280 million pounds of glyphosate yearly. Another 24 million pounds of the herbicide is used every year in home yards, roadways, forestry, and turf, according to a 2020 analysis by the agency.

Given this enormous use of glyphosate in the United States, it is perhaps unsurprising that exposure to it is widespread. A unit of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did the largest and most comprehensive study to determine glyphosate exposure using urine collected from a sample of Americans selected between 2013 and 2014 to accurately represent the entire population. Researchers found that more than 80 percent of participants, who were six years and older, had been exposed to glyphosate. In discussing the results, the CDC suggested that food was an important source of exposure to the chemical. “Participants who had not eaten for eight or more hours had lower levels of glyphosate in their urine.”

The Salinas Study: Liver Diseases and Diabetes

A growing number of studies link exposure to glyphosate with various human health problems other than the cancer hazard that IARC evaluated. Typically classified as epidemiology, this research does not formally determine cause and effect but is more realistic and often more compelling than research done using laboratory animals or cell cultures.

One example of an epidemiology study comes from the agricultural town of Salinas, California. Starting in 1999, the University of California, Berkeley, scientists recruited pregnant mothers and then their children as volunteer participants in a study called the Center for the Health Assessment of Mothers and Children of Salinas (CHAMACOS), which was conducted over a period of more than 20 years. These “480 mother-child duos” mostly belonged to farmworker families in the Salinas area. The mothers provided their blood and urine samples and other health information during pregnancy, while the samples from children were collected when they were 5, 14, and then 18 years old. All of this data was used to answer essential questions about glyphosate exposure.

The CHAMACOS study compared teens with higher-than-average exposure to glyphosate as children to those with lower exposure. Teens with higher exposure to glyphosate and its primary breakdown product, aminomethylphosphonic acid (AMPA), were more likely to show signs of liver inflammation, meaning they had a higher risk of developing liver disease. They were also more likely to have metabolic syndrome (high blood pressure, high blood sugar, low levels of “good” cholesterol, and several other health problems), which could make them more susceptible to serious health concerns such as liver cancer, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes, later in life.

The study had several other interesting results. In the early years of the study (2000-2002), glyphosate exposures in children were infrequent and low. Most participants did not have glyphosate in their bodies. This changed dramatically as time went on. Glyphosate and AMPA were found in 80 to 90 percent of the 14-year-old participants. The researchers note that this mirrors the national and global increase in glyphosate use.

In addition, the Salinas study showed that glyphosate exposures in this agricultural farmworker community were similar to exposures across the country in people who were not farmworkers. According to the researchers, this suggests that the primary source of glyphosate exposure was food, concluding that “diet was a major source of glyphosate and AMPA exposure among… study participants… as indicated by higher urinary glyphosate or AMPA concentrations among those who ate more cereal, fruits, vegetables, bread, and in general, carbohydrates.”

American Women: Pregnancy Problems

Another example of epidemiology showing glyphosate hazards comes from a study of pregnant women living in California, Minnesota, New York, and Washington. This study found that more than 90 percent of these women were exposed to glyphosate and that higher exposures to glyphosate and AMPA during the second trimester were linked to shorter-than-normal pregnancies. The study participants represented all American pregnant women in terms of race, ethnicity, economic status, and urban versus suburban families. The report concluded that exposure to glyphosate “may impact reproductive health by shortening length of gestation.”

Canadian Study: Glyphosate in Food

A detailed evaluation of glyphosate exposure comes from a study of about 2,000 pregnant women in 10 cities across Canada between 2008 and 2011. Based on urine analysis and questionnaires, the researchers concluded that food was a more likely source of glyphosate exposure than household pesticide use or pesticide drift. The foods linked to higher glyphosate exposures were spinach, whole grain bread, soy and rice beverages, and pasta. The strongest link was “between consumption of whole grain bread and higher urinary glyphosate concentrations.”

Government Testing

Government agencies in North America have tested foods for glyphosate contamination. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration started testing food for glyphosate in 2016-2017. In more recent testing of more than 2,000 samples from 2020, the FDA found relatively high levels of glyphosate in lentils (up to 20 parts per million, or “ppm”), garbanzo beans (up to 12 ppm), and black beans (up to 1 ppm). The U.S. Department of Agriculture tested corn (unprocessed grain) for glyphosate in 2021. Glyphosate was found in about 35 percent of the samples tested. The highest contamination level was relatively low at 0.14 ppm.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) tested a much wider variety of foods (almost 8,000 samples) between 2015 and 2017. More than 40 percent were contaminated with glyphosate. Consistent with the FDA data, CFIA found relatively high levels of glyphosate in beans (up to 8 ppm), chickpeas (up to 3 ppm), and lentils (up to 3 ppm).

The researchers found other commonly eaten foods with relatively high glyphosate levels, including couscous (up to 1 ppm), pasta (up to 1 ppm), pearl barley (up to 2 ppm), oatmeal (up to 1 ppm), infant oatmeal (up to 2 ppm), and rye flour/flakes (up to 6 ppm). Two foods with somewhat lower concentrations, but important because they are eaten often, were flour (77 percent of the samples were contaminated; with levels up to 0.8 ppm) and pizza (90 percent of samples contaminated; with levels up to 0.5 ppm). The research by CFIA found that “The highest glyphosate levels were observed in pulses and wheat products.”

Consumer Advocacy Group Testing

Several nonprofit organizations have also conducted testing of popular foods for glyphosate contamination. This testing is beneficial because the results identify brands contaminated with the herbicide, which would typically not be part of the government agency testing. Some 2022 results from the Detox Project, a research platform, provide details about glyphosate residue levels for brands such as Village Hearth’s 100% whole wheat bread (1 ppm), 365 Whole Foods Market’s whole wheat bread (1 ppm), and Quaker Oats (0.5 ppm).

In some good news, the Environmental Working Group reported in 2023 that glyphosate contamination of oat cereals and other oat-based products has decreased, with the highest levels found in Quaker Oatmeal Squares (less than 0.5 ppm).

Organic Farming

Certified organic farmers do not use glyphosate or most other synthetic pesticides. Buying and eating organic food is an excellent way to reduce glyphosate exposure. For example, a 2020 peer-reviewed study found that glyphosate exposure in four U.S. families was reduced by 70 percent within six days after they switched to an organic diet. In the CFIA study of glyphosate contamination of Canadian foods, testing of more than 1,000 organic items found that 75 percent were free of glyphosate, and most of the remaining organic products had only small amounts of the chemical. Organic products can be contaminated by drift, contaminated water, or contaminated equipment, but these levels are typically low.

The amount of organic farmland in the U.S. was almost five million acres in 2021, and organic food sales topped $60 billion for the first time in 2022, according to a 2023 survey by the Organic Trade Association.

“Organic has proven it can withstand short-term economic storms. Despite the fluctuation of any given moment, Americans are still investing in their personal health, and, with increasing interest, in the environment,” said Organic Trade Association CEO Tom Chapman, according to a May 2023 press release.

If organic farming continues to expand and is made accessible to consumers across the U.S., a future with glyphosate-free food seems within reach.

Author Bio: Caroline Cox is a retired pesticide scientist. She was a staff scientist at the Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides from 1990 to 2006 and a research director and senior scientist at the Center for Environmental Health from 2006 to 2020. She has been writing about glyphosate hazards since the 1990s. She is a contributor to the Observatory

 This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.