Happy Thanksgiving

 

"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

As US hunger rises, Trump administration’s ‘efficiency’ goals cause massive food waste

 

The U.S. government has caused massive food waste during President Donald Trump’s second term. Policies such as immigration raids, tariff changes and temporary and permanent cuts to food assistance programs have left farmers short of workers and money, food rotting in fields and warehouses, and millions of Americans hungry. And that doesn’t even include the administration’s actual destruction of edible food.

The U.S. government estimates that more than 47 million people in America don’t have enough food to eat – even with federal and state governments spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year on programs to help them.

Yet, huge amounts of food – on average in the U.S., as much as 40% of it – rots before being eaten. That amount is equivalent to 120 billion meals a year: more than twice as many meals as would be needed to feed those 47 million hungry Americans three times a day for an entire year.

This colossal waste has enormous economic costs and renders useless all the water and resources used to grow the food. In addition, as it rots, the wasted food emits in the U.S. alone over 4 million metric tons of methane – a heat-trapping greenhouse gas.

As a scholar of wasted food, I have watched this problem worsen since Trump began his second term in January 2025. Despite this administration’s claim of streamlining the government to make its operations more efficient, a range of recent federal policies have, in fact, exacerbated food wastage.

A farmworker raises her hands as armed immigration agents approach during a raid on a California farm in July 2025. Blake Fagan/AFP via Getty Images

Immigration policy

Supplying fresh foods, such as fruits, vegetables and dairy, requires skilled workers on tight timelines to ensure ripeness, freshness and high quality. Help knowledgeable voices rise above the noise. Support The Conversation.

The Trump administration’s widespread efforts to arrest and deport immigrants have sent Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Border Patrol and other agencies into hundreds of agricultural fields, meat processing plants and food production and distribution sites. Supported by billions of taxpayer dollars, they have arrested thousands of food workers and farmworkers – with lethal consequences at times.

Dozens of raids have not only violated immigrants’ human rights and torn families apart: They have jeopardized the national food supply. Farmworkers already work physically hard jobs for low wages. In legitimate fear for their lives and liberty, reports indicate that in some places 70% of people harvesting, processing and distributing food stopped showing up to work by mid-2025.

News reports have identified many instances where crops have been left to rot in abandoned fields. Even the U.S. Department of Labor declared in October 2025 that aggressive farm raids drive farmworkers into hiding, leave substantial amounts of food unharvested and thus pose a “risk of supply shock-induced food shortages.”

Food specially formulated to feed starving children is marked for disposal in a U.S. government warehouse in July 2025. Stephen B. Morton for The Washington Post via Getty Images

Foreign aid cuts

When the Trump administration all but shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development in early 2025, the agency had 500 tons of ready-to-eat, high-energy biscuits worth US$800,000, stored to distribute to starving people around the world who had been displaced by violence or natural disasters. With no staff to distribute the biscuits, they expired while sitting in a warehouse in Dubai.

Incinerating the out-of-date biscuits reportedly cost an additional $125,000. An additional 70,000 tons of USAID food aid may also have been destroyed.

Tariffs

In the late 20th century, as globalized trade patterns grew, U.S. farmers struggled with agricultural prices below their production costs. Yet tariffs in the first Trump administration did not protect small farms.

And the tariffs imposed in early 2025, after Trump regained the White House, severed U.S. soybean trade with China for months. Meanwhile, there’s nowhere to store the mountains of soybeans. An October 2025 agreement may resume some activity, but at lower price levels and a slower pace than before, as China looks to Brazil and Argentina to meet its vast demand.

Though the soybeans were intended to feed the Chinese pig industry, not humans, the specter of waste looms both in terms of the potential spoilage of soybeans and the actual human food that could have been grown in their place.

Mature soybeans sit unharvested in an Indiana field in October 2025. Jeremy Hogan/Getty Images

Other efforts lead to more waste

Since taking office, the second Trump administration has taken many steps aimed at efficiency that actually boosted food waste. Mass firings of food safety personnel risks even more outbreaks of foodborne diseases, tainted imports, and agricultural pathogens – which can erupt into crises requiring mass destruction, for instance, of nearly 35,000 turkeys with bird flu in Utah.

In addition, the administration canceled a popular program that helped schools and food banks buy food from local farmers, though many of the crops had already been planted when the cancellation announcement was made. That food had to find new buyers or risk being wasted, too. And the farmers were unable to count on a key revenue source to keep their farms afloat.

Also, the administration slashed funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency that helped food producers, restaurants and households recover from disasters – including restoring power to food-storage refrigeration.

The fall 2025 government shutdown left the government’s major food aid program, SNAP, in limbo for weeks, derailing communities’ ability to meet their basic needs. Grocers, who benefit substantially from SNAP funds, announced discounts for SNAP recipients – to help them afford food and to keep food supplies moving before they rotted. The Department of Agriculture ordered them not to, saying SNAP customers must pay the same prices as other customers.

Food waste did not start with the Trump administration. But the administration’s policies – though they claim to be seeking efficiency – have compounded voluminous waste at a time of growing need. This Thanksgiving, think about wasted food – as a problem, and as a symptom of larger problems.

 -The Conversation

Tevis Garrett Graddy-Lovelace, Provost Associate Professor of Environment, Development and Health, American University School of International Service

American University School of International Service master’s student Laurel Levin contributed to the writing of this article.

 

War of the Brown Noses: The great Trump world crackup has only just begun

 

   

Donald Trump began this week calling Marjorie Taylor Greene a traitor. Standing on the steps of the Capitol, flanked by survivors of Jeffrey Epstein, Greene — someone not so much made by MAGA as made of it — flung the label back at him, unsubtly suggesting the president is captive to foreign interests. 

That same morning, Trump Whisperer and failed congressional candidate Laura Loomer issued her own dire warning to the GOP, tweeting, “I’m going to say it, the GOP has a Nazi problem.” She ought to know. The first time most people encountered her, she had her arm around one in a YouTube video, bragging about her “big tits and Ashkenazi IQ” and striking out with him anyway. Some metaphors have a long payoff.  

A war of Nazis vs. Neocons/Globalists might have remained an “ideological” battle behind closed doors, its final word a press release that got repeated until it sounded like conventional wisdom. What Loomer and Greene have done is make that battle active, present and public. They aren’t alone. 

As the Heritage Foundation is pulled in two directions by America First groypers and the significantly Jewish neoconservative foreign policy establishment, Candace “I am also a Black commentator who loves Hitler” Owens and Charlie Kirk’s widow are tearing up the young conservative grifter and YouTube maniac demographics. 

Practically before the body grew cold, Owens began suggesting that Zionist sleepers in the GOP, the Mossad and Kirk’s widow had a hand in his assassination. (Meanwhile, better check to make sure Erika Kirk isn’t secretly transgender.) 

America First is also at war with the tech fascists’ fondness for HB1 visas, just as their supposed populism confronts the reality of what the Trump economy feels like for anyone whose response to a foreclosure crisis won’t be loading up on discount property.

What Loomer and Greene have done is make that battle active, present and public.

Then there is Thomas Massie, the Republican representative from Kentucky’s 4th District, whose commitment to treating the Epstein case as exactly what it looks like has given the House permission to discuss the president as culpable in a massive child-sex-trafficking ring. 

Massie presents the tip of the spear when it comes to dividing a caucus that has been animated by the philosophy that “everyone I don’t like is a pedophile,” while also persistently ducking the “there’s a documentary on Netflix about this” reality that Jim Jordan still serves in the House, and perpetually skates on the fact that not a month and sometimes not even a week goes by without the police introducing new confirmation that “Pedocon Theory is a theory like gravity is a theory.”

Like the cartoon dog in a room filling with flames, Trump and company’s response will probably be, “This is fine.” It’s a meme from the internet, so look for it to appear on the social media timeline of something like the Department of the Interior. It will be childish, stupid and unconvincing, but you can’t fault them, because for 10 years childish, stupid and unconvincing worked. 

Like a golf handicap, Trump could count on a press corps willing to add the numbers needed to cover the gap between what he told us the score was and what he actually shot. The loss of this reflexive support is invariably depicted as his “eroding trust,” but it’s like any other Trump employer-employee relationship: He rewarded the media’s tireless work with nothing, then fired it without a plan for a replacement. 

The story that MAGA tells itself and dares anyone to contradict will find newer and odder bedfellows. If a MAGA incarnate like Greene can claim to patriotically defend it while essentially declaring its creator a traitor, then this is a game that anyone can play. Laura Loomer’s dedication to Trump is so great that she replaced whatever personality she had with his interests and his satisfaction, and she has no trouble imperiling the new base by accurately describing it. 

This is, if not courage, then at least opportunism instantly recognizable to a party full of hyenas. Every new voice creates more permission and support for the next, and every unapologetic counterargument shreds another part of an administration’s messaging almost wholly dependent on having everyone in the party respond to the damning presence of objective reality with, “Nuh-uh.” They may not call this resistance, but it is assuming the form. 

The trouble with pretensions to kingship is that they come with none of the ceremonial aspects of monarchy.

Trump would never use that word either, but he knows it when he sees it. Only five months after a big fan of his started hunting Minnesota Democrats on his kill list, Trump took to social media Thursday morning for another rousing rendition of stochastic terror. 

Democrats who encourage the military to disobey unlawful orders, he wrote, should be hanged. 

But after a decade of the Trump Death Penalty looming over their heads, they need no reminders of their sentence, nor do his followers need more encouragement to exact the punishment. No, this one went out to those in the party whose burden is maintaining whatever polite fictions the Trump administration needs to paper over divisions among the base. 

“Tariffs don’t raise prices, but our removing some just lowered them,” and “Our distinguished colleague from the SS with a doctorate in Great Replacement is very disturbed about campus antisemitism” — whatever fraud gets us over the next 24-hour hump. 

The reward for loyalty is more of the same, and the cost of disloyalty is death. The question now is whose.

The problem with polite fictions is that both parties have to keep being polite, and Trump never upheld his part of the deal, with either the media or his caucus. The latter features many people like Greene who punched their ticket by being as vindictive and self-centered as their leader. At the same time, mainstream journalism has less incentive to pretend along with him that he is intelligent and capable. 

The trouble with pretensions to kingship is that they come with none of the ceremonial aspects of monarchy — the perks and cheats — that indicate an oath binding the participants either to the royal will or the axe. The long dynastic chains bring the polite fictions to you, premade and pre-solemnized, without any of the strain on credulity that comes with inventing them on the fly in less than a calendar year. Even if King Canute’s command couldn’t halt the tide, he still ended the day as king, and he didn’t have to cordon off the shore with courtiers to pretend there never was an ocean in the first place.

 

AS CHAOS UNFOLDS, FIND SOLID GROUND…

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The Silent Massacre of Millions in Ukraine

 

Holodomor- The silent massacre of millions in Ukraine. Murder through starvation in the “Breadbasket of Europe.” In a year where there was a record harvest, millions died slowly and painfully because Stalin and the Soviet killing machine wanted to get rid of the “Ukrainian problem” of resistance and national identity. One third who starved were children... One eyewitness noted, “When we returned to school in the autumn of 1933, two thirds of the seats were empty...”

To this day, Russia denies this happened and continues its genocide against Ukraine. Eternal memory to the lost souls... Вічная Пам‘ять!

Вшанування пам’яті жертв Голодомору / Commemoration of the Victims of Holodomor

https://holodomor.ca/holodomor-basic-facts/

“We were not sitting in the Netflix headquarters writing scripts that will be Oscar-nominated" -Sergiy Kyslytsya

The US and Ukraine have drafted a new 19-point peace deal but left the most politically sensitive elements to be decided by the countries’ presidents, according to Ukraine’s first deputy foreign minister Sergiy Kyslytsya. 

Washington had previously put Kyiv under pressure to agree a 28-point proposal that had been developed by US and Russian officials and crossed several long-standing Ukrainian red lines. Kyslytsya, who was in the room as part of the Ukrainian delegation for high stakes talks in Geneva, told the Financial Times the meeting was an “intense” but “productive” effort that resulted in a thoroughly revised draft document that left both sides feeling “positive.”

After hours of painstaking talks that nearly fell apart before they started, the US and Ukrainian teams reached agreements on several issues but “placed in brackets” the most contentious points — including territorial issues and relations between Nato, Russia and the US — for presidents Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy to decide. The Ukrainians said they “were not mandated” to make decisions on territory — particularly ceding land as the original draft plan suggested — which under their country’s constitution would require a national referendum. 

The new draft, Kyslytsya said, bore little resemblance to the earlier leaked version of the peace proposal that had caused uproar in Kyiv. “Very few things are left from the original version,” he said. “We developed a solid body of convergence, and a few things we can compromise on,” he said. “The rest will need leadership decisions.” 

Each side will take the latest working drafts back to Washington and Kyiv to brief the presidents. The Trump administration was then expected to approach Moscow to seek to advance the talks, he said. Draft copies of the plan given to the heads of the US and Ukrainian delegations were the only texts to leave the room. Kyslytsya said all other copies were taken back at the conclusion of the meeting. The talks in Geneva almost fell apart before they started, according to Kyslytsya. 

The discussions were led on the Ukrainian side by Zelenskyy’s powerful chief of staff Andriy Yermak and National Security and Defense Council secretary Rustem Umerov, with Kyslytsya and a band of military officers and intelligence officials playing a supporting role on Kyiv’s side. The American delegation included secretary of state Marco Rubio, Army secretary Dan Driscoll, Trump’s special envoy for Russia Steve Witkoff, and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, whose presence initially surprised Ukrainian officials. 

Kyslytsya said the Americans were attentive, eager to hear the Ukrainians’ point of view and open to suggestions. “Almost everything we suggested was taken on board,” he said. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Monday said “everybody inside feels optimistic about what happened and transpired yesterday in Geneva... 

Ultimately, the vast majority of these points have been agreed upon.” While the talks ended on a positive note, they almost failed to begin, according to Kyslytsya, describing the mood in Geneva Sunday morning as “very tense”. The Americans had arrived frustrated by leaks to the media in the days leading up to the meeting and the public debate around origins of the first draft proposal. “The first hours were totally...” he said, pausing for several seconds, “hanging by a hair.” 

It took nearly two hours of talks between Yermak and the US delegation to turn down the temperature and get back on track. “Eventually we were able to go to the US mission and begin real conversations,” Kyslytsya said. A lengthy morning session with the Americans allowed the Ukrainians to air their concerns and requests. That was followed by a short break and a detailed point-by-point review of the proposed peace plan, he said. Kyslytsya said the US side appeared willing to remove a proposal to introduce a 600,000 cap on Ukraine’s army. 

He said the US negotiators had listened carefully to the Ukrainian arguments and agreed to take the points into account. “They agreed the Ukrainian army number in the leaked version [of the peace plan draft] — whoever authored it — was no longer on the table,” he said. “The military will continue to discuss the arrangements.” 

The presence on the American side of Jared Kushner, left, initially surprised Ukrainian officials. A proposal for a blanket amnesty for potential war crimes in the original draft was reworked in a way that addresses “the grievances of those who suffered in the war”, he said. A separate session later in the day brought in European allies, including representatives from the UK, France, Germany, Italy and EU institutions. 

Prior to the US talks, Ukraine had held private discussions with European national security advisers to co-ordinate positions and identify shared priorities, Kyslytsya said. He repeatedly praised the “constructive engagement” of the US team, singling out Rubio, Driscoll and Kushner. “There was no point where they said: We won’t discuss it. We went through all points carefully.” 

It remains unclear whether Trump will want Zelenskyy to approve the document with a signature, but Leavitt said “there are no plans at this moment” for a meeting between the two leaders. The US president said his Ukrainian counterpart should back a draft plan by Thanksgiving on Thursday. Washington must decide how and when to present the draft peace deal to Russia. 

The Kremlin on Monday said it had not seen or been briefed on the US-Ukrainian draft. Kyslytsya said: “It’s on the Russians to show if they are genuinely interested in peace or will find a thousand reasons not to engage ...Ukraine has no choice but to engage with US peace plan. Ukraine, for its part, has expressed willingness to continue working towards a fair end to the war and to travel 'wherever' to continue the process.” He also emphasized the broader significance of the meeting. 

“The fundamental achievement in Geneva is that we managed to preserve a workable partnership and dialogue with the Americans,” he said. “Despite the media hype and social media frenzy, both sides showed that the partnership is strong and capable of producing a viable document for the leaders.” Still, Kyslytsya remained cautious. “We were not sitting in the Netflix headquarters writing scripts that will be Oscar-nominated,” he said. “We should not be driven by excitement or hype, but by responsibility and the complexity of the issues.”

- Christopher Miller in Kyiv published November 24, 2025. Financial Times, Additional reporting by Steff Chávez in Mexico City.

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Resignation

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s resignation didn’t just send a shockwave through Georgia politics — it ripped open a question Republicans have been terrified to ask out loud: What happens to the GOP after Trump?

People like Georgia radio host Martha Zoller are already saying it plainly: “People are kind of reeling.” And they are. Not just because Greene quit — but because of why she quit. Because behind the press releases and the vague political statements, there’s a darker truth circulating in Republican circles: Greene wasn’t just feuding with Trump… she was getting death threats from inside her own movement.

Let that sink in.    

The self-proclaimed “fighter,” the woman who spent years whipping up the base with apocalyptic rhetoric, culture-war hysteria, and violent fantasy politics — ended up on the receiving end of the same machinery she helped build. That’s not irony. That’s the logical end of a party that treats rage as a governing philosophy.

Georgia political observers are scrambling for explanations, but even they sound unsettled. Greene wasn’t predictable, but she was durable. She survived scandals that would have ended ten normal political careers.

She survived national humiliation, ethics investigations, and public ridicule. But she couldn’t survive this: a base turning on her, Trump turning on her, and the death threats piling up as the MAGA machine decided she was no longer pure enough.

And the biggest question Zoller raises is the one Republicans have avoided for nearly a decade: “What is the Republican movement once it’s not Trump?” Because if Greene — the loudest, most extreme, most unquestioningly loyal MAGA star — can’t survive breaking orbit from Trump, what does that say about the rest of the Republican Party? About anyone who tries to imagine a future that isn’t chained to one man’s ego?

Greene wanted to be the architect of the post-Trump right. Instead, she became proof that such a thing might not even exist.

-The Other 98%

A Father Buries His Child that the Russians Murdered in Ternopil, Ukraine