Nobel Prize-winning economist pinpoints major flaw in Trump's 'nervous' Iran war ploy

Ewan Gleadow
April 1, 2026 
RAW STORY

FILE PHOTO: U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth looks on, as President Donald Trump delivers remarks, in the Oval Office at the White House, in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 21, 2025. REUTERS/Carlos Barria/File Photo

Donald Trump's plan for the war with Iran could cause even further trouble for taxpayers across the country, according to a Nobel Prize winner.

Paul Krugman has warned that the president's current task in Iran is to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Crude oil prices reached a staggering $100 a barrel earlier this week, and the veteran economist does not see the price improving any time soon. Even though the United States' own oil exporters profited from the Strait of Hormuz closure, Krugman claims there is no way this will help the average citizen.

Writing in his Substack, he explained, "Now, America produces a lot of oil, and the domestic oil industry will be earning large windfall profits even as U.S. consumers suffer. But so what?

"We don’t have any mechanism in place to capture and redistribute those windfall gains, so ordinary U.S. families will bear the full brunt of the global oil shock even though America is a net oil exporter."

"The Fed could, in principle, try to look through the effects of the Strait crisis on business costs as well as direct effects on consumer prices. But given how nervous everyone is about the risk of 70s-type stagflation, it probably won’t."

Krugman went on to suggest the reaction of the Federal Reserve could be a cause for concern. "There’s an additional, technical but important reason to be even more worried about soaring prices for diesel, jet fuel and industrial materials than about gasoline prices," he wrote. "It involves how the Federal Reserve is likely to react.

"The Fed normally bases its decisions about whether to reduce or increase interest rates on 'core' inflation — inflation excluding food and energy prices. The reason it does this is that food and energy prices are highly volatile and are usually a poor indicator of what inflation will be over the next few years."

"So the Fed tries to 'look through' inflation fluctuations driven mainly by the prices of groceries and gasoline. For example, it didn’t raise rates in 2011, when there was a temporary uptick in inflation driven entirely by oil prices."

Trump just earned an economic title he'll never brag about

Robert Reich
March 30, 2026 

RAW STORY


U.S. President Donald Trump walks as he heads to Marine One

 to travel to Ohio and Kentucky, from the White House in Washington, D.C.,

 U.S., March 11, 2026. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

Friends,

When he ran for president again in 2024, Trump made three promises to the American public:

(1) He said he’d “secure” the southern border. Most Americans now believe he’s gone too far in this.

(2) He’d avoid foreign wars. He said: “We’ve spent $8 trillion in the Middle East, and we’re not fixing our roads in this country? How stupid. How stupid is it? And we’re not fixing our highways, our tunnels, our bridges, our hospitals, even.” Umm. How well has this promise turned out?

(3) His third promise was to bring prices down and create more jobs. He said: “Starting on day one, we will end inflation and make America affordable again, to bring down the prices of all goods.”


In fact, Trump has pushed prices way up.


As of today, the price of Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil, is above $116 a barrel. The average price for a gallon of gas in the United States is now $4.00, and many people are paying far more. Food costs are also heading upward.

He’s also raised tariffs on imports. This has increased the prices of everything we buy from abroad.

He has also pledged to be “the greatest jobs president that God has ever created.”


But he’s been the worst jobs president in American history.

In his first term, Trump presided over a historic net loss of nearly 3 million jobs, the worst jobs numbers ever recorded under an American president.

So far in his second term, he has presided over a loss of 150,000 jobs. (By contrast, in the final 14 months of Joe Biden’s presidency, the economy added 1.74 million jobs.)


The only thing Trump has done to make any Americans better off is to cut taxes on the rich and big corporations. He did this in his second term. It was also his major economic policy in his first term (which he promised would result in $4,000 annual raises for everyone else. How did that work out? Did you get a $4,000 raise?)

May I speak plainly? Trump has turned the American economy into s---.Trump’s economic record is only slightly worse than that of every Republican president before him. Here’s the historic truth that everyone needs to understand: The American economy does worse under Republican presidents. Since 1933, the U.S. economy has grown nearly twice as fast on average under Democrats.

Wage growth slowed after Reagan’s tax cuts for the rich and big corporations. And the Bush and Trump tax cuts didn’t trickle down, either.


These giveaways to the wealthy have come at the expense of investments in infrastructure, education, and health care — making life more expensive and difficult for everyone who isn’t rich.

They’ve also exploded the debt and deficit.

Reagan oversaw a 186 percent increase in the national debt — the biggest percentage increase in over 70 years.


The Bush and Trump tax cuts — which mostly benefited corporations and the rich — are the main reasons why America’s debt continues to grow faster than the economy.

Look at the historic record and you see something else: Republican presidents have led us into the three worst economic crises of the last hundred years.

The Great Depression began in 1929 under Herbert Hoover. The Great Recession began in 2008 under George W. Bush. The pandemic recession of 2020 began under Trump.


Democrats (FDR, Obama, and Biden) led us out of these Republican economic crises.

Republicans talk about “running the country like a business.” Sure. They’ve run it the way Trump ran his businesses: with massive debts, a string of failures, and payouts for the folks at the top, while average workers get shafted again and again.

Given Republicans’ track record, why would any hardworking American put their financial security in the hands of a Republican president (or, for that matter, a Republican Congress) ever again?

Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org

Can a New ‘New Deal’ Wipe Out Corporate Control of the Democratic Party?

WALL ST DEM'S ARE THE REAL GOP

The exploding popularity of progressive politicians and the policies they embrace is not an anomaly. It’s a signpost.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and US Senate candidate Graham Platner are seen at a rally on September 1, 2025 in Portland, Maine.
(Photo by Anna Bahr/Friends of Bernie Sanders)

Thom Hartmann
Dec 22, 2025

Common Dreams

The media is freaking out over a new Rasmussen poll that found:
“A majority of voters under 40 want a democratic socialist to win the White House in the next presidential election.
”… 51% of Likely U.S. Voters ages 18 to 39 would like to see a democratic socialist candidate win the 2028 presidential election. Thirty-six percent (36%) don’t want a democratic socialist to win in 2028, while 17% are not sure. …
“Among the youngest cohort (ages 18-24) of voters, 57% want a democratic socialist to win the next presidential election…
”Among those who voted for Kamala Harris in last year’s presidential election, 78% would like to see a democratic socialist candidate win the 2028 presidential election…“ (emphasis added)

I was on Ali Velshi’s MSNOW show yesterday morning discussing this, along with Michael Green who recently wrote a thought-provoking article about how the official poverty line in America is completely out-of-date and out of touch with the needs of most Americans. I shared a few statistics from my recent book The Hidden History of the American Dream: the Demise of the Middle Class and How to Rescue Our Future:When, in 1957, my dad bought the house I grew up in, the average cost of a single-family home in America was about 2.2 times the average annual wage. Today it’s more than ten times the average wage.
When my Boomer generation was the same age as today’s Millennials, we owned a bit over 22% of the nation’s wealth; Millennials today control only about 4% of the country’s wealth (and it’s the same for Zoomers).
From the 1930s right up until the Reagan Revolution, it was possible for seniors to live comfortably on Social Security alone; Reagan undid that with his “reforms” so today that’s nearly impossible.
When I ran my first seriously successful business in the early 1970s, it cost me around $35/month for comprehensive health insurance for each of my 18 employees; at that time hospitals and health insurance companies were required by Michigan law (where I lived; most other states were identical) to be run as non-profits. Today, health insurance can be as much as one-fifth of a company’s payroll expense.
When Reagan came into office in 1981, a single wage earner could support a family with a middle-class lifestyle, and fully 65% of us were in the middle class (up from around 20% in the 1930s). Today, after 44 years of Reaganomics, it takes two full-time people to achieve the same status, which triggers huge childcare expenses, which is part of why only 43% of us are middle class .
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FDR’s great — and successful — Democratic Socialist experiment following the Republican Great Depression was to drive the economy from the bottom up, reversing the “Horse and Sparrow” trickle-down economics and deregulation of the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations that provoked the Great Crash.

He did that by:Expanding the notion of the commons — the stuff we all collectively own and is administered or funded and regulated by government — to include free public education nationwide (and cheap college), old-age retirement (Social Security), and public power and transportation systems (Tennessee Valley Authority, federal support for local transit, roads and highways).
Legalizing unions, an effort that was so successful that when Reagan came into office fully a third of us had good union jobs and, because they set the local wage floors, two-thirds of Americans had the equivalent of a union wage and benefit package.
Establishing a minimum wage on which a single worker could raise a family of three and still stay above the federal poverty level (today’s federal minimum wage is $7.25: adjusted with the Consumer Price Index, that $1.60 minimum wage in 1968 is equivalent to about $14.90 an hour in 2025 dollars).

In the years since, we’ve continued to expand the commons by establishing national single-payer healthcare systems for low-income people (Medicaid) and retired people (Medicare), both of which came out of LBJ’s Democratic Socialist program that he called The Great Society.

Meanwhile, Republicans and a few neoliberal Democrats have pushed back against these Democratic Socialist programs that made the American middle class the first in the history of the world to exceed more than half the population.Reagan’s war on unions has cut our union membership down to well under 10% in the private sector.
His gutting federal funding for education has exploded college costs to the point where three generations are saddled with over $2 trillion in debt that can’t be discharged by bankruptcy.
Reagan’s tax cuts for the rich (from 74% down to 27%) and corporations tripled the national debt (from $800 billion to $2.4 trillion) just in his eight years; since then the four GW Bush and Trump tax cuts have, when combined with Reagan’s, produced a $38 trillion national debt so big that we now spend more on servicing their debt than we do on our defense budget or would on administering a national healthcare system.

Back in the 1940s, after the incredible success of the New Deal, President Roosevelt wanted to further expand the commons by expanding the scope of his Democratic Socialist programs. Just before he died, he proposed a “Second Bill of Rights” that included:“The right to a useful and remunerative job in the nation’s industries, shops, farms, or mines. (Unionization and an above-poverty-level minimum wage.)
“The right to earn enough to provide adequate food, clothing, and recreation. (Ditto and government as the employer of last resort.)
“The right of every farmer to raise and sell products at a return that gives his family a decent living. (Don’t manipulate farm prices with stupid tariff wars, etc., and make the government the purchaser of last resort.)
“The right of every businessperson, large and small, to trade free from unfair competition and domination by monopolies. (Break up the giant corporations and encourage average people to start small businesses, including with loan supports.)
“The right of every family to a decent home. (Today this would mean no more corporations, hedge funds, and foreign billionaires owning single-family homes to squeeze us dry by jacking up rents.)
“The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to enjoy good health. (FDR favored a single-payer healthcare system like Medicare for All.)
“The right to protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment (i.e., robust Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance).
“The right to a good education.” (Free or inexpensive college, quality public schools in every community.)

Much to the chagrin of my Republican-activist father, my grandfather (a 1917 Norwegian immigrant) frequently and proudly described himself as a socialist. When I asked him what he meant, he always pointed me to FDR, the New Deal, and his proposed Second Bill of Rights.

And here we are again.

My grandfather’s generation saw up-close and firsthand the tax-cutting and deregulation binge of the Roaring 20’s (which were only “roaring” for the morbidly rich), and then had the lived experience of watching FDR put the country back together and create the world’s first widespread middle class.

Millennials and Zoomers today are seeing the same thing, between the Bush Housing Crash of 2008, the botched Covid Crash of 2020, and the GOP’s relentless program to drive the wealth of the nation into the money bins of the billionaires who own that party.

They see the example of most European countries, where the commons includes college (many will actually pay you a stipend to attend), healthcare, and daycare/preschool, and union density is often well above 80%. Housing is subsidized or heavily regulated, leading several to have essentially ended homelessness. Giant corporate monopolies are prohibited and local small businesses are encouraged.

Europeans call these programs Democratic Socialism or social democracy, and young Americans clearly are enthusiastic about bringing the “European Dream” to this country.

My sense is that — much like in the 1930s — a significant majority of Americans are sick of the neoliberal “let the rich run things because they know best” bullshit that Republicans, “Tech Bros,” and a shrinking minority of on-the-take Democratic politicians embrace.

Meanwhile, nobody’s sure why the Democratic National Committee (DNC) is refusing to release the autopsy they did of the 2024 election, producing speculation it may have uncovered examples of Russian and Republican manipulation of both voters and the vote, but I’m guessing the real reason is that the neoliberals who largely run the DNC saw feedback that reflected the Rasmussen poll I opened this article with.

The exploding popularity of progressive politicians from Zorhan Mamdani to Bernie Sanders, Jasmine Crockett, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez aren’t an anomaly; they’re a signpost to both electoral and governing success for the next generation of genuinely progressive Democratic politicians.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Thom Hartmann
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of "The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream" (2020); "The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America" (2019); and more than 25 other books in print.
Full Bio >

Opinion - How President Trump ruined Christmas

John Mac Ghlionn, 

opinion contributor

THE HILL
Sat, December 20, 2025 



President Trump has weathered scandals, impeachments, investigations, electoral defeats, and enough lawsuits to make a mid-size law firm weep. But this winter, he’s facing something he can’t bluff or bark away: prices. Real prices. Grocery-store prices. The kind that glare at you from the receipt like a personal insult.

And Americans are tired of being insulted.

His approval rating has fallen to depths not seen since Nixon started sweating through his suits. Even Republicans are beginning to admit something is off. Strategists are panicking. Voters are grimacing. Nothing feels stable anymore, except the cost of groceries, which is now apparently welded to the price of rare minerals.

The moment the floor gave way came on Dec. 7, when Trump turned on “Fox & Friends,” his long-time emotional support animal, and found Peter Schiff calmly pointing out that Americans can’t afford much of anything right now. Schiff didn’t yell or blast the president. He simply stated the obvious: prices are rising, wages aren’t and Trump’s tariffs are making everything worse.

Trump’s response was instant and volcanic. He accused Schiff of being a “Trump-hating loser,” demanded producers be investigated, and suggested some unnamed force was infiltrating the network.

But no matter how many enemies he invents, voters know when they’re being squeezed. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found only 26 percent of Americans think Trump is handling the cost of living well.

Even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who has defended every Republican president since the Bronze Age, has finally waved the red flag. Ignoring affordability, he warned, isn’t a strategy but political self-harm. You can yell “Fake news!” at a reporter. You can’t yell it at a supermarket shelf. As Gingrich put it, any Republican who denies the problem “is not listening to the American people.” Prices feel real because people feel them, and in a free country, perception becomes reality fast. When your voters decide groceries are unaffordable, no spin or late-night rant can drag them back into believing otherwise.

And the sting of rising prices is now paired with something even harder to ignore: Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior. When he’s not comparing female reporters to farm animals, he’s on Truth Social unloading a stream of consciousness that reads like a diary no one asked to see. He’s always been a ranter, of course, but the recent eruption didn’t register as a mere tantrum. It operated on an entirely different level. Hundreds of posts an hour. AI images. Conspiracy theories running around like mice in a grain silo. He accused Michelle Obama of controlling President Biden’s autopen. He suggested Canada was meddling in American elections. He claimed Democrats faked affordability statistics. He warned of shadowy enemies and imaginary plots. It was a kaleidoscope of fury, paranoia and capital letters.

And he did it in December, the one month Americans beg for a break. They want lights. Carols. Hot chocolate. They want to forget their overdrafts and pretend the economy isn’t hanging by a thread. They want peace on earth, or at least silence from their president at 3 a.m.

But instead, they got a man firing off posts like an overcaffeinated teenager locked in a basement with three routers and a grudge.

Christmas didn’t stand a chance.

Families are already tiptoeing around budgets. Four in ten say they’re cutting back. Six in ten say gifts for others are on the chopping block. This year, stockings across America will be filled not with gadgets or toys but with the one gift every politician hands out for free: disappointment.

Tariffs have turned holiday shopping into a form of financial stunt work. Small businesses are being squeezed so hard they now measure success by whether they can make it through one more import cycle without crying.

Take a fragile economy. Add a president broadcasting his own mental turbulence to millions. Mix in a month that demands emotional stability more than any other. The result is simple: Trump stepped on Christmas, barefoot, and shattered it.

John Mac Ghlionn is a writer and researcher who explores culture, society and the impact of technology on daily life.

Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved

Trump's 'refusal to face reality' on economic crisis shows his 'indifference': analysis

Ewan Gleadow
December 22, 2025 

RAW STORY


FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump holds an executive order about tariffs increase, flanked by U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., February 13, 2025. REUTERS/File Photo

Donald Trump has failed to face up to the reality of the cost of living crisis according to a political commentator who highlighted this "indifference".

John Casey suggested the president had failed to mark up the everyday problems facing the country this Christmas in an opinion piece for The Daily Beast. Casey claimed that Trump had flat out lied about prices falling when, in fact, they were on the rise. Trump's administration was compared to that of Herbert Hoover's "moral failure" in failing to adapt to The Great Depression

Casey wrote, "Herbert Hoover embodied the moral failure of inaction. When the Great Depression devastated the nation, he refused to treat widespread suffering as a call for federal intervention."

"The catastrophic results included soaring unemployment, hunger, disease, and death. Americans experienced what it means when their government refused responsibility for pain."

"Trump’s governing style reflects this refusal to face reality, with consequences stemming from deadlines passed and protections lapsed, with the indifferent refrain that 'things won’t be that bad.'"

"He dismisses warnings from job reports to inflation data as mere messaging problems and the reliable fallback of fake news. Economic hardship is challenged as a Democratic hoax, even as ordinary Americans struggle. Gas prices are down even when they are up."

These economic woes are starting to put strain on the MAGA faithful, according to Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman. Writing in his Substack newsletter, Krugman explained how Trump had inherited an economy that was in much better shape before he took office.

The Nobel Prize winner wrote, "Trump inherited when he took office was in much better shape than today’s economy, with lower unemployment combined with faster job growth, and inflation trending down."

"Trump’s radical policy changes – huge (illegal) tariffs, mass deportations, big tax cuts (for the rich), benefit cuts (for the poor and middle class), mass layoffs of federal workers, disinvesting in huge green energy projects and aid to farmers — have been clearly damaging to everything besides crypto and AI.

"It strains credulity – even for the Trump faithful – to claim that we are still in Joe Biden’s economy." Krugman went on to suggest Trump will try and "gaslight" Americans into believing the economy has been fixed.

He wrote, "Trump is going to make a prime-time address to the nation tonight. The details of his speech haven’t been announced, but it’s a good guess that he intends to gaslight Americans yet again, claiming that things are going well. They aren’t."

It’s Time for an All-Out Food Fight With Trump

How can ordinary grocery shoppers organize and become part of the movement that is endeavoring to protect society against Trump’s authoritarian juggernaut?


A customer shops for eggs in a Kroger grocery store in Houston, Texas.
(Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

Jeremy Brecher
Dec 14, 2025

Common Dreams

LONG READ


Hunger has a funny way of concentrating the attention.

The cost of food and cutbacks in the provision of food for those who need it have been drivers of mass protest throughout much of history:One of the events initiating the French Revolution was the Women’s March on Versailles, which began among women in the marketplaces of Paris protesting the high price and scarcity of bread. Their demonstrations quickly became intertwined with the activities of those who were seeking an end to autocracy and had just issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
The 2008 Egyptian general strike over rising food costs provided inspiration for the overthrow of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak three years later.
In 2022 in Sri Lanka, rising food prices among other grievances led to protests that culminated in the overthrow of the ruling regime.

Recent months have seen the emergence of a powerful movement-based opposition to President Donald Trump and MAGA, manifested in the 7 million participants in No Kings Day and the unprecedented on-the-ground opposition to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and National Guard occupations of American cities. At the same time, the price of food for Americans of every class has soared: A survey this summer by the Associated Press and NORC found the cost of groceries has become a major source of stress for just over half of all Americans—outpacing rent, healthcare, and student debt.

What are sometimes belittled as “pocketbook issues” like the cost of food, housing, and medical care have become critical issues for a majority of Americans. So far, the hundreds of millions suffering from inflated prices have not found a way to organize themselves and fight back. Nor has the movement-based opposition taken up their cause. But a rarely remembered consumer boycott half a century ago indicates how such self-organization against high food prices might emerge.
“America’s Largest Protest”

Ann Giordano, 33, described herself as “just a housewife.” She recalled that she was never particularly conscious of food prices; her Staten Island kitchen didn’t have enough shelf space for her to buy in large quantities. But one day when she had put the groceries away there was still space left on the shelf. She vaguely wondered if she had left a bag of food at the store. Next time she came home from shopping, she looked in her wallet and concluded that she had accidentally left a $20 bill behind. When she went back to the supermarket and found out how much her food really cost, she suddenly realized where the shelf space had come from and where the money had gone.

It was early spring in 1973. Inflation was rising, food prices were soaring, and millions of shoppers nationwide were having similar experiences. Mrs. Giordano called some of her friends and discussed the idea of a consumer boycott—an idea that was springing up simultaneously in many places around the country in response to rising food prices. Soon a substantial network of women was calling homes all over Staten Island, spreading word of the boycott. They called a meeting at a local bowling alley to which over one hundred people came on two days’ notice. They named themselves JET-STOP (Joint Effort to Stop These Outrageous Prices) and elected captains for each district. Within a week they had covered the island with leaflets. picketed the major stores, and laid the basis for a highly effective boycott.

Mrs. Giordano and her friends were typical of those who gave birth to the 1973 consumer meat boycott, “a movement which started in a hundred different places all at once and that’s not led by anyone.” As a newspaper account described it:
The boycott is being organized principally at the grassroots level rather than by any overall committee or national leadership. It is made up mainly of groups of tenants in apartment buildings, neighbors who shop at the same markets in small towns, block associations, and—perhaps most typical—groups of women who meet every morning over coffee. All have been spurred into action by the common desire to bring food prices back to what they consider a manageable level.

The 1973 consumer meat boycott was undoubtedly the largest mass protest in American history. A Gallup poll taken at the end of the boycott found that over 25% of all consumers—representing families with 50 million members—had participated in it. Large retail and wholesale distributors reported their meat sales down by one-half to two-thirds. The boycott was strongest among what the press referred to as “middle income” families—those with incomes around the then-national average of $10,000 to $12,000 a year. It represented, in the words of one reporter, “an awareness that, for a whole new class of Americans like themselves, push has finally come to shove.”

In low-income neighborhoods, sales fell less during the boycott, largely because, as retailers pointed out, the residents, who couldn’t afford much meat at any time, had been cutting back for weeks due to high prices. As one Harlem merchant said, “How much can these people tighten their belts when they don’t have too much under their belts in the first place?”

Some advocates of the boycott made the dubious argument that it would bring meat prices down by reducing the demand for meat. Most participants, however, saw the movement as a protest, a way of communicating to politicians and others what they felt about the rising cost of living.

President Richard Nixon responded by putting a freeze on meat prices, but his move was met by scorn among many boycotters, who felt that prices were already far too high (“They locked the barn door after the cow went through the roof,” commented one housewife).
“We Ain’t Buying It!”

The meat boycott did not prove to be an effective tactic for combating high prices. Lacking a further strategy for meeting its participants’ needs and failing to hook up with the other mass insurgencies of the time, the movement soon lost momentum. Participants stopped coordinating their activity and returned to more individual strategies. But it did show the tremendous capacity of ordinary people to organize themselves on a massive national scale around issues of mutual concern—in this case the price of food.

Recent months have seen the emergence of the consumer boycott as a powerful vehicle for combating the Trump regime and undermining its “pillars of support.” Today’s boycotts are far more effectively targeted on specific institutions and realizable demands. For example, when the “Tesla Takedown” challenged Elon Musk’s role demolishing federal agencies and jobs, sales plunged and company stocks fell 13% in three months. A boycott campaign against Target initiated in January by the local Black community in Minneapolis over its reversal of its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies has now cut sharply into its sales, helping lead to its stock falling 33%, a $20 billion loss in shareholder value, and replacement of its CEO. When Disney took late-night host Jimmy Kimmel off the air over comments he made following the murder of Charlie Kirk in September, the Working Families Party helped put together a toolkit that explained how to cancel a Disney subscription. The Wall Street Journal reported that customers ditched Disney+ and Hulu at double the normal rates in September. Disney brought Kimmel back within days, and Hulu soon followed suit.

The 1973 meat boycott illustrates the way what are sometimes dismissed as “pocketbook issues” can be drivers of self-organization and massive outpourings of public discontent.

Today’s boycotts are also much better aligned with other forces. For example, in the days following Thanksgiving, major organizations that had backed the millions-strong national No Kings and MayDay2025 days of action, including Indivisible, 50501, and MayDayStrong, swung behind the boycotts of Target, Amazon, Home Depot, and other major corporations. Some national coordination was provided by a group that called itself “We Ain’t Buying It.”

This action is taking direct aim at Target, for caving to this administration’s biased attacks on DEI; Home Depot, for allowing and colluding with ICE to kidnap our neighbors on their properties; and Amazon, for funding this administration to secure their own corporate tax cuts.

These groups and many others are backing the boycott in support of striking Starbuck’s workers under the slogan, “No contract, no coffee!”

Like the Tesla Takedowns, these boycotts are coordinated with and often spearheaded by demonstrations and other forms of direct action at physical locations. And they are finding ways to stimulate other forms of pressure on their targets: The Amazon protest group Athenaforall, for example, is encouraging local groups to demand an end to local contracts with Amazon, permission for Amazon expansions, and public subsidies for Amazon.

Today’s boycott actions are better targeted and better allied than the 1973 meat boycott, but so far, they have not drawn in much of the population that is directly harmed by Trump and his corporate backers. The 1973 meat boycott shows that pocketbook issues, such as inflation and most notably food prices, can be a basis for self-organization and action beyond the electoral arena among the wide swath of people they affect.

The 1973 meat boycott illustrates the way what are sometimes dismissed as “pocketbook issues” can be drivers of self-organization and massive outpourings of public discontent. Such examples from the past are unlikely to provide us the specific programs or tactics we need to meet today’s food crises. But they do demonstrate the power that people can mobilize when they are driven by food deprivation.

Food Facts

The US currently has two overlapping food crises. One is the elimination of food programs for the poor. According to the Center for American Progress:
Project 2025 and the Republican Study Committee budget envisioned a transformative dismantling of federal nutrition assistance programs. In January, the Trump administration chaotically froze federal funding, leaving farmers reeling and nonprofits serving the needy worrying about steady access to support from SNAP and Meals on Wheels. In March, the administration cut more than $1 billion of funding from two programs that supply schools and food banks with food from local farms and ranches. These cuts affected schoolchildren and small farmers in all 50 states.

Despite the end of the government shutdown, millions face cutoff of food assistance right now. The GOP’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” passed earlier this year, cuts SNAP by roughly 20%. The cuts may affect people in every state. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the addition of new work requirements alone will cause 2.4 million people to lose benefits in an average month.

There is also another food crisis that affects everyone—poor and less poor—the fast-rising cost of food.

As you may have noticed, the price of food in American supermarkets has soared. As surveys indicate, the cost of groceries has become a major source of stress for American consumers.

Many consumers compare food prices now to five years ago. According to the Department of Agriculture, five years ago the average cost of groceries for a family of two working adults and two children ranged between $613 and $1,500 per month. In 2025, such a family is spending between $1,000 and $1,600 per month at the grocery store.

Food prices have continued rising through Trump’s presidency. In September 2025, banana prices were up 7% from a year before, ground beef had risen 13%, and roasted coffee rose 19%, according to the most recent Consumer Price Index (CPI) data available. (At that point the Trump administration stopped releasing CPI data—perhaps on the theory that no news is good news, or that what you don’t know won’t starve you.) As of September, the average cost of a pound of ground beef was $6.30, according to Federal Reserve data—the highest since the Department of Labor started tracking beef prices in the 1980s and 65% higher than in late 2019. The average retail price of ground roast coffee reached a record high of $9.14 per pound in September, more than twice the price in December 2019 when a pound of ground coffee cost just over $4.

Discontent over inflation was a principal cause of Trump’s 2024 election victory. It was also a principal cause of the Republican rout in 2025. But there is little public confidence that either Democrats or Republicans will rectify it. And neither has much in the way of a program to fix it—beyond each blaming the other.

The Fight for Food

In the 1973 meat boycott, households with 50 million members found a way to protest high food prices without waiting for elections. Today, the hundreds of millions of victims of exorbitant food prices may be enraged, but they have not yet found a way to organize themselves and fight back. Nor has the movement-based opposition that has challenged Trump’s galloping autocracy yet found a way to address food and other affordability issues. Food deprivation presents an opportunity for the movement to defend society against Trump’s depredations to bring a new front—and a new constituency—into that struggle.

While food inflation has multiple causes, our current food crises are in considerable part a result of actions by Trump and MAGA’s would-be autocracy. For example, Trump’s tariffs, a significant cause of rising food prices, represent an unconstitutional usurpation of the exclusive authority of the legislative branch to levy taxes. The violent attacks by ICE on immigrant workers—especially on farm workers—have driven workers from the fields, leading to farm labor shortages and rising food prices. And of course the cuts in SNAP and other food support programs make food immensely more expensive for tens of millions of people. While long-term solutions to food prices and food security will require major reforms in agricultural and other policies, reversing Trump’s tariff, anti-immigrant, and anti-SNAP policies could help a lot right now.

The anti-autocracy movement has the opportunity to raise the issues of food and other consumer prices as a fundamental part of the way MAGA autocracy is hurting ordinary people. The message can be: The destruction of democracy is hurting you. This can open a way to the convergence of “pocketbook” concerns and the “No Kings” struggle for democracy. The movement-based opposition can serve as an ally to help people organize themselves and fight for themselves—as households with 50 million members did in the 1973 meat boycott.

While food inflation has multiple causes, our current food crises are in considerable part a result of actions by Trump and MAGA’s would-be autocracy.

The 1973 meat boycott grew out of the daily life conditions of millions of people; mass response to today’s food crises will similarly depend on the experiences, feelings, reflections, discussions, and above all experimental action of those suffering their consequences. But one of the limits on the meat boycott’s success was the difficulty it had formulating concrete demands and a program which could actually realize its objectives. Today, there are proposals “in the wind” to bring down food prices that are well worth discussing and testing. They include:

End all tariffs on food: Trump’s tariffs contribute significantly to the high cost of meat, coffee, bananas, and other groceries—tariffs on Brazilian beef imports are more than 75%, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. Whatever the Supreme Court decides about current challenges to the constitutionality of Trump’s tariff programs, he will almost certainly try to continue his tariff powers using different legal justifications—and the impact on consumers will continue. Yet his recent reduction of some tariffs on food shows how politically vulnerable he is on this issue—and indicates that pressure could force even more reductions.

The Yale Budget Lab recently estimated that tariffs will cost households almost $2,400 a year. In a recent poll, three-quarters said their regular monthly household costs have increased by at least $100 a month from last year. Respondents identified the tariffs as the second biggest threat to the economy. Only 22% supported Trump’s tariffs. A demand to end all tariffs on food might win quick and massive support—and find allies among the public officials and corporate leaders who are turning against Trump’s tariffs. Sen. Jacky Rosen of Nevada recently introduced the No Tariffs on Groceries Act, saying, “Donald Trump lied to the American people when he promised to bring prices down ‘on day one.’ His reckless tariffs have done the opposite, raising grocery costs and making it harder for hardworking families to put food on the table.”

Restore all food programs: The hunger-producing cuts in nutrition programs like SNAP are immensely unpopular. In October, Republican Senator Josh Hawley, of all people, introduced two bills to reinstate Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits and critical farm programs during the government shutdown. Despite the end of the government shutdown, cuts in SNAP and other nutrition programs are burgeoning. A campaign to cancel all cuts in all food programs would have wide popular support and could be spearheaded by those who have lost or will lose their benefits. Legislation to do so was introduced in Congress in late November.

Provide free school meals: Free school lunch programs represent a widely accepted form of support for all families—without demeaning means tests. In Colorado voters just passed statewide ballot measures which would raise $95 million annually for school meals by limiting deductions for high income taxpayers. The measures will support Healthy School Meals for All, a state program that provides free breakfast and lunch to all students regardless of their family’s income level. Excess receipts can be used to compensate for the loss of federal SNAP funds. Nine states and many cities already provide free meals for all students. Such programs can directly reduce the money families have to pay for food.

Expand SNAP to all who need it: A proposal by food insecurity expert Craig Gunderson would provide SNAP benefits to all those with incomes up to 400% of the poverty line. If benefits were also expanded by roughly 25%, it would reduce food insecurity by more than 98% at a cost of $564.5 billion. While such a program is not likely to be instituted all at once, the demand to expand SNAP eligibility could win wide popular support and directly benefit tens of millions of people. According to Gunderson, states can and have set higher eligibility thresholds of up to 200% of the poverty line. Given the wide public outrage over the soaring wealth of the wealthy, surely a tax on high-income people to pay for such a program could win popular support.

Support community gardens, local farms, and food mutual aid: The Trump administration has eliminated two programs that provided schools and food banks $1 billion to buy food from local farms. This has directly impacted food banks, schools, and farmers by cutting off a key market for local produce and reducing the amount of fresh food available to those in need. People don’t have to wait for government programs to start growing their own food to fight hunger—in fact, they are doing so already, for example, through community gardens. But state and municipal programs can provide essential support for expanding these efforts.

Open public grocery stores: New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has proposed a network of city-owned grocery stores focused on keeping prices low, rather than on making a profit. They would buy and sell at wholesale prices, centralize warehousing and distribution, and partner with local neighborhoods on products and sourcing.

“Don’t Starve—Fight”

Historically it has often been hard to find the levers of power to affect food prices. The 1973 meat boycott was powerful enough to bring about token action by President Richard Nixon. But it was unable to parlay participation by families with 50 million members into an effective way to reduce food prices. Around the world food riots have often been more successful in bringing down governments than in bringing down the price of food.

Targeted boycotts have recently proved effective where they could seriously affect a powerful target—witness the Tesla Takedown causing Elon Musk to withdraw from his DOGE disaster and Disney’s rapid rehiring of Jimmy Kimmel. Targets might include food companies that have supported Trump.

Today’s boycotts are highly effective at generating new and creative tactics: Consider the anti-ICE activists in Los Angeles, Charlotte, and elsewhere who swelled long lines to buy 17-cent ice scrapers, then again swelled long lines to return them—to send a message to Home Depot “to scrape ICE out of their stores.”

A movement against the failure to bring down high food prices could be a natural ally for the emerging movement to defend society against Trump and MAGA.

Boycotts are only one vehicle that could be used for food protests. Local demonstrations and “hunger marches” can be vehicles for dramatizing the issue and mobilizing people around it. Food banks, unions, churches, and other local institutions are in a strong position to initiate such actions. There is no way to know in advance what actions will achieve traction, but that is a good reason to start “testing the waters.”

Under public pressure, many states are stepping up to replace SNAP funding to compensate for federal cuts. A special session of the New Mexico legislature, for example, authorized $20 million weekly to provide state nutrition assistance benefits to the 460,000 New Mexicans who rely on SNAP.

But states will only be able to fill in for the federal government for a limited period of time. The New Mexico program, for example, only provides funding through the week of January, 19, 2026. At some point, even Republican governors and legislators may well begin demanding “re-federalization” of food programs.

Such a dynamic can be seen in the federalization of relief in the early days of the Great Depression. The entire American establishment, led by President Herbert Hoover, abhorred the idea of federal help for the poor and hungry, maintaining it was exclusively the responsibility of local governments and charities. But “hunger strikes” and other protests, often under the slogan “Don’t Starve—Fight!” created disruption and fear of social upheaval. In response, many cities and states created emergency relief programs, but soon many of them were on the verge of bankruptcy. Once-conservative city and state leaders began trooping to Washington to ask for federal support. As Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven put it, “Driven by the protests of the masses of unemployed and the threat of financial ruin, mayors of the biggest cities of the United States, joined by business and banking leaders, had become lobbyists for the poor.”

Under such pressure, the Hoover administration developed a program of loans to states to pay for relief programs. With the coming of the New Deal, this became an enormously expanded program of federal grants. The New Deal also began to buy surplus commodities from farmers and distribute them to families with low income.

While the details are different, this basic dynamic of pressure from people to cities and states to the federal government is still relevant today. Pressure to expand local and state programs is not an alternative to federal programs, but a step to forcing their expansion.

One weakness of the 1973 meat boycott was its isolation from the other burgeoning movements of the time, including the civil rights movement; the movement against the Vietnam War; and the large-scale wave of strikes, many of them wildcats. This made it less powerful than it otherwise might have been. A food movement today would have the opportunity for powerful alliances. Like consumers, farmers are being devastated by Trump’s tariffs and would benefit from expanded food programs. Like food consumers, farmers are also being hurt by the ICE policies driving farm workers away from the fields.

Food inflation might seem to be a middle-class issue, but poor people spend a substantially higher proportion of their total income on food, so rising food prices affect them even more. In 2023, the fifth of the population with the lowest incomes spent nearly 33% of their income on food; the highest-income fifth spent barely 8%. The rising cost of food means the poor can buy even less with whatever small funds they have. So low-income and better-off food consumers are natural allies.

High food prices were an important reason for Donald Trump’s election; he promised to reduce prices on “day one” of his presidency. Spooked by rising consumer anger at high food prices, on December 6 Trump established two task forces to investigate “whether anti-competitive behavior, especially by foreign-controlled companies, increases the cost of living for Americans.” An accompanying fact sheet stated, “President Trump is fighting every day to reverse Biden’s inflation crisis and bring down sky-high grocery prices—and he will not rest until every American feels the relief at the checkout line.” The task forces are instructed to report their findings to Congress within 180 days and present recommendations for congressional action within a year.

A movement against the failure to bring down high food prices could be a natural ally for the emerging movement to defend society against Trump and MAGA—what I have called “Social Self-Defense.” Conversely, the emerging movement-based opposition to Trump and MAGA has everything to gain by encouraging the development of a movement that allows millions of people to fight, not starve.


Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Jeremy Brecher
Jeremy Brecher is a historian, author, and co-founder of the Labor Network for Sustainability. His book, "Climate Insurgency: A Strategy for Survival," or free download at his personal website. His other books include: "Save the Humans? Common Preservation in Action" (2020), "Strike!" (2020), and, co-edited with Brendan Smith and Jill Cutler, "In the Name of Democracy: American War Crimes in Iraq and Beyond" (Metropolitan/Holt).
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Why America Is Removing Thousands Of Dams And Letting Rivers Run Free – OpEd

The 2024 removal of the Iron Gate Dam, part of the Klamath River restoration, the largest dam removal project in history. Photo Credit: Bob Pagliuco / NOAA Office of Habitat Conservation, Wikipedia Commons

December 3, 2025 

By Tara Lohan

After centuries of dam building, a nationwide movement to dismantle these aging barriers is showing how free-flowing rivers can restore ecosystems, improve safety, and reconnect people with nature.

With more than 550,000 dams in the United States, free-flowing rivers are an endangered species. We’ve dammed, diked, and diverted almost every major river in the country, straightening curves, pinching off floodplains, and blocking passage for fish and other aquatic animals. But this has come at a great cost. Freshwater biodiversity—all the organisms that hail from our rivers, streams, lakes, and wetlands—is among the most threatened on the planet. Dams have played a big role in that demise, pushing fish, mussels, and other animals to the brink, and some over it. In North America, nearly 40 percent of fish are imperiled, and 61 species have blinked out since 1900.

A growing dam removal movement has led to some 2,200 dams being blasted and backhoed from U.S. rivers—most of them in the past 25 years. It’s an extraordinary turn of events for a dam-loving country. Europeans began erecting river barriers soon after they arrived in North America. Massachusetts’s Old Oaken Bucket Pond Dam, built in 1640, is one of the country’s oldest known dams. Thousands more followed across New England, then down the East Coast, and eventually westward. They powered mills that ground corn, cut lumber, forged tack, and produced textiles. As dams raised the height of the water behind them, they also smothered rapids and white water so that logs could be floated from upstream forests—where they were felled—to downstream industry, where they were processed. After hydroelectric power replaced mechanical power in the 1880s, the dams kept towns and cities alight.

As dam building pushed westward, dam heights pushed skyward. Hoover Dam, built in the 1930s with the labor of 21,000 men, sits 726 feet high and more than 1,200 feet long—more a fortress than infrastructure. Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River in Washington rises to 550 feet and stretches nearly a mile long. The United States emerged from the Great Depression into a dam-building frenzy that lasted more than 30 years, dubbed the “go-go years” by Marc Reisner in Cadillac Desert, his iconic book on western water. Between 1950 and 1979, approximately 1,700 dams were built each year.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which built many of the country’s mammoth dams and reengineered its rivers, had a motto: “Our rivers: total use for greater wealth.” Millions of Americans cashed in on the boom, often without giving it a thought. Politicians and regulators championed dams for their power, flood control, water storage, and recreational potential. Indeed, dams shaped the architecture of the West, irrigating millions of arid acres to grow crops for people and livestock, corralling drinking water for cities hundreds of miles away, churning the engines of war to create aluminum for fighter planes and plutonium for bombs, and turning valleys and canyons into giant swimming pools for our amusement.

Woody Guthrie captured the sentiment of those years in his 1941 song “Grand Coulee Dam,” which refers to the Columbia River as a “wild and wasted stream.” Wasted until it was dammed, that is. The folksinger, spurred by a government paycheck for his efforts, penned 26 songs espousing the virtues of the Columbia River’s dams. That sentiment was also a natural extension of an ethos brought to the Americas by European colonists: Nature should be harnessed, subjugated, bent to the will of those manifesting their destiny. Along the way, any impact on fish and river health was either poorly understood or simply ignored. Often the latter. Also ignored were obligations to tribes that had treaty rights to fish rivers that were quickly becoming empty of fish.



For most Indigenous people, dams didn’t bring enrichment or progress; it was one more theft from the enduring process of colonization in which food, community, ceremony, and sovereignty were stolen. Barry McCovey Jr., a member of the Yurok Tribe in California, called the dams on the Klamath River, where his people reside, “cultural genocide.” Dams have swallowed creation sites, burial grounds, gathering places, fishing holes, homelands, and human history.

In the 1990s, then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt reflected that we have been building, on average, one large dam a day every day since the Declaration of Independence. It hasn’t been without ecological consequences either. Dams have decimated migratory fish populations by blocking their access to vital upstream habitat for spawning, feeding, and evading predators. The barriers also obstruct the downstream movement of sediment and nutrients, thus depleting riverbanks and coastal beaches, hastening erosion, and reducing the growth of riverside plants that feed insects, birds, and other animals.

The water that backs up behind a dam—its impoundment—turns a river into an unnatural lake. Migrating young salmon that once quickly rode spring freshets to the ocean must now navigate slow-moving water over a wide expanse, which takes more energy and increases the chances that they’ll end up as dinner to a hungry predator, of which there are many if you’re a tiny fish. And that’s all before they have to run the turbine gauntlet and face the drop from the dam’s height to the water below. The slack water in an impoundment behind the dam can also heat up, turning these reservoirs into bathtubs with lethal temperatures for some fish. The warm water can also spur the spread of invasive species that prey on native residents.

Dams upend so many natural processes that it could be argued a river dammed isn’t really a river at all. It’s also possible that many of us don’t remember how a free-flowing river really looks and sounds. Dam removals can help restore not just river function but our collective memory, and I think we’ll need to do a lot more of it. The U.S. dam-building flurry hit its peak in the 1970s, and since 2000, we’ve been taking down more dams than we’ve been building. But the dam removal movement didn’t happen spontaneously. It was fought for by tribes, conservationists, fishers, and eventually broad, somewhat unlikely coalitions. It was also aided by environmental laws that protect clean water and endangered species, by scientific studies of dam removals and their impacts, and by regulators willing to manage adaptively.

Many people may see removing dams as outlandish. After all, they provide clean, cheap energy, right? But it turns out that only 3 percent of dams produce hydropower. Although hydropower is often placed in the “clean energy” column, dams and reservoirs also produce greenhouse gases, such as methane, and some do so to a significant degree.

Climate change poses yet more challenges. In drought-plagued regions, such as the Colorado River Basin, very little water can leave major reservoirs too low to produce hydropower or deliver water supplies. On the flip side, many dams today aren’t designed to withstand climate-amplified storms, which are increasing in frequency and severity, can threaten public safety, and may leave big cleanup bills. A big storm in 2023 put Montpelier, Vermont, underwater, and experts found that dams actually made the flooding worse.

There are many compelling environmental reasons to remove dams—including the long list of ecological consequences given above—but public safety is also paramount. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gave the nation’s dam safety a “D” grade in 2021. Until 2019, there were more than 15,000 “high-hazard” dams, where a failure would result in the loss of life. And there’s ample reason to be worried. The average age of our dams is 57 years, and more than 8,000 have surpassed 90 years. Aging dams require regular maintenance to ensure their safety, but this comes at a significant cost. As of 2024, $165 billion was required to rehabilitate all nonfederal dams in need of repair, and another $27 billion was needed for federal dams, according to the ASCE 2021 report.

Dams also don’t have to fail to be dangerous. At U.S. low-head dams, many only a few feet tall, some 1,400 people have drowned because of the unseen and unsafe hydraulics that these dams produce. The 6-foot-tall Dock Street Dam in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, has taken 31 lives between 1913 and April 2025.

Of course, many of our dams serve critical purposes, and I’ve yet to meet a dam removal advocate who thinks that they should all come down. I certainly don’t. But there’s no shortage of low-hanging fruit when it comes to dams worthy of demolition. Tens of thousands of dams—in some states, the majority of dams obstructing rivers and streams—no longer serve a useful purpose. These so-called deadbeat dams include mill dams, where the mills are decades (or centuries) gone, and obsolete dams, such as the 168-foot-tall Matilija Dam in Southern California, which was built for water storage but filled with silt in just 50 years. Some dams are orphans, with no known owner and therefore no one overseeing their upkeep. In many cases, it’s cheaper to take down dams than to refurbish and retrofit them to meet modern safety and environmental laws.

Dam removals can also be a necessary step toward ameliorating harm to Indigenous communities from the loss of food sovereignty, treaty rights, cultural resources, and homelands. More people are now realizing the benefits of restoring nature for nature’s sake—for the bears, birds, and beavers. For the salmon and cedars. Certainly, that’s been the case on the Elwha River in Washington state. People also benefit from ecological restoration. Over the last few decades, we’ve started to better account for what healthy rivers provide. These ecosystem services have helped put a value on something invaluable.

These days, we’re still building dams, although fewer than before, which is a step in the right direction. But to undo centuries of environmental harm, we’ll need bigger leaps.

American Rivers has set an ambitious goal to work with partners to remove30,000 dams and open up 300,000 river miles by 2050. That work is aided by aquatic connectivity teams now operating in 26 states and counting. There are also some other unlikely partners, such as the hydropower industry, although it’s not a booster of every project.

“It has really come down to safety and economics. They’re electing to take out their lower-performing assets,” Brian Graber, senior director of River Restoration at American Rivers, told me. “There are many more dam owners who want to remove dams, and so trade groups, like the National Hydropower Association, are no longer adversaries.”

Opening up rivers, I think, opens up a door of possibilities both for fish and people. It allows us to reimagine how to grow food without emptying rivers of life, how to generate clean energy without driving extinction, and how to move forward without leaving part of the community behind. We can be better neighbors to each other, but also better people on this planet.

Author Bio: Tara Lohan has been a professional environmental journalist and editor for more than 15 years. Her work has been published in the Nation, the American Prospect, Salon, High Country News, Grist, the Revelator, Adventure Journal, and other news outlets. She is the editor of two books on the global water crisis and, most recently, Undammed: Freeing Rivers and Bringing Communities to Life (Island Press, 2025).

Credit Line: This excerpt is adapted from Tara Lohan’s Undammed: Freeing Rivers and Bringing Communities to Life (2025, Island Press). It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) with permission from Island Press. It was produced for the web by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.