Monday, September 28, 2020

'Lawful but awful': US self-defense laws questioned after Breonna Taylor’s death

Kenny Jaco and Jessica Priest, USA TODAY•September 27, 2020

The lack of criminal charges this week against Kentucky police officers for the shooting death of Breonna Taylor stems not from a unique quirk in that state’s law but from deeply embedded protections in the U.S. legal system for those who use deadly force to protect themselves.

Those protections mean law enforcement officers and civilians alike have been deemed justified in accidentally killing or injuring innocent bystanders in the course of self-defense.

•In 2018, a San Antonio police officer responding to a report of an assault fatally shot one man when he meant to shoot another grabbing for a gun.

•In 2017, a Philadelphia laundromat owner shot a bystander twice in the hand while firing on a fleeing man who’d stolen $2,000 from his store.- ADVERTISEMENT -

•In 2015, a Utah police officer shot and injured a man resembling a suspect who had fired a gun at him.

A Kentucky grand jury indicted one of the three officers who served a warrant the night of Breonna Taylor's death. The charges were not for Taylor's death but for wanton endangerment of her neighbors when the officer fired his weapon into a nearby apartment

None was charged with a crime.

“You’ve got to have intent. And with Breonna Taylor, he (the officer) didn’t intend to kill her. The officer returned fire and happened to get Breonna,” said Scott Boudreaux, a Birmingham, Alabama, defense attorney who has represented clients in accidental killings. “I think it’s self-defense.”

In the early hours of March 13, Taylor’s boyfriend shot one of the three plainclothes officers. He said he mistook them for intruders when they broke down the door to her apartment, serving a search warrant for narcotics. Police said they identified themselves before entering the home. They returned fire and hit Taylor, who died in her apartment hallway. No drugs were found.
Photos of Breonna Taylor's apartment were included in a request for a no-knock search warrant made by the Louisville Metro Police Department.

Wednesday, a grand jury indicted one of the three officers, Brett Hankison, on charges of wanton endangerment of Taylor’s neighbors – not Taylor herself – as a result of firing his weapon into a nearby apartment. It declined to indict any of the officers for reckless homicide.

Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron cautioned against a “quest for revenge,” which did little to quell unrest after the grand jury decision. Protests erupted across the country.

"If Brett Hankison's behavior was wanton endangerment to people in neighboring apartments, then it should have been wanton endangerment in Breonna Taylor's apartment too," Ben Crump, an attorney for Taylor's family, wrote on Twitter.

The way the officers carried out the "no-knock" search warrant after midnight should be reviewed, said Dave LaBahn, president of the national Association of Prosecuting Attorneys. Crump suggested the officers knowingly used false information to obtain the warrant. If that can be proved, the dynamic of the case against the officers could change, and more charges could be brought.

The officers entered Taylor’s apartment legally, were shot at first and had a right to defend themselves, LaBahn said, calling the situation “lawful but awful.”

What Cameron described as “vigorous” self-defense laws in the state are part of a much broader trend in America toward forgiving people who claim self-defense.
Attorney Ben Crump says police should have been charged in Breonna Taylor's death.

Many U.S. states have statutes codifying the Castle Doctrine, which stems from an English court case finding in 1604 that a man has no duty to retreat from an assailant in his own dwelling, because “a man’s home is his castle.”

More than half of U.S. states, including Kentucky, expanded on this concept by enacting “stand your ground” laws, which remove the duty to retreat for people attacked outside their homes – so long as they are in a place they have a right to be, aren’t committing a crime and didn’t provoke the confrontation.

In Taylor’s case, LaBahn said, Kenneth Walker, Taylor's boyfriend, was justified in shooting at the officers, and they were justified in shooting back.
A ‘true man’ fights back

After American colonies gained their independence from the British, the new states largely imported common law from England to use as judicial precedent for their own courts. In England, the law recognized very few civilian homicide defenses as valid.

English law forbade homicide except as a last resort, requiring those under attack to first flee the scene or retreat as far away as possible. Only then, with a wall at their back and nowhere else to go, did the state authorize them to kill their assailants. Even then, it was the killers’ burden to prove that using lethal force was necessary to save themselves from grievous harm.

England’s duty to retreat was a “powerful means to produce a society of civility,” wrote Richard Maxwell Brown in his 1991 book, "No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society." Boiled down, it was a command to avoid physical conflicts, Brown wrote, barring fatal outcomes in most disputes and resulting in relatively low homicide rates.

Americans abandoned the English standard and adopted a fundamentally different attitude toward self-defense, primarily fueled by two state court decisions in the post-Reconstruction era.

In Ohio in 1876, the Supreme Court reversed the conviction of a man who shot and killed his son-in-law. The man said the son-in-law charged at him with an axe. The court found that the man was not at fault for provoking the confrontation and had acted as a “true man,” free to defend himself against his assailant.

The following year, the Supreme Court in Indiana took it a step further, ruling that a man who shot and killed an unarmed man in a riot on Election Day was justified because the unarmed man had instigated a fist fight with him.

Overturning the man’s conviction, Judge William Niblack wrote that “the tendency of the American mind seems to be very strongly against the enforcement of any rule which requires a person to flee when assailed.”

In light of these decisions, courts across the USA began to broadly accept the view that fleeing amounted to cowardice and that cowardice was un-American, Brown wrote in his book. In the early 1900s, a Minnesota judge rejected the duty to retreat, saying it was an outdated law that did not take into account the influx of guns into societal life. Wisconsin’s Supreme Court the same year asserted man’s “divine right” to “stand his ground.”
Cathy Makowski demonstrates against what she calls the abuse of Florida's "stand your ground" law in front of the Seminole County Courthouse in Sanford, Fla., after the shooting death of teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012.

Some states, including Florida, have gone so far as shifting the burden onto prosecutors to prove a homicide was not committed in self-defense. Such laws “benefit the defendant in a phenomenal way” and make prosecutors less likely to file homicide charges, especially in cases with no witnesses, said Denis deVlaming, a criminal defense attorney in Clearwater.

“Prosecutors hate this new law,” deVlaming said. “Unless they can disprove the defendant’s version of events, either forensically or by a statement or contradiction, he gets a pass.”
Laws especially protect police

In 2017, Birmingham, Alabama, resident Darrell Hutton shot at a man who pulled a gun on him, and one of the bullets struck and killed a 4-year-old girl. He was charged with murder.

Boudreaux represented Hutton and asked a judge for a hearing to consider whether Alabama’s “stand your ground” law applied. He argued that Hutton was defending himself and didn’t intend to kill the girl.

A judge agreed, dismissing the charges.

Law enforcement officers rarely face criminal charges or convictions as a result of fatal shootings because of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1989 that their actions must be evaluated based on what a reasonable officer would do, given what was known at the time.

Because this is a hard concept for jurors to wrap their minds around, prosecutors often choose not to charge officers, said Philip Stinson, a criminal justice professor at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

“The role of a prosecutor is to seek justice, but as a practical matter, they're very concerned with whether they can obtain a conviction,” he said.

Even when fellow officers testify that they didn’t feel afraid, calling the accused officer’s reason into question, jurors defer to how the accused officer felt in the moment.

“Jurors are very reluctant to second-guess the split-second, life-or-death decisions of a police officer in a potentially violent encounter,” Stinson said.

Stinson found that since 2005, 121 officers have been charged with murder or manslaughter resulting from an on-duty shooting in the USA. Of them, 44 were convicted – most for a lesser offense, such as official misconduct, deprivation of civil rights, aggravated assault or reckless discharge of a firearm.

Of the seven convicted of murder, four of the convictions were overturned.

According to The Washington Post, police fatally shot nearly 1,000 people in 2019.

That 1989 Supreme Court ruling, Graham v. O’Connor, was about officers using excessive force, not self-defense.

Labahn said there are questions about whether defense laws should be written as they are and whether no-knock warrants should be used the way the Louisville officers did.

“This is why we have legislatures,” LaBahn said. “Unfortunately with many things in criminal justice, it takes bad results for people to pay attention.”


 

Kyle Rittenhouse, Conservative America’s Teen Dream Killing Machine

What is there to say about people who think it was acceptable for cops to shoot up Breonna Taylor in her own home (damaging precious dry wall in the process) but that Kyle Rittenhouse, who broke actual laws, is an American hero? They are obviously racists obsessed with white innocence. Young Rittenhouse is just a poor boy from a poor family.

Last Thursday, Rittenhouse's mother, Wendy, and his lawyer, John Pierce, attended a Wisconsin Republican event in Waukesha County. Perpetual rage machine, Michelle Malkin, brought Wendy Rittenhouse on stage where the audience gave her a standing ovation for raising a child who murdered two people and gravely injured a third. This might make sense if they were Klingons, who believe a child is a man “the day he can first hold a blade," but these people claim to follow the teachings of noted cuck Jesus Christ.

Malkin shared a photo on Twitter of herself with Wendy Rittenhouse and her son's homicide attorney. She boasted that she'd spoken to Kyle Rittenhouse on the phone and “thanked him for his courage." It takes as much courage to shoot someone as talent was required to produce that Justice League movie.

It doesn't seem like anyone was wearing masks or socially distancing at this event. Presumably, they were only prepared to gun down COVID-19, preferably in its own bed. The smile on Wendy Rittenhouse's face is very different from the anguish you see from the mothers of Breonna Taylor, Jacob Blake, Ahmaud Arbery, Tamir Rice, and Trayvon Martin. She looks confident that the system is going to work out in her son's favor ... either that or she's very pleased with her chicken piccata appetizer.

This is the same week that the man who killed Taylor was charged with felony wall defacement, so you can understand why we might think Kyle Rittenhouse might never see a day in prison. His “innocence" was openly proclaimed by future QAnon congresswoman, Majorie Taylor Greene.

Twitter

Wisconsin prosecutors have charged Rittenhouse with a crime, but conservatives like Greene have no problem publicly disagreeing with that decision, while hiding behind Mitch McConnell's pet attorney general's burial of the case against Taylor's killers.

Rittenhouse was a vigilante who placed himself in a dangerous situation after illegally obtaining an assault rifle. You can't claim “self-defense" for a violent altercation you personally initiate. If that theory had any legal merit, Johnny Cochrane would've tried it with O.J. Simpson. Of course, Simpson was only a rich and a celebrity. He wasn't a random white kid.

Greene responded to a tweet from Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, and declared that she'd oppose ALL gun control legislation and will “defend our GREAT Second Amendment always." Yeah, guns are so awesome, two people are dead and another person permanently disabled. Rittenhouse is a coward who never would've been within 1,000 miles of the incident if he wasn't toting artificial, high-caliber “courage." Guns make everything worse. But Greene thinks this was a positive outcome. I enjoy a nice cocktail, but if a teenager got wasted (illegally) and took a car on a joyride (illegally) and killed some people, I wouldn't consider that a great moment for the 21st Amendment.

Former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi also defended Rittenhouse last week. She told Sean Hannity that Young Goodman Rittenhouse was a “little boy" trying to “protect his community," which was in a different state where he committed his murders.

From Newsweek:

"You have got a 17-year-old out there trying to protect his state," Bondi said, despite the fact the teenager traveled from his hometown in Antioch, Illinois, to attend the protests on August 25.

Bondi is used to lying — she defended Trump during his impeachment sham trial — but this one is a king-sized Double Whopper. She also kept mentioning that Rittenhouse was only a child of 17, which I suppose was intended to make him seem innocent, but it just reinforces that he was guilty of openly carrying an assault rifle.

Gun rights advocates who adore Rittenhouse have tried to claim he falls under the “just out hunting" exception. However, human beings — even so-called looters and rioters — are never in season. Rittenhouse was playing-acting as a cop, but all he did was create the sort of “gang violence" conservatives pretend to care about whenever they mention Chicago.

When I was in college, a film professor interpreted the ending of Taxi Driver as Travis Bickle's dying fantasy. It just wasn't realistic that the media and the American people would embrace a violent psychopath as a “hero" just because he killed the “right people." That's a charmingly naive view. Today's Travis Bickle would become a Fox News folk hero and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

[Newsweek]

Follow Stephen Robinson on Twitter.

Global banking systems 'well placed to absorb' Covid shocks
Issac John /Dubai

(AFP)
Moody's said in its report that most banking systems are in good shape and can withstand the inevitable rise in bad debts over the coming months.

Most banking systems across the world are well-placed to absorb the economic shocks triggered by the coronavirus, but a second wave of the virus, leading to new blanket lockdowns or self-imposed changes in consumers' behaviour, poses a significant threat, Moody's Investors Service said in a report on Thursday.

"In contrast to the financial crisis, the banking system is more likely to act as a shock absorber rather than an amplifier," said Nick Hill, managing director - Banking at Moody's Investors Service. "But a second wave of the pandemic that leads to new lockdowns and economic turmoil could cause more lasting damage to banks' credit profiles."

Moody's bullish outlook is in sharp contrast to the dismal projections made by S&P Global about an estimated combined loan losses of $2.1 trillion faced by banks across the globe by the end of 2021, including a hit of $1.3 trillion this year, more than doubling the 2019 level as a result of the pandemic crisis.

Around 60 per cent of the losses are likely to be in Asia-Pacific S&P, although the highest relative increases - at more than double on average compared with 2019 - will occur in North America and Western Europe. S&P estimate that the top 200 rated banks represent about two-thirds of global bank lending.


Moody's said in its report that after ten years of broadly benign economic conditions, and relentless regulatory pressure to reinforce balance sheets, most banking systems are in good shape and can withstand the inevitable rise in bad debts over the coming months. "In addition, actions taken by central banks and governments to soften the virus impact have slowed the rise in asset risk and underpinned liquidity and funding," the global rating agency said in its bullish outlook on global banking.

Banks with more diversified business models - notably those with capital markets activities - will also prove more robust than those focused on more susceptible activities like lending to small businesses and corporates, said Moody's.

However, projecting a different scenario of the global banking industry, S&P Global Ratings said recovery of the sector would stretch to 2023 and beyond.

"Covid-19 and the oil price shock of 2020 are taking a heavy toll on global banks. We anticipate it will be difficult for the financial strength ratings on financial institutions to return to pre-crisis levels. We don't expect the world's largest banking sectors, including more than half of G20's, to recover to pre-Covid-19 levels until 2023, or beyond," said S&P, which has taken 335 negative rating actions globally since the outbreak began.

"The hit on financial institutions globally has been unambiguously negative," said S&P Global Ratings credit analyst Gavin Gunning.

"We have already negatively revised the economic or industry trends underpinning the financial strength of many banking jurisdictions globally. This trend should persist. Further, we have seen negative rating momentum affecting financial institutions in most major banking jurisdictions, indicating that downside risks are to the fore," said Gunning.

The rating firm said recovery to pre-Covid-19 levels would unlikely come before end-2022 even for less-affected banking jurisdictions. These jurisdictions include China, Canada, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia.

"Risks remain firmly on the downside for these banking jurisdictions, in our view," said Gunning.

S&P noted that in 2019, credit losses were near historical lows in almost all the higher-income countries in Asia-Pacific. Years of benign economic conditions have helped the region. "We estimate that the Covid-19 shock to these economies will drive a multifold increase in credit losses. Economic recovery in the subsequent period should ease the credit losses, in our view."

For the US and Canadian banking systems in 2020 and 2021, pandemic-related loan losses will likely sharply increase. "Such losses should tail off thereafter, pending an economic rebound envisaged in our base case. Credit losses will likely rise significantly from historically low levels for European banks in 2020, and remain high in 2021. A full economic recovery could take several years under our base case," said S&P.

While emerging-market banks will likely see a sharp increase in credit losses in 2020, there is potential for a gradual improvement in the following years if economic activity rebounds, it said.

issacjohgn@khaleejtimes.com

Issac John
Editorial Director of Khaleej Times, is a well-connected Indian journalist and an economic and financial commentator. He has been in the UAE's mainstream journalism for 35 years, including 23 years with Khaleej Times. A post-graduate in English and graduate in economics, he has won over two dozen awards. Acclaimed for his authentic and insightful analysis of global and regional businesses and economic trends, he is respected for his astute understanding of the local business scene.
Syria minister calls Turkey main terrorism sponsor in region
AP/New York
Filed on September 28, 2020


Syria's Deputy Prime Minister Walid Muallem speaks in a pre-recorded message which was played during the 75th session of the United Nations General Assembly at UN headquarters.

(AP)

Walid Al Moallem says Turkey is guilty of crime against humanity for cutting water to towns that resisted Turkish occupation


Syria's foreign minister accused Turkey on Saturday of being "one of the main sponsors of terror" in his country and the region, and said it is guilty of "a war crime and a crime against humanity" for cutting water to more than a dozen towns that resisted Turkish occupation.

In unusually harsh language, Walid Al Moallem said "the Turkish regime reigns supreme" when it comes "to sponsors and financiers of terrorism".

He said in a prerecorded speech to the first-ever high-level meeting of the UN General Assembly held virtually because of the Covid-19 pandemic that the cutoff of water supplies endangered civilian lives, especially during the coronavirus crisis.

The nine-year Syrian conflict, which initially began as a civil war, later became a regional proxy fight. Turkey, which now controls a zone in northern Syria, has backed opposition fighters against Syrian President Bashar Assad, Syrian Kurdish fighters and the Daesh extremist group.

Al Moallem also accused Turkey of moving "terrorists and mercenaries - referred to by some as 'moderate opposition' - from Syria to Libya," violating Iraq's sovereignty, using refugees "as bargaining chips against Europe" and laying claim "by force to energy resources in the Mediterranean".

"The current Turkish regime has become a rogue and outlaw regime under international law," the Syrian minister said. "Its policies and actions, which threaten the security and stability of the whole region, must be stopped."

Turkey's UN Mission said it "rejects Syrian regime's delusional statement, ridden with ludicrous allegations, in its entirety".

"It's shameful and unacceptable that the murderous Syrian regime which lost its legitimacy long ago continues to misuse (the) UN General Assembly general debate to distort the facts," said a mission spokesperson, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"The Syrian regime is responsible for death, mutilation, abduction, starvation and enforced disappearance of millions of Syrians," the spokesperson said.

"Its crimes against humanity, violations of international humanitarian law and the war crimes have been documented in countless UN reports."

Al Moallem declared that the Syrian government "will spare no effort to end the occupation by all means possible under international law" of American and Turkish forces.

US troops are deployed in the country to fight the Daesh group.

"The actions of these forces, taken directly or through their terrorist agents, secessionist militias, or manufactured and illegitimate entities, are null and void, with no legal effect," he said.

Al Moallem, who is also deputy prime minister, denounced US sanctions, saying they are blocking the delivery of life-saving medicine and equipment during the pandemic.

He called the "Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act" passed by the US Congress an "inhumane attempt to suffocate Syrians, just like George Floyd and others were cruelly suffocated in the United States, and just like Israel suffocates Palestinians on a daily basis".

Floyd, a handcuffed Black man, died May 25 after a white officer used his knee on Floyd's neck to pin him to the ground. The officer has been charged with second-degree murder, third-degree murder and manslaughter.

Al Moallem called on all countries affected by unilateral sanctions "and those that reject such measures to close ranks against them and alleviate their impact on our peoples ... through cooperation, coordination, and concrete political, economic and commercial means".

On the political front, he said Syria's government hopes a committee given the responsibility of drafting a new constitution for the country "will succeed".

But, he said, this will be possible only "if there is no external interference whatsoever in its work and by any party".

Sunday, September 27, 2020

USA 
New rule may strip pollution protections from popular lakes

JOHN FLESHER,
Associated Press• September 27, 2020


WILMINGTON, N.C. (AP) — Nearly 50 years ago, a power company received permission from North Carolina to build a reservoir by damming a creek near the coastal city of Wilmington. It would provide a source of steam to generate electricity and a place to cool hot water from an adjacent coal-fired plant.

Sutton Lake became popular with boaters and anglers, yielding bass, crappie, bluegill and other panfish. But coal ash from the plant fouled the public reservoir with selenium, arsenic and other toxic substances, endangering the fish and people who ate them.

Environmentalists sued Duke Energy, which settled the case by spending $1.25 million protecting nearby wetlands. But now the company — and other U.S. power producers — may have gotten the last laugh.

The Trump administration this year completed a long-debated rewrite of the Clean Water Act that drastically reduces the number of waterways regulated by the federal government. A little-noticed provision for the first time classifies “cooling ponds” as parts of “waste treatment systems” — which are not covered under the law.


The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the power industry describe it as a clarification with little real-world effect. But environmental groups challenging the Trump rule in court say it opens up reservoirs like Sutton Lake to similar abuse.

“These lakes are sources of food, drinking water, recreation and property values for surrounding communities,” said Frank Holleman, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center. “They’ve been protected under the Clean Water Act ever since it’s been adopted, all the way back to Nixon. No responsible adult would have stripped away these protections.”

The provision on reservoirs is an example of “hidden bombs” that could lurk in the new regulation's fine print, said Mark Ryan, a former EPA attorney who helped craft the Obama administration's clean-water rule that was replaced by the substantially weaker Trump version.

“Congress needs to fix this, or it will be tied up in litigation forever,” Ryan said.

The 1972 law requires developers, factories and others who use navigable waters to get permits specifying how much pollution can be discharged or wetland acreage filled. State regulators and the EPA monitor compliance and punish violators.

Disagreement over which waters are under federal jurisdiction has produced Supreme Court rulings and regulatory tinkering. But cooling reservoirs for power plants were covered until the Trump rewrite, Holleman said.

No complete list of such reservoirs is available, but at least a dozen manmade lakes appear to be vulnerable now, said Blan Holman, also an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center. Some cover thousands of acres, are prized boating and fishing spots, and have shorelines dotted with houses.

Among them: 4,900-acre (1,983-hectare) Clinton Lake in central Illinois, which was built in the 1970s to serve a nuclear power plant and is part of a state recreation area. Others are in the Carolinas, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas.

Lake Keowee, which provides cooling waters for a Duke Energy nuclear plant near Seneca, South Carolina, is 26 miles (42 kilometers) long and up to 54 feet (16.4 meters) deep. It's a water sports haven and a drinking water source for several cities.

Alice Guzick, who lives beside the scenic reservoir in the Appalachian mountains, said she fears the regulatory change will make builders less careful to prevent runoff as homes spring up along the shoreline.

“That sediment could cause a lot of pollution,” Guzick said. “There are many small businesses that would fail if the water were ever contaminated.”

The Edison Electric Institute, which advocates for power companies, last year asked the EPA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to group cooling ponds with unregulated waste treatment systems, saying confusion over their status had led to costly lawsuits.

But the industry wasn’t seeking a loophole to leave large reservoirs unprotected, said Alex Bond, the group’s associate general counsel for energy. He said critics are exaggerating what the wording change will mean.

“Generally speaking, the entire lake is not considered the waste treatment system,” Bond said, but rather the area near a plant where hot water is discharged. “Anything beyond that would be subject to regulation.”

EPA said in a statement that federal agencies “do not anticipate changes in longstanding implementation practices associated with these systems.”

Duke Power spokesman Philip Sgro said the company pushed for the wording change to be sure its coal ash retention basins at Sutton Lake and other reservoirs were excluded from the clean-water regulation. They are being closed and their contents moved to landfills.

“The lakes and reservoirs used for public access and recreation will remain classified as waters of the United States, and permits will still be required to discharge wastewater into them,” Srgo said.

But that's not what the new regulation says, Holleman countered. The law has always excluded waste treatment systems from coverage, he said, and now those systems have been defined to include cooling waters, leaving no basis for issuing federal permits to protect the reservoirs.

The power industry says state laws also will protect large reservoirs. But they are often weaker than the federal Clean Water Act and many don't allow citizen groups to sue over violations, Holleman said.

Wilmington-area environmental activist Kemp Burdette said he fears for Sutton Lake, a 1,100-acre (445-hectare) reservoir that a Duke University study last year found was still heavily contaminated with metals from decades of ash spills even though the coal plant has been replaced with a natural gas system.

“Removing any protection from this lake is going to mean the amount of pollution that's allowed to be dumped in here goes up,” Burdette, of Cape Fear River Watch, said during a recent boat tour. Great blue herons skimmed the dark, wind-rippled surface in search of fish, while ospreys took wing from sycamore and cypress trees lining the shore.

Now that coal ash has been moved from shoreline lagoons to a nearby landfill, “you could have this lake start to heal itself,” he said. “But to consider this wastewater is a terrible thing that's probably going to kill this lake.”

___

Follow John Flesher on Twitter: @johnflesher

GRITS

Cream of Wheat to remove Black chef from the box as it updates imagery in wake of calls for racial equality
Kelly Tyko, USA TODAY,
USA TODAY•September 27, 2020


The smiling Black chef will soon come off the boxes of Cream of Wheat.

More than three months after Cream of Wheat’s parent company, B&G Foods, said it was “initiating an immediate review” of the brand’s packaging, a decision has been made – the chef will be removed.

In rapid succession back in mid-June, several companies announced they would retire racial imagery from their branding from Aunt Jemima to Mrs. Butterworth's in the wake of renewed calls for racial equality.

Experts say the branding announcements are a ripple effect from the Black Lives Matters protests over the police killing of George Floyd and other African Americans.

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Mars Inc. also announced this week that its 70-year-old Uncle Ben's rice brand will be renamed Ben’s Original and will drop the logo.

Packaging with the new rice name will hit stores next year and the new Cream of Wheat packaging is expected to be unveiled early next year.

Pimento cheese chase: Costco reportedly pulls Palmetto Cheese after founder calls Black Lives Matter a 'terror organization'

New name for Uncle Ben's: Popular rice brand will soon be known as Ben's Original

“For years, the image of an African-American chef appeared on our Cream of Wheat packaging,” B&G Foods said in a statement to USA TODAY. “While research indicates the image may be based upon an actual Chicago chef named Frank White, it reminds some consumers of earlier depictions they find offensive. Therefore, we are removing the chef image from all Cream of Wheat packaging."

The breakfast cereal of enriched farina has long been criticized for the use of a smiling Black chef on its packaging, which has appeared there since the 1890s. The figure on early boxes was known as Rastus, a racial caricature of a Black man, which is considered derogatory.

"We understand there are concerns regarding the Chef image, and we are committed to evaluating our packaging and will proactively take steps to ensure that we and our brands do not inadvertently contribute to systemic racism,” B&G Foods said in a June news release. “B&G Foods unequivocally stands against prejudice and injustice of any kind.”

The company said in its statement to USA TODAY that it has a "new philanthropic initiative in recognition of the importance of diversity and inclusion in the culinary community" and "has begun developing relationships with several of the leading culinary schools to help support and aid in the development of African-American and Latinx candidates through various scholarship and other initiatives."

Palmetto Cheese, which calls itself the top-selling pimento cheese in the U.S., also has begun rebranding to remove the image of Vertrella Brown, a Black cook who popularized the product, from the packaging.

News of the rebranding came after Brian Henry, the founder of the cheese brand and mayor of Pawleys Island, South Carolina, made a public Facebook post on Aug. 25 calling Black Lives Matter a "terror organization."

Costco reportedly removed the pimento cheese from store shelves after Henry's post but a representative for the wholesale club said they had no comment when USA TODAY reached out Tuesday.

Contributing: Associated Press

Follow USA TODAY reporter Kelly Tyko on Twitter: @KellyTyko

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Cream of Wheat chef to be removed from boxes of cereal next year
What America owes: How reparations would look and who would pay

SAMARA LYNN and CATHERINE THORBECKE,
Good Morning America•September 27, 2020



This report is part of "Turning Point," a groundbreaking month-long series by ABC News examining the racial reckoning sweeping the United States and exploring whether it can lead to lasting reconciliation.

In the early 20th century, Richard Givens, a Black man, toiled as a laborer in a box mill in Greensville County, Virginia.

He earned $300 for the entire year in 1939, according to U.S. Census records, an income Givens had to use to support a family of eight.

That seemingly paltry sum (worth only approximately $5,500 today) was even anemic for the time -- less than the median salary for non-white men ($460) and about a quarter of what white men made at the time ($1,112), according to data from the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census.- ADVERTISEMENT -


MORE: Mississippi to vote on Jim Crow-era law designed to secure 'white supremacy' in state politics

That economic gap for Givens, like many of his Black contemporaries, existed 75 years after the end of slavery and persists today. Many say that the existence of that gap has been perpetuated by systemic racism in America -- a combination of laws and institutions that perpetuate inequality -- and necessitates reparations to address those wrongs.

Since the end of slavery, Black Americans have been in a fervent and mostly futile race to catch up economically to their white counterparts. The Black-white wealth gap has been and remains vast -- the net worth of the average white family is 10 times greater than the average Black family, according to a 2016 report from the Brookings Institute.
PHOTO: Economists, advocates and more discuss what the reality of reparations for descendants of enslaved people in the U.S. would look like. (ABC News)
PHOTO: An illustration of a slave auction published in the Illustrated London News, Feb. 16, 1861. (Corbis via Getty Images)

Moreover, median wealth of Black families remains less than 1/10 of white families in 2020, the Senate Joint Economic Committee found in its report, The Economic State of Black America in 2020.

For over 200 years, colonial America and then the U.S. was a slave state, then, an apartheid state -- with Jim Crow laws in the South and actively racist practices such as redlining -- financial institutions denying mortgages to people of color, or providing mortgages to them only in limited areas usually with homes and properties of low value.
PHOTO: A restaurant in Maryland has a sign over its front entrance designating it 'white only' and telling African Americans that they must enter the establishment through the rear door, circa. 1948. (Joe Schwartz Photo Archive/Corbis via Getty Images, FILE)More

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Advocates and experts argue that ongoing systemic racism has placed Black Americans at a disadvantage in everything from obtaining an education to being paid fair wages, purchasing homes, starting businesses and passing down generational wealth -- all components needed to achieve robust economic health.

Some advocates and experts say reparations are the answer. They would not only help eliminate wealth differences caused by systemic racism, but are also "a form of compensation that would amount to healing," William "Sandy" Darity, an economist and professor at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy told ABC News.

The topic is controversial. While arguments have been made that reparations to Black descendants of enslaved people could help restore economic balance in the nation, there is the outstanding question of how much should be paid out and to whom.

So what exactly is owed? That depends on which economic expert you ask.
Calculating reparations

Darity and co-author Andrea Kirsten Mullen have a new book, "From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century," that analyzes past estimates for reparation amounts and offers new ones.

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign economist Larry Neal estimated in 1983 that America owed $1.4 trillion in reparations for Black descendants of enslaved people. Neal based this figure on the amount of wages earned by non-enslaved workers between 1620 and 1840, subtracting costs related to the care of slaves (food, housing, care, etc.).

According to Darity and Mullen, that 1983 figure compounded at 4%, 5% and 6% interest by 2019, would be $5.7 trillion, $8.1 trillion and $11.4 trillion, respectively, as per their calculations.

They also suggest there was a major flaw with Neal's calculation: it doesn't take into account the 20 years before the Civil War.

Roger Ransom, a former economics professor at the University of Virginia and the University of California, and Richard Sutch, who was a professor emeritus of economics at the University of California, before his death in 2019, based their calculation on the profit from slavery between 1806 and 1860. Their method, compounded at interest rates of 4%, 5% and 6% in 2018, would amount to $14 billion, $19.7 billion, and $27.7 billion, Darity and Mullen figured. But they also cited flaws with Ransom and Sutch's methodology. They argue that the calculation doesn't account for the first 30 years of slavery in the country, it omits profit from the slave trade, and charges the enslaved for their own maintenance costs, resulting in "the lowest bill for black reparations among those we examine," Darity and Mullen write in their book.

One of the more complex calculations is by Thomas Craemer, a professor of public policy at the University of Connecticut. He multiplied the "prevailing market wage" by the number of hours enslaved people worked (assuming a 24-hour work day) between the years 1776 and 1865. That model, calculated for 2019 at 4%, 5% and 6% interest rates, works out to $16.4 trillion, $17 trillion and $17.7 trillion, respectively.

The problem with Craemer's calculation, according to Darity and Mullen, is that it relies on "the market wage for non-slave labor" rather than "the hypothetical non-slave labor wage that would have prevailed in the absence of captive enslaved Africans." This yields a slightly lower calculation as per Darity and Mullen.

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Therefore, Darity and Mullen came up with their own calculation based on net worth. They cite the gap in mean household wealth by race, which was $795,000, according to the 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances.

"If the average black household consists of 3.31 persons," Darity and Mullen write in their book, "the mean shortfall in wealth for individual black Americans would have been approximately $240,000."

Next, they multiplied $795,000 by the U.S. Census Bureau's estimate of 10 million Black households, arriving at a reparations bill of $7.95 trillion.

They also offer an alternative calculation. The Black population comprises about 13% of the American population. The nation's total household wealth reached $107 trillion by the second quarter of 2018. Thirteen percent of that amount is $13.91 trillion. As Black Americans are estimated to hold at most, 3% of the nation's wealth, according to Census data, that amounts to $3.21 trillion.

Eliminating the difference in household wealth, "would require a reparations outlay of $10.7 trillion" or, $267,000 per person for the 40 million eligible Black descendants of slavery, Darity and Mullen write.

Eligibility, Darity said, can be established through genealogical research to find out if one's ancestors were held as chattel, a task some say is impractical, including Congressman Jim Clyburn, one of the highest-ranking House Democrats who said in an interview that he feared reparations "would lead to contested debates about who would be eligible due to the sprawling family trees that have evolved in the generations since slavery was abolished."
 
PHOTO: House Oversight and Reform Subcommittee Chairman James E. Clyburn speaks at a hearing on Capitol Hill, Sept. 1, 2020, in Washington, DC. (Graeme Jennings/Pool/Getty Images, FILE)

Critics of reparations have also argued that the conversation leaves an entire group of people, Black American-born descendants of immigrants, some of whose families have been in the U.S. for generations -- and many whose families may have survived decades if not centuries of institutional racism -- excluded.
Federal government reparations

As the nation grapples with allegations of systemic racism, the ongoing wealth gap and other persistent and mounting inequities between Black and white Americans -- including disparate health outcomes and police brutality -- academics and activists say the federal government needs to face a reckoning for its culpability in these ongoing issues.

"You often hear individuals say, I didn't own any slaves, and to them I always say, 'Well, you may not have but the federal government permitted it and endorsed it, facilitated it,'" Andre Perry, an economist and fellow at the Brookings Institution, told ABC News. "Therefore, the federal government has a responsibility of paying that back."

"The policies that facilitated slavery were at fault," Perry added. "The damage was caused by policy failure. Policies should drive the remedy."

Looking abroad, despite many of the individual perpetrators of the Holocaust being long gone, Germany has paid out billions of dollars to survivors, their families and eligible heirs.

Perry also noted that there are historical precedents for the U.S. federal government compensating victims of its past mistakes, and so-called "reparations" have happened before, just not for Black Americans.

Through the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, the government admitted to a litany of wrongdoings in its internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. As part of a reparations package, the government paid $20,000 to every living survivor of the internment camps and issued an apology that acknowledged a "grave injustice" that was "motivated largely by racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership." In total, $1.6 billion was paid out to more than 82,250 eligible claimants. Adjusted for inflation, that figure would top $3.5 billion in 2020.
PHOTO: Japanese people lining up for registration at the Alien Reception Center, Manzanar, Calif., March 27, 1942. (Bettmann Archive/Getty Images, FILE)

Nkechi Taifa, a lawyer and reparations advocate with the National African American Reparations Commission (NAARC), told ABC News that when that bill was passed, "it came from taxpayer dollars."

"I had nothing to do with the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II," she said. "But my tax dollars helped to pay for that reparations settlement."

MORE: A look back at Japanese internment camps in the US, 75 years later

Taifa also noted a much darker historical precedent, referencing 1860s legislation that paid reparations to slave owners for their so-called loss of "property."

"Reparations were paid out after the Civil War, they just weren't paid to Black people," Taifa said. "They weren't paid to the formerly enslaved people. They weren't paid to the victims, they were paid to the slave owners for the loss of their property."

President Abraham Lincoln's emancipation bill in 1862 provided payment to slave owners up to $300 for each enslaved person who was freed. Adjusted for inflation, that figure would be approximately $8,000.

There has been a history of pushback for reparations at the federal level.

Black Republicans like Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina are not in favor of reparations, but instead, favor policies like opportunity zones. On his website, Scott claims opportunity zones are incentives that aim to "lift entire communities out of poverty by attracting private dollars to the corners of our country that have been left behind as the American economy has surged forward."

Black Democrats have also been skeptical of reparations including Rep. Clyburn, who said in an interview with the Post and Courier, that reparations would be "difficult to implement."

And some have argued that social programs like Medicaid, Social Security and other welfare benefits are a form of reparations, while not specifically targeted at Black people, write Darity and Mullen in their book.

Taifa called all the arguments for why the federal government shouldn't pay reparations now, because of cost, logistical difficulties or the amount of time that has passed: "hogwash."

"I say that because whose fault is it that this much time has passed that has not been addressed?" she said. "The demand for reparations has been going on ever since the enslavement era."

Perry added that historically in the U.S, "when there's white suffering, we find the money."

"We will sell debt, we will do a number of things to find the revenue," he added.

Taifa cited how Congress rallied some $2 trillion extremely quickly in the CARES Act to respond to the COVID-19 crisis as an example of how lawmakers are able to find the money when they need to.

At the local level, one city has found a creative way of raising reparations funds. Evanston, Illinois said earlier this year that it plans to use the $10 million collected by the city in legal marijuana sales to provide Black residents with housing and economic development benefits.

Ultimately, Perry said he doesn't think the issue is a matter of where the money will come from, but rather, "it's about political will."

"We shouldn't prohibit policy simply because it's hard to implement," he said. "They said the same thing about integration, about women's rights -- that it's too hard, that the culture won't allow it, that the blowback will be too severe."

"Resistance is more about ignorance," he said. "Not about facts."

Darity and Mullen in their book state, "The invoice [for reparations] should go directly to the U.S. Congress."

"The culpable party," Darity said bluntly, "is the United States government."

Darity and Mullen also propose in their book several ways the federal government could fund reparations without imposing new taxes. One way, they discuss is by funding through deficit spending.

Deficit spending -- defined as the government spending more than it collects -- Darity and Mullen write, would require no change in tax rates, and if reparations provide a stimulus, could actually generate a tax revenue to fund the program.

They also suggest that the Federal Reserve could fund reparations in much the same way it funded investment banks during the Great Recession.

Because of the bailout by the Federal Reserve, Darity and Mullen make the argument that "there can be no doubt that the Fed has vast capacity to provide the funds required for a properly designed and financed reparations program."
Private sector

Meanwhile, as increasing evidence emerges of private sector culpability or complacency in the slave trade, many are also calling on these entities which still exist today to pay reparations.

A slew of banks, life insurance companies and even universities have been thrust into the spotlight recently after evidence emerged they were involved in the slave trade.

Georgetown University admitted in recent years to selling 272 slaves in 1838 to pay off debts and ultimately keep the school open. In 2019, the private university announced the creation of a fund it said could generate $400,000 a year in scholarships to benefit the descendants of these people.

In 2005, JPMorgan Chase admitted that two of its predecessor banks in Louisiana had links to the slave trade, The Associated Press reported. The investment banking giant issued an apology and set up a scholarship fund for Black students from the state.

Taifa said she has been fighting for entities that "were culpable and benefited unjustly" from the slave trade era to "come up with a settlement or negotiation."

Earlier this year, the nation's wealthiest Black man, billionaire Robert Smith called on companies that profited off the slave trade to consider paying reparations.

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"I think corporations have to also think about, well, what is the right thing to do?" he told Reuters.
What should 'reparations' look like?

Proposals for what reparations should look like vary widely. Many advocates are calling for direct payments, others are arguing for tax cuts, and some say they should come in the form of investments in Black communities, scholarship funds or other collective investments.

The HR 40 bill that was introduced in the House last year by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Tex., calls for the creation of a commission to study and develop reparation proposals. Senator Cory Booker, D-NJ, introduced a partner bill in the Senate. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reportedly expressed her support for the bill during at an event at Howard University last year. The late Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., first proposed the bill that would become H.R. 40 in 1989.
PHOTO: In this June 19, 2019, file photo, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee speaks during a hearing on slavery reparations held by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties on June 19, 2019, in Washington, DC. (Zach Gibson/Getty Images, FILE)More

Despite support expressed from some high-profile members of Congress, the legislation tracking site GovTrack.us assigned it a 4% chance of being enacted in 2019, citing methodology by AI researchers and data engineers at the firm Scopos. This was calculated, however, before the police killing of George Floyd set in motion a new racial reckoning in the U.S.

The progressive political organization Democracy in Color said in a July 2020 poll conducted through the online platform Civiqs that 50% of Americans support H.R. 40, an uptick from 2019 when only 31% said they supported it.

Taifa said "beyond anything else it absolutely and completely, any and every reparation settlement must include an official apology."

She said she is fighting for monetary reparations but thinks that efforts should go beyond just payments, such as pardons for Black people who were disproportionately targeted during the problem-plagued "War on Drugs," educational scholarships, investments in Black community development and more.

"Our reparation settlement should be creative," she said. "The harm was multifaceted and the relief should be as well."

Perry added that as an economist he thinks the "most prominent form of reparations should come in the form of a check."

"This is about a debt that is owed," he said. "This about compensating for labor and damage, so it should come into the form of a check" to descendants of enslaved people.

In their book, Darity and Mullen also suggest direct payments and said they could be disbursed over time. They also suggest "a portfolio of reparations" which could be trust funds available for eligible Black Americans to apply for grants for homeownership, education, establishing businesses or purchasing financial assets.

Some localities are also "trying to figure out ways how they can create policies that address the policy violence inflicted on Black Americans over the over the course of centuries," Perry said.

"So, it might come in the form of investments in Black communities, new zoning practices, educational scholarships, business loans," he said.

Most importantly, to Taifa, reparations can "go a long way toward the racial healing that we need, the closing of a shameful chapter in this history and also the allowance for the victims themselves, those parties, to decide just what they want."

"When I say 'they,' I'm talking about we, Black people, really want as a future here, a political future, economic future, a cultural future in the light," Taifa added.

What America owes: How reparations would look and who would pay originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
How do you cover a group as diverse as Asian Americans in Southern California?

Teresa Watanabe,
Los Angeles Times Opinion•September 27, 2020

An article that appeared in The Times supported the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans. (Newspapers.com)

In 1881, the Los Angeles Times ran an article titled “The Heathen Chinee,” which purported to enlighten readers about the “peculiarities of the race as observed in Chinatown.” The article appeared just four days after the paper, then known as the Los Angeles Daily Times, began publishing, and it told readers that “Chinamen” believe in goblins and ghosts and live in grimy rooms reeking of “mysterious odors.” They show “criminal carelessness” about fire safety with their open cooking braziers and — news flash! — their cheap meals of rice, mustard greens and slivers of fish and pork are the secret behind their ability to “live on a pittance” and outbid white workers for jobs.

Nearly a century later, the newspaper hired Edwin Chen, the first Asian American reporter to join the paper’s Metro staff. Chen, hired as a science writer in 1979, remembers being met by an editor on his first visit to the Metro newsroom with the greeting, “It’s Charlie Chan!” He was stunned, he says, and kept walking amid chuckles from his new colleagues.

Today, the newspaper features smart and sensitive coverage of the community by an Asian American columnist, Asian American podcasters and other Asian American journalists, who make up 14.6% of our newsroom staff. That proportion, the largest among major U.S. newspapers, is not far from mirroring the Asian American share of the population in Los Angeles County and California.

The Times has made real headway in its coverage and newsroom representation of the nation’s fastest-growing racial/ethnic group. But it has not been nearly enough.
An article from the Dec. 8, 1881, edition of The Times is filled with racist invective against Asian Americans. (Los Angeles Times)-

Of course, it’s never been easy to cover Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. We are a dazzlingly diverse array of more than 50 ethnic groups, with different languages, cultures, religions and histories in the United States. I am a third-generation Japanese American; my paternal grandfather came from a rural village in the shadow of Mt. Fuji to settle in Seattle in 1908. My colleague Anh Do arrived here with her family in 1975 from Vietnam days before the fall of Saigon. The families of The Times’ Asian American staffers come from Japan, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines.

The issue of coverage has bedeviled The Times from its inception, as the “Heathen Chinee” article demonstrates. Reading through more than a century of stories about Asian American Angelenos in the paper reveals stubbornly persistent stereotypes. No matter how long Asian American families had been in the United States — fighting its wars, paying its taxes, contributing to the nation’s well-being — they were still often seen as foreigners, exotic at best, sinister at worst.

In 1917, The Times wrote approvingly of Japanese Americans after Japan joined forces with the major Allied powers of the United States, Great Britain, France, Russia and Italy during World War I. “Thousands of young Japanese are being educated in the schools and colleges of America,” The Times wrote. “To the ancient standards of Samurai honor, to the proverbial thrift and industry of the Orient, they are adding practical, progressive American ideas.”

But after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, launching America’s entry into World War II, Japanese Americans were portrayed as dangerous, disloyal and unable or unwilling to assimilate. “A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched,” wrote W.H. Anderson in a Times column two months later, supporting the mass incarceration of 120,000 people of Japanese descent, including my family, in 10 remote detention camps ringed by barbed wire and guarded by armed soldiers.

Although there was never any evidence of Japanese American disloyalty, The Times supported the incarceration and opposed the community’s return to the West Coast. The editorial positions followed decades of agitating for racist laws to protect white Californians from the “Yellow Peril” — and economic competition — by barring the entry of Chinese and Japanese immigrants and prohibiting them from owning land.

The newspaper apologized for its support of the incarceration three years ago, 75 years after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which paved the way for the mass removal and imprisonment of Japanese Americans.

But as recently as 2016, some Times coverage still implied that Asian Americans were an unwelcome presence. In a story that year, a white music store owner who had stayed put in Monterey Park despite a “tsunami” of Asian immigrants transforming the San Gabriel Valley was likened to a xenophobic bumper sticker that read the “last American to leave Monterey Park.” The story quoted no Asian Americans. After Times staffers Cindy Chang, Rong-Gong Lin II and Frank Shyong raised objections, a top manager agreed the story did not meet Times reporting standards. But the online version of the story remained largely the same, with the word “white” inserted in brackets between “last” and “American.”)

Asian Americans are still being blamed for the acts of foreign countries. President Trump has pointedly called COVID-19 the “China virus,” and Asian Americans have reported nearly 2,600 incidents of discrimination, including verbal and physical assaults, according to Stop AAPI Hate, a national coalition of organizations. Chinese Americans are also decrying what they say is an alarming and growing racial profiling of their scientists and researchers as federal agencies crack down on China’s efforts to steal intellectual property.

Today, however, The Times is covering these stories and giving space on its opinion pages to Asian Americans writing about them.
Japanese Americans wait with their luggage at the Santa Fe rail station in Los Angeles for trains that will take them to an incarceration camp in the Owens Valley. (Russell Lee / Library of Congress)

So how does a newspaper cover the vast Asian American and Pacific Islander community today?

Newsroom representation matters. In 1981, Times journalists Bill Sing, Nancy Yoshihara and David Kishiyama became three of the founding members of the Asian American Journalists Assn., aimed in part at increasing our ranks in U.S. news organizations. The group now has more than 1,500 members in 20 chapters across the United States and in Asia.

Back then, though, our presence was so small that former Times staffer Elaine Woo still recalls her discomfort during her newsroom interview for a suburban bureau position in 1983.

“My most distinct memory was a sea of middle-aged white men in short-sleeved shirts and black ties,” says Woo, who covered the Westside before moving to education, editing and obituaries. “I thought … ‘I don’t belong here.’”

Asian Americans and other journalists of color slowly began increasing at The Times after the 1984 launch of the MetPro diversity training and hiring program. A turning point was the 1992 Los Angeles civil unrest following the acquittal of four LAPD officers caught on videotape brutally beating a Black man, Rodney King.

Stewart Kwoh, who headed a local Asian American civil rights organization, brought community leaders to meet with then-Editor Shelby Coffey III. The group was particularly concerned about how Korean Americans had been portrayed during the unrest, when the paper ran sensationalist photos of some of them on rooftops armed with guns, without adequately explaining that they took up arms because police had abandoned their neighborhoods and left hundreds of their businesses to be damaged or destroyed.

Although our two Korean-speaking reporters at the time, business reporter Don Lee and San Diego reporter John H. Lee, pitched in on coverage of the unrest with stories humanizing the Korean American community, they had their own beats to cover.
Korean store owners attempt to defend their property in Koreatown at Western Avenue and 5th Street on April 30, 1992. (Hyungwon Kang / Los Angeles Times)

Kwoh’s group pointed out the need for someone specifically assigned to cover the Asian American community. Craig Matsuda, a longtime Times employee who left in 2008, recalls that he and other AAJA members had made a similar request to a Metro editor before the 1992 unrest but were turned down. Kwoh says that Coffey agreed on the spot to expand coverage, leading to the hiring of the late K. Connie Kang, an experienced journalist who was born in what is now North Korea, raised in Okinawa, Japan, and fluent in both Korean and Japanese.

In what came to be seen as a heyday of newsroom diversity, The Times hired many other journalists of color in the 1990s and launched a City Times section focused on the central city.

Diversity is important not only in the reporting ranks but also in decision-making roles. As an assistant managing editor, Karen Wada successfully lobbied for funds to include Asian Americans for the first time in the newspaper’s polls. In 1996, Wada became the first Asian American to join the newspaper’s masthead group of top newsroom leaders as a deputy managing editor and later as a managing editor.

After then-foreign editor Alvin Shuster sent me to Tokyo in 1991 as the newspaper’s first Asian American foreign correspondent, he was succeeded by Simon Li, who sent other Asian American correspondents to foreign postings, including Henry Chu and Ching-Ching Ni.

Ashley Dunn, a Chinese American who served as Metro editor from 2011 to 2014, saw the need for better coverage of Asian Americans and hired Do to cover the Vietnamese community and Chang to cover immigration and ethnic communities.

The Times broke new ground when editors named Shyong as our first Asian American Metro columnist last year and launched our first Asian American-focused podcast by him and entertainment writer Jen Yamato in March. “Ethnic reporting is an intervention in the white perspective that is embedded in journalism,” Shyong says.

But we still have vast holes in our coverage. We largely neglect the huge presence here of Filipinos and of South Asians with roots in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and the Maldives (yes, we have all of these groups in California). Staffers have written about Filipino American veterans, nurses, COVID-19 victims, cultural practices and Historic Filipinotown; about Little India, South Asian troubles following the 9/11 attacks and Sikh truckers; and more recently, about Democratic vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ Indian heritage. But the coverage is spotty and not nearly what the communities deserve given their size and influence. Ethnic Filipinos and Indians now make up California’s largest Asian American groups after ethnic Chinese.

That wasn’t always true. In the early 20th century, Asian Americans were overwhelmingly ethnic Chinese and Japanese. Thanks to liberalization of federal immigration laws in 1965, 37% of Asian Americans today trace their roots to East Asia, 33% to Southeast Asia and 27% to South Asia, according to Karthick Ramakrishnan, a UC Riverside political science professor.

“People need to update their understanding of what Asian Americans are,” Ramakrishnan says.
Times columnist Frank Shyong, left, visits Paul's Kitchen on San Pedro Street in Los Angeles. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

In addition, we can’t rely only on Asian Americans to cover the full breadth of Asian America. For one thing, not everyone wants that job. Chen, for instance, was born in China and speaks fluent Chinese but aspired to join our Washington bureau to pursue his passion for government and politics. He got there in 1989 and subsequently covered science, the Iraq war, presidential campaigns and the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations before leaving the paper in 2006.

Woo was drawn to education and profile writing, an art she honed with beautifully rendered obituaries.

“I didn’t want to be pigeonholed,” Woo says. “I didn’t think of myself as an Asian American or Chinese American reporter; I thought of myself as an American journalist, and I wanted others to think of me that way.”

The job is simply too vast, the communities too numerous and diverse for one or two reporters to handle alone. Shyong and Do bring expertise and excellence to our coverage, but we need to do more.

How to do better? One idea is for reporters across the paper — Asian American or not — who know and love certain communities to keep an eye on them. While I cover higher education, I also do stories about Japanese Americans and Little Tokyo every now and then, because I know what’s happening in my community and people reach out to me with story ideas. Editors should give all reporters with a similar desire the time to break from their beats for the occasional cultural story.

More broadly, however, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders should be part of the warp and woof, as Matsuda says, of our overall coverage. The question isn’t really how to cover Asian Americans; it is how to cover Los Angeles, because we, along with other racial and ethnic communities, are Los Angeles.

“When has the paper recognized Asian Americans are not a marginal group; we’re a defining group in the area?” asks Peter Hong, a former Times reporter who is Korean American. He calls the idea of a dedicated Asian American beat an outdated model that is “so 1980s.”

Asian American experts should be quoted in general news stories. Asian Americans should be covered as part of education, business, politics, environment, health, food, entertainment and geographical beats. Former Times reporter Mark Arax, for instance, broke new ground in the mid-1980s covering the rise of the ethnic Chinese community in the San Gabriel Valley. He is not Asian American, but he’s a terrific reporter who simply saw that demographic shift as an important part of his San Gabriel Valley beat. Later, he moved to the Central Valley and wrote about the Hmong community there along with Latino laborers, agriculture, Yosemite National Park and other local topics.

Nearly a decade earlier, William Overend wrote a piece that shattered the “model minority” myth that all Asian Americans are educated, affluent and without need for public services. In “The Chinatown Tourists Don’t See,” he wrote about poverty and isolation among Chinese immigrants, interviewing them through an interpreter.

The Times needs to invest in equipping all staff members with the cultural IQ and linguistic skills to understand our diverse communities. We live in one of the most diverse spots on the planet — both ethnically and religiously. Today, more than ever, our coverage needs to reflect that.
NY Times:
President Trump paid no federal income taxes in 10 of the past 15 years, he paid $750 in US income taxes in 2016, 2017

The Associated Press,
Associated Press•September 27, 2020

President Donald Trump paid just $750 in federal income taxes the year he ran for president and in his first year in the White House, according to a report Sunday in The New York Times.

Trump, who has fiercely guarded his tax filings and is the only president in modern times not to make them public, paid no federal income taxes in 10 of the past 15 years.

The details of the tax filings complicate Trump’s description of himself as a shrewd and patriotic businessman, revealing instead a series of financial losses and income from abroad that could come into conflict with his responsibilities as president. The president’s financial disclosures indicated he earned at least $434.9 million in 2018, but the tax filings reported a $47.4 million loss.

The disclosure, which the Times said comes from tax return data it obtained extending over two decades, comes at a pivotal moment ahead of the first presidential debate Tuesday and weeks before a divisive election against Democrat Joe Biden.

Speaking at a news conference Sunday at the White House, Trump dismissed the report as “fake news” and said he has paid taxes, though he gave no specifics. He also vowed that information about his taxes “will all be revealed,” but he offered no timeline for the disclosure and made similar promises during the 2016 campaign on which he never followed through.

In fact, the president has fielded court challenges against those seeking access to his returns, including the U.S. House, which is suing for access to Trump's tax returns as part of congressional oversight.

During his first two years as president, Trump received $73 million from foreign operations, which in addition to his golf properties in Scotland and Ireland included $3 million from the Philippines, $2.3 million from India and $1 million from Turkey. The president in 2017 paid $145,400 in taxes in India and $156,824 in the Philippines, compared to just $750 in U.S. income taxes. 
 
Trump found multiple ways to reduce his tax bills. He has taken tax deductions on personal expenses such as housing, aircraft and $70,000 in haircare. Losses in the property businesses solely owned and managed by Trump appear to have offset income from his stake in the television show “The Apprentice” and other entities with multiple owners.

During the first two years of his presidency, Trump relied on business tax credits to reduce his tax obligations. The Times said $9.7 million worth of business investment credits that were submitted after Trump requested an extension to file his taxes allowed him to reduce his income and pay just $750 each in 2016 and 2017.

Trump, starting in 2010, claimed and received an income tax refund that totaled $72.9 million, which the Times said was at the core of an ongoing audit by the IRS. The president has declined to release his taxes because of the audit.

A lawyer for the Trump Organization, Alan Garten, and a spokesperson for the Trump Organization did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Associated Press on the report.

Garten told the Times that “most, if not all, of the facts appear to be inaccurate.”

He said in a statement to the news organization that the president "has paid tens of millions of dollars in personal taxes to the federal government, including paying millions in personal taxes since announcing his candidacy in 2015.”

The New York Times said it declined to provide Garten with the tax filings in order to protect its sources.

During his first general election debate against Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016, Clinton said that perhaps Trump wasn't releasing his tax returns because he had paid nothing in federal taxes.

Trump interrupted her to say, "That makes me smart.”