At Least These Goniffs Have Been Stopped for a Decade

I am referring, of course, to John Deere, who have been forced into a settlement that requires them to allow farmers to fix their own tractors.

The Right to Repair movement is generally associated with electronics, but its latest battle has been fought—and won—on an entirely different front: the ranches of America’s heartland. The issue at hand was a dispute between the Federal Trade Commission and tractor/farm equipment manufacturing company John Deere, and, specifically, a suit filed jointly by the FTC and five states against the company back in 2025. That suit was settled this week, and the settlement represents a resounding victory for the plaintiffs.

The FTC’s statement about the case accused the company of “illegally restrict[ing] the ability of farmers and independent technicians to repair Deere equipment, including tractors and combine [harvesters].” That statement was issued by then-FTC chair Lina Khan, who has since been removed from the position by the Trump administration and replaced by the more “deal-friendly,” in the words of the New York Times, Andrew Ferguson. (She has since served as part of NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s transition team.)

………

Nevertheless, John Deere’s eagerness to reap the amber waves of gain that could be had by redefining the concept of ownership has meant that they’ve spent the last decade doing their very best to make it difficult for anyone but authorized dealers to repair their machinery. In particular, as per the FTC’s statement on this week’s settlement, the company “makes the only software repair tools capable of performing all electronic repairs on Deere equipment…[but] has previously made such tools available only to its authorized dealers, forcing farmers to rely on authorized dealers for many necessary repairs.” And as Wien explained in 2025, those software tools are copyrighted, so “not only [were] [John Deere] being anti-competitive, it [was] literally illegal to compete with them.”

That’s all set to change with the settlement reached between the company and the FTC this week. The FTC’s statement on the matter explains that the terms of the settlement require John Deere to “provide farmers and independent repair providers with the same equipment repair resources, including applicable software capabilities, that it currently provides to authorized Deere dealers”—and to do so “for the next 10 years and under the supervision of the FTC and plaintiff states.” 

This is good.  What would have been better would have been to send some Deere senior executives to jail. 

F%$#! I May Have to Read Jane Austen Again

Youtuber Farm to Taber has a fascinating video about how Jane Austen explains how the issues of rural America are really issues of not particularly competent landed gentry, and not corporate agriculture.

I had to read Pride and Prejudice in high school, and I hated every page. 

I had little interest in the topic, which at the time I saw as little more than a Regency romance.

She makes a compelling case that the novel is a trenchant critique of the society of the time which can be applied to rural areas today. 

I am now thinking that I may have to reread that book 46 years after I nearly threw it out the window.

Yes

In response to the question, "Screwworm Is Back In Texas Cattle—Is DOGE To Blame?" the answer is, "Yes."

DOGE killed the programs fighting the flesh eating maggots, because they all are flesh eating maggots.

New World screwworm, a parasitic fly with larvae that burrow in healthy tissue of cattle, deer, horses and other warm-blooded animals, was discovered in La Pryor, Texas.

The case is the only one that has been identified in the country so far, according to the USDA, but a wider outbreak could severely impact already-suffering cattle numbers and put even more of a strain on ranchers as they spend money on treatment and prevention.

In turn, the price of beef—which has gone up roughly 75% since December 2020—could continue to rise.

The U.S. cattle herd is already at its lowest level in 75 years, and a major screwworm outbreak would cause more calves to die, adult cattle to lose weight and limit what animals are suitable for sale, meaning fewer pounds of beef reaching the market.

Even without a major outbreak, containment efforts may cause the government to implement widespread cattle movement restrictions, limit border crossings or impose quarantine on certain herds, all of which would further impact the nation’s cattle numbers.

The return of screwworm comes after the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, launched by the Trump administration, last year cut funding for a project dedicated to monitoring and containing New World screwworm in Central America.

The funding was axed days before the U.S. ended a temporary suspension of cattle imports from Mexico, meaning livestock was allowed to cross the border without any of the monitoring previously funded by the U.S. Agency of International Development (USAID).

Agriculture officials and cattle industry leaders raised alarm about the cuts at the time and, for the last several months, pleaded with the government to step in as they monitored screwworm infections moving north through Mexico—but they were ignored, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller told NBC News.

If the next Democratic President does not prosecute the sh%$ out of these folks, they will have betrayed their obligations at the most basic level.

Meatloaf for Dinner Again?

New rules from the Department of Agriculture will drastically increase the speed of lines in slaughter houses, which will results in more worker injuries, particularly repetitive stress injuries, and increase contamination, likely including a human finger or two.

Welcome to a reboot of Upton Sinclaire's The Jungle.

The country’s poultry and swine processing plants, already incredibly dangerous workplaces, are poised to get a green light from the Trump administration to vastly speed up the work. In February, the Agriculture Department released two proposed regulations to increase evisceration line speeds for hogs, chickens, and turkeys. The swine plant proposal removes the current maximum of 1,106 hogs an hour and instead imposes no limit at all, allowing companies “to determine their own line speeds,” which has never happened before. The proposed poultry rule, meanwhile, allows all chicken plants to run at 175 birds per minute, a limit that has only applied previously to plants involved in a pilot program. Turkey processing plants could increase from 55 to 60 birds per minute.

The rules, which come after the meatpacking industry has repeatedly lobbied for the ability to run lines as fast as possible, will almost certainly lead to more worker injuries. Workers will be left with chronic pain or amputated digits and limbs, but they will make these companies more money. “More meat, more profits,” noted Kathleen Fagan, an adjunct professor in the Case Western University school of medicine and a former medical officer at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA. The effects of this new rule will not only be felt by workers; it also threatens to let more foodborne pathogens infect Americans’ meat.

The industry, which is already made up of highly profitable conglomerates, has unsuccessfully tried for this before. Under President Barack Obama, it pressed for higher speeds overall; instead, the administration allowed 20 poultry plants to run faster as a pilot program. Under the first Trump administration, the industry petitioned to get rid of “arbitrary line speed limitations,” but rather than accede to that demand, more plants were allowed to apply for waivers to join the pilot and increase their speeds.

 

I Hurt All Over

I rented a tiller, and turned over the dirt for Sharon's* herb garden. 

My hands have finally stopped feeling numb. 

^*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

Gary Larson Was Right

Cows got tools!

More specifically, a cow in Switzerland (because, of course, Switzerland) has been documented using tools.

Scientists have been forced to rethink the intelligence of cattle after an Austrian cow named Veronika displayed an impressive – and until now undocumented – knack for tool use.

Witgar Wiegele, an organic farmer and baker from a small town in Carinthia near the Italian border, keeps Veronika as a pet and noticed that she occasionally played with sticks and used them to scratch her body.

………

Word soon got around and before long a video clip of the cow’s behaviour reached biologists in Vienna who specialise in animal intelligence. They immediately grasped the importance of the footage. “It was a cow using an actual tool,” said Dr Antonio Osuna Mascaró at the city’s University of Veterinary Medicine. “We got everything ready and jumped in the car to visit.” 

I have this image of one of the lab coated biologists running into the room shouting, "Road Trip!!!" 

………

Armed with a deck brush, Osuna Mascaró and his colleague Alice Auersperg set about testing Veronika’s skills. Through a series of field trials, the brown Swiss proved she could not only pick up the broom, but wield it according to the job at hand. If the broom was at an awkward angle, Veronika used her tongue to reposition it before clamping it in place with her teeth.

Veronika favoured the bristled end of the broom to scratch the tough skin on her back. But she switched to the smooth handle and scratched more gently when the itch was on more delicate, lower body areas such as her udders and belly, according to the study in Current Biology.

“At the beginning I thought this was the result of a mistake. Perhaps Veronika was not careful enough when selecting her tool for self-scratching,” Osuna Mascaró said. “But after a while we started to observe a pattern: Veronika indeed had a preference for using the broom end, but when she used the handle end she was doing so in a meaningful way.”

Tool use is well known in chimps, crows, dolphins and even octopuses. The latter have been filmed throwing shells at one another. But livestock have never been considered the sharpest of animals. Gary Larson’s 1982 Far Side cartoon, Cow Tools, shows a cow standing behind a table of oddly shaped objects. It confused scores of readers, including Larson’s mother, prompting him to explain: “While I have never met a cow who could make tools, I felt sure that if I did, they (the tools) would lack something in sophistication and resemble the sorry specimens shown.”

I, for one, welcome our new bovine overlords.

Signs of the Apocalypse

This was a documentary

Rampaging sheep in Germany.

About 50 wayward sheep broke off from their flock and stormed a discount supermarket in a German town, startling and delighting customers as the animals rushed to explore the aisles before being escorted from the premises.

The woolly incursion occurred on Monday during a routine seasonal migration of the sheep in the Bavarian municipality of Burgsinn. A few dozen of the sheep had other ideas about the route and made their way into a store of the Penny retail chain.

“It was impossible to tell whether the sheep were looking for something particular on offer or just wanted to warm up,” the company said in a statement, noting that the flock seemed particularly fond of the checkout area where shoppers and staff were present.

Witnesses said that while the animals resisted the urge to nibble their way through the fresh produce on display, their foray into the store left a path of destruction in the drinks section as their bustling knocked glass bottles and other products from the shelves.

This won't end well.

So Not a Surprise

The study which showed that the herbicide glyphosate was safe to humans, you know, the one that was literally bought and paid for by Monsanto, has been formally retracted.

Given that RFK, Jr. was counsel on a lawsuit against Monsanto about its health risks, and given that a law requires that the EPA review the chemical by the end of 2026, this raises some interesting questions.

It's pretty clear that Trump and his thugs do not want to make a fair review of the chemical, one which would likely restrict or ban it, but now one of the cornerstones of doing nothing has been knocked out.

In 2000, a landmark study claimed to set the record straight on glyphosate, a contentious weedkiller used on hundreds of millions of acres of farmland. The paper found that the chemical, the active ingredient in Roundup, wasn’t a human health risk despite evidence of a cancer link.

Last month, the study was retracted by the scientific journal that published it a quarter century ago, setting off a crisis of confidence in the science behind a weedkiller that has become the backbone of American food production. It is used on soybeans, corn and wheat, on specialty crops like almonds, and on cotton and in home gardens.

The Environmental Protection Agency still considers the herbicide to be safe. But the federal government faces a deadline in 2026 to re-examine glyphosate’s safety after legal action brought by environmental, food-safety and farmworker advocacy groups.

The E.P.A. has also faced pressure to act on glyphosate from the Make America Healthy Again movement, led by supporters of the health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who once served as co-counsel in a lawsuit against Monsanto over exposure to Roundup.

The 2000 paper, a scientific review conducted by three independent scientists, was for decades cited by other researchers as evidence of Roundup’s safety. It became the cornerstone of regulations that deemed the weedkiller safe.

But since then, emails uncovered as part of lawsuits against the weedkiller’s manufacturer, Monsanto, have shown that the company’s scientists played a significant role in conceiving and writing the study.

In the emails, Monsanto employees praised each other for their “hard work” on the paper, which included data collection, writing and review. One Monsanto employee expressed hope that the study would become “‘the’ reference on Roundup and glyphosate safety.” The pharmaceutical giant Bayer acquired Monsanto in 2018 for $63 billion.

I don't generally favor criminally charging researchers with criminal fraud and conspiracy, but this is a slam dunk, and their continued silence means that the conspiracy has been ongoing, and so that is not subject to the statute of limitations.

Charge the researchers, charge the Monsanto staff, charge the Monsanto executives. 

Now We Know Why Rudolph’s Nose Was So Bright

It turns out that because of their proclivity for eating lichen, and lichen's proclivity for absorbing radioactive fallout, reindeer are among the most radioactive creatures on earth, which must be a bummer for the Sámi,  Inuit, and Yupik peoples, for whom reindeer herding remains a cultural and dietary touchstone.

In 1986, after the Chernobyl disaster, the Earth Island Journal ran a story titled “Rudolph the Rad-Dosed Reindeer?” In the article, Gar Smith described fears that radioactive Cesium-137 had contaminated reindeer, threatening the health and livelihoods of the indigenous Sami people. Government officials tried to reassure people about the level of danger, but Smith remained skeptical.

In fact, scientists had been aware of fallout-contaminated reindeer for decades. In the 1960s, the discovery of contaminated caribou triggered a major public health investigation in Canada. Historian Jonathan Luedee describes how, in their efforts to unravel the mystery, scientists and politicians grappled with the reality of a nuclearized world.

“Between 1953 and 1958,” Luedee explains, “the US, UK, and the Soviet Union conducted more than 220 atmospheric nuclear tests,” leading to concerns about widespread ecological contamination. Caribou were already on scientists’ minds. Their population had been mysteriously declining, and Indigenous groups in northern Canada had long relied on caribou meat. Early radiation studies showed that caribou had “higher exposure levels than other grazing animals, including groups of animals located closer to nuclear testing sites,” Luedee writes. Then, in 1959, Canadian botanist Eville Gorham noted high levels of radioactive material in lichen.

After a brief testing pause, the Soviet Union resumed nuclear weapons tests in the Arctic skies in 1961. Fallout from years of testing gradually fell onto lichen. Animals grazed on the lichen, absorbing radioactive particles into their bones and their flesh.

……… 

After several more years, they determined that human exposure had peaked in 1965, then declined. But Luedee points out that “even at 1965 levels, the amount of Cesium-137 detected in caribou meat was more than 580 times greater than that found in Ottowa’s poultry sample.” 

On a personal note, I recall eating reindeer sausage when I was a child in Alaska, around 1967.

Sweet. 

Reminds Me of the Movie Over the Hedge

Every so often, you see a headline, and you think, "Way to reinforce stereotypes."

The headline, "Japanese Farmers Send Out Automated Laser Drones to Defend Chickens," is one of these heds.

It has a seriously dystopian robot anime vibe: 

Chicken farming is a fowl business. To make it, you’ll need extensive knowledge in animal husbandry, business finance, biosecurity, and mechanical repair. If one company in Japan has its way, that list could soon include “drone skills” as well.

A Japanese firm called NTT e-Drone Technology Company Ltd has developed a drone-laser system designed to scare wild birds and other unwanted visitors away from chicken coops, as reported by tech blog Tom’s Hardware.

The quadcopter system sports a payload consisting of a laser-grid projector not unlike those chintzy Christmas light shows from 2019. When deployed, the drone automatically navigates toward unwanted nuisance animals before blasting them with a dazzling array of red and green lasers.

Also, it reminds me of a movie I saw a while back:

Morons

Guess what?  After DOGE and its evil minions™ forced out 15,000 USDA employees, the US Department of Agriculture is scrambling to recruit new people to replace them.

Gee, hoocoodanode that firing all the folks who did the real work would result in no work getting done.

In testimony on Capitol Hill on Tuesday and Wednesday, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins confirmed that the U.S. Department of Agriculture is now looking to fill critical positions, after agreeing to pay more than 15,000 employees' salaries and benefits through September in exchange for their resignations.

………

But the need to fill positions so soon after letting people go has raised questions, including from Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee.

There are no questions here.

They are incompetent, though to be fair, this could be an attempt to allow right wing saboteurs to burrow into the bureaucracy, but my money is them being idiots.

It's Thursday ╭∩╮（︶︿︶）╭∩╮

Undeniably bad numbers, with 242,000 initial claims, well above the forecast of 220,000, while continuing claims rose to 1.89 million:

Applications for US unemployment benefits rose to a two-month high last week, at a time around the end-of-year holidays when data is volatile.

Initial claims increased by 17,000 to 242,000 in the week ended Dec. 7. The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey of economists called for 220,000 applications. A metric that helps smooth out volatility, the four-week moving average, rose as well and unadjusted data suggest the gains were spread across states.

Continuing claims, a proxy for the number of people receiving benefits, increased to 1.89 million in the previous week — which included the Thanksgiving holiday — according to Labor Department data released Thursday.

Also, the producer price index (PPI) rose by .4% last month led by ……… Eggs?

U.S. producer prices increased by the most in five months in November, but easing costs of services such as portfolio management fees and airline fares offered hope that the disinflationary trend remains in place despite stalled progress.

A surge in the price of eggs amid an avian flu outbreak accounted for much of the bigger-than-expected rise in producer inflation last month. Other details of the report from the Labor Department on Thursday were, however, mostly favorable, prompting economists to sharply lower their estimates for the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price measures tracked by the Federal Reserve for its 2% inflation target.

So bird flu is f%$#ing the poultry industry.

And, we are seeing an increase in infections being transmitted to people.  (And cows)

We may be seeing yet another pandemic in its early stages.

How About Some Good News?

It appears that hobbyist beekeepers are responsible for a net increase in colonies across the country.

These bees are better cared for, not trucked all over the country, and so are more resilient than their commercial counterparts, and this may prevent a shortage of pollinators:

There’s now a record number of honeybees humming in the U.S—and for many farmers, hobbyist beekeepers, and almond-milk lovers, the news is sweeter than honey.

Nearly a million bee colonies have been formed in the past five years, according to 2022 Census of Agriculture data from the USDA, boosting the total number of colonies to an all-time high of 3.8 million.

The record high has arrived after nearly 20 years of collapsing colonies, where bees died from exposure to poisonous pesticides, stress from cross-country transit to pollinate crops, invasive pests, and changes to habitat. While new colonies have formed, the threat of their collapse is still a very relevant danger.

One does wonder how anthropogenic climate change will factor into all of this.

 

osh%$

When one talks about potential zoonotic disease transfer, there is one animal that figures prominently, and that is the pig.

So the fact that bird flu has been found in pig is the proverbial big f%$#ing deal:

H5N1 bird flu virus has been found in a pig on a farm in Oregon, the first time the virus has been seen in a pig in the United States, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported Wednesday. A second pig may also have been infected, Oregon authorities later revealed.

………

Pigs are sometimes called a “mixing vessel” for flu viruses, because they can be infected with both bird flu viruses and human flu viruses. If the animals are co-infected at the same time with two or more viruses, the viruses can swap genes, potentially creating a hybrid virus that is better able to spread to and among people than bird flu viruses typically are. This phenomenon, called reassortment, is what gave rise to the 2009 H1N1 pandemic.

Because pigs can play this role, flu experts have been worried that the H5N1 virus currently spreading in cows in the United States could make its way to pigs — though any version of the H5N1 virus in pigs would be an unwelcome development.

Best evidence right now is that the 1918 influenza strain originated from bird that was subjected to a porcine "Shake and Bake" before jumping to humans.

This is not good.

Not a Surprise

Attempting to outflank right-to-repair legislation, John Deere made promises to ease repair of their tractors and other agricultural equipment.

They lied.

This is not a surprise.  Extracting maximum money to the detriment of their customers is a core business strategy for Deere:

US Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has sent a letter to John May, CEO of agricultural equipment maker Deere & Company, questioning whether John Deere is living up to the promises it made to support people's right to repair.

And if it's not fulfilling those promises, it may be failing in its obligations under America's Clean Air Act, she added.

In January 2023, following years of legal challenges from farmers wanting to simply fix their own farm equipment outside authorized dealerships, John Deere signed a memorandum of understanding with the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF).

The agreement [PDF] calls for the manufacturing giant to provide farmers and independent repair shops with the tools, software, and documentation necessary to fix broken Deere-made agricultural machines, such as tractors and harvesters. In exchange, the AFBF agreed "to refrain from introducing, promoting, or supporting federal or state 'Right to Repair' legislation" that goes beyond what's promised in the MOU.

Essentially, Deere promised to play nice and help people fix their machines, by providing the tools and support needed, and the federation would back off from pushing for tough laws enshrining the right to repair.

But according to Senator Warren's missive [PDF], dated Wednesday, John Deere has not lived up to those commitments, and the MOU looks like a gambit to sabotage strong right-to-repair legislation, which is being adopted in various states and has the support of the Biden administration. 

John Deere has been promising to play nice for some time, and they never keep their promises.

Stop negotiating, and fire up the lawsuits, lobbying for right to repair laws, and institute administrative actions to make their business plan untenable.

Trusting the company is a losing proposition.

Good News South of the Border

Monsanto has withdrawn its efforts attempting to roll back Mexico's efforts to protect its maize supply and genome.

Any news that includes a loss by Monsanto is good news:

After a four-year legal battle on multiple fronts with Mexico’s AMLO government, Monsanto has finally thrown in the towel. Last Tuesday, Mexico’s National Council of Humanities, Sciences and Technologies (Conahcyt) announced that two Mexican divisions of Monsanto — now subsidiaries of German chemicals giant, Bayer, which in 2018 acquired Monsanto in arguably the worst ever corporate merger — had dropped their law suits against the Mexican government over its intention to ban genetically modified corn.

As readers may recall, Mexico’s outgoing President Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador signed a presidential decree in 2020 seeking to ban all use and importation of GMO corn and the toxic weedkiller, glyphosate. His government has also placed import restrictions on white corn, which is generally used for human consumption in Mexico. The reasons cited for doing so include protecting the health of the population, the environment and Mexico’s genetic diversity of maize.

But this is not just about biotech. It is about increasing Mexican food sovereignty by reducing the threat of unfair US competition in the global corn market. As even the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, an international affairs think tank, recently conceded, US corn has dominated Mexico over the past three decades for one main reason: thanks to NAFTA, the scales have been stacked in the favour of US growers:

And US agriculture has been stacked in favor of the big agribusinesses, who seem determined to foist things like glyophosate.

The US standard or requiring proof of harm, as opposed to proof of safety, is a bad thing, both for genetic diversity and public health.

Learning Nothing

Once again, the public health establishment, with an assist from the USDA, is completely fumbling tracking of a new deadly disease, in this case, Avian flu, which, in case I have not mentioned it, currently has a mortality rate of about 50% among humans.

They aren't tracking it, because it's voluntary for farmers, because the Department of Agriculture is more interested in protecting farmers, particularly the large corporate megafarms, than it is in protecting the population from the next catastrophic pandemic:

Reliance on individual dairy farmers to help track the spread of avian flu is leaving the federal government without the data necessary to understand — and slow — the virus’ spread in the U.S.

The biggest challenge for the federal response, agriculture and public health officials told POLITICO, is that the more the virus spreads among dairy cows, the more opportunity it has to mutate and become easier to jump to additional humans. The number of documented infected dairy herds in recent weeks has risen rapidly — and several other states have confirmed initial infections in cows.

But many dairy farmers are declining to test their cows, leaving the nation vulnerable to a situation in which federal officials won’t have adequate warning if the virus evolves and poses a greater risk of infection to people. 

“The longer this is prevalent in animal farms and livestock operations across the state, the greater the opportunity is for future mutations in animals or human risks in different ways going forward,” said Tim Boring, who heads the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development in Michigan, a state with two confirmed human cases to date as it deals with a major bird flu outbreak among poultry and now dairy herds.

The federal response is largely focusing on voluntary efforts by farmers to help track and contain the outbreak. But many farms still have not signed up for USDA efforts to boost surveillance and testing for the virus. To date, 94 herds across 12 states have tested positive for bird flu, but the testing has covered a mere fraction of the nation’s nine million dairy cattle. Only about 45 exposed and symptomatic humans have been tested for avian flu, CDC Principal Deputy Director Nirav Shah said in a Thursday briefing with reporters.

Mark Lyons, a senior USDA animal health official, said federal officials are “still working closely to understand the breadth” of the bird flu outbreak in the nation’s dairy herds.

No they are not working closely to understand the breadth of the outbreak, they are doing their best to avoid a situation where farmers will be forced to cull herds because of the infection.

The solution is simple, mandate testing, develop criteria for culling herds, and provide restitution to the farmers who lose their herds in this way.

Of course, they will never do that.  That would be communism.

7 Fat Years, then 7 Lean Years

Economist Isabella Weber, best known as one of the first people to point out the phenomenon of  "Greedflation" is now saying that significant caches of grain should stockpiled to account for anthropogenic climate change driven agricultural collapse.

If this sounds familiar, that's because it sounds like Joseph's interpretations of Pharaoh's dreams in the bible:

Isabella Weber, the economist who ignited controversy with a bold proposal to implement strategic price controls at the peak of inflation and identified corporate profits as a driver of high prices, has proposed a new measure that could prevent food shortages and price gouging in the wake of another disruption of the global supply chains.

Weber’s new paper, published on Thursday, looks at how grain prices spiked in 2022 as Covid snagged supply chains and Russia invaded Ukraine. The price hikes helped to drive record profits for corporations while pushing inflation higher and increasing global hunger. In the paper, Weber and colleagues call for the creation of buffer stocks of grain that could be released during shortages or emergencies to ease price pressures.

Such a system would quell the volatility that is a hallmark of the grain market and keep food prices down, said Weber, the paper’s lead author and an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts.

My alma mater, but whatever.

………

Weber’s previous work on inflation went viral after the Guardian published her opinion piece. Her views were pilloried by some leading economists and rightwing media but have since gained support from policymakers and other economists.

A new entity proposed by Weber and her co-author, Merle Schulken, would work similarly to how the Biden administration has wielded the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to try to limit price spikes and collapses in the oil market. When demand for oil is strong and prices climb, the government can use its oil reserves to help bring prices down. When demand is weak and prices fall so low that pumping more oil becomes unprofitable, the government buys and stores barrels in its reserve.

In effect, a grain reserve could set a ceiling on prices to protect consumers, while establishing a floor to shield farmers when grain prices collapse.

Though the concept could work for most commodities, Weber focused on grains because they are easy to store and their prices affect other foods, like meat.

Her mouth to God's ear, I guess, or maybe it's the other way around.

United Fruit Finally Pays

Not enough, but a jury has found Chiquita liable for damages as a result of its policy of funding death squads.

It only took SEVENTEEN F%$#ING YEARS: 

In a landmark ruling in the fight for human rights, a jury has found banana giant Chiquita Brands International liable for financing the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a brutal paramilitary death squad. After 17 years of legal proceedings, the first set of victims and their families have finally obtained justice.

The jury’s decision reaffirms what we have long asserted: Chiquita knowingly financed the AUC, a designated terrorist organization, in pursuit of profit, despite the AUC’s egregious human rights abuses. By providing over $1.7 million in illegal funding to the AUC from 1997 to 2004, Chiquita contributed to untold suffering and loss in the Colombian regions of  Urabá and Magdalena, including the brutal murders of innocent civilians. This historic verdict also means some of the victims and families who suffered as a direct result of Chiquita’s actions will finally be compensated.

The victims welcomed this decision as recognition of their suffering and an opportunity for reparation. “It’s a triumph of a process that has been going on for almost 17 years, for all of us who have suffered so much during these years. There’s a debate about justice and reparation; we’ve been fighting since 2007. We’re not in this process because we want to be; it was Chiquita, with its actions, that dragged us into it. We have a responsibility to our families, and we must fight for them,” said one of the victims.

This historic ruling marks the first time that an American jury has held a major U.S. corporation liable for complicity in serious human rights abuses in another country, a milestone for justice.

Now, how about f%$#ing arresting the f%$#ing psychopath executives who made, or authorized, these payments.

These people literally hired mercenaries to murder people.

Hopefully, Deere Loses Big Time

Federal Judge Iain Johnston has ruled that the class action lawsuit against John Deere’s repair practices can go forward.

Considering the fact that he was appointed by Trump, and that he was a member of the Federalist Society, this is a pleasant surprise.

If you have been living in a cave, you are probably unaware that John Deere has been locking down its tractors so that farmers and independent mechanics cannot repair them or use 3rd party parts.

This is one reason why older unrestricted tractors actually sell for a premium over the newer models.

Of course, the certification of class action is not a victory in court, but frequently, particularly in front of Republican appointed judges and Federalist Society members, it is the highest hurdle to clear.

But clear it they did:

A U.S. judge on Monday said Deere & Co must face claims from crop farms and farmers that the agricultural machinery maker has unlawfully conspired to restrict services for maintenance and repair.

U.S. District Judge Iain Johnston in Rockford, Illinois, rejected Deere's effort to dismiss consolidated lawsuits accusing the Moline, Illinois-based company of violating U.S. antitrust law.
The judge said the plaintiffs had met legal thresholds to pursue their claims.

"According to the complaint's allegations, Deere has the ultimate control of the repair services market," Johnston wrote in his 89-page order. "These allegations are not mere legal conclusions. The complaint is chock-full of factual allegations to support this conclusion."

Deere has denied the allegations and will have a chance at a later stage in the case to dispute the merits of the farmers' claims. 

………

 In the Deere litigation, six prospective class actions were consolidated last year before Johnston. The cases allege Deere has conspired with dealerships to control where and how machines are maintained and repaired. 

The complaint said farmers are "prevented from using trusted, less expensive, and more conveniently located skilled mechanics who are not affiliated with Deere."

It is self evident that people should be allowed to repair stuff that they own, and even (former)Federalist Society members get that.