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Wednesday, September 01, 2021

PRISON NATION USA

Report: San Luis Obispo County Jail violates prisoners' rights

The Department of Justice on Tuesday released a report stating the San Luis Obispo County Jail violated the rights of its prisoners.

File Photo by Kevin Dietsch/UPI | License Photo

Sept. 1 (UPI) -- The Justice Department said Tuesday that California's San Luis Obispo County Jail has violated the rights of its prisoners by failing to provide them with adequate healthcare, specifically for mental health issues, and subjects them to excessive use of force.

The announcement from the Justice Department came some three years after it opened an investigation into the conditions of the jail in October of 2018 following a series of prisoner deaths at the facility.

In its findings, the department said "there is reasonable cause to believe, based on the totality of the conditions, practices and incidents discovered at the San Luis County Jail" that the facility violates the Eighth and 14th Amendments of the Constitution.

Specially, the investigators found that the jail fails to provide prisoners with constitutionally adequate medical care and adequate mental healthcare.

It also uses prolonged restrictive measures against prisoners with serious mental illness that places them at substantial risk of serious harm as well as fails to prevent, detect or correct such uses of force.

The county jail also denies equal access to services, programs or activities to prisoners with disabilities, in particular those with mental health disabilities.

"Our Constitution guarantees that all people held in jails and prisons across our country are treated humanely, and that includes providing access to necessary medical and mental healthcare," Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division said in a statement. "After a comprehensive investigation, we found that San Luis Obispo Jail harms the people it incarcerates by subjecting them to excessive force and by failing to provide adequate medical and mental healthcare."

The jail, located outside the city of San Luis Obispo, which is about 190 miles north of Los Angeles, houses approximately 540 prisoners at any time, a signifiant portion of whom suffer from mental illness.

According to the report, at any given time about 39% of its prisoner population is taking some form of psychotropic medication and the jail estimates that more than 90% of its population have substance abuse issues.

The report said that the jail fails to provide prisoners, many of whom have serious medical needs, with adequate medical assessments and does not evaluate or treat those who request medical attention in a timely manner.

These conditions, it said, subject them to substantial risk of serious harm, and which are exacerbated by inadequate staffing, monitoring and oversight, among other issue.

The investigation, which opened following a series of deaths at the facility, said that between January 2012 and June 2020, 16 prisoners died under its care, including a 36-year-old man who suffered from schizophrenia.

The man, identified only by the initials AA, died after spending 46 consecutive hours strapped to a restraint chair, which followed him being held in isolation for 16 months.

He was placed in the restraint chair on Jan. 20, 2017, after he was observed hitting himself in the face and head, and he remained in that chair naked aside from a blanket until Jan. 22.

"Within 40 minutes after being released from the restraint chair, he died of a pulmonary embolism," which is blood clots that form as a result of a lack of mobility, the report said.

The report states that though the facility discontinued the use of the restraint chair and made other changes prisoners who suffered from mental of physical health issues continued to die at the facility.

The investigators concluded that staff frequently use force against prisoners where force is unnecessary or where the degree of force is greater than what is required while also applying force without first seeking compliance through voluntary means.

"Prisoners who curse at deputies or disobey minor routine instructions -- e.g., to stop yelling or kicking a cell -- are often subjected to force even when the force is unnecessary to ensure safety," it said.

They also found that the jail over relies on restrictive housing to manage prisoners with serious mental illness, which subjects many of them to serious harm, including death.

"The county also inappropriately uses restrictive housing to manage prisoners who have recently attempted suicide or engaged in acts of self-directed violence," the report states. "Prisoners who have been housed in restrictive housing for prolonged periods frequently engage in acts of self-harm."

The department in the report has listed dozens of measures, and that within 49 days after issuing the report, the attorney general may initiate a lawsuit to correct the identified deficiencies, it said.

In a statement Tuesday, the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff's Office said it has received the report, but said it fails to take into account the measures it has taken since the investigation began.

"The sheriff's office has worked cooperatively with the Department of Justice over the past three years to investigate deficiencies and determine appropriate improvements to ensure our jail facility is fully compliant with federal law," Sheriff Ian Parkinson said. "We are pleased with our progress so far and will continue to work diligently to provide a safe and secure jail facility."

Virginia Gov. Northam pardons Martinsville Seven

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (C) consoles the surviving family members of the seven Black men executed in 1951 for the alleged rape of a White woman. The governor pardoned the so-called Martinsville Seven. Photo courtesy of the governor's office

Aug. 31 (UPI) -- Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam on Tuesday posthumously pardoned seven Black men who were executed in 1951 for the alleged rape of a White woman.

He said he granted the pardons because the men were tried by an all-White jury, without due process and executed because they were Black, "and that's not right.

"This is about righting wrongs," Northam said. "We all deserve a criminal justice system that is fair, equal, and gets it right -- no matter who you are or what you look like. I'm grateful to the advocates and families of the Martinsville Seven for their dedication and perseverance. While we can't change the past, I hope today's action brings them some small measure of peace."

Northam announced the pardons during a ceremony in the Patrick Henry Building with surviving family members of the seven men and activists.

The state executed Francis DeSales Grayson, 37; Frank Hairston Jr., 18; Howard Lee Hairston, 18; James Luther Hairston, 20; Joe Henry Hampton, 19; Booker T. Millner, 19; and John Clayton Taylor, 21, by electric chair. In 1977, the Supreme Court ruled that the the death penalty can't be used as a punishment for rape.

Northam said the pardons don't address the men's guilt, but rather the lack of due process and the state's history of disproportionately executing Black people.

Virginia became the 23rd state in the nation to ban the death penalty earlier this year after Northam voiced his support for abolition. He signed the new law March 24.

Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said Northam's pardon was an important and symbolic step toward reconciling that racial disparity in the state's use of the death penalty.

"The sham trials of the Martinsville Seven in front of all-White, all-male juries epitomized the use of the death penalty as a White supremacist instrument of racial oppression and embodied the link between lynching, segregation, and the death penalty," Dunham told UPI. "Everybody knew that the message of the executions wasn't that the guilty would be punished; it was that 'we' (meaning the White establishment) can get any of you (the entire Black community) on any pretext at any time. It was a manifestation of racial terror lynching through the legal system.

"Virginia's abolition of the death penalty was an historic event in ending the legacy of these racial injustices going forward. But the case of the Martinsville Seven is important in another way -- the pardon is a formal apology and an acknowledgment that the lives of the people who were victims of the ultimate racial oppression, their family members' lives, and the lives of everyone in the Black community have value. Their lives matter. And the act of acknowledging this matters, too."

Video Game Characters and the Socialization of Gender Roles: Young People's Perceptions Mirror Sexist Media Depictions

Karen E . Dill-Shackleford

Sex Roles

14 Pages

1 File ▾

Video game characters are icons in youth popular culture, but research on their role in gender socialization is rare. A content analysis of images of video game characters from top-selling American gaming magazines showed male characters (83%) are more likely than female characters (62%) to be portrayed as aggressive. Female characters are more likely than male characters to be portrayed as sexualized (60% versus 1%), scantily clad (39% versus 8%) and as showing a mix of sex and aggression (39 versus 1%). A survey of teens confirmed that stereotypes of male characters as aggressive and female characters as sexually objectified physical specimens are held even by nongamers. Studies are discussed in terms of the role media plays in socializing sexism.

https://www.academia.edu/7918958/Video_Game_Characters_and_the_Socialization_of_Gender_Roles_Young_Peoples_Perceptions_Mirror_Sexist_Media_Depictions?auto=download&email_work_card=download-paper

Carpets, dust are sources of airborne 'forever chemicals' in schools, offices

A new survey revealed surprisingly high airborne PFAS concentrations in kindergarten classrooms, which researchers link to old carpets and other products with manufacturing processes that include the chemicals.

File Photo by wavebreakmedia/Shutterstock

Aug. 31 (UPI) -- Harmful forever chemicals called PFAS can become airborne and circulate indoors, according to a new study.

Using a new measurement technique, researchers detected surprisingly high concentrations of PFAS in air sampled from kindergarten classrooms, university offices and laboratories.

In some indoor settings, scientists detected toxin levels as high as those measured at outdoor clothing and carpet stores, where PFAS-treated products are bought and sold.

Researchers shared the results of their survey in a new paper, published Tuesday in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters.

RELATED Report: Dangerous levels of 'forever chemicals' found at Great Lakes area military sites

"Food and water are known to be major sources of PFAS exposure. Our study shows that indoor air, including dust, is another source of exposure to potentially harmful forever chemicals," senior study author Rainer Lohmann said in a press release.

"In fact, for children in homes or schools with old PFAS-treated carpets, inhalation may be even more important than dust as an exposure pathway to volatile PFAS that eventually could biotransform to more persistent and harmful PFAS," said Lohmann, a professor at the University of Rhode Island whose research focus is marine and atmospheric chemistry.

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are a class of synthetic compounds used in a variety of industrial processes and found in dozens of household items.

RELATED Study: Many cosmetics contain unlisted, toxic 'forever chemicals'

They have been linked to a variety of health problems, including cancer and high cholesterol, and a report published earlier this year found the toxins are accumulating in municipal drinking water all over the United States.

The health threats posed by PFAS have inspired U.S. lawmakers to take action as the chemicals have been found in drinking and ground water across the country, including after years of use at military bases.

In April, Reps. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., and Fred Upton, R-Mich., introduced bipartisan legislation on Tuesday to designate PFAS as hazardous substances and set a national drinking standard for the "forever chemicals.

RELATED 'Eco-friendly' foam may pose environmental, human health risks

A separate analysis published Tuesday by the Environmental Working Group spotlighted six U.S. military sites with ground water PFAS levels thousands of times higher than the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and most states permit.

But as the latest findings show, PFAS contamination isn't limited to water.

To measure the concentrations of airborne PFAS in various indoor settings, scientists affixed polyethylene sheets to the ceilings of several kindergarten classrooms, offices and laboratories.

Researchers also placed a sheet in one single family home, an elevator, two Rhode Island carpet stores and the storage room of an outdoor clothing store in California.

Several classrooms and labs at the University of Rhode Island had higher PFAS concentrations than those measured in the storage room in California. The highest PFAS concentrations were measured in the two Rhode Island carpet stores.

"PFAS were formerly used as stain and water repellents in most carpets," said lead author Maya Morales-McDevitt. "Fortunately, major retailers including The Home Depot and Lowe's now only sell PFAS-free carpets. We believe that slowly smaller retailers will do so as well."

Families can reduce PFAS exposure by replacing carpets, but a variety of other products can emit forever chemicals, including clothing, shoes, building products and furniture.

"As long as they continue to be used in products, we'll all be eating, drinking, and breathing PFAS," said co-author Tom Bruton, senior scientist at the Green Science Policy Institute. "We need to turn off the tap and stop all unnecessary uses of PFAS as soon as possible."

Brazilian viper venom may become tool in fight against coronavirus, study shows

By Leonardo Benassatto

© Reuters/CARLA CARNIEL Brazilian study uses snake venom against COVID-19 in Sao Paulo

SAO PAULO (Reuters) - Brazilian researchers have found that a molecule in the venom of a type of snake inhibited coronavirus reproduction in monkey cells, a possible first step toward a drug to combat the virus causing COVID-19.

© Reuters/CARLA CARNIEL Brazilian study uses snake venom against COVID-19

A study published in the scientific journal Molecules this month found that the molecule produced by the jararacussu pit viper inhibited the virus's ability to multiply in monkey cells by 75%.

© Reuters/CARLA CARNIEL Brazilian study uses snake venom against COVID-19

"We were able to show this component of snake venom was able to inhibit a very important protein from the virus," said Rafael Guido, a University of Sao Paulo professor and an author of the study.

The molecule is a peptide, or chain of amino acids, that can connect to an enzyme of the coronavirus called PLPro, which is vital to reproduction of the virus, without hurting other cells.

Already known for its antibacterial qualities, the peptide can be synthesized in the laboratory, Guido said in an interview, making the capture or raising of the snakes unnecessary.

"We're wary about people going out to hunt the jararacussu around Brazil, thinking they're going to save the world ... That's not it!" said Giuseppe Puorto, a herpetologist running the Butantan Institute's biological collection in Sao Paulo. "It's not the venom itself that will cure the coronavirus."

© Reuters/CARLA CARNIEL Brazilian study uses snake venom against COVID-19

Researchers will next evaluate the efficiency of different doses of the molecule and whether it is able to prevent the virus from entering cells in the first place, according to a statement from the State University of Sao Paulo (Unesp), which was also involved in the research.

They hope to test the substance in human cells but gave no timeline.

The jararacussu is one of the largest snakes in Brazil, measuring up to 6 feet (2 meters) long. It lives in the coastal Atlantic Forest and is also found in Bolivia, Paraguay, and Argentina.

© Reuters/CARLA CARNIEL Brazilian study uses snake venom against COVID-19

(Reporting by Leonardo Benassatto; Additional reporting by Pedro Fonseca; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

Brazilian viper venom may become tool in fight against coronavirus, study shows

Black US farmers awaiting billions in promised debt relief

BOYDTON, Va. (AP) — There was a time when Black farms prospered.

LONG READ

Just two generations out of slavery, by 1910 Black farmers had amassed more than 16 million acres of land and made up about 14 percent of farmers. The fruit of their labors fed much of America.

Now, they have fewer than 4.7 million acres. Black farms in the U.S. plummeted from 925,000 to fewer than 36,000, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's latest farm census. And only about one in 100 farmers is Black.

What happened?

They were able to overcome the broken promise of “40 acres and a mule” to the newly freed slaves — a military order, later rescinded. But over the last century, they faced one obstacle after another because of their race.

Farmers needed loans to expand, to buy seed, to bridge the time between harvests. But lenders — chief among them, the USDA — often refused to give them money, and often rushed to foreclose. Suppliers and customers undercut them. Laws of inheritance led to the breakup of homesteads.

Now the government wants to make amends by providing billions of dollars in debt forgiveness for farmers of color as part of the pandemic relief package. But a judge has put the money on hold in the face of lawsuits filed by white farmers claiming that the program is unfair — reverse discrimination.

Today’s Black farmers and the descendants of Black farmers who struggled and lost their stakes argue that they are the ones who have been the victims of injustice:

The Virginia farmer who barely was able to keep part of his farm when the USDA threatened to sell it at auction. The Kansas man who lost the land his grandparents once homesteaded. The Arkansas farmer who is holding on by a thread, praying the federal aid will come through in time.

It was racism, says farmer John Wesley Boyd Jr. And it still is.

“I think discrimination is still pervasive. I think that it’s done in a much subtler way,” Boyd says. “I don’t think you’re going to see many USDA officials spitting on people now or maybe calling them colored, but they aren’t lending them any money — the way they lend white farmers.”

___

Steering his John Deere tractor with his left hand, the 55-year-old Boyd clutches a rusty, mud-encrusted horseshoe in his right. Discovered in a field by one of his workers, it’s become something of a talisman.

“This horseshoe here probably came off one of the mules,” he says as the squeaky-creaky planter carves rows into the rocky soil. “Because that’s what Blacks were using. They weren’t using no tractors like this, man.”

On this blistering summer day, Boyd is sowing his cash crop, soybeans, making passes up and down a rolling 1,000-acre tract along the broad Roanoke River in Virginia. It’s one of several parcels he owns, totaling 1,500 acres — some of it land that his ancestors once tilled as slaves.

And now, it’s his. Some days, it’s hard to believe.

“I’m owning land that many of my forefathers worked when it was scotch free. You know -- slave labor, man,” says Boyd, his black cowboy hat casting a shadow over his face. “I’m just trying to make them proud.”

Like the other Black farmers, Boyd has encountered prejudice in many ways. An example: Boyd’s wife, Kara, a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, recalls the time her husband took a load of soybeans to the grain elevator and got a low price for it. Too much trash or moisture in it, he was told.

When Kara Boyd brought in another load from the same field, she got a better price. But when her stepfather, who is white, took a load out of the same field, she recalled that he was told: “Man, these are the best beans they’d seen and how many more could he bring them?”

But Boyd’s battle with the USDA was epic. It almost wiped him out.

Boyd was just 18 years old when he assumed an existing USDA loan when he bought his first farm in the early 1980s. He says walking into his local USDA office was like a return to the Jim Crow era. Black farmers had supervised accounts and could only get appointments with the local lending officer on a single day of the week, a practice that came to be known as Black Wednesday.

Boyd endured racial slurs. A loan officer once spat tobacco juice on him — he accidentally missed the spit can, the official would claim. Another time, Boyd saw an official tear up his application and throw it in the trash.

In 1996, USDA took just 30 days to foreclose on some of his farmland. Then the department moved to auction off the remaining 110 acres.

Boyd joined other Black farmers at a protest in Washington, tying a mule named 40 Acres to the White House gate. Their demonstration was successful; less than a week later, then-Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman soon declared a farm foreclosure moratorium. Boyd had just enough time to save his farm.

Documents from a USDA internal review that Boyd provided to The Associated Press show investigators found his operating loan requests were not processed for years, despite explicit instructions from the agency’s state director. It also found that his account was improperly referred to a credit bureau as delinquent when it should have been restructured, deepening his financial difficulties.

Boyd recounts how, unlike their white counterparts, Black farmers who fell behind on a payment would see their loans immediately accelerated, no negotiations. They would be given just 30 days to pay the full amount or they were pressured to sign their deed over to USDA under a program which purportedly allowed them to lease and later buy back their land when their financial situation improved.

But that typically didn’t happen because USDA’s local county committees — comprised mostly of white local farmers — would be given first option on such leases. That’s how Boyd says he lost his 46-acre tobacco farm in 1996. It ended up in the hands of a white farmer who was a member of the committee.

These kinds of practices prompted U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman to approve the landmark settlement of the Pigford v. Glickman lawsuit filed by Black farmers in 1999.

The settlement provided about $1 billion to 15,000 farmers who said USDA unfairly turned them down for loans because of their race between 1981 and 1996. A second round of $1.25 billion stemming from that lawsuit was approved by the court in 2011 for people who were denied earlier payments because they missed filing deadlines.

“It is up to the Secretary of Agriculture and other responsible officials at the USDA to fulfill its promises, to ensure that this shameful period is never repeated and to bring the USDA into the twenty-first century,” the judge wrote.

Though USDA paid more than $2.4 billion under the Pigford settlements, state taxes eroded recoveries, debt relief was incomplete and reports before Congress show the settlements did not cure the problems faced by minority farmers.

Government lawyers noted in a court filing that between 2006 and 2016, Black farmers were subject to 13% of USDA foreclosures — despite receiving fewer than 3% of direct loans.

___

Tucked amid the vast plains of Kansas are the remnants of what was once the bustling Black settlement of Nicodemus. It is the most famous of the Midwestern settlements where former slaves known as “exodusters” migrated more than a century ago, hopeful that farming their own land here would help them escape the racism and poverty of the South.

Little remains today of that farming heritage as even the few Black families who were able to hold on to their land now mostly lease their ground out to white farmers. Nicodemus farmers who once tilled hundreds of acres of farmland no longer actively farm, and much of their ground has been lost over the generations.

Just a couple of miles outside the town sit the 200 acres that the grandparents of Theodore Bernard Bates once homesteaded. The Black farmer and his father bought the family homestead in 1970, taking a loan from what was then the Production Credit Association of Stockton, Kansas.

USDA’s farm loan lending agency refused to even give them an application to fill out, said Bates, one of the original named plaintiffs in the Pigford lawsuit. He received, as he puts it, “not a penny” from that settlement.

“I learned later the reason (USDA) didn’t want to give me an application was because they didn’t want it hanging in their office that they discriminated against a Black person,” Bates says. “They’d be in trouble, see, so they didn’t want that in the office. They didn’t want that record.”

The 1980s were especially tough on the Bates farm. They suffered through a drought one year, a late freeze in another and then a hailstorm that wiped out their wheat crop. Their lender foreclosed.

Three years before his death, the former president of the Production Credit Association swore in a 2012 affidavit that there was a plan to get Bates “out of farming.” Elvin D. Keiswetter said in that affidavit that the lender’s board decided it would “rather foreclose, even if they lost money” than take Bates’ money, regardless if it was paid on the notes.

Keiswetter said that shortly after their lawyer filed the foreclosure petition, Bates came to his office with his parents and his children. Bates owed about $180,000; he asked whether, if he paid $100,000, the lender would give him until after harvest, or six months, to pay the balance.

They took his farm machinery first, and then they took the land. Then the sheriff came and cut the lock on his grain storage bins. Bates and his wife watched for hours that night as trucks hauled out thousands of bushels of wheat they had worked hard to harvest.

After they took everything, Bates says the family was forced to go on food stamps to survive. He worked a few odd jobs over the years, including a stint as a corrections officer. Every time they go to Nicodemus now, they drive alongside the edge of their old homestead to look at the land.

“It is just something you can’t explain,” he says. “It hurts so deep.”

Years later, the now 84-year-old Kansas man is still haunted by the memory of Nov. 7, 1986 — the day they went to the federal court hearing in Wichita where the foreclosure was finalized. They got home late that Friday evening and his father, Alvin, asked him, “What you guys get done today?”

“We got foreclosed on,” Bates told him.

His father didn’t say a word, he recalls.

“I guess he just couldn’t stand it to see his family homestead go, you know, and he died that Sunday,” Bates says.

___

The USDA was not responsible for all the misfortunes of Black farmers. Other structural impediments also have taken their toll.

One involves family land that is passed on to several surviving kin without a will, known as “heirs’ property.” USDA studies show the practice is prevalent among Black people in the South, Appalachian white families, Hispanics in southwestern colonia communities and Native American tribes.

The result: a lack of access to money, because lenders are usually reluctant to extend credit without a clear title to the land. Congress authorized in the 2018 farm bill language that would ease loans to those farmers. But it was not until this year that USDA actually funded a $67 million heirs relending program to resolve land ownership and succession issues.

Many Black farms have been lost over the decades in what are called partition sales. In the South, particularly, many Black landowners distrusted the local courts, or were barred from them, and failed to leave wills or even record their deeds. Over several generations, a single tract can end up being held in common by dozens or even hundreds of heirs.

In places like coastal Georgia and South Carolina, popular vacation destinations, speculators would track down distant members of these families and buy their interest in the old family farm, which the heir may never have even seen. That outsider can then petition the court to sell the entire tract and divide the money, leaving the entire tract of land to be sold at auction, often at a fraction of its real value.

Paul Bradshaw signed in 2008 a lease that upon his death gave his son, Rod, a 10-year option to farm and eventually buy the entire 2,950 acres that the Black farmer had accumulated near Jetmore, Kansas — a move meant to keep the family farm intact for the next generation.

By then, the father and son had already been farming together for decades. Paul Bradshaw, who died two years after signing that lease agreement, had also separately drawn up a will that evenly split the money received for the farm among his eight children, his son says.

Over the years, Rod Bradshaw had made several discrimination complaints against USDA. When his claim seeking debt relief under the Pigford lawsuit was denied, he says he was unable to buy out his sisters’ shares.

A bitter family fight ensued after his father’s death, and a local judge threw out the lease agreement and split the family farm among the son and his seven sisters. Rod Bradshaw says he ended up with about 350 acres of it that he still farms, while his sisters sold or leased their acres to white farmers.

“If Dad knew what happened, he would be livid,” he says.

Bradshaw ended up filing for bankruptcy — something he said he never would have had to do, had it not been for USDA’s refusal to give him debt relief under the Pigford settlement and its confiscation of his farm program payments. He filed a federal discrimination lawsuit against USDA in 2004, leading to a bench trial in 2018. He is still waiting for the judge’s decision.

Bradshaw — who has more than $300,000 in direct USDA loans that would qualify for the debt relief — has been unable to obtain any money through pandemic relief benefits open to all farmers.

“I think I am probably going to suffer some setbacks, but I think I can hang on ... depending on what happens,” Bradshaw says.

___

USDA spokeswoman Kate Waters says the agency is committed to rooting out systemic racism and reducing barriers to accessing services. She says the department plans to launch an Equity Commission later this year to identify problems and fix them.

Congress, meanwhile, approved a $4 billion debt relief program for 16,000 farmers of color in March as part of the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 stimulus package.

The funding was intended to remedy past discrimination in USDA loan programs, and to provide $1 billion for outreach and technical assistance for what it calls socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers — a group that includes not only Black farmers, but also Hispanic, Native American and Asian producers.

White farmers have filed lawsuits in Florida, Wisconsin, Tennessee, Texas, Wyoming, Illinois, and Minnesota. In June, U.S. District Judge Marcia Morales Howard issued a nationwide, preliminary injunction halting the program.

The Texas case is led by Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller and brought by America First Legal, a nonprofit started this year by Stephen Miller and other senior members of former President Donald Trump’s administration.

Sid Miller, who is suing in his personal capacity as a farmer and not on behalf of the state, contends the debt relief is unconstitutional because it excludes white farmers based on their race or ethnicity. He argues USDA no longer discriminates against farmers of color and called the loan forgiveness a “backhanded way” of offering reparations.

“It is just flat wrong,” Miller said. “Us Republicans and old white guys, we get accused of being racist all the time, but this is racist by the administration. It couldn’t be a plainer case of racist.”

But it is clear that minority farmers still suffer disproportionately. As of May 31, 11% of white farmers were delinquent on a government farm loan, compared with 37.9% of Black borrowers, 14.6% of Asian borrowers, 17.4% of American Indian borrowers and 68% of Hispanic borrowers, according to court documents.

For Abraham Carpenter, a 59-year-old Black farmer whose family grows fruits and vegetables near Grady, Arkansas, the injunction means he has to wait and hope for help with about $200,000 in loans, even as rain has wiped out hundreds of acres of watermelons, turnips, collards and other crops.

“I’ve seen some really, really tough times, you know, but I’ve always been able to survive because of God’s blessing and his mercy and his grace. And they are still upon us,” Carpenter says. “So I am not going to say I am going to go belly up. I am going to work a little harder and I am going to pray a little harder.”

___

Hegeman reported from Belle Plaine, Kansas.

Roxana Hegeman And Allen G. Breed, The Associated Press

#NATURALCAPITAL

Price tag on the planet? Helping business value nature

From agriculture to housing to transportation, economic growth has historically depended on burning through finite natural resources and rearranging natural landscapes.

© Pedro PARDO Indigenous populations, fishermen and real estate developers all value mangrove forests but have different ideas of what to do with them

AFP

As the IUCN World Conservation Congress kicks off in France on Friday, an urgent question will be how to reduce the devastation wrought by humanity on the environment.

One idea gaining currency is to assign nature an economic value.

"It's the only way to speak the same language as political decision-makers," Nathalie Girouard, an expert on environmental policy at intergovernmental think tank OECD, told AFP.

© Gal ROMA Highlights of a landmark Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) draft report on the effects of a warming planet on nature.

"We have increased economic growth at the expense of nature."

Chemical-intensive agriculture, over-fishing, pollution and climate change are all pushing ecosystems to the brink of collapse.

For business, putting a monetary value on nature means that damaging resources such as breathable air and drinkable water becomes not just a survival risk, but a financial one.

© Joao LAET Critics of natural capital say legislation and not financial incentive will work best to protect remaining ecosystems

But experts are divided on how to measure "natural capital", and some argue that it should not be done at all.

- Natural capital -

During most of industrialisation, the intrinsic value of nature's bounty -- air, fresh water and oceans, for example -- was not recognised because it cost nothing to consume or pollute.

The concept of natural capital, some conservationists and economists argue, makes it possible to evaluate ecosystems in terms of the "services" they provide -- and the cost of repairing them when damaged.

Mary Ruckelshaus, head of the Natural Capital Project at Stanford University, acknowledges that it is a complex task.

She gives the example of their work in Belize where indigenous populations, fishermen and real estate developers all value mangrove forests, but have very different ideas of what to do with them.

Some will value their capacity to dampen storm surges, while others would prefer to see aquaculture or sandy beaches in their place.

"They help protect coastlines, communities from sea-level rise and hurricanes," she says, adding that such a "service" is worth millions, in some cases billions, of dollars.

"You can monetise that."

But she says such numbers cannot always cover the true cost of harming a resource.

"What's the cultural value of the mangrove forest to an indigenous community who lives in Belize? Priceless," she continues.

Ruckelshaus says the best way to assign value to ecosystems is to get all the interested parties around a table.

"If you articulate and quantify where the most value is for each stakeholder, often you don't have as many trade-offs as you think," she says.

- Regulation still key -

When you scale things up, the numbers are eye-popping.

Some $44 trillion (37 trillion euros) of annual economic value generation -- half of the world's gross domestic product -- is moderately or highly dependent on nature, according to the World Economic Forum.

Using the natural capital as the guiding principle, proponents favour integrating natural resources into the calculation of a country's wealth.

"This is the first step to integrating biodiversity in national strategies and plans and to bring about real change, thanks to clear targets and indicators," said Girouard.

But the concept remains controversial for some.

In 2018 British writer and environmentalist George Monbiot argued against the idea, which he said "reinforces the notion that nature has no value unless you can extract cash from it".

French author, environmentalist and member of the European Parliament Aurore Lalucq agrees.

"We don't need to give a price to bees -- we need to outlaw the pesticides that kill them," she told AFP.

She believes that legislation, not financial incentive, will work best to protect remaining ecosystems.

"We need to regulate, make practices illegal and invest in green infrastructure and biodiversity," she said.

Ruckelshaus acknowledges that the monetary value system has its limitations and that government regulation remains crucial.

"Valuing nature... gives everybody the same information but it doesn't guarantee that everyone will make the decision to protect nature," she said.

laf-nrh/mh/jj/rl

Nothing new about anti-vaccine hysteria

First in a two-part series

In an early episode of the TV doctor drama “House” (2004-2012), the title character, played by Hugh Laurie, is talking to a mother who won’t vaccinate her baby because she believes it’s all a big scam.

Dr. House holds up the baby’s toy frog and offers some observations on the business model of the company that made it.

“You know another really good business?” he says abruptly. “Teeny, tiny baby coffins. You can get them in frog green, fire engine red. Really.”

Of course, House was saying the quiet part out loud for effect. Few non-fictional doctors would be so blunt.

But vaccine skepticism has become a major problem in the modern world — though perhaps not as prominent in Newfoundland and Labrador as it is in some parts of Canada and south of the border.

“Thankfully, in this province, I haven’t run into too much hesitancy over my career, which is different from a lot of my colleagues in the country and in the world,” Dr. Natalie Bridger told The Telegram this week.

Bridger, Eastern Health’s clinical chief of infection prevention and control, said she finds the sea of misinformation spread on Facebook and other social media sites “soul-crushing.”

“Vaccines are probably one of the main reasons why life expectancy has gone up and infant mortality has gone down,” she said. “There have been many other discoveries in the medical world over the past 100 or so years, but I would say vaccines are up there as probably No. 1.”

As it turns out, misinformation about vaccines has a surprisingly long history.

Take the case of Dr. Alexander Ross.

Ross was a member of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Quebec, Ontario and Manitoba in 1885 when he circulated a pamphlet lashing out at a small pox vaccination campaign underway in Montreal.

“His pamphlet serves as a prime illustration of the strategies used by anti-vaccinationists — both then and now,” Paula Larsson, a doctoral student in the history of medicine at Oxford, wrote for theconservation.com last year. “These arguments are not new and have changed little over time. Learning to recognize their repackaging in modern form can help with effectively combating their power.”

What are those strategies?

First, downplay the seriousness of the disease.

“Despite mortality rates between 30 and 40 per cent, and the extreme contagiousness of the disease, it was common for anti-vaccinationists to claim that smallpox was only a minor threat to a population,” wrote Larsson.

Ross insisted authorities were panicking over a minor outbreak, and that the disease wasn’t serious. In fact, more than 3,000 people — two per cent of Montreal’s population — died in the epidemic despite best efforts to combat it.

Another tactic parallel to today’s “anti-vaxx” propaganda was to trot out a litany of things the vaccine may cause. In recent times, we had the autism scare of 1998, which has since been soundly debunked (more on that in Part 2), but the alarmism was no different 100 years earlier.

“The anti-vaccinationists of the past claimed that vaccination caused a full spectrum of diseases, from smallpox itself to syphilis, typhoid, tuberculosis, cholera and ‘blood-poisoning,’” wrote Larsson.

The difference in the 19th century is that unsterile practices did occasionally cause secondary transmission of infections, something unlikely to occur today.

Larsson also highlights the tendency — then as now — to see media, experts and drug makers as part of a giant, money-making cabal, colluding to pull the wool over people’s eyes in order to capitalize on public fear.

And perhaps most surprisingly, the notion of personal freedom was as prominent a cudgel against vaccines in 1885 as it is in 2021.

“Tyranny detestable in any shape, but in none so formidable as when it is assumed and exercised by a number of petty tyrants,” Ross wrote in his pamphlet. “It is in vain for working men and women to plead that they do not believe in the efficacy of vaccination. They are told that they may believe what they like, but that vaccinated THEY MUST BE, or leave their employment, which to many of them means STARVATION!!”

Today’s social media warriors have nothing on the hyperbole of 1885.

“There have always been individuals who capitalize on medical crises to push their own agenda, and in the modern age of digital media, strategies of misinformation have evolved and expanded,” Larsson concludes. “Much like Ross, the leaders of these movements gain social power by painting themselves as lone crusaders.”

Peter Jackson, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Telegram

How secret Canadian money helped forge modern China

Special to National Post

LONG READ

© Provided by National Post A 1910 photo of Sun Yat-sen taken by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. Soon after this photo was taken, Sun would embark on a secret fundraising trip through the Chinatowns of Western Canada.

While you were busy memorizing interminable details about Responsible Government or Laura Secord, you missed out on some of the best parts of our national story. Hopefully we can rectify things somewhat in our occasional series, The Secret History of Canada, documenting the little-known (and often R-rated) parts you missed. Today, the time an influential Chinese revolutionary travelled in secret through Canada’s early 20th Century Chinatowns.

To the non-Chinese British Columbians who spotted him in their midst, he would have seemed like just another Chinese person; no different than the millions of others the federal government of the era was actively trying to keep out.

He dressed well, spoke English perfectly and — particularly rare for a Chinese national of the era — was a Christian. He was also a wanted man who faced immediate arrest and deportation if any official ever figured out that he wasn’t the Japanese or American he claimed to be.

But the non-Chinese coal miners and fishermen of early 20th Century Canada never did place the mysterious figure, and would never know they had rubbed elbows with a revolutionary who would shape the course of future events like few others.

Sun Yat-sen in 1924, just before his death.

Sun Yat-sen took a weak, divided and economically stagnated China and set it on the course to becoming the economic juggernaut it is today. And he did it in part with clandestine Canadian support.

Born in 1866 to a poor rural family in Guangdong province, Sun was educated by British missionaries in Hawaii, which was then an independent kingdom. Upon his return to China, Sun initially set out to train as a physician, but soon came to believe that his semi-colonized homeland needed to embrace Western thought and technology to end decades of military and economic defeats.

China at the time was ruled by the Qing Dynasty, which had been in power since the 17th Century. While the rest of the world was feverishly building railroads, China under the Qing saw them as an encumbrance that would harm agriculture and obstruct feng shui. Government corruption was rampant, and Qing bureaucracy never accounted for China’s growing population. Overwhelmed officials completely failed to respond to an 1876 famine that killed at least nine million people.

Part of the ruined Old Summer Palace in Beijing, China, circa 1860. The Palace, formerly the residence of emperors of the Qing Dynasty, was destroyed by British and French forces during the Second Opium War in 1860. The conflict was one of several that became emblematic of the weakness of China’s Qing rulers.

In 1894, Sun wrote a lengthy letter to his provincial governor suggesting ways China could modernize. When it was callously dismissed, Sun returned to Hawaii and founded the Revive China Society, an underground revolutionary society that drew from the disaffected lower class.

In 1895, China was decisively defeated by Japan in the first Sino-Japanese War. After inflicting Chinese casualties that were up to 30 times higher than their own, Japan won control of Taiwan, the Korean peninsula and parts of eastern China — all of which it would control until the end of the Second World War.

The humiliation convinced Sun that reform of the existing dynasty was impossible. With the help of revolutionary contacts in Hong Kong, Sun launched an uprising in Guangzhou, just up the Pearl River Delta from Hong Kong.

His plan to seize the city was leaked, leading to the arrest of dozens of Society members and the execution of Lu Haodong, best known as the designer of the blue sky and white sun emblem which still adorns the Taiwan flag. The uprising was a spectacular failure that forced Sun into exile, pursued by the vengeful agents of the Qing Empress.

Sun Yat-sen, centre, with members of the Tong Meng Hui Nationalist Movement in Vancouver, February, 1911.

An 1896 stop in London saw Sun detained by Qing secret service , where deportation and execution seemed certain until a British media campaign and friends in the U.K. government stepped in. The Foreign Office successfully pressured the Qing embassy to release Sun, and the incident left him a sudden celebrity.

Sun’s first trip to Canada , in 1897, was a layover between Europe and Japan. Trailed by Qing agents from Montreal to Vancouver, Nanaimo, and Victoria, he could do little more than take in the sights. But when he returned in 1911, he would be in the Chinatowns of the West Coast preaching revolution.

The 1899 Boxer Rebellion saw disaffected Chinese peasants push the Qing into a failed attempt to oust Western influence and missionaries. Its failure at the hands of a multi-nation alliance had further destabilized China.

In the meantime, Sun had orchestrated multiple uprisings, including an attempt to seize a military fort on the Vietnam border and a rebellion in the city of Huizhou, where the revolutionaries defeated the Qing in several skirmishes before being put down.

An Edmonton militia of Sun supporters. It was founded in 1915, and more than 500 people applied for membership. Edmontonians Ma Ziang and Huang Huilong, who would later travel to China to serve as Sun’s bodyguards, were members.

His world travels had made him an experienced speaker and fundraiser with legions of fans and powerful enemies. He’d also become wanted by the same country that saved him from the chopping block in 1896.

Sun’s rabble-rousing was clashing with Britain’s business interests in China, and the U.K. now warmed to the idea of deporting him to the Qing. If Canadian authorities identified him, he would be arrested on the spot and deported to meet his likely demise.

In 1911, Sun entered Vancouver with false papers, and he sometimes pretended he was Japanese. But the Chinese-Canadians he spoke to knew exactly who he was.

In Victoria alone Sun raised $12,000 dollars for the revolution, which is about $289,000 today. Sun didn’t just promise to oust the Qing and establish a republic in China; he told eager crowds of more than 1,000 people that, when he was in charge, China would negotiate better treatment for Canada’s Chinese population.

© Cumberland Museum and Archives A 1910 photo of the massive, self-contained Chinatown in the Vancouver Island mining town of Cumberland. Sun Yat-sen secretly spoke here during his 1911 tour.

At the time, Chinese and Japanese immigrants to Canada had to pay a punitive $500 head tax . They also couldn’t vote, and had been declared “obnoxious to a free community and dangerous to the state” by a 1902 government commission .

Begrudgingly tolerated only as a source of cheap labour, laws banned Asians from many professions, and land covenants barred them from living in most neighbourhoods. Just a few years prior to Sun’s arrival, two days of spontaneous anti-Asian rioting in Vancouver had seen Japanese and Chinese neighbourhoods terrorized by rampaging white mobs.

© Library and Archives Canada Damage to an Asian-owned store in the aftermath of a 1907 riot in Vancouver orchestrated by the Asiatic Exclusion League.

Sun’s journey was a strict secret, and no mainstream press accounts from the time noted his tour through Canada. But everywhere Sun went, the Chinese-Canadian community flocked to him. Edmontonians travelled to Calgary, Lethbridge, and Winnipeg just to hear him talk, while businesses and community groups mortgaged their property for the cause .

Sun’s passionate speeches won over everyone from socialists to Ming Dynasty revivalists, and word spread to cities Sun couldn’t reach. Some Chinese invested in bonds that Sun promised his future republic would repay, while Qing representatives on their own barnstorming tours tried to undercut Sun’s message by selling investments and official titles.

His swing through the prairies in February 1911 rustled up another $35,000 (about $845,000 today). Considering that he was a wanted criminal pulling his support from a largely impoverished underclass, Sun was collecting truly incredible sums.

© B.C. Archives Part of the ruined Old Summer Palace in Beijing, China, circa 1860. The Palace, formerly the residence of emperors of the Qing Dynasty, was destroyed by British and French forces during the Second Opium War in 1860. The conflict was one of several that became emblematic of the weakness of China’s Qing rulers.

Sun was away from China when he learned about the Wuchang Uprising. Disgruntled soldiers influenced by Sun’s work were upset at a Qing plan to hand Chinese railroads over to foreign banks. They rebelled, and soon controlled all of Wuchang, which is today part of Wuhan. Inspired by their success, uprisings began breaking out across the country.

Flush with Canadian cash, Sun rushed home with dreams of creating a democratic republic from the chaos. After the military forced the resignation of the last Qing Emperor, Sun was briefly named provisional president of a government in Nanking, but was ousted by the powerful authoritarian Yuan Shikai in March 1912.

Sun was sent into exile once again as Canada and other Western governments recognized Yuan as the leader of the new Republic of China.

Sun returned to China in 1917 and attempted to halt its slide into fractured fiefdoms as former Qing generals transformed themselves into warlords. His humble Revive China Society had evolved into the powerful Kuomintang party, but Sun concluded that only a complete military conquest could allow a unified China to begin transitioning towards democracy. To that end, in the last months of his life Sun was extending an olive branch to the nascent Communist Party of China.

In 1925, Sun died of gallbladder cancer at just 58, creating a power vacuum in the Kuomintang that was eventually filled by Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang’s relationship with the Communist Party would soon fracture, throwing the country into a civil war that would not resolve until 1949 — and would simmer even through the long years of Japanese occupation during the Second World War.

© MIKE CLARKE/AFP/Getty Images Photos of Sun Yat-sen seen during a 2004 pro-democracy rally in Hong Kong.

In the West, Sun is an obscure figure overshadowed by Chiang and Mao Zedong. But in China he remains revered. Better remembered for his tenacity than his philosophy, his relentless fundraising and ability to keep the revolutionary flames stoked saw him dubbed the Father of China in both Taiwan and the People’s Republic.

The Kuomintang is still a powerhouse in Taiwanese politics, while Beijing is known to downplay Sun’s anti-imperialism, Christianity, and democratic vision in order to emphasize his role as a proto-socialist revolutionary with an eye towards rapid modernization.

© AFP PHOTO/Sam YEH In this 2005 image, Taiwan opposition leader Lien Chan leads a Kuomintang delegation in a bow to a statue of Sun Yat-sen at Sun’s mausoleum outside Nanjing in the People’s Republic of China.

Signs of Sun’s legacy can be seen throughout Canada. Toronto features two statues of him , visitors to Montreal can check out Sun Yat-sen Place, and if you’re driving in Markham, Ont., you might find yourself on Sun Yat-Sen Avenue. If you’re out west, there’s another statue in Victoria , and Vancouver’s impressive Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden.

Sun’s work strengthened ties between Chinese-Canadians and their homeland, and left the Canadian diaspora with a stronger sense of identity . Many followed his lead in cutting off their queues — distinctive long braids that were a sign of Qing subservience — which helped them better integrate into Canadian society. Hundreds of Chinese Canadians formed a militia that would travel to China to aid Sun and offer their services in the First World War.

But China’s revolutionary upheaval came to Canada, too. In 1916, Victoria’s Chinatown saw violent conflict between supporters of different would-be governments. Rival Chinatown newspapers competed to spread their version of rapidly changing events. And in 1918, a Kuomintang supporter in Victoria assassinated a visiting politician from Yuan Shikai’s government, briefly rendering association with the Kuomintang illegal in Canada.

© Ryan Sharpe/Wikimedia Commons A statue of Sun Yat-sen erected just outside Victoria, B.C.’s historic Chinatown.

In 1923, just two years before Sun’s death, Canada’s head tax would be replaced with a total ban on Chinese immigration, the Chinese Exclusion Act. This act lasted until 1947, when Chinese-Canadians were finally given full citizenship, beginning the slow improvement of conditions that Sun had promised.

Contemporary China’s glass skyscrapers and high-speed rail lines could be seen as a manifestation of the modernized future Sun had hoped for his homeland, but they came without the democratic freedoms the revolutionary had so fervently championed in Canadian Chinatowns.

During a 2016 visit to Vancouver, Sun’s great-grandson suggested that his ancestor would be “quite disappointed” with modern China’s human rights record.

It Happened in Canada

The Secret History of Canada

We found tax records showing 'Hillbilly Elegy' author JD Vance's anti-opioid nonprofit faltered

awren@insider.com (Adam Wren,Meghan Morris)

Two figures loom large over J.D. Vance's political future: tech titan Peter Thiel (left), who donated $10 million to Vance's Senate campaign, and former President Donald Trump, who has yet to endorse a Republican in the crowded Ohio primary.

John Lamparski/Getty Images; Astrid Riecken For The Washington Post via Getty Images; Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images; Samantha Lee/Insider

JD Vance is running for Senate in Ohio as a savior of the Midwest.

A nonprofit he started to fight the opioid epidemic seems to have faltered.

Vance's track record is the subject of an Insider deep-dive.

On the heels of "Hillbilly Elegy's" best-selling success in 2016, author JD Vance wrote a New York Times op-ed announcing that he was moving back to his native Ohio. The reason: a nonprofit aimed at combating the state's opioid epidemic.

"I've talked about these problems and I came to the conclusion that maybe I should be doing something to solve them," Vance told The Columbus Dispatch at the time.

Five years later, the much-ballyhooed nonprofit Our Ohio Renewal seems to have faltered before it ever got off the ground. Its status is now raising questions about the credentials of Vance, who has entered a crowded Republican primary to replace retiring GOP Sen. Rob Portman in 2022.

A review by Insider of the nonprofit's tax filings showed that in its first year, Our Ohio Renewal spent more on "management services" provided by its executive director Jai Chabria - who also serves as Vance's top political advisor - than it did on programs to fight opioid abuse.

Read more: 'Hillbilly Elegy' author JD Vance is running for Senate as a savior of the Rust Belt. Insiders and experts say that reputation is unearned.

The group, which has shut down its website and abandoned its Twitter account after publishing only two tweets, says it commissioned a survey to gauge the needs and welfare of Ohioans.

Vance's campaign declined to provide any documentation of the project when Insider asked about it. His campaign also declined to comment on the record about Our Ohio Renewal's work. As Insider prepared to publish its story, Vance attended a "Rally 4 Recovery" event in Dayton for families who have suffered from addiction.

A spokeswoman for the Ohio Opioid Education Alliance, the state's largest anti-opioid coalition, said in an interview she hadn't heard of Vance's organization.

The nonprofit raised so little in each of the last three years - less than $50,000 a year - that it wasn't even required by the IRS to disclose its activities and finances.

"It's a superficial way for him to say he's helping Ohio," says Doug White, a philanthropy adviser and former director of Columbia University's master of science in fundraising management.

Back in 2017, Vance tapped his best friend from Yale University law school, Jamil Jivani, to help run the operation, advising him on law and policy. Soon after Jivani decamped from Toronto to Columbus to help launch Our Ohio Renewal, he fell ill with stage four non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and left Ohio in 2018.

"It looks different now, with him being a Senate candidate," Jivani told Insider in an exclusive interview.

To read the whole Insider deep dive into Vance's nonprofit and his tech investing history, click here.