Lessons for Everyone from the Irish Farmer Protests

Anthony Pahnke

 May 1, 2026

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Barn on the French Prairie, Willamette Valley, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Can anything make farmers turn away from Trump?

How rightwing populism has gripped rural areas, especially among farmers, is evidenced by the results from the past few presidential elections.

Still, critical challenges are emerging for key constituencies in Trump’s base, principally due to the damage that the Iran war is doing in the countryside.  Similar conditions pushed Irish farmers to the streets in early April, causing a change among political leadership shortly after, and also helping producers receive some much-needed relief.

That Irish farmers took to the streets shouldn’t surprise folks.  Earlier this year in January, some of them were also demonstrating, but against the EU-Mercosur trade deal.  Not too long ago in 2024, their counterparts across the English Channel throughout many European countries staged weeks of actions to protest free trade deals and excessive bureaucratic regulations.  Outside of Europe, in Mexico beginning in 2025 and continuing into 2026, farmers for many of the same reasons, are blocking roads to demand government intervention to address falling prices for their produce.

Taking a quick glance at these recent protests taking place around the world, farmers in the United States seem to be asleep at the wheel as producers in many other countries are taking control by challenging their governments and calling for economic justice.

It is not the case that farmers in the US are living large.

In 2025, farm bankruptcies rose by 46% compared to 2024.  In 2026, even though there appears to be some movement in a positive direction concerning prices for corn and soy farmers, the jump in what they have to pay for fuel and fertilizer caused by how the Iran war devastates global supply chains is eating into their profits.

Making matters worse, the fertilizer industry is heavily concentrated.  A standard metric for measuring concentration – the four-firm concentration ratio (CR4) – shows that the leading four companies in fertilizer markets control about 75% of sales.  When that figure is above 40% within a certain industry, according to researchers, then illegal practices such as price-fixing become endemic and consumers pay more than they should at the register.  Put simply, the negative economic impacts from the Iran war are compounded by an industry looking for excuses to further jack up prices.

Meanwhile, the current version of the Farm Bill in Congress woefully fails to meet the needs of a farm economy facing crisis.

First, pricing policy to support farmers was decided last year in the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) when the surge in input prices was not on the political radar.  Adding insult to injury for our food and farm system, the OBBB also cut food assistance support and climate change initiatives.  Speaking to problems farmers are facing, nowhere in the current Farm Bill do we find any discussion of taking on corporate power.  Investing in transitioning farms to small-scale, young producers is also mainly an afterthought in the legislation. How hundreds of agribusiness commodity groups support the current version of the legislation while as many small-scale producer-led groups have voiced opposition, is testament to the fact that our farm policy is about propping up export markets instead of feeding Americans and creating resilient systems.

Trump’s billion-dollar handout to large-scale, mainly high-income farmers at the start of the Iran conflict shows an administration not concerned with sustaining our food system, but with padding the pockets of rich elite allies.

Farmers in Ireland faced similar challenges and felt that they had no choice but to go to the streets.  Their actions, drawing comparisons to France’s yellow vests movement, also boasted no clear leaders.  In locally organized, spontaneous actions, groups from April 7th to 14th mobilized by blockading strategic oil refineries as well as slowing down traffic on key streets and highways.

Their mobilizations bore some fruit.  First, they managed to secure a short-term relief package in the form of direct payments to offset rising fuel costs.  Politically, they also caused some political shifts, driving leaders to leave the governing coalition in opposition to how the farmers were treated.  While short of generating long-lasting structural change, the demonstrations in Ireland still show how small-scale protests driven by economic malaise can get national attention and prompt change.

Perhaps more importantly for US farmers is how the Irish managed to overcome their relative isolation in society and mobilize with others.  Particularly, Irish producers brought  truckers to their side, which aided with their efforts at creating roadblocks and slowdowns.  Their interests also were aligned, as truckers also have been negatively impacted by rising fuel prices.

With a widely maligned Farm Bill  working its way through Congress, legislators have apparently decided to forget about making meaningful changes to our food and farm system.  Meanwhile, the Iran war is placing unnecessary stress on farmers and most other working people.  Such conditions are similar to those in Ireland, which led farmers to find common cause with others.  Now is as good a time as any other for their counterparts in the US to say enough is enough and denounce a rigged economy that benefits the few at the expense of the many.

Anthony Pahnke is a Professor of International Relations at San Francisco State University. His research covers development policy and social movements in Latin America. He can be contacted at anthonypahnke@sfsu.edu

Is the DNC Giving Kamala Harris a Boost for 2028?

Norman Solomon

 May 1, 2026

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More than four months after Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin announced that he was breaking his promise to release its autopsy report on the 2024 election, the decision remains highly controversial. Arguments swirl around whether it’s wise to proceed without public scrutiny of what went wrong during the last presidential campaign. But scant attention has focused on how hiding the autopsy provides an assist to Kamala Harris, who currently leads in polling of Democrats for the party’s 2028 nomination.

As Harris eyes another run, she has a major stake in the DNC continuing to keep the autopsy under wraps – and has a lot to lose if it reaches the light of day. She must feel gratified when Martin defends keeping the autopsy secret, saying that the party should not “relitigate” the 2024 election and claiming that release of the 200-page document would result in “navel-gazing.”

Release of the entire autopsy would likely be a blow to Harris’s chances of becoming president in January 2029. Partly based on interviews with more than 300 prominent Democrats and others in all 50 states, it reportedly concludes that Harris’s unwavering support for U.S. weapons shipments to Israel was a significant factor in her loss to Donald Trump.

While she pursued an unsuccessful strategy of wooing scarce “moderate” Republican voters, many in the Democratic base were repelled by the full backing that Harris gave to President Biden’s massive arming of Israel as civilian deaths mounted in Gaza. She adhered to Biden’s admonition that there be “no daylight” between the two of them as she campaigned for president after he withdrew from the race.

At the time, polls showed that Harris was harming her election prospects by refusing to distance herself from Biden’s policy toward Israel. She evades that reality in her post-election book 107 Days, which dismisses antiwar protesters at her rallies as mere “hecklers.”

Harris’s protracted book tour has been beset by disruptions as well as her inability to provide cogent responses. At one appearance last fall, protesters yelled “Your legacy is genocide! Your legacy will always be genocide!” Her rejoinder was, “You know what, I am not president of the United States. You want to go to the White House and talk to him, then go on and do that.” Weeks later, speaking in Chicago, when a protester accused her of complicity in the Gaza horrors, she fired back: “Are you the same person that was telling people not to vote?”

Renewed attention to the Harris 2024 finances would also be unwelcome. Thirteen months after the election, the New York Times reported, “some Democratic donors have demanded a more thorough accounting of how exactly the party and Ms. Harris spent $1.5 billion in 15 weeks en route to losing every battleground state in 2024.” In mid-April, NBC News noted that “to date, a full accounting has not been made of who was paid what from the $1.5 billion, though the DNC later disclosed it carried more than $20 million in debt from Harris’s loss.”

A few weeks ago, Harris told an audience of influential black leaders that she’s “thinking about” running for president again and said that “I know what the job is and I know what it requires.” Politico described those comments as “the most explicit sign yet she’ll run for president in 2028.”

Just about the last thing Harris would need is enormous publicity about an authoritative audit from the DNC – the governing body of the Democratic party – about what was wrong with her 2024 campaign. Such an autopsy would stoke fires of negativity and apprehension about making her the party’s standard-bearer again.

The DNC’s scrapping of the autopsy is a political gift that keeps on giving to Harris as she appears to be gearing up for the 2028 campaign. A straw in the wind: The DNC national coalitions director, Gabriel Uy, recently emailed colleagues that he will leave that job in early May to “be working for VP Harris again, so let’s keep in touch.” Uy was the Nevada political director for Harris’s presidential campaign in 2019 and then deputy director of public engagement and intergovernmental affairs for Harris when she was vice president. Other high-level DNC employees will probably also be migrating to the Harris staff.

Under ongoing pressure from a variety of Democrats, Martin has begun to indicate that he will supply “top lines” summarizing the autopsy. Such a move would do little to placate critics, raising pointed questions about what was omitted and why the DNC was only willing to engage in cherry-picking instead of fully informing the party faithful.

During an MS NOW television interview in late April, while he used head-spinning illogic to defend concealing the autopsy, Martin went out of his way to say “I’m not here to protect anyone.” The interviewer had not asked if he was protecting anyone. It seemed to be an instance of “the chairman doth protest too much.”

Martin has properly emphasized that the Democratic National Committee should maintain strict neutrality in relation to presidential primaries, unlike what happened in 2016 when the DNC secretly assisted Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders. A year ago, in a well-publicized dustup with David Hogg, then in a brief stint as DNC vice chair, Martin insisted that Hogg could not run a funding operation for candidates in party primaries and remain a DNC officer.

“I am determined to make sure we don’t repeat the same errors of the past,” Martin wrote in Time magazine. He explained that “I’ve spent the past decade making sure our party cannot ever again be perceived as having a thumb on the scale for one candidate.”

But now, in effect, Martin’s concealment of the autopsy report puts a thumb on the scale for one candidate: Kamala Harris.

Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, is published by The New Press.

Jerome Powell at the Fed: an Appraisal

Dean Baker

 May 1, 2026

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Jerome Powell most likely has his last meeting as Fed Chair this week. Kevin Warsh, Trump’s pick, will likely have been approved as chair by the Senate in time for the Fed’s next meeting in June. We don’t know yet whether this will be Powell’s last meeting, since his term as a Fed governor doesn’t end until 2028.

While the norm has been for chairs to step down completely from the Fed when their term as chair ends, Powell has indicated that he may stay on until Trump’s absurd criminal investigation of the Fed over building cost overruns has finally been put to rest. This investigation was clearly started as part of Trump’s effort to pressure the Fed to lower rates.

Jeanine Pirro, the US Attorney for the District of Columbia, has said that she is putting the investigation aside for now. This gives North Carolina Senator Tom Tillis the excuse he needs to approve Warsh. (He had said that he wouldn’t provide the deciding vote as long as the investigation continued.) But both Pirro and Trump clearly left open the option of renewing the investigation at some future point.

We all remember that RFK, Jr. promised not to tamper with the vaccine schedule to get the deciding nomination vote from Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy. As a doctor, Cassidy felt strongly about the value of vaccines. Kennedy gave the promise needed to get his vote, and then quickly fired all the experts on the vaccine committees and appointed a group of hacks with little scientific background.

There is no reason to assume that Pirro won’t do a similar bait and switch. Powell is surely aware of this dynamic. If he were to stay on as a governor, it would deny Trump the opportunity to appoint another member of the Fed’s Open Market Committee that sets monetary policy. He would also have the stature to lead a challenge to a descent into MAGA craziness if Warsh tries to go in that direction. I have no insight into Powell’s thinking on this issue, but for what it’s worth, he has my vote for staying on.

Moving Towards Full Employment: Powell’s Legacy

I don’t have time to try to write a full Powell retrospective, but I do want to credit him for what I consider his major accomplishment as Fed chair: taking the commitment to full employment seriously. The Fed has a dual mandate to pursue low inflation and maximum employment. It has generally taken the first part of this mandate far more seriously than the second part, often leading to higher unemployment.

As Jared Bernstein and I wrote in a couple of books, low unemployment is an extremely powerful tool in reducing inequality. Low rates of unemployment disproportionately benefit the most disadvantaged groups in the labor market: those with less education, Black and Hispanic workers, and people with criminal records. For this reason, we placed a huge premium on the Fed’s willingness to push the limits in trying to lower the unemployment rate.

To be clear, the Fed can’t do it all. We need training programs and government-supported jobs to really get to full employment, but we should want a Fed that does all it can. Powell did this in his first term. When he took over as Fed chair from Janet Yellen in February 2018, the Fed had started on a path of raising interest rates following a long period of a zero rate, following the Great Recession.

Powell originally continued this course but then stopped raising rates in 2019. He then actually lowered the rate three times, a quarter point each time, despite the fact that the unemployment rate was 3.6 percent. This was lower than almost all economists’ estimates of the NAIRU (the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment). Most economists put this number at 5.0 percent unemployment, and some considerably higher.

The tightness of the labor market had the predicted effect. The unemployment rate for Black workers fell to 5.3 percent, which at the time was the lowest on record. (It fell to 4.8 percent in 2023.) Workers in the bottom half of the wage distribution had the bargaining power to secure real wage gains. And there were accounts of employers reaching out to prisons to get in contact with people about to be released, so they could look to hire them.

Powell responded quickly and aggressively to the pandemic. He again lowered the Fed’s interest rate to zero and engaged in quantitative easing (buying longer-term bonds) to try to directly drive down longer-term interest rates like mortgages. This succeeded; the interest rate on 30-year mortgages fell below 3.0 percent in 2021.

This was the story I was looking at when Powell came up for reappointment in 2021. For my part, I was a strong proponent of a second term. I felt that we had come far in getting the Fed to take full employment seriously. Powell was best situated to carry that mission forward. And he did.

The country went on to have the longest period of below 4.0 percent unemployment since the early 1950s. There were strong real wage gains at the bottom end of the wage distribution, with real wages for workers at the 10thpercentile rising 15.3 percent between 2019 and 2024. And as noted above, the unemployment rate for Black workers fell to 4.8 percent.

It’s possible to blame Powell for the surge of inflation in 2021 and 2022, but I would not share in that criticism. We know the vast majority of the inflation stemmed from pandemic-related supply shocks and then the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I suppose if Powell had jacked up rates sooner, it might have lowered inflation somewhat more quickly, but the cost would have been higher unemployment.

I wouldn’t consider that a good deal. To my mind, the important part of the story is that he brought inflation back down almost to the Fed’s 2.0 percent target with only a very limited rise in unemployment. In fact, before Trump made his plans to liberate us with his tariffs, inflation was on a path to hit the Fed’s 2.0 percent target in 2025.  Few economists thought that was possible. This was a great success.

I won’t say I agree with everything Powell did. He was seriously deficient on regulation, allowing for the situation where the Fed considered it necessary to bail out Donald Trump’s crypto-bro friends at the Silicon Valley Bank in 2023. He also raised rates more than I considered necessary and held them high longer, but he could have been right in these calls.

In any case, I can’t argue with his overall record for eight years. His management of the Fed allowed millions of people to hold jobs who otherwise would have been unemployed and tens of millions to get higher wages than would otherwise have been the case. That is a really big deal.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

Dean Baker is the senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC.