Activists Have Lobbied For This Native American Prisoner's Release For Decades. Now Due To COVID They Fear His Time Is Running Out.

Leonard Peltier has spent 46 years in prison for the murders of two FBI agents. He and his supporters have long said that his conviction was based on an unfair trial.

by Stephanie K. Baer

BuzzFeed News Reporter

Posted 5 hours ago

Mike Simons / Tulsa World via AP

Demonstrators carry a banner during a rally for Leonard Peltier in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Feb. 7, 2022.

Supporters of a Native American activist who has spent more than 40 years behind bars for a crime he says he didn't commit have ramped up their push for clemency after he recently tested positive for COVID-19.

Leonard Peltier is serving consecutive life sentences in a high-security Florida prison for the murders of two FBI agents in a 1975 shootout on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. For decades, he and his supporters have lobbied for his sentence to be reduced, arguing that his conviction was based on lies, threats, and faulty evidence.

Now that the 77-year-old activist, who has diabetes and an abdominal aortic aneurysm, has COVID, it may be his last chance at freedom.

"Time will be of the essence if he turns south quickly," his attorney and former US District Court judge Kevin Sharp told BuzzFeed News. "He could get it again. How many times can he take this before he can’t take it? He got life, not death."

Cliff Schiappa / Associated Press

Leonard Peltier in 1986

A prominent member of the Indigenous rights group American Indian Movement, Peltier had traveled to Pine Ridge in 1975 to assist members of the reservation amid tensions between those who supported the tribal government and those who supported AIM. Formed in the 1960s, the group sought to draw attention to police brutality and discrimination against Indigenous people and stand up for their rights under the treaties between the US government and Native American tribes.

While Peltier has admitted he was present at the June 26, 1975, shootout that resulted in the deaths of FBI agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams as well as a Native American man named Joseph Stuntz, he has long maintained his innocence. More than 40 people were involved in the gunfight, but only Peltier and three others were ever charged. Two of his codefendants were acquitted on the basis of self-defense, while the charges against the fourth were dropped. Stuntz's death was never investigated.

Peltier is considered by many to be a political prisoner due, in part, to the ways in which his case was prosecuted. Officials were never able to prove that Peltier fired the fatal shots that killed the agents. Instead, prosecutors relied on testimony from supposed witnesses who later recanted their statements, saying that FBI agents threatened and coerced them into lying. Years after Peltier was convicted, it was revealed that the government withheld a ballistics report that showed the shell casings collected from the scene didn't come from his weapon, according to his attorney.

"The president has the power under the Constitution to fix this today," Sharp said. "[The Bureau of Prisons] can fix it by sending him ... for home confinement or compassionate release. And it's so easy that if you're not doing it, it's politics."

In recent days, Native state lawmakers and members of Congress, including Sen. Patrick Leahy, have made personal appeals to President Joe Biden to release Peltier. "He is exactly the kind of individual who should be considered for clemency," Leahy said in a statement.

Even actors like Susan Sarandon and Danny DeVito have urged Biden to let him go.

"You can do it man," DeVito tweeted. "Pick up that pen."

Twitter: @DannyDeVito

Peltier first tested positive for COVID on Jan. 28 and was dealing with a painful, persistent cough, according to his attorney. Although he did receive his first two doses of the vaccine, Peltier did not receive a booster shot before he got sick, despite being eligible for one.

On Monday, Sharp said he has not been able to get updates on Peltier's condition since last week.

"I have no idea how Leonard is doing because no one has spoken to me," he told BuzzFeed News.

In response to BuzzFeed News' questions, a White House official acknowledged Peltier's request for clemency and the public support to release him and said all requests for pardon or commutation go through the White House Counsel’s Office.

"I don’t have more to share on Mr. Peltier’s request at this time," they said.

A spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons declined to comment on Peltier's case, but said the agency cannot act alone to reduce an inmate's sentence, noting that the BOP director must ask the prosecuting US attorney's office to file a motion to do so.

The FBI and the Department of Justice declined BuzzFeed News' requests for comment. But a former FBI agent who monitored the case for the last 15 years said the agency would probably be unsupportive of releasing Peltier.

"I can't speak for the FBI, but I can tell you from my past experience the FBI was — and probably continues to be — opposed to any clemency being granted and any consideration being given to Peltier getting out of [prison]," retired assistant special agent in charge Bob Perry told BuzzFeed News.

In December 2000, after then-president Bill Clinton said he would consider Peltier's request for clemency, FBI agents took the unusual step of staging a rally outside the White House in protest.

Reuters

FBI agents protest the campaign for Peltier's clemency outside the White House on Dec. 15, 2000.

Was This Shirt Made With Forced Labor? Hugo Boss Quietly Cut Ties With The Supplier.

Hugo Boss distanced itself from a major clothing manufacturer shortly after a BuzzFeed News report on its links to cotton in Xinjiang, which the US has banned.

by Alison Killing

BuzzFeed Contributor

by Megha Rajagopalan

BuzzFeed News Reporter

Posted on February 3, 2022, 

BuzzFeed News

A logo-patch, slim-fit shirt in peached cotton sold by Hugo Boss

Hugo Boss has quietly removed subsidiaries of a Chinese textile giant from its supplier list days after BuzzFeed News raised questions about the Chinese company's deep ties to the Xinjiang region, where forced labor is rampant.

Last month BuzzFeed News reported that Hugo Boss and several other major clothing brands were continuing to ship clothes made by Esquel Group, a company that gins and spins cotton at facilities in Xinjiang, where the Chinese government is carrying out a campaign of mass imprisonment and forced labor targeting Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities.

Forced labor is so widespread in the region and supply chain audits are so difficult to carry out that it is almost impossible to establish whether forced labor is being used there, experts say. The US placed trade restrictions on one of Esquel’s Xinjiang-based subsidiaries in July 2020, and in January 2021 banned all cotton from Xinjiang, both times citing concerns about forced labor.

But Hugo Boss and other apparel brands kept sourcing clothes from other Esquel companies based in Guangdong, southern China, and importing them to the United States to sell. Procurement records and company statements reviewed by BuzzFeed News show that Esquel’s Guangdong branch works together with its Xinjiang-based cotton spinning factories, and Esquel’s own public statements make clear that its Xinjiang cotton production is deeply intertwined with its worldwide clothing operation.

Since the ban against all cotton began, at least 17 Esquel shipments have arrived in the US for Hugo Boss, according to Panjiva shipping records.

Hugo Boss did not reply to a question about why it changed its supplier list, and Esquel did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The BuzzFeed News story was published on Jan. 13. According to archived versions of the brand’s website on the Internet Archive, the Esquel companies were removed from the supplier list sometime between Jan. 15 and 24

Around this time, one more Esquel shipment did make it to the United States. Carrying cotton shirts and pants, the shipment arrived at the Port of Seattle on board a container ship called the OOCL Oakland, bound for Hugo Boss Canada, according to Panjiva shipping records. The haul was worth $50,100.​​

'Time for Him to Go': Ron Johnson Says He Won't Fight for Wisconsin Jobs

"Don't elected's usually try to get more jobs for their constituents? Not if your name is Ron Johnson," quipped Wisconsin progressive Randy Bryce.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) speaks during a Senate Budget Committee hearing on February 10, 2021. (Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

JAKE JOHNSON

COMMON DREAMS

February 7, 2022

Republican Sen. Ron Johnson faced a torrent of backlash over the weekend for publicly admitting that he won't pressure a Wisconsin manufacturer to locate around 1,000 new jobs in his home state rather than in South Carolina, which has some of the most anti-union labor laws in the nation.

"Johnson just said he wouldn't lift a finger to make sure the new USPS truck is built here in Wisconsin."

"It's not like we don't have enough jobs here in Wisconsin," Johnson said Saturday, a line that's almost certain to become Democratic Party ad material as the two-term Republican senator campaigns for reelection in the crucial battleground state.

"I wouldn't insert myself to demand that anything be manufactured here using federal funds in Wisconsin," Johnson told reporters when asked about the U.S. Postal Service's 10-year contract with Oshkosh Defense, the Wisconsin-based company that USPS tapped to produce its "Next Generation Delivery Vehicle."

Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, one of several Democrats running for Johnson's seat, called the Republican senator's remarks "outrageous" and argued it is "time for him to go."

"This is absurd," Barnes wrote in a Twitter post on Sunday. "Ron Johnson just said he wouldn't lift a finger to make sure the new USPS truck is built here in Wisconsin. In Oshkosh, where he's from!"

Watch Johnson's comments:



On top of environmentalists' warnings about the climate impact of the USPS contract—which is for the production of a fleet of largely gasoline-powered vehicles—labor advocates and Wisconsinites have voiced outrage over Oshkosh Defense's plan to manufacture the postal delivery trucks with non-union labor in South Carolina.

Oshkosh Defense employees represented by the United Auto Workers are pressuring the company to reverse its decision, but Johnson indicated Saturday that he views South Carolina's anti-union laws as a positive.

"In the end, I think when using federal tax dollars, you want to spend those in the most efficient way and if it's more efficient, more effective to spend those in other states, I don't have a real problem with that," said the senator.

Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) tweeted in response to Johnson that "it's my job to support job creation in Wisconsin and I want the trucks built here."

"To me, it's simple—I want Oshkosh Defense to manufacture trucks in Oshkosh with Wisconsin workers," Baldwin wrote.

Randy Bryce, a former U.S. House candidate in Wisconsin's 1st Congressional District, also weighed in, asking, "Don't electeds usually try to get more jobs for their constituents?"

"Not if your name is Ron Johnson," Bryce added.

Despite 2020 Promise, Jill Biden Confirms Free Community College Plan Is Dead

"The proposed yearly cost of Biden's free community college plan would come out to less than 1.5% of the 2022 Pentagon budget," said CodePink.

U.S. First Lady Jill Biden speaks at the Community College National Legislative Summit at the Marriott Marquis on February 7, 2022 in Washington, D.C. Biden announced that tuition-free community college is no longer a part of the Build Back Better social spending legislation in Congress. (Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)


JULIA CONLEY

COMMON DREAMS
February 7, 2022

Confirming that the Biden administration has abandoned its efforts to pass tuition-free community college—a signature campaign promise—First Lady JIll Biden on Monday offered a stark reminder, according to one critic, of "how low we, the people, are on the U.S. list of priorities."

The first lady spoke at the Community College National Legislative Summit in Washington, D.C., telling attendees that President Joe Biden has not found a way to keep the community college provision in the Build Back Better Act, his social spending and climate package, as Democrats continue to negotiate the bill.

"As a first-generation college graduate and former community college professor in the poorest big city in America, this is unacceptable."

"Joe has also had to make compromises," said Biden, a longtime educator who currently teaches at a community college. "Congress hasn't passed the Build Back Better legislation—yet. And free community college is no longer a part of that package."

Biden expressed her own disappointment in the Democratic Party's failure to coalesce around the president's domestic agenda, suggesting that right-wing Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia—who pressured the White House to remove key climate and social spending provisions from the package last year only to announce in December that he would not support it—was to blame.

"I was disappointed," the first lady told the room of community college leaders from across the country. "Because, like you, these aren't just bills or budgets to me, to you, right? We know what they mean for real people, for our students."

"It was a real lesson in human nature that some people just don't get that," Biden added.

During the 2020 campaign, the president focused on his promise of providing two years of tuition-free community college to eligible students, while progressive candidates Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called for a return to tuition-free public college.

"I'm used to managing expectations but I shouldn't have to manage them down to nothing," tweeted journalist Kelsey Atherton on Monday after the first lady said the White House has, for now, accepted defeat of Biden's more modest proposal.

Under the Build Back Better Act, Biden proposed spending $45.5 billion to make two years of tuition free for five years, with states opting into the program and the federal government fully covering it for the first year before cost-sharing with the states began.

The yearly cost of providing tuition-free community college is equal to what the Pentagon spends in a matter of days, tweeted Security Policy Reform Institute founder Stephen Semler and anti-war group CodePink.

Experts have said eliminating tuition for community college students would increase enrollment, which has fallen by about 10% in the past few years, and could result in higher earnings for graduates.

But the president and congressional Democrats have backed away from Biden's campaign promise for several months, with House Democrats leaving the provision out of the Build Back Better package it passed in November and instead offering aid for community colleges and education grant programs.

As Democrats attempt to secure the support of Manchin, Biden has also said the expanded child tax credit which provided millions of working families with monthly direct payments of up to $300 per child last year will not make it into the package.

Journalist Heidi N. Moore suggested that Biden's failure to strengthen social supports for families could leave voters with the impression that the Democrat has done little to meaningfully affect their day-to-day lives.

The first lady said Monday that the White House will try to include benefits for community college students into future legislation, and Democrats are examining ways to provide tuition assistance to some students in the Build Back Better Act.

The abandonment to the free community college plan, however, is "unacceptable," according to U.S. Senate candidate Nina Turner.


"Congress needs to fight for this," she said.

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

Jill Biden says bills aren't footballs to 'pass or pivot'








First lady Jill Biden speaks at the Community College National Legislative Summit, Monday, Feb. 7, 2022, in Washington. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

DARLENE SUPERVILLE
Mon, February 7, 2022,

WASHINGTON (AP) — Jill Biden went public Monday with her frustration over a political process that she says treats legislation like a football to “pass or pivot” while real people, such as her community college students, wait assistance that would help them build better futures.

“Governing isn't a game. There are no teams to root for or against, just people, Americans from all walks of life who need help and hope,” the first lady told a meeting of advocates for community colleges in a message that also seemed directed at members of Congress.

She was talking about a proposal to make community colleges tuition free, promised during the 2020 presidential campaign but now dropped from a much larger social welfare and climate bill that was a core domestic priority for her husband, President Joe Biden.

Her pointed comments were unusual since first ladies generally try to avoid being drawn into the political fray or getting too involved in the legislative process. But the issue is deeply personal for Jill Biden, who has taught at community colleges for many years and is a longtime advocate of waiving tuition to help the students who attend these schools. She worked on the issue during the Obama administration, when her husband was vice president.

President Biden scrapped the tuition plan as he tried to win the support of key Senate Democrats who objected to the scope and cost of the overall measure, and whose votes he desperately needed given solid opposition from Republicans in a chamber split 50-50.

But the “Build Back Better” bill ended up stalled in the Senate anyway, and one of those Democrats, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, recently declared that measure “dead.”

On Monday, Jill Biden told the Association of Community College Trustees national legislative summit that the president will continue to push Congress to adopt the proposal.

“Joe doesn't quit. He doesn't give up. He is keeping his promise to rebuild our middle class and he knows that community colleges do just that," the first lady said to applause.

Last year, Jill Biden, a veteran community college English and writing professor, addressed the organization with taped remarks, bowing to the COVID-19 pandemic, and promised that her dream of waiving some tuition would become reality with her husband in the White House.

“We have to get this done. And we have to do it now. That’s why we’re going to make sure that everyone has access to free community college and training programs,” she said in 2021.

Speaking in person on Monday to a masked audience inside a hotel ballroom, she blamed failure to deliver on the “compromise” the president had to make.

The first lady, a professor at Northern Virginia Community College, talked about having to lend a book to one of her students last week because he couldn't afford to buy it before pay day, and about a student mom who eventually dropped out of class because her child got COVID-19.

Both students would benefit from tuition-free college, child care support and other provisions of the stalled legislation, she said.

“Build Back Better isn't just a piece of legislation and it's certainly not a football to pass or pivot,” Jill Biden said.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the first lady was “speaking from her heart.”

Myra Gutin, a Rider University professor and author of “The President’s Partner: The First Lady in the Twentieth Century,” said first ladies don't take on Congress or call out their failures, but that Jill Biden “must have felt that she could not remain silent” on this particular issue.

“Her dismay is genuine and she was not going to paper over the lack of action,” Gutin said in an email.

The first lady, who grew up in Pennsylvania, opened with a few words about her love for sports and Philadelphia's pro teams, before she got to her point.

“I’m a first lady for all Americans, but when it comes to teams, my heart belongs to the Philadelphia Eagles, the 76ers, the Phillies, and the Flyers,” she said. “The competition, the crowds, the rivalries, I love it all.”

“But too often, we treat what happens in our nation’s capital like a sports game, too, wondering which team will score the most points with voters,” she said. “Legislation becomes a football to keep away from the other side, and Americans get lost in the playbook.”

Jill Biden said she and the president both knew getting tuition-free college wouldn't “be easy," but she was still disappointed “because, like you, these aren't just bills or budgets to me.”

“We know what they mean for real people, for our students, and it was a real lesson in human nature that some people just don't get that,” the first lady said.

HYPERCHONDRIA OR HYSTERIA AS LIKELY

Microwaves Or Ultrasound Might Explain Open "Havana Syndrome" Cases, US Intelligence Report Says

“We will stay at it, with continued rigor, for however long it takes," said a joint intelligence agency statement about the remaining, unsolved, Havana Syndrome cases.

by Dan Vergano

BuzzFeed News Reporter

Updated on February 3, 2022, 


Miami Herald / TNS
The US embassy in Cuba

Pulsed microwaves or ultrasound beams “plausibly” might have caused so-called Havana Syndrome injuries now thought to have affected about two dozen CIA and State Department employees, according to a newly released US intelligence community expert report.

The redacted report, however, fell short of definite conclusions, suggesting that psychology may also “cause some other incidents or contribute to long-term symptoms” of the incidents.

Starting in late 2016 and into the next year, about two dozen CIA and State Department personnel in Cuba began reporting dizziness, vertigo, trouble concentrating, and related symptoms, often initiated after hearing sharp grinding noises, that came to be called “Havana Syndrome.” The symptoms spread to Canadian diplomats and then worldwide, particularly in the last year, after the US Defense Department asked its personnel to report similar cases. Some news reports late last year claimed hundreds of injuries, with some national security news reporters, citing intelligence sources, claiming that Russian spies were attacking US diplomats worldwide with clandestine pulsed microwaves.

In January, however, a US intelligence community report assembled by the CIA concluded that there was no massive worldwide campaign, and that most of the reported injuries were explainable. Only about two dozen were truly concerning and bore further investigation, perhaps being the results of attacks of some kind.

The expert panel report released Wednesday is a complement to that report, looking only at possible mechanisms for the injuries in those remaining cases. Essentially it finds that pulsed microwaves or ultrasound beams were “plausibly” causes for the injuries, meaning they were not impossible (as opposed to “likely”) explanations, and that researchers should examine them further.

"We will stay at it, with continued rigor, for however long it takes," Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines and CIA director William Burns said in a joint statement regarding the report on the “Anomalous Health Incidents,” as syndrome cases are now termed by the US government. The Biden administration had announced on Tuesday that it was appointing a central point person to create policies for addressing reports of syndrome-like injuries that are scheduled for release later this month.



Elizabeth Frantz / Reuters
CIA Director Bill Burns testifies next to Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines.

The new report does rule out radiation, poison, audible and subsonic noises, and heat as possible explanations for the injuries. In reintroducing ultrasound as an explanation for Havana Syndrome, however, the expert report complicated, rather than simplified, explanations for the cases. A National Academies of Sciences report had found that pulsed microwaves, which are capable of causing faint sounds in the ear at certain settings, were the most plausible (again, rather than likely) explanation, followed by mass psychology. Experts had largely ruled out ultrasound in 2017, but the new report suggests that concealed ultrasound sources close to victims might cause injuries.

In an email, University of Illinois biomedical engineer James Lin said the ultrasound finding left him “puzzled.”

“To have any effect, the source needs to be very strong (powerful and bulky equipment) or very close to the target or subject,” said Lin, a proponent of pulsed microwaves. “Ultrasound propagates very poorly in air. It is quickly attenuated.”

UCLA neurologist Robert Baloh says the expert study not finding a smoking gun to explain the injuries, along with the recent intelligence report dismissing most cases, points to a simpler answer in mass psychology. "I believe that they are coming around to the conclusion that there was no weapon but they are bending over backward not to offend 'victims'," he said, by email.

University of Pennsylvania bioengineer Ken Foster wasn’t as skeptical.

"I had been a skeptic, but after my recent study, I am convinced that it is possible to cause a frightening but harmless experience to someone using pulsed microwaves,” he said in an email. “The challenge is to make such attacks ‘stealthy’ (not observed), but I think that is possible also. I do not know whether such weapons exist, and the government is not telling us. But if some actor wanted to frighten the entire State Department and CIA by hitting a few individuals, they succeeded admirably.”

In ruling out audible noises for playing a role in Havana Syndrome, the expert panel echoes a similar declassified State Department report first reported last year by BuzzFeed News that found recorded Havana Syndrome “attack” noises were likely from crickets and weren’t caused by microwaves. A central contradiction in reports of Havana Syndrome incidents are that the incident recordings of audible noises don’t comport with explanations like microwaves or ultrasound that don’t cause them.

The unnamed experts who authored the new report were provided more than 1,000 classified documents, including the findings of “Top Secret” programs, and met with people with injuries to reach their findings. Such classified information was not provided to a 2019 CDC panel report, also first reported last year by BuzzFeed News. Nevertheless, the new report finds “a dearth of systematic research” on microwaves hurting people, and “information gaps” regarding ultrasound injuries, despite its access.

“Today’s findings underscore the need to continue investigating the source of these symptoms, and prioritizing access to care for those suffering from these medical conditions,” Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, said in a statement.

“I’d really like to see national security reporters start asking why the intelligence agencies are releasing these Havana Syndrome reports now,” media scholar Nolan Higdon, author of The Anatomy of Fake News: A Critical News Education, told BuzzFeed News. He called the rapid switch in recent weeks of news reports going from breathlessly reporting a Russian attack campaign on hundreds of US diplomats to instead reporting a few dozen confusing injuries disappointing.

Similar to past reports, the expert panel expressed sympathy for people with injuries, calling them real and requiring treatment, assistance mandated last year by Congress in overwhelming votes. They echoed Burns, who in a recent year-end message to CIA retirees, said, “Our officers have reported very real experiences and suffered very real symptoms — and it is profoundly wrong, and profoundly harmful, to suggest otherwise.”

Why A Treatable Cancer Disproportionately Kills Black Women

Nearly half of Georgia’s counties lack an OB-GYN, according to a Human Rights Watch report.

A CONSEQUENCE OF THE RIGHTWING ATTACK ON ABORTION SERVICES

by Kavitha Surana
BuzzFeed News Reporter

Posted on February 2, 2022

Fg Trade / Getty Images

Across the United States, Black women have a significantly higher chance than white women of dying from cervical cancer. A new report from Human Rights Watch, an advocacy organization, zooms in on Georgia to investigate some of the reasons why and finds that “neglect and exclusion” from the nation’s broken healthcare system are to blame.

If caught early, cervical cancer is highly treatable, with a 93% five-year survival rate. Still, more than 4,000 women in the US die from it each year. The mortality rate is more than twice as high for Black women as that of white women, a rate similar to women living in developing countries with poor healthcare access, according to an American Cancer Society study. The gap is similar to disparities in cancer outcomes more widely across the United States.

Gynecologists can screen for the disease with an annual exam, called a Pap test. It’s a quick, if slightly uncomfortable, procedure: The doctor inserts a small brush into the vagina to collect cells from the cervix to later analyze under a microscope.

But Black women in Georgia, particularly in rural areas, are less likely to get those screenings, or to be diagnosed, the Human Rights Watch report found. Cervical cancer diagnoses have decreased in the state in recent decades, but disparities remain. Even after diagnosis, the five-year survival rate for Black women who were diagnosed with cervical cancer in Georgia was 57% in 2018, compared to 65% for white women, according to data from the National Cancer Institute.

“This pattern of neglect and exclusion from the healthcare system should be front and center,” said Annerieke Daniel, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, which produced the report in partnership with the Southern Rural Black Women’s Initiative. “No one should be dying from this disease, and Black women should not be dying at disproportionate rates.”

The report, which partnered with community researchers to interview 148 Black women in rural southwest Georgia, found statewide challenges for women’s healthcare are partly to blame.

Nearly half of the state’s counties lack an OB-GYN, according to the report. Seven rural hospitals have closed since 2010, and 38 labor and delivery units since 1994. More than 250,000 Georgians are uninsured because they can’t find an affordable option, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Georgia is one of 12 states that haven’t expanded Medicaid, which would mean more residents with low incomes would have healthcare coverage.

One woman told the researchers: “I did not have a habit of going to the doctor because I had to pay.”

Another remembered a conversation with a nurse about follow-up testing after a routine exam showed abnormal results. “She said I would have to pay for it to get the information and get the test done over again,” the woman said. “I couldn't afford it, so I just didn't go back.”

Lack of information, stigma, discrimination, and distrust of the medical system also played a role, the report found. The human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine can substantially reduce the risk of cervical cancer — but in 2019, only about half of teenagers in Georgia were fully vaccinated for it. About a third of the women interviewed for the report had never heard of it, and some parents associated it with sexual activity, Daniel said. Many of the women also recalled feeling their healthcare concerns were dismissed by medical professionals because of their race.

The state has services meant to help uninsured Georgians with low incomes get access to cervical cancer screenings, through healthcare navigators and medical transport systems; the report recommended these resources be expanded to reach more people.

“We see this as a human rights failure,” Daniel said. “When you have Black women dying at such high rates from a disease that is highly treatable and highly preventable, it’s clear whose rights and health the government is investing in and protecting.”

 

Is crypto already too big to fail?

February 7, 2022

Diana Ejaita

By Tressie McMillan Cottom

This week, we continue our discussion about speculative financial technologies, specifically those that run on the blockchain: cryptocurrency and non-fungible tokens. Since I started writing about such technologies last month, it feels that my crypto marketing has picked up significantly.

Every app that I use for banking has invited me to invest in cryptocurrency or to attend an investment seminar on the blockchain. The question guiding the newsletter remains, “What problem does this solve?” Last week, I offered up an answer: For a small group of very wealthy people, blockchain and crypto solve the problem of where to put a lot of money. And, for some aspirational people, the culture of crypto makes them feel part of the action.

But why are politicians and other institutions so drawn to the promise of crypto?

One reader suggested that these technologies will ultimately solve the problem of the unbanked, those several million or so American households that the F.D.I.C. says do not, as of 2019, have a checking or savings account. People are untethered from banks for different reasons. Some are pushed away by retail banks’ high fees, minimum balance requirements and inflexible terms of use.

Others live in bank deserts, places where there aren’t many retail banking options. (I support postal banking for this very reason. After years of various people putting proposals before Congress, the U.S. Postal Service finally started a pilot program offering routine financial services.) If part of crypto’s pitch is that it can bring people much-needed financial services, then that would be a good reason to figure out how it does that and on what terms. That raises the question, who is in charge of figuring that out?

In last week's newsletter, I talked to Anil Dash, a tech executive who helped invent NFTs almost a decade ago and is ambivalent about how they have been used today. I asked him what regulatory or institutional body is responsible for making sure that all of these new blockchain tools do what they promise. The answer is no one.

“Part of the reason that entity does not exist is because there’s a really deliberate tactic of shifting between when the domain’s code and when the domain is policy or culture,” Dash told me. He added: “They say, ‘You can’t regulate what code we can write. That’s innovation,’ right? Then whenever it’s convenient, they say, “Well, you can’t regulate what people can sell to each other in the free market. That’s innovation. So you have this unassailable thing where it’s a dessert topping and a floor wax, and which regulatory regime prevails is whichever one is more hands-off.”

What Dash is describing is a prime breeding ground for predatory schemes. In a recent newsletter, Paul Krugman likened crypto to subprime mortgages: low-information borrowers with narrow margins for losing money taking on risky financial products that extract profit for elite asset holders at the top. One might say, the risk and reward structure is shaped like a pyramid.

Despite the clear disadvantages for small investors, the idea that blockchain is the wave of the future has taken hold. I am fascinated by that. It reminds me of American folk economics.

Folk economics refers to the very human impulse to describe complex economic processes in lay terms. The most popular example is talking about the national budget like a household budget. Politicians encourage that kind of folk knowledge every election year when they allude to the “average” American family balancing a metaphorical checkbook at the dinner table. (Someone asked me to pay using a check recently and I panicked. I have no idea where my checkbooks are. I have them somewhere safe, so safe that I have not seen them in years. I do not need to. Paper checks are strange enough to me that the idea of balancing a physical checkbook over takeout at my kitchen counter is basically science fiction. I doubt that I am the only one.)

Despite checkbooks being an outdated metaphor, you can see why we like thinking about a system as complex as the budget in simple terms. Doing so makes us feel informed and in control. Knowing just enough to use a system is more than sufficient for everyday life. But oversimplifying complex financial instruments and the obscure rules of markets makes us vulnerable. We start to believe that these things are as intuitive as our folk models, and do not need oversight or even a clear-use case.

I asked Daniel Hirschman, a sociologist at Brown, about the power of folk economics. One of the things Hirschman studies is how we make sense of statistics and how they become powerful. I do not want to overstate the popularity of blockchain and crypto and NFTs. They are still niche investment vehicles. But their centrality in media discourse is increasing rapidly.

Crypto’s future popularity rests on what social scientists call a stylized fact. A stylized fact is an observable phenomenon that can be counted but cannot be easily explained, or as Hirschman says, “empirical irregularities that need an explanation.” One stylized fact about crypto is that it has high market value. The exact value changes — crypto is volatile — but the particular number matters less than that it is a large number and is repeated ad nauseam. It gives you the sense that crypto is important without explaining why. And when people have a big number and no way of knowing what the number means, they fall back on a folk understanding of economics.

What holds the ecosystem together is a belief about tech: that its innovations are unquestionable and inevitable. Anil Dash hit on something that put that into clear focus for me. Fintech culture is very agnostic about expertise, to put it mildly. A reader emailed me after my first crypto newsletter to say that I am skeptical about it because I have a Ph.D. The implication is that formally credentialed people are suspicious of anything that might undermine their authority.

Dash has called this phenomenon the non-credential of tech culture. It stems from the internet’s early days as devoutly libertarian and anti-institutional, and thrives in online spaces like Reddit and Discord. The idea that tech cannot “trust those outsiders” poses a problem for tech’s ability to solve real problems. As Dash put it, “The challenge is that a maturing industry has to have the continuity of expertise.” I offered a counterpoint: a maturing industry could also have regulation. So far, that is a pipe dream.

Hirschman’s latest paper examines the power of folk economics using the gender wage gap as an example. He recommended two books by Finn Brunton to better understand the cultural connections between scams and fintech: “Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet,” and “Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency.”

I also found Joseph Laycock’s essay discussing whether crypto is a religion very interesting. Laycock says the question is not nearly as helpful as thinking about the characteristics of people’s irrational faith in technologies to solve all of humanity’s problems. That sounds about right.