Politics & Globalization
International trade agreements force the U.S. and other participting countries to "harmonize" food and envrironmental safety standards to the lowest common denominator. Often these agreements are negotiated behind closed doors, shutting out Congress and the public, while granting corporations and trade associations a seat at the table. It's no surprise that these agreements give transnational corporations "special rights", allowing companies to challenge individual countries' environmental, worker and food safety laws and regulations.
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Rose and Ronnie· Joe volunteer© 2008
With vaccine rollouts underway, humanity looks set to win the fight against the coronavirus. But some elites planning a post-coronavirus ‘Great Reset’ don’t want to go back to normal. Here’s what they have planned instead.
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Deb Haaland faces a difficult road ahead at the Department of the Interior, if her nomination by President-elect Joe Biden is confirmed. A tribal citizen of the Laguna Pueblo and a Democratic member of Congress from New Mexico, Haaland will be stepping into a minefield: a mixture of various aims imposed by her party’s centrist leadership, tribal interests, progressive causes, and the energy industry. For an Indigenous woman from New Mexico, it will be all the more fraught.
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It’s unlikely that Joe Biden expected that, of all his cabinet nominees, his choice for US agriculture secretary would cause the most blowback. Yet that is exactly what happened. The former secretary Tom Vilsack, fresh off the revolving door, is a kind of all-in-one package of what frustrates so many about the Democratic party.
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President-Elect Joe Biden has nominated Tom Vilsack as Agriculture Secretary.
This is bad news.
Tom Vilsack was “Mr. Monsanto” even before he started at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in 2009.
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A few months ago, a company called Capella Space launched a satellite capable of taking clear radar images of anywhere in the world, with incredible resolution. It can even see inside some buildings, including spotting airplanes inside hangars — though only in the case of lightweight structures.
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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez believes the Democratic Party needs new leadership, telling The Intercept in an interview that it’s time for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to go. But the left, she said, currently has no plan on how to fill the subsequent leadership vacuum.
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Biden’s transition team is packed with tech industry insiders. All those campaign donations from tech companies may turn out to have been a shrewd investment. The odds of a Biden administration taking on the power of the tech giants is only slightly better than those of a snowball staying cool in hell.
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After a summer and fall dominated by the imperative of defeating Donald Trump, progressive forces are entering a winter of discontent. Joe Biden has offered them little on the list of top personnel being named to his administration. While Sanders wants to maintain a cordial relationship with the incoming president, he doesn't like what he's seeing.
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On Tuesday, after some public tokenizing and horse trading, President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team crowned dairy industry lobbyist and former Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to lead the Department of Agriculture. Vilsack won out over House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn’s pick, Rep. Marcia Fudge, who was also backed by progressives.
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“Pandemics are like terrorist attacks: We know roughly where they originate and what’s responsible for them, but we don’t know exactly when the next one will happen. They need to be handled the same way — by identifying all possible sources and dismantling those before the next pandemic strikes.”
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