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Here Is the Mysterious High Roller Donald Trump Wants to Put In Charge of Our Food

by marques458 Posted on August 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump churns out strong opinions like McDonald’s produces Big Macs. But save for the odd eruption—like declaring the supremacy of Trump Tower Grill’s “taco bowls” or blaming the California drought on environmentalists to the delight of the state’s agribusiness interests—he has been relatively quiet about food. At last month’s Republican National Convention, the real-estate developer/reality TV star took a step toward filling out his food and farm policy by tapping Nebraska agribusiness owner and cattleman Charles Herbster as the chairman of his Agricultural and Rural Advisory Committee.

Like Trump, Herbster is an unconventional business titan with political ambitions.

He and his wife own Conklin, a Kansas City-based company with an odd mix of product lines: from pesticide additives called adjuvents to fertilizers for farms and lawns to probiotics for livestock, pets, and even people to industrial roof coatings to motor oils for “everything from semis to farm equipment to race cars.” In addition, he owns a cattle-breeding company called Herbster Angus Farms as well as farmland in Nebraska and Colorado, for which he received a total of $196,757 in farm subsidies between 1995 and 2014, according to the Environmental Working Group’s Farm Subsidy Database. (That’s not a particularly high number—many Nebraska farm operators got much more over that time frame.)

Before he took the reins of Trump’s ag-policy team, Herbster was best known for his aborted 2013 campaign for Nebraska’s governorship, as Politico’s Ian Kullgren recently noted. Soon after exiting the race, Herbster donated $860,000 to the campaign of another Republican gubernatorial candidate, Beau McCoy, a Nebraska state senator. Herbster ultimately donated a total of $2.7 million to McCoy’s campaign, “nearly his entire war chest,” The Omaha World-Herald reported. McCoy lost the race. Last year, Herbster hired McCoy to run marketing for Conklin’s building-supply business. Another one-time Nebraska officeholder, former Gov. Dave Heineman, joined Conklin’s board of directors last year.

Herbster’s largesse to politicians hasn’t been limited to McCoy’s failed bid. Politico notes he “has given $336,000 to Republican candidates and ag-related PACs since 2012.”

He is a major funder of Ag America, which describes itself as a “Federal Super PAC active in local, state, and federal elections.” Herbster sits on the Ag America steering committee, and according to the money-in-politics tracker Open Secrets, he donated $60,000 to it in 2015. Other recent contributors include Monsanto, DuPont, Archer Daniels Midland, and several other agribusiness giants.

In public documents, Ag America pushes a a fairly standard agribiz policy agenda: The next president must subject (unnamed) federal ag regulations to “rigorous cost-benefit analyses” and pursue free trade agreements “across the globe to open markets for America’s agricultural products.”

That last bit would seem to contradict Trump’s oft-stated antipathy to the the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a pending trade deals that was hotly supported by the agribusiness lobby.

And that appears to be where Herbster comes in—reassuring farm interests that a Trump presidency wouldn’t mean reduced access to foreign markets.

On a recent afternoon, I caught up with Herbster by phone on a corn field on his Nebraska farm after calling a number I found on the website of Herbster Angus Farms. I was quite surprised when the man himself answered the phone. After volunteering that “I’ve been friends with Donald J. Trump for more than 10 years,” Herbster told me that he’s been getting calls from farmers “concerned about issues of trade.” Herbster said he reassures them that Trump “is not against trade in any way”—it’s “just that we wants trade to be fair,” and that means renegotiating trade deals. Herbster acknowledged that “trade for agriculture in the Midwest has probably been pretty good for the past few years,” but that it “hasn’t been good for small manufacturers in middle America and the coasts.” Trump, he suggested, would make trade great again for everyone.

He then mentioned reducing the inheritance tax (applied only to estates valued at $5.45 million or higher) as a “big issue,” and said that rolling back regulation would be “at the forefront” of a Trump’s first 100 days as president. “We regulate, regulate, regulate,” he complained. Paraphrasing Ronald Reagan, he added that “if it moves, the government’s response is to tax it; if it keeps moving, the response is to regulate it; and if it stops moving, the response is to try to control it and subsidize it.”

I asked him to specify what regulations he sought to dismantle. “We’re not gonna pinpoint and try to detail the minutiae of all of those, because the first thing we have to do is we have to win,” he said. “I believe we are gonna win, but I’ve always said, until you win, all of the great ideas in the world aren’t going to help you, because you have to win to implement ’em.”

Rather than sweat policy details, “my focus .. is to make sure we get rural America out to vote, that we raise as much money as possible,” he said, adding that “it’s gonna take a lot of money for this campaign, because we saw what happened with Romney versus Obama.”

Meanwhile, Herbster said, he’s working to assemble a group of people to serve with him on Trump’s ag-policy committee, which will be announced the first week of August. “Everyone’s gonna pretty well know the names on that list—we have some governors, we have some former governors … we’ve put together a really great list.”

I pressed him for more policy details, but he politely hustled me off the phone. “I don’t want to be rude, but I’ve got concrete being laid at the farm,” he said.

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Here Is the Mysterious High Roller Donald Trump Wants to Put In Charge of Our Food

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Walmart Sets Its Sights on Africa—With Uncle Sam’s Help

by marques458 Posted on August 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, the second day of this week’s three-day US-Africa Leaders Summit, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon shared the main stage with the CEOs of General Electric and Dow Chemical. Sitting on a panel moderated by Bill Clinton, he talked about how his company was working with farmers to grow food to sell in its stores, and even export back to the United States and United Kingdom. “As we look at what we’re trying to do in Africa, we are simply trying to provide customers access to fresh produce and other items at a great value,” McMillon said. “To do that, we got to have a great supply chain.”

Yet Walmart isn’t building that supply chain alone—it’s getting a boost from the US government. At the close of the summit—which saw more than 50 African heads of state and government and 100-plus US and African businesses (and more than a few of their lobbyists) pack into a Washington, DC, hotel to plan the future of US-Africa relations—Walmart vice president Maggie Sans announced that the company and its foundation had pledged $3 million to train 135,000 farmers in Kenya, Rwanda, and Zambia, including 80,000 women. The funds will expand existing projects organized by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the consultancy Agribusiness Systems International, and the nonprofit organizations Global Communities and the One Acre Fund to develop farm-to-market supply chains. Under the program, Kenyan farmers can expect to see their incomes double in a single growing season, Sans said.

Walmart and USAID have worked together before. Beginning in 2007, the agency partnered with Walmart, TransFair (an independent certifier of fair-trade imports), and SEBRAE (a Brazilian nonprofit) to train 5,000 farmers in Brazil to improve the quality of their coffee crop to sell at Walmart stores. In 2011, USAID joined with a Guatemalan nonprofit and Walmart’s Mexican and Central American arm to connect farmers benefiting from a USAID program to boost production to the company’s supply chain. The agency helped train small farmers in Honduras and Guatemala to grow potatoes and onions that fit Walmart’s specifications, and Walmart provided a place to sell them.

A Marko store in Johannesburg, South Africa, part of the Massmart brand, which was purchased by Walmart in 2011 Themba Hadebe/AP

Produce is the central component of Walmart’s expansion into Africa, which began in 2011, when Walmart bought a majority share of the South African-based Massmart chain for $2.4 billion. At the time, Massmart had almost 300 stores in 14 African countries, according to Bloomberg. By August 2013, Massmart had almost 360 African stores, and Walmart announced plans to build 90 more, with a “focus on fresh food,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Three weeks later, Walmart, the Walmart Foundation, and USAID signed a memorandum of understanding with the aim of forming a voluntary partnership between the parties, focusing on climate change, farmer training, and agriculture, among other priorities.

USAID administrator Rajiv Shah acknowledged in a 2012 interview with Foreign Policy that working with Walmart was necessary, even if the choice wasn’t universally embraced. “Over the last several decades, it’s been controversial to have companies like Walmart in the development solution,” he said. “I think it is the kind of long-term development program that is needed to succeed at scale over time.”

Shah went further at a speech at the University of Arkansas, shortly after signing the memorandum at Walmart’s headquarters in Bentonville: “We want to bring Walmart’s core capabilities in philanthropy and business to every part of the world to transform the face of hunger and poverty,” he said. “To end poverty, childhood deaths, and hunger, we need to bring together businesses with supply chains for partnership to reach the farthest corners of the globe.”

While supermarket chains in Africa may benefit the farmers who supply them, not everyone is convinced that expanding their customer base will end hunger. In 2013, World Bank researchers found that the richest fifth of the population of Zambia accounted for two-thirds of all the country’s supermarket sales; the bottom 60 percent accounted for only 12 percent. A year earlier, geographers Bill Moseley, Stephen Peyton, and Jane Battersby compiled a database of supermarkets and population distribution in the Cape Town, South Africa, area that showed that supermarket density was 16 times higher in upper-middle-income neighborhoods than in the poorest areas.

Despite the disparity, poor and urban residents interviewed for the study said they preferred to shop at supermarkets when they could since they stocked higher-quality food. The problem was that the poorest customers had irregular incomes and often lacked refrigerators at home, meaning they could only purchase food in small quantities, which is easier at local shops than at supermarkets selling bulk and packaged goods.

“Supermarket expansion is neither a solution to, nor a curse on, hunger alleviation efforts in urban South Africa and the region more broadly,” the researchers wrote in an Al Jazeera op-ed. “This market-oriented solution to improving urban food access is inherently limited because it just cannot meet the needs of the poorest of the poor.”

Whoever its future customers will be in Africa, Walmart says it’s ready to meet them. “Everywhere we operate, we find our customers have so much in common,” McMillon said. “Our customers in Africa want to spend less on everyday needs so they can provide more for their families. We want to help.”

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Walmart Sets Its Sights on Africa—With Uncle Sam’s Help

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Meet the Americans Who’ve Lost Their Unemployment Benefits: "I’m Thoroughly Petrified"

by marques458 Posted on January 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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When Congress reconvenes next week, lawmakers will have to decide whether to extend federal unemployment benefits for about 1.3 million Americans. These emergency benefits—which Congress let expire shortly after Christmas—are part of a 2008 program that allows workers who have been out of the job for more than six months to receive an emergency extension on their payments up to 47 weeks. If Congress fails to renew these benefits, only a quarter of jobless Americans will be receiving any benefits at all, according to the Huffington Post.

As these charts show, the United States is looking at the worst long-term unemployment crisis since soup kitchen lines peaked during the Great Depression. Americans who have been unemployed for more than six months are often hit with major financial and personal hardship. Around 10 percent must file for bankruptcy, more than half report putting off medical care, and many say they have, “lost self-respect while jobless.” But who are these Americans who have lost their benefits? Some reached out to Mother Jones. Here are their stories:

Name: Anonymous

State: New York

“My benefits run out this week. I’m thoroughly petrified…I am the nice girl you went to high school with who was in the advanced classes, graduated with an A average, and went on to college. I’m the girl who always worked through high school, college, law school, and grad school. I never thought I would end up a welfare mother, but here I am. I want you to know how I got here and why I can’t get out. I want you to realize that your nasty comments on social media about the losers demanding entitlements and benefits and hand-outs as compared to your ‘hard-earned money,’ hurt more than you know. Those comments may also be hurting your friend or colleague or relative. I’m not alone in this situation. I do not want benefits, or hand-outs, or entitlements. I want a job. I want to be able to pay my own way. I want to be self-sufficient again and earn the money I receive through hard work. I don’t want to lose my house or have to talk to another debt collector. But in the meantime, I am grateful that some of our lawmakers saw fit to protect the vulnerable in times of need.”

Maureen “Momo” Kallins

Name: Maureen “Momo” Kallins

State: Washington

“I am 65 years old. For three years I worked as the General Manager and the Business Manager of a small public access television station in Washington State. I lost that job in January 2013, which supported half of our household. (I have two sons, 26 and 24, and I live with my husband.) I was awarded unemployment insurance of less than half of my salary that month, which was extended after six months. I have applied for numerous jobs but never even get an interview. A friend of mine in the film business said recently, ‘When you apply for a job at 50 people laugh at you. When you apply for a job at 65 people just look at you like you are crazy.’ Presently I am adding to my video resume and trying to build a business. I sincerely hope that the members of Congress can agree to extend these benefits and throw us a lifeline.”

Name: Carol Watterston

State: Nevada

“After being laid off after seven years at my job, I have now been unemployed since November 9, 2012. I job hunt for full-time employment everyday. I’ve been to multiple interviews and nothing has worked out. I’ve even attempted going back to school but I have bad credit and can’t afford it…I’m already struggling to pay my rent, my bills, my car insurance and feed myself and my pets. I have never been one that expects or wants any kind of charity, and this situation I’m in is degrading and shameful, but I have to do whatever is necessary for survival. However, I have a lot more than other people on this planet. I have a roof over my head, I have food in my fridge, I have a car, and I have a very supportive family, which I’m thoroughly thankful for.”

Tara Dublin

Name: Tara Dublin

State: Washington

“I was a very popular DJ on the radio in Portland. When I lost that job, I could not find another job in local media. The radio station that fired me has not replaced me. As a single mom of two sons (15 and 10 years old), it was imperative to me that I show my kids that we don’t roll over and die when bad things happen; we fight. And I’ve been fighting for the last four and half years. In the time since I lost that dream job, I’ve had small opportunities, but nothing long term. I’ll get a voiceover gig just when a bill is due…I worked holiday retail sales at Nordstrom but wasn’t rehired for this season, and despite applying for every retail and waitressing job I can find, I have yet to be hired. I’m on the verge of losing my house yet again, and I am terrified, I don’t ask for a lot out of life—just to be in a job that makes me happy and pays my bills.”

Name: Anonymous

“I lost my marketing communications specialist position in April and have not landed a job in nine months of looking, despite working at it diligently and investing in expensive job-hunt strategy and technique classes. I am 61. I believe my age and the reasonably good salary I was earning were factors in losing my job. I was replaced by a 20-something who could be paid a lower salary. I just do not get the assertion I see in so many news stories that eventually, long-term unemployed people just stop looking for work. Who can afford to do that? How can they live?”

Name: Jeff

State: Indiana

“I have an associate degree in hotel and restaurant administration. Right now I live in an old mobile home in pretty bad condition, but at least it is a sheltering place. I do not have a high standard of living, so really my only worry about not having a job and losing my unemployment benefits is becoming homeless. I only have rent, car payment and insurance, utilities, and food as expenses. I also worry about my three cats because I don’t want to see them suffer because of what is happening to me. I have pretty much been taking care of myself since I was 13, and the thought of not having a roof over my head is terrifying…I do think Congress needs to extend benefits, because people are suffering and it would be a catastrophe to let all those who are hurting slip even lower.”

Name: Anonymous

State: Washington

“I had a baby in July 2012. I was on unpaid maternity leave until November 2012. I was informed that I would be getting laid off in October 2012. I was in a unionized position but I got bumped by a more senior union member. We had insurance through my work. So we went on COBRA for $1800 a month. The unemployment benefits extension was covering the COBRA payment. Now we’ll be paying for COBRA out of pocket. And we have another baby on the way. I know I’m one of the lucky ones out there. I have enough in savings and an overall family income that I can make a choice to stay with the expensive COBRA, so that I don’t have to deal with this hassle of changing to Medicaid mid-pregnancy.”

And here are some stories from other news outlets:

David Davis, Virginia: “That’s one goal, to avoid living on the street or in my car.” (The New York Times )
Adaline Irizarry, New Jersey: “If I don’t get an extension, I’m screwed. I think a lot of people are in that situation.” (The Star-Ledger)
Celeste, New York: “I don’t buy books; I get everything from the library. We go to maybe one movie a year.” (Buzzfeed)

Kaitlyn Smith, California: “I have to keep the house at 55 degrees even though I have two little girls, ages 2 1/2 and 1 1/2.” (Los Angeles Times)

Mary Lowe, Ohio: “We didn’t do anything for Christmas—50 bucks for our daughter, that was it.” (CBS News)

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Meet the Americans Who’ve Lost Their Unemployment Benefits: "I’m Thoroughly Petrified"

Posted in alo, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Meet the Americans Who’ve Lost Their Unemployment Benefits: "I’m Thoroughly Petrified"