Tag: economy

$40 Trillion in Debt and the Interest Bill Keeps Growing

The United States has crossed $40 trillion in gross federal debt, and Washington will treat it as another unfortunate milestone before returning to the business of spending money it does not have. The more immediate problem is what it costs to carry that debt. Treasury’s figures show approximately $1.17 trillion in gross interest expense through July, just ten months into fiscal year 2026. That works out to roughly $117 billion a month, or $3.85 billion every single day over that period. These are interest costs, not repayments that reduce the principal. Washington incurs this expense while the debt itself continues climbing.

There are two different interest figures, and they should not be confused. Treasury’s gross interest expense includes interest credited to government accounts holding Treasury securities. The federal budget’s net interest measure excludes those internal payments and includes other offsets. The Congressional Budget Office’s February outlook placed net interest at approximately 3.3% of GDP in 2026, implying more than $1 trillion for the full fiscal year. Even on that narrower measure, Washington is devoting roughly one dollar in five of projected federal revenue to interest. The distinction matters for accounting, but neither number describes a government bringing its finances under control.

The issue was never simply that government had borrowed a large sum. It was that borrowing had become a permanent arrangement, with interest added to budgets already running deficits. Politicians take credit for the original spending, while the cost of financing it survives long after they leave office. Their successors inherit the bill and issue more debt rather than confront the promises that created it.

Consider what refinancing actually means. When a Treasury security matures, its holder must be repaid. If Washington finances that redemption by selling another security, the creditor has changed, but the government has not eliminated the obligation. It has renewed it at whatever rate the market will accept. Borrowing to refinance principal is separate from the interest bill, yet both require continued access to willing buyers. This is why a government can make every payment on time while its underlying financial position deteriorates.

The mathematics of higher rates becomes brutal at this scale. Every additional percentage point on $1 trillion of debt means another $10 billion in annual interest once that debt carries the higher rate. Apply that to successive waves of refinancing and the expense builds year after year. The entire $40 trillion does not reset overnight, and it would be misleading to suggest otherwise. Existing fixed-rate securities retain their coupons until maturity. That delay, however, can conceal the developing burden and give politicians another excuse to postpone action.

There is no magic number at which a country automatically collapses. Confidence, borrowing costs, economic growth, and the ability to raise revenue all matter. The danger is that higher interest expenses require more borrowing, while concerns about that borrowing encourage investors to demand still higher yields. A deteriorating fiscal position can then begin reinforcing itself.

CBO projects net interest costs reaching $2.1 trillion in 2036, or 4.6% of GDP. That is a projection under its stated assumptions, not a guaranteed outcome, but it demonstrates that the problem does not disappear even in an orderly baseline. Washington is not merely struggling with a temporary expense left over from an emergency. It is carrying an interest burden expected to grow while elected officials continue making commitments against future revenue.

War makes this arithmetic harder. Military operations require resources today, while the interest on borrowing to finance them can remain for decades. If conflict also raises energy costs or disrupts production, it can complicate the Federal Reserve’s inflation problem. Higher rates may be necessary to restrain inflation, but they also increase the cost of new federal borrowing. Demanding that the Fed cut rates does not repair that conflict, especially when long-term investors remain free to demand compensation for inflation and fiscal risk.

Republicans cannot explain this away by blaming Democratic spending while defending every unfunded commitment of their own. Democrats cannot promise an expanding government without confronting the cost of financing it. Both parties have constituencies they refuse to disappoint and obligations they prefer to leave to the next administration. The interest bill does not recognize party affiliation, and the bond market does not have to accept a campaign promise as repayment.

The $40 trillion figure should therefore be understood through the income required to sustain it. America possesses enormous productive capacity, but that is not permission for Washington to claim an ever-larger portion of future revenue before the public receives any new service. More than a trillion dollars in annual net interest is already a substantial claim on that income. The question is how much further government intends to mortgage the future before admitting that borrowing has become its substitute for governing.

Keep reading

Mexico Is Growing Because It Still Produces Something

Mexico’s economy expanded 1.4% in the second quarter, nearly three times the OECD average of 0.5%. That placed it sixth among the economies in the report and marked its strongest quarterly expansion since early 2022. Yet listen to the political discussion in Washington and you would think nothing exists south of the border except cartels and migrants. There are factories, engineers, suppliers, and entire communities whose livelihoods depend on producing goods for the North American market. Politicians can dismiss Mexico all they want, but corporations making investment decisions have to look at costs, transportation, labor, and access to customers.

Mexico is benefiting from manufacturing moving closer to the United States, with opportunities spreading into the businesses supporting that production. The economy contracted a revised 0.3% in the first quarter before rebounding, and output in the second quarter was 2.1% above a year earlier. Nobody should pretend that this means Mexico has entered some uninterrupted boom. Nor should we attribute the entire rebound to manufacturing when the report identifies primary activities as the fastest-growing sector, expanding 2.4%. The broader point is that a country’s productive potential does not vanish because one quarterly number disappoints. Investment takes time to become capacity, and capacity takes time to become income.

Washington’s mistake is assuming that forcing companies to reconsider China automatically means all that production will return to the United States. A manufacturer must calculate whether it can operate profitably. Moving closer to American customers while retaining a competitive cost structure can make Mexico attractive. Tariffs may change that calculation, but they do not abolish it. Businesses will adjust their operations to survive whatever rules governments impose.

There is also a difference between attracting productive investment and attempting to manufacture prosperity through public spending. A factory must eventually sell something customers want at a price they will pay. Government can borrow to finance an unsuccessful program and then borrow again to conceal the failure. The private business does not possess that luxury indefinitely. Its survival depends on meeting demand, controlling costs, and investing where it expects a return. That discipline is precisely what disappears when politicians convince themselves they can direct the economy better than the people risking their own money.

Mexico can still squander the opportunity. Security, water, electricity, transportation, and predictable rules matter to anyone considering a long-term investment. A cheap workforce is of little use if production is repeatedly interrupted or goods cannot reach the customer. Mexico’s government cannot simply congratulate itself over a favorable growth ranking and assume investment will continue regardless of its decisions. Geography provides an advantage, but government can make even an advantageous location too difficult to operate in.

Mexico’s recovery deserves attention because it brings the discussion back to something governments routinely forget: people need the opportunity to earn a better living. They need employers competing for their skills and customers willing to purchase what they produce. A quarterly GDP ranking will not provide that by itself, but sustained productive investment can. Mexico has an opportunity to turn its position beside the American market into lasting prosperity. The greatest service its politicians can provide is to stop assuming that the wealth created by everyone else exists primarily for government to spend.

Keep reading

The $29 Trillion Debt Rollover Nightmare

Governments and corporations are expected to borrow a record $29 trillion from global bond markets in 2026, according to the OECD. That is $4 trillion more than in 2024 and twice the amount borrowed only ten years ago. The financial press will present this as evidence that debt markets remain deep and resilient, but 78% of the borrowing by OECD governments will not finance new roads, productive industry, or economic expansion. It will be used merely to refinance debt that already exists.

This is the Ponzi structure underlying modern government finance. Politicians speak as though debt is repaid, but governments almost never repay the principal. When a bond matures, they issue another bond to obtain the money needed to redeem the first one. They then borrow still more to finance the current deficit and increasingly borrow to pay interest on the debt accumulated by previous administrations. The entire system functions only while investors remain willing to roll the obligations forward.

The $29 trillion figure is annual borrowing, not the total amount of outstanding debt. Sovereign and corporate bond markets combined have already reached approximately $109 trillion. The system must therefore absorb an enormous wave of new securities every year merely to prevent old promises from defaulting. This is why the refinancing cycle matters far more than the political debate over whether a technical default will occur. A government can continue paying every bondholder on time while still entering a debt crisis if refinancing costs rise beyond what its tax base can sustain.

Politicians became addicted to short-term debt because it was cheaper than locking in long-term interest rates. The OECD reports that 30-year yields have risen significantly across most countries since 2022, leading governments and companies to issue more short-maturity debt. This lowers the interest bill temporarily but forces borrowers to return to the market more frequently. They are trading today’s discomfort for tomorrow’s crisis because nobody in government wants to admit the actual cost of decades of fiscal mismanagement.

A nation that finances itself for thirty years is protected from immediate changes in interest rates on that debt. A nation that continually borrows at short maturities must refinance again and again at whatever rate the market demands. When confidence falls, the cost resets quickly across the debt structure. A one-percentage-point increase may appear insignificant to some bureaucrat, but applied to trillions in recurring issuance, it consumes hundreds of billions that must be extracted through higher taxes, reduced services, inflation, or still more borrowing.

Central banks are also reducing their government-bond holdings after years of manipulating rates through quantitative easing. This leaves hedge funds, households, and foreign investors to absorb a growing supply of debt. These buyers are more sensitive to price and are not obligated to rescue politicians from their own stupidity. If the yield does not compensate them for inflation and political risk, they will demand a higher return or move their money elsewhere. Government calls this market instability because it cannot stand the idea that its debt should be priced honestly.

The competition for capital is becoming vicious. Governments need money for welfare states, pensions, military expansion, energy subsidies, industrial policy, and the interest on existing debt. Corporations must refinance their own obligations while funding new investment, and the artificial-intelligence race is adding another enormous borrower to the market. Nine major technology companies are expected to issue approximately $1.2 trillion in bonds between 2026 and 2030 as they pursue a combined $4.1 trillion in capital spending. Every dollar absorbed by government debt is capital that cannot finance productive private investment without pushing rates higher.

War will make this rollover crisis far worse. Governments are expanding defense budgets while rebuilding supply chains, stockpiling strategic resources, subsidizing domestic manufacturing, and attempting to reduce dependence on geopolitical rivals. These expenditures are being added to budgets that were already insolvent before the War Cycle turned higher. They are preparing for a global conflict with borrowed money while the cost of that money is rising.

This is why the Sovereign Debt Crisis will not resemble the 1930s or some dramatic bankruptcy proceeding. Governments that borrow in their own currencies can create the money necessary to make nominal payments, but they cannot create purchasing power. They will repay creditors in depreciated currency, force financial institutions to hold public debt, suppress interest rates below inflation, impose capital controls, and search for new ways to trap private savings inside the system. Default will come through the destruction of the currency and the confiscation of wealth rather than a polite announcement that the Treasury has missed a payment.

The movement toward CBDCs and tokenized bonds must be understood within this context. Governments facing a record refinancing burden will want a financial system capable of identifying capital, controlling its movement, and directing it toward approved assets. They will say digital money improves efficiency and tokenized debt provides instant settlement. What they will never advertise is that the same infrastructure can prevent capital from escaping when investors no longer wish to finance the state voluntarily.

The OECD recommends that governments ensure the “long-term sustainability” of their debt, as if politicians who created this disaster will suddenly discover restraint. They will not cut spending until the bond market forces the issue because every expenditure has a constituency and every reform threatens someone’s election. They will raise taxes, manipulate markets, change accounting rules, and blame speculators long before admitting that government itself has become the greatest threat to financial stability.

The world must absorb $29 trillion in borrowing during 2026 while war expands, rates rise, central banks retreat from bond markets, and private industry competes for the same capital. The system remains functional only because confidence has not yet completely broken. Once investors question whether rolling government debt forward is worth the risk, the refinancing machine will seize. Governments do not have $29 trillion sitting in a vault to repay these obligations. They have only the ability to borrow again, tax the public, or destroy the value of money.

Keep reading

The Entire Financial System Is Chained to Government Debt

The Bank for International Settlements is warning that near-record public debt and the growing role of hedge funds and other nonbank financial institutions have created what it calls a “fiscal-financial stability nexus.” That is sanitized bureaucratic language for a system in which governments, banks, pension funds, insurers, hedge funds, and central banks are all chained to the same mountain of sovereign debt. If government bonds begin to fail, the losses will not remain confined to some account at the Treasury. They will spread through the institutions holding the public’s savings and eventually force central banks to choose between the currency and the financial system.

Government debt is treated as the foundation of modern finance. Banks use sovereign bonds as collateral, pension funds hold them to match future obligations, insurers depend on them for income, and hedge funds trade them using enormous leverage through repurchase markets. Regulators assign government debt privileged treatment because they have declared it “risk-free,” but no investment is free of risk. The label exists because government needs financial institutions to purchase its bonds, and admitting that sovereign debt can become unstable would expose the fraud supporting the entire system.

The BIS estimates that the probability of a financial-stress event comparable to the Global Financial Crisis occurring within three months is roughly ten times higher when public debt relative to GDP is elevated. The probability rises from approximately 0.3% under lower-debt conditions to 3.8% when government debt is high. The risk increases further when nonbank financial institutions hold a larger share of the market because many depend on leverage and short-term funding that can disappear the moment bond prices move against them.

This is how a routine selloff can become a systemic event. Government bonds decline, yields rise, and leveraged funds suffer losses. Lenders demand additional collateral, forcing those funds to sell more securities into a falling market. Liquidity disappears, borrowing costs surge, and the losses spread to banks and other institutions connected through funding markets. Government then complains that the market is “dysfunctional” because investors are no longer purchasing its debt at politically convenient prices.

The central bank is forced to intervene because allowing the bond market to clear naturally could bring down the financial system. It purchases government securities, supplies emergency liquidity, and claims that the operation is temporary and has nothing to do with financing the state. Yet every rescue teaches the market that excessive leverage will be protected and teaches politicians that reckless borrowing carries no immediate consequence. This creates the next crisis by encouraging the exact behavior that caused the first one.

The BIS openly admits that repeated central-bank interventions can weaken market discipline over government spending. This is the vicious circle they cannot escape. Governments borrow excessively, bond markets become unstable, central banks suppress the instability, and politicians interpret the rescue as permission to borrow even more. The debt increases until each attempt to restore honest interest rates threatens the banks, pensions, and funds that were encouraged to hold it.

Keep reading

The Guest List Economy: How Big Tech, Big Pharma, and Big Real Estate Lock You Out

Who, exactly, manages the U.S. economy? And what happens when the people who run it convert it into their own private club — one that has a guest list that somehow never includes you?

Big Tech giants like Apple decide which apps you’re allowed to see and use. Remember when it shut down Parler? 

One day Parler was up. The next day Parler was gone — just because Apple decided the wrong people were talking too much.  

That’s a very convenient arrangement, don’t you think? 

Big banks and payment processors often play the role of gatekeepers too — deciding which businesses get accounts, which transactions get processed, and, in some cases, who gets access to the financial system at all. Conservatives learned just how much power those institutions wield during the years-long fight over politically motivated “debanking.”

Then there are the pharmacy benefit managers — middlemen who stand between you and the medicine your doctor prescribed. They decide which drugs get covered by insurance, which pharmacies you get to use, and how much you pay.

Do we honestly believe these people have the patients’ best interests at heart?

Of course we don’t.  

Average people lose choices and smaller competitors must follow the rules as written by the powerful and well-connected.

Their latest racket is in housing. 

Giant real estate players are creating preferred networks, where the well-connected get the first look at available homes on the market while regular buyers are left to scour through a public market that no longer always presents everything that’s actually for sale.  

House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee Chair Scott Fitzgerald is asking the right questions. He has demanded answers from Compass — the country’s biggest real estate brokerage — and Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED) MLS system about the private listings partnership they have popularized together, which only MRED members can see. Because the MLS controls nearly all the listings that are visible in one particular region, this anti-competitive behavior has real consequences.  

But the American people have many allies in their corner. 

Just like Rep. Fitzgerald and the rest of his colleagues on the congressional antitrust subcommittee, the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission have also never been afraid to enforce the competition laws on the books to protect

Populist conservatives should always do antitrust this way — enforcing the law, knocking down the barriers anti-free market actors put up, and giving regular people a fair shot at competing. But then getting the hell out of the way.

The goal should be to protect competition, not to remake the economy to fit a more egalitarian, socialistic model — like how the Biden administration prevented low-cost airlines Spirit Airlines and Jet Blue from merging, leading to Spirit’s bankruptcy earlier this year. That didn’t help consumers. That led to less choices and higher fare costs. 

What helps consumers is a government willing to take down the corporate actors who violate the consumer welfare standard and leave Americans with fewer choices, not more. Right now, the most urgent target for that kind of enforcement is the housing industry.

The hallmarks of a free marketplace are competition, choice, and the promise that an outsider can still knock the people on top off their perch by building a better mousetrap. 

America’s economy is supposed to be a marketplace open to everyone, not a managed economy that has its rules set by the members of a members-only club. The more Congress, Attorney General Todd Blanche, and FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson can do to keep it that way, the better off we’ll all be.

Keep reading

Will WAR Bankrupt the West?

War and sovereign debt are merging into a vicious spiral that will determine which nations survive the coming monetary crisis. Governments entered the conflicts in Ukraine and Iran, along with the escalating confrontation between the United States and China, already buried beneath debt accumulated through decades of fiscal incompetence. Now they are increasing military spending, subsidizing domestic industries, restructuring supply chains, and borrowing even more money to prepare for conflicts their own foreign policies helped create.

The United States, China, France, the United Kingdom, and Japan already carry gross government debt exceeding an entire year of economic output. Russia has drained much of its National Wealth Fund to finance the war in Ukraine while Western governments froze approximately $300 billion in Russian sovereign assets. Gulf states are being forced to expand defense spending amid the conflict with Iran, and Europe has committed itself to raising NATO-related expenditures toward 5% of GDP by 2035. Trump wants to increase annual US defense spending by $500 billion to reach $1.5 trillion, but Washington is already borrowing simply to pay interest on the debt it accumulated before this latest round of wars began.

These people speak about military spending as if the money materializes from thin air without consequences. Government does not possess wealth of its own. Every missile, drone, weapons package, foreign aid program, and military deployment must be financed through taxation, borrowing, or inflation. Taxation drains the productive economy, borrowing competes for private capital, and inflation silently confiscates purchasing power from everyone. Politicians choose debt because it conceals the cost until after the election, allowing them to play emperor today while leaving future generations with the bill.

The yield on the 10-year US Treasury has nearly tripled over five years to 4.3%, which means Washington is financing a vastly larger debt at far higher interest rates. This is elementary mathematics that the political class refuses to confront. A government may survive $10 trillion in debt when rates are near zero, but the same fiscal structure becomes impossible when the debt multiplies and borrowing costs normalize. Every additional dollar devoted to interest is a dollar that cannot maintain infrastructure, reduce taxes, or support genuine economic development. Government then borrows more to cover the interest, increasing the debt that created the problem in the first place.

The attempt to separate national economies from geopolitical rivals will impose another enormous cost. Europe abandoned cheap Russian energy and then wondered why its industries became uncompetitive. The West wants to reduce dependence on Chinese manufacturing and rare earths, but rebuilding those supply chains will require subsidies, tariffs, controls, and years of expensive investment. Iran’s position around the Strait of Hormuz demonstrates how quickly a regional conflict can threaten a route that previously carried roughly one-fifth of the world’s daily oil supply. Every attempt to create economic security through political coercion raises prices, reduces efficiency, and demands still more government borrowing.

Keep reading

The Economy Is Stagnating

The Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge rose again in July, with the headline Personal Consumption Expenditures index increasing 0.2% for the month and 3.7% from a year earlier. Economists expected the annual rate to decline to 3.6%, yet it remained unchanged from June, while core PCE excluding food and energy increased 0.2% monthly and 3.3% annually. The political class has spent years promising that inflation was retreating, but prices are still rising at nearly twice the Federal Reserve’s official target after households already endured the largest cumulative increase in the cost of living in decades.

This is what they refuse to explain when they celebrate a lower inflation rate. A decline in the RATE of inflation does NOT mean prices declined, for it merely means the government believes they are increasing at a slower pace. The rent, insurance premium, electric bill, grocery receipt, property tax, and cost of borrowing do not return to where they stood before the inflationary wave began, and wages must rise faster than this accumulated increase simply to restore purchasing power that has already been destroyed.

The core figure is equally deceptive because removing food and energy excludes two of the expenses people cannot avoid. Economists defend this practice by claiming those categories are volatile, but that volatility does not make the expense imaginary. Energy flows into transportation, agriculture, manufacturing, utilities, packaging, and practically everything that must be produced or delivered, while food is not some discretionary luxury that families can postpone until the next Federal Reserve meeting.

The problem is now spreading well beyond one monthly inflation report. The economy expanded at an annualized rate of only 1.5% during the second quarter, employers eliminated 23,000 jobs in July, and May and June payrolls were revised downward by a combined 103,000. Inflation remains at 3.7% while employment has been stagnating for months, which is the precise environment the Keynesian playbook cannot resolve because raising rates attacks economic activity while doing nothing to repair the geopolitical, fiscal, regulatory, and supply-side pressures driving prices.

The Federal Reserve is now trapped by government. Washington continues to borrow and spend regardless of the business cycle, forcing the Treasury to compete for capital while interest payments consume an expanding share of federal revenue. The central bank can raise short-term rates, but it cannot produce oil, lower insurance costs, reverse taxation, rebuild supply chains, end wars, or restore confidence among businesses that no longer know what their expenses will be six months from now.

This is not a new inflation cycle appearing in July, just as the weak employment report did not suddenly mark the beginning of labor deterioration. Both figures confirm a trend that has been in motion beneath the government’s revised statistics for some time. The private economy is losing momentum while the cost of government, debt, energy, insurance, and basic necessities continues to rise, and calling this a “soft landing” will not change the fact that Americans are being forced to pay more merely to stand still.

Keep reading

Cloward, Piven, And Zinn Told Us They Wanted To Bankrupt America

remember when the National Debt Clock first went up. I don’t remember the exact day, and honestly, I thought it went up during Reagan’s second term, but I was wrong. I looked it up, and it went up on February 20, 1989, exactly a month after Reagan left office.

I’m certain my confusion came from the fact that, while Reagan was in office, all the Democrats could talk about was the national debt. And it was a big deal. In retrospect, the growth under Reagan was unprecedented, rising about 184% during his eight years, more than double that of Nixon and Ford combined (as a percent), four times that of Carter in one term, not to mention five times Clinton, and more than double Bush and Obama combined.

Now, of course, we all know why the debt ballooned so much under Reagan. Tax cuts and the military, especially Star Wars! That’s what the Democrats tell us.

Well, all of that, but really the most important thing was: Democrats. What did Democrats have to do with anything? Pretty much everything. Democrats, led by the liar/streetfighter/Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill, never saw a government program outside of Defense that they wanted to cut.

Well, technically, to be fair, there was something else they didn’t spend money on…the border wall they promised Reagan in 1986 in exchange for his granting amnesty to 2.7 million illegal aliens. The illegals got amnesty, but Reagan never got the promised wall.

And so it goes.

That first clock clocked in at $2.7 trillion. Boy, does that feel like a long time ago! And it was. Back then, a trillion dollars actually meant something. Today’s Debt Clock just recently crossed the $40 trillion mark.

At some point, these numbers stop feeling real. We hear things like, if the government spent $1 million a second, it would take it over a year to spend $40 trillion, and other things we can’t quite wrap our heads around.

An easier way to think about it is this: In 1989, the $2.7 trillion National Debt worked out to about $11,500 per American. Today, at $40 trillion, that number has jumped to about $116,000 per person.

Keep reading

4 Giant Pesticide Companies Also Control Global Seed Market — That’s Bad for Consumers and Farmers

As the number of seed companies, which are also pesticide companies, consolidates through mergers, farmers face challenges associated with fewer seed choices, higher prices, less diversity and proprietary genetically engineered (GE) organisms.

To combat these problems, a nationwide action has been launched to tell members of the U.S. Congress to cosponsor the Fair Seeds for Farmers Act (H.R. 9681 and S. 5104).

A contributor to the high cost of food, seeds as an input account for up to 25% of farmers’ operating budgets. Four companies, the “Big 4,” control 51% of the global seed market — and they are the same four companies that control 62.3% of the agricultural chemical market — Bayer, Corteva, Syngenta (owned by ChemChina) and BASF.

The top four companies selling genetically modified seeds are the same. This concentration in the industry leads to higher costs and less choice for farmers, and less research into varieties suitable for organic systems.

The Fair Seeds for Farmers Act attempts to reduce these impacts. A 2023 U.S. Department of Agriculture report (USDA), “More and Better Choices for Farmers: Promoting Fair Competition and Innovation in Seeds and Other Agricultural Inputs, summarizes many of the problems.”

Farmers in the U.S. have not always needed to buy seed. The federal government — through the Patent Office until 1862 and the USDA thereafter until 1924 — mailed seeds free of charge to farmers throughout the country.

USDA collected seeds (germplasm) from farmers who experimented with varieties to meet regional needs, saved the seeds and shared them. In 1924, responding to pressure from seed companies, the practice ended.

Further support for the commercialization of seed production came from the Plant Patent Act (PPA) of 1930, applying to asexual reproduction of plants (e.g., grafting scions, cuttings, and runners), and the Plant Variety Protection Act (PVPA) of 1970, applying to seeds.

Under the PVPA, plant breeders were granted an exclusive right to propagate and sell their new varieties for 20 years, but those varieties were available to researchers who could use them for breeding new varieties, and farmers could save seeds to replant (and, until 1994, sell).

A number of Supreme Court decisions from 1980 to 2001 resulted in utility patents being issued for seeds and plants. Utility patents (“patents for invention” or “patents”), which can be issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for inventions that are novel, nonobvious and useful, apply to all users and can restrict seed saving, research and breeding.

Thus, patents eliminate resources from the pool of genetics available to plant breeders for improving crops. If breeders are allowed to use patented plants for breeding, they are often subject to restrictive licensing agreements.

Organic farmers can lose certified crops when genes (pollen) drift from GE plants. But they and others are also subject to lawsuits for patent infringement from the large seed/pesticide/biotech companies.

Keep reading

50 Survival Lessons From The Great Depression: The Horrifying Things Americans Did When Money, Jobs, & Hope Disappeared

Introduction

October 29, 1929, began as a Tuesday and ended as an autopsy. When the stock market shed its skin that Black Tuesday, it revealed something putrid beneath the gilt and glamour of the Roaring Twenties – the entire economic edifice had been a painted facade, a stage set propped up by speculation and debt. Within months, the iron sinews of American industry seized up. Factories that had belched smoke and churned out automobiles now stood silent as tombstones. Construction cranes froze in place, their skeletal arms reaching toward empty skies. The breadlines formed not from laziness but from the sudden, violent evaporation of work itself – fourteen million pairs of boots kicked dust on Main Street, fourteen million stomachs growled in concert.

The trauma cut marrow-deep. Men who had worn white collars found themselves fighting rats for garbage. Women who had managed households like generals now found themselves bartering wedding rings for sacks of beans. Children learned to sleep through the rumble of empty bellies, to recognize the particular gray color of hunger. This was not merely poverty – poverty implies a falling from somewhere. This was collapse, the sudden plunging of an entire civilization into a pit without handholds. The American Dream, that peculiar national religion promising infinite ascension, revealed itself as a confidence trick played on the desperate.

Yet here is the strange miracle: they did not all perish. They did not all devolve into the savage calculus of dog-eat-dog, though some surely did. Instead, something older and tougher emerged from the wreckage – a kind of stubborn, ornery ingenuity that had lain dormant during the fat years. People remembered how to do things. They recalled skills their grandparents had brought from the old country: how to stretch a dollar until it screamed, how to mend what was torn, how to find nourishment in landscapes others called barren. They discovered that the human animal is infinitely adaptable, capable of surviving on pride and lard and sheer cussedness when the supermarkets close and the ATMs go dark.

We have grown soft in the intervening decades. We have forgotten the taste of true scarcity, the texture of want. Our landfills overflow with the discarded, while our grandparents hoarded string and bacon fat like treasure. We order sustenance through glowing screens, disconnected from the soil and the seasons. But the old knowledge persists, passed down through whispered conversations in kitchens where the radio once played FDR’s fireside chats. The fifty fragments of wisdom that follow are not theoretical. They were paid for with calloused hands and sleepless nights. They represent the collective survival manual of a generation that faced the abyss and chose, defiantly, to keep walking.

50 Tips From the Great Depression

1. Move as a clan. When work dried up in Akron or Detroit, families packed their possessions into trucks and rolled toward the horizon like Bedouins. Staying together meant pooling resources, sharing bread, ensuring that when one member stumbled, others could prop them up. The lone wolf starved; the pack endured.

2. Follow the harvest. Migrant farm work was the artery that kept many alive. Cotton in Texas, apples in Washington, wheat in Kansas – each crop had its season, its hunger for hands. A family could stitch together nine or ten months of labor by chasing ripeness across state lines, living in tents that leaked when it rained.

3. Ask not what the job is; ask only if it exists. Pride was a luxury item, quickly pawned. Men who had managed offices took up shovels. Women who had worn silk now scrubbed floors. The work itself mattered less than the doing of it, the exchange of sweat for coins.

4. Put every able body to the grind. Children sold newspapers, gathered bottles, ran errands for pennies. Grandparents watched infants so mothers could scrub laundry. No one sat idle; the family was an economic unit, a small cooperative where survival was the only dividend.

5. Scavenge value from the discarded. Driftwood became fuel. Rusted metal became scrap. Bones became glue. The beachcomber and the junk man were aristocrats in this economy, turning refuse into currency through sheer force of will.

6. Embrace the government’s outstretched hand – cautiously. The New Deal programs, for all their bureaucratic weight, taught skills and poured concrete. Men learned masonry while building dams; they learned forestry while planting trees. Take the help, but keep your eyes open.

7. Work until you cannot stand. There was no retirement, no gold watch and pension. Seventy-year-olds swept floors. Eighty-year-olds watched grandchildren. The body worked until it broke, and then it found lighter work.

8. String together fragments. When full-time work vanished, people cobbled three part-time positions into a patchwork income. Dawn at the bakery, noon at the cannery, night at the loading dock. Sleep became a negotiable commodity.

9. Knock on every door. The unemployed did not wait for advertisements; they walked the streets, entering every shop and factory, offering labor by the hour. Persistence was the only resume that mattered.

10. Create your own occupation. Women arose before dawn to cook stews and pies, then sold them outside factory gates during lunch breaks. Men sharpened tools on porches, offering services to neighbors. Necessity was the mother of small enterprise.

11. Cultivate the jack-of-all-trades. The specialist starved. The man who could fix a roof, shoe a horse, and balance books found three times the opportunity. Breadth trumped depth when the market for expertise collapsed.

12. Accept payment in kind. Farmers took on hands they couldn’t pay in dollars, offering instead bushels of corn or sides of pork. A chicken was as good as a five-dollar bill in many towns.

13. Crowd under one roof. When the bank took the house, families scattered like seeds – not to the wind, but to the homes of relatives. Three generations in one farmhouse was cramped, but the body heat alone saved on coal.

14. Convert your vehicle to shelter. Those with cars or trucks slept in them, parking behind churches or in empty lots. Public gyms offered showers for pennies; the automobile became a rolling bedroom.

Keep reading