Monday Reading

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

Ryan Cooper writes about how the rotted- out Republican Party is determined to take health insurance away from millions of Americans:

... If Trump wins reelection, he will very likely be able to replace Ruth Bader Ginsberg on the Supreme Court, and that will almost certainly spell doom for the law (with this lawsuit or another one). If that happens, something like 20 million people will lose their insurance immediately — as Medicaid is drastically rolled back, the exchanges are shut down, and anybody between 18 and 25 who is still on their parents' coverage is kicked off. Protections for people with preexisting conditions would be removed, and private insurers could once again place annual and lifetime coverage limits on their policies.

The slow-motion collapse of the private health insurance system would accelerate as well, as cost-control policies designed to slow the cancerous cost bloat that is eating the American economy from the inside would be deleted. More broadly, there would be spectacular chaos within the health care system, which was totally overhauled to accommodate ObamaCare changes — and this time there will be no guiding hand from Congress.

So while there is a never-ending parade of war crimes, corruption, and general insanity from the Trump regime to distract us, let's not forget that Republicans are also gunning for your health insurance. If they can't take it away, by God they'll make it as crummy and expensive as possible.

Preserving affordable health insurance will be a key defining issue in 2020, as it was in the 2018 mid- term blue wave elections. 

Frida Ghitis thinks 2019 was a turning point in the battle for democracy in Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America.  But:

The pivotal contest is taking place in the United States, the country whose deep democratic roots make it well-equipped to defy the authoritarian trend. The United States remains a vigorous democracy, but it, too, is one of the nations where democracy, according to Freedom House, “has weakened significantly,” thanks in part to a president who launches incessant attacks “on the rule of law, fact-based journalism, and other principles and norms of democracy." This year, that president, Donald Trump, was impeached in a historic vote. Although the chance that legislators will remove him from office remains almost nonexistent, impeachment signaled that many Americans strongly reject his assault on democratic norms. The 2020 election will determine whether the nation that has been an icon of global freedom will shift to a democratic path or continue on the rutted road to authoritarianism, which would have ominous implications for freedom around the world.

The 2016 election was the most important election in American history in at least 80 years;  2020 will be even more important.  If affordable health insurance is a key issue, Trump's and Republicans' assault on American democracy will be the key theme.

American agriculture is experiencing a one- two punch from nitwit Donald "Rump" Trump's trade wars and climate change:

US farmers have taken a particularly harsh beating this year from a one-two punch of nasty flooding exacerbated by climate change and a trade war with China.

Severe floods spurred by record rainfall soaked the southeast and the Midwest this summer, delaying plantings of corn and soy crops. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported that the 12-month period ending in May of this year was the wettest 12 months on record in the United States. (NOAA’s full climate and weather assessment for 2019 will be available in January.) Flooding on the Mississippi River this year also set records for how long it lasted in several locations.

In August, the US Department of Agriculture reported that farmers weren’t able to plant more than 19.4 million acres of cropland in 2019, the most since reporting began in 2007. Most of this area was spread across 12 states in the Midwest and Great Plains.

The late planting pushed back harvests, leaving the crops still standing vulnerable to freezing. Historic autumn rainfall then further drenched the region, leading farmers in states like Minnesota and North Dakota to abandon tens of thousands of acres of crops, including potatoes and sugar beets.

The ongoing trade war with China has also hammered crop sales. Chinese imports of US agriculture products fell by nearly 20 percent, and the Trump administration has responded with close to $28 billion in aid for farmers hurt by foreign tariffs. (The Environmental Working Group found that big, industrial-scale farms, rather than family farms, are getting the majority of those funds.)

A lot of the farmers who voted for Trump will still vote for him because he hates the same people they do;  but don't be surprised if the added chaos Trump brings to the table doesn't peel off a not- insignificant number of them.

For a more comprehensive reading list, we recommend Infidel 753's link round- up (which is where we found the story on struggles in American agriculture, above).  Always worth the visit, both for the round- up and for his other posts.