Don’t expect too much from President Trump’s announcement last week that the Justice Department is launching probes into price-fixing among big beef processors, namely Tyson, JBS, National Beef and Cargill. Politicians have been hollering at meatpackers about wage and price collusion since the days of Teddy Roosevelt, and they keep on.
These investigations often end with cash settlements that have become a cost of doing business. They swat them like flies from a cow’s haunches.
Trump accused the companies by name of driving beef prices artificially higher. A few weeks ago he blamed cattle producers. Meantime, Trump went shopping for Argentine beef to compete with Iowa producers who finally are posting a profit.
It is hard to know what is really happening here. Trump aide Stephen Miller has spoken with ill will toward Tyson in particular and the meat supply chain generally. Trump is in a battle with Brazil, whose Batista family owns JBS. It is unlikely that the Justice Department intends to break up the meat oligopoly. If it wanted to do that, it simply would have ICE raid the plants and send the markets into frenzy.
The investigation is just more political theater intended to make us believe that we have an open and competitive market. History tells us that anti-trust has been smoke and mirrors since the railroad reached Omaha.
MOST IOWA FARMERS are going through difficult times because of lost export markets. Sen. Chuck Grassley last week said that there will be a bailout for agriculture in the range of $10-13 billion. The senior Republican offered few other details. President Trump also has spoken of the need for a farm bailout package paid by tariffs.
Iowa lost its export markets to Brazil and Argentina during the first Trump term. The Biden Administration maintained tariffs that held down Chinese soy purchases. We are not recovering the Chinese market from Brazil. The United States is now a secondary supplier. We now depend on government bailouts.
We do not have a current farm bill. It is two years overdue by inaction from the likes of Bailout Chuck. Once we burn through $13 billion, what do you do for an after-party trick?
Eight Senate Democrats got nothing in return for their votes to reopen the government. The Trump Administration remains before the Supreme Court trying to take food from the mouths of children. Medicaid will be cut, and even more rural health care services will be curtailed. Working families will be shocked at the rise in their health care costs as Republicans in Congress deny subsidies to cushion the blow.
Republicans are slashing benefits to people. They have to own that. The government shutdown focused the public for 40 days on how Trump and Republicans are making life more difficult and expensive for working families. The GOP owns food stamp cuts in rural Iowa, closed hospitals and nursing homes, no farm bill and rising health insurance rates. Republicans in Iowa will have an extremely difficult time defending their record of lost export markets, depressed prices and rising costs.
Republicans won the entire Iowa congressional delegation on the express agenda of tax cuts and reduced services. People voted for it. Now they are waking up to the fact that they made a bad bet. Municipal and state elections swung toward Democrats just as thousands of flights were being cancelled, with the shutdown in its full throes.
Democrats thought they had Trump where they wanted him, but he refused to negotiate. He doubled down by insisting on eliminating food assistance in rural counties, the foundation of his base. Democratic congressional leaders are so bad at messaging they give rise to anxiety about who would shoulder the blame as the shutdown started to impact millions of lives. A few blinked and caved.
Democrats are frustrated and divided. So are Republicans. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green, MAGA-Ga., is furiously defending health care subsidies. Appalachian Republicans are openly defending food stamps because their voters depend on it.
Rising health care premiums will be felt at the ballot box. So will $625 billion in cuts to Medicaid that deny the frail elderly their due care at a decent nursing home. Rob Sand is making an issue of it in his race for governor. His likely Republican opponent, Rep. Randy Feenstra, will have to defend his votes that closed nursing homes and maternity wards. (Feenstra could not produce a farm bill, either, while in the majority.) If not Feenstra, any Republican tying his sail to Trump faces the same headwind.
Republicans have fixed their own noose. Democrats should step back and let them hang by their own devices. The 2026 midterm elections should be a rout despite Democratic leadership. You can whip the hide of the voter for only so long before it hurts. The voters will feel the hurt every time Trump wields his pen or opens his mouth between now and next November.
Academic scientists across Iowa warned in their 15th annual climate statement this week of rising insurance costs because of increasingly extreme weather. Nearly 180 scientists at colleges and universities statewide signed on to the statement. They note that the past decade has been the hottest 10 years of the last 175. The rapidly changing climate is leading to more furious storms — tornados, derechos and massive hail storms. Last year, Iowa was among 15 states with a “mounting insurance crisis,” the statement says, from the damage those storms caused.
“Over the past 40 years, billion-dollar disasters (adjusted for inflation) in the region encompassing Iowa have more than doubled. These Midwest events are part of an emerging global trend of shattered long-term climate records, with growing losses of life and property, resulting in higher insurance costs,” the statement says.
As a result, home insurance rates rose 14% from 2023 to 2024 and are projected to rise nearly 20% this year. Some insurers are leaving Iowa.
Crop insurance costs also mount. Last year premiums were $15.8 billion, nearly $10 billion of which is subsidized by taxpayers.
They urge upgraded building standards for climate resiliency, and of course less reliance on fossil fuels like coal.
Many among us like to think that climate change is a hoax. Insurance bills are real. Flattened crops and ripped roofs are real. “It is past time to act,” the scientists write.
How frustrating for Alta: Voters declined to approve a bond issue to build a $1.25 million library. It’s easy to understand why: You’re giving up part of a park to build a library, and property taxes are high enough already. It’s also easy to remember that the city and Alta-Aurelia School District shared a library until the legislature took on the role of book censor. Because adult books were near children’s books, the cohabitation could not continue.
The law is frustrating and stupid. And costly. Elementary school students were not exposed to steamy romance novels. The apoplexy over dirty books in school was entirely created to create political panic and cleave people. It worked. The city and school district were split up.
It’s a shame that Alta’s library has to make due under temporary circumstances. It is so unnecessary. A solution will emerge one way or another. People will pay for the right library in the right place. They had one until legislators played morality cops.
The city council and library board will put their heads together and come up with a sustainable plan for the Alta Public Library. Since the legislature created this problem, perhaps the Republican politicians who imposed this moral order on us sinners would like to offer their assistance (we like to maintain a sense of humor in sarcastic times). Gov. Reynolds surely has some Trump tariff money to offer. No, as usual, the property taxpayer is on the hook, and there are limits. Rural communities struggling along are expected to go it alone while the preachers in the Capitol tell them what God thinks is good for them.
Comments
No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here