I like to ask people this question–around 75% of whites in 1968 disapproved of Martin Luther King. So if you are white, I want you to look around at your 3 closest white people and ask which of the four of you would have supported King and the civil rights movement? And why do you think it would have been you? Because you probably would have hated him or at least thought he had gone way too radical and that very much includes liberals. I mean, he opposed the Vietnam War! He talked about socialism! He was supporting labor unions!!!!

The comments around the protests on campuses remind me of this because the arguments against them are incredibly facile. Regardless of the quality of the strategy or whether this is actually going to work or whatever, none of that matters much to the key point, which is that people oppose ALL forms of protest, no matter how peaceful or how not peaceful. For example, see this Gallup poll from 1961:

A question Gallup asked in 1961, about what has been remembered as one of the most iconic and effective protest movements in American history. pic.twitter.com/2Bqpvo3pLO

— Logan M. Davis (@LoganMDavis) May 2, 2024

I don’t know the racial crosstabs on this poll, but presumably they talked to at least some non-whites and presumably those numbers would have been more favorable (though certainly not universally so). The point is, we venerate John Lewis and SNCC and the sit-in and Freedom Rider heroes today. In 1961, most of us would have hated them and thought their crazy radicalism was hurting Black people. Why they might even get Barry Goldwater elected in 1964!

The post Whites Always Oppose Protest Movements, No Matter the Tactics appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

On May 3, 1932, the former president of the Iowa Farmers Union, Milo Reno, organized the Farmers Holiday Association. This was a short-lived but important expression of rural organizing in the midst of the Great Depression.

Farmers are usually left out of labor histories and there’s a good reason for this. They are a bunch of reactionary assholes, by and large. Despite being in a pretty disadvantageous place in the system of American capitalism, few identify more with ideas of individualism and producerism than the people actually tilling the land. This remains true today. We have often talked in our current politics about the so-called “Buddy Garrity Republican,” named after the car dealer from Friday Night Lights. Farmers really embrace parts of this too–they know they are getting screwed, but it is never their fault and they hate change of all kinds anyway, so believing they have built everything they have and that their government welfare is totally different than some unwed mother (PRODUCERISM BABY!!; I’ve seen this argument articulated in exactly this way in various agricultural magazines in the 70s and 80s), they see the world as filled with enemies to their way of life.

Well, it wasn’t that different a century ago either. Going back to the 1880s, the Knights of Labor tried to figure out how to make connections with farmers, but mostly didn’t. Populists in the 1890s tried to figure out to make connections with labor, but also mostly didn’t. These conversations were common enough among reformers on both sides of this divide for decades, up through 1950 or so. But while farmworker organizing became common enough after 1900, both with the IWW and CIO based actions, as well as independent union movements and sharecropper movements, organizing actual farmers was very difficult. There was some rural socialism on the Great Plains in the early years of the twentieth century, but it was of limited vision, not to mention explicitly for white people only.

Despite how we usually talk about the Great Depression as starting in 1929, for farmers, it basically was 1921 or so. The government had promoted overproduction in World War I with no thought as to what would happen when the war ended. By the time farmers had invested in new debt-funded machinery and got these crops in the ground, the war was over. Overproduction ruled the day and farmers got more and more desperate. They began to organize. People such as Henry Wallace became national voices for governmental reform for farmers and eventually, that would happen in the New Deal.

But farmers also engaged in direct action and that is what led to the Farmers Holiday Association. The FHA came out of the National Farmers Union, which was really much more about things such as tariff reform and sales cooperatives than anything like a labor union. The head of the Iowa Farmers Union, the state branch of the NFU, was a man named Milo Reno, who came out of a long-time farm reform family. An older man by 1932, he had been around during the Populists and is a key individual linking that era of reform with the New Deal era of reform.

With the NFU not really that effective, Reno decided to create a sister organization, the Farmers Holiday Association. The name came from the position that farmers should strike to reorder their businesses by raising prices. This was a more aggressive organization for sure. Thanks to Reno, Iowa was the center of the FHA’s activism, but it had significant support throughout the northern Plains and Upper Midwest. It never really extended to the South, but you had very different dynamics there, if many of the same problems. Reno was a great speaker, a man with a booming voice who exerted serious leadership qualities.

The idea behind the FHA, again, was the idea of the strike. Farmers would work together to stop selling their produce until prices rose enough to make it worth their while. They wanted their share of the profits. The question was whether a bunch of individualistic independent farmers could work together to do that. What made the idea interesting was the strategy behind it. Avoiding any kind of centrally planned leadership, members could enforce the strike on their own through radical direct action. When the FHA decided to start a strike in August 1932, it allowed individuals to do their own thing. They could blockade roads, intimidate farmers who did not participate, go after the cops if they interfered, whatever they wanted to see it through. The governors of states such as Iowa and South Dakota were not amused. Neither were truckers, who often plowed into the picket lines. The strike didn’t work and some FHA members were arrested. The FHA did attract attention from larger leftist groups. In fact, the Communist Party hoped to attract members and focused on the Nebraska chapter for this, but it never got very far, which does not surprise me in the least. I mean, the entire idea behind the organization was profit for farmers.

The reason for the FHA to exist was heavily undermined by the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which put into place much of the farm community’s demands. In this case, rather than promote a strike, the government paid farmers to destroy their crops to reduce production and competition, thus leading to the demanded higher prices. AAA was most certainly controversial. Some farmers loved it, others hated the sheer idea of it. The Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional a few years later, but the basic idea of price supports stuck around and really that ended the entire history of farmer organizing in terms of farm owners. Obviously, farm workers would have a long history of organizing that continues to the president. But the price supports did take care of a lot of their problems.

However, the FHA opposed Roosevelt’s plans as not sufficient. Reno himself wasn’t sure what to think and postponed a second attempt at a strike in 1933 to see what would happen. But his members found AAA disappointing. They seemed to think FDR would rain money down on them, and AAA was many things, but it wasn’t that. They also believed that the same people who caused their problems under Hoover were returned to power under Roosevelt. Wallace responded by basically icing them out. Reno tried to appeal directly to FDR. But what AAA ultimately did was undermine much of FHA’s support and it disappeared by 1937. Reno ended his career supporting radical alternatives to the New Deal, flirting with figures such as Father Coughlin and Huey Long.

I borrowed from Jean Choate’s Disputed Ground: Farm Groups That Opposed the New Deal to write this post.

This is the 518th post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.

The post This Day in Labor History: May 3, 1932 appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Monday is your new Saturday morning, the start of the weekend. Once your kids are at school, you have a lazy morning of self-care (clearing your inbox) followed by brunch with friends (an all-hands meeting in the conference room with stale bagels). You round out the afternoon by spending time in nature (dozing off in a desk salad).

Tuesday is Saturday afternoon. After a slight interruption to your weekend (Monday evening with your kids), you’re ready to get back to the fun. You host a boozy book club (your colleague stops by your desk to comb through the latest all-company memo for hints that layoffs are coming). Tired, you decide to take in a matinee (mandatory webinar on cybersecurity).

Wednesday is spa day (pooping in the office bathroom stall with no interruptions). You deserve it!

Thursday, you have a sunny date in the park (meeting with HR to discuss an unfortunate misunderstanding of your office’s policy against filling the bathroom with lighted candles). Against a soundtrack of soft jazz music (buzzing fluorescent lightbulb and stern reprimands), you feel your stress melt away.

Friday is the new Sunday Scaries (chilling knowledge that you will spend an uninterrupted two days and three nights with your loved ones).

Saturday is Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday crammed into twenty-four hours. Your responsibilities include wiping butts, driving inexplicably angry people to soccer games and gymnastics events that happen at the same time in different places, and repeating yourself. Your work will often crawl into bed with you after you think you’ve clocked out. You are paid in bad artwork that you are contractually obligated to display. Also, new Saturdays still include old Saturday night bar fights (between your children, who attended yet another birthday party and are drunk off apple juice boxes).

Sunday is Wednesday (except Wednesday now lasts three weeks and involves picking up vomit).

NOTE: If your children contract any kind of virus, the week will also be the week.

An Oregon City couple has been arrested on first and second degree criminal mistreatment charges related to the death of their infant child in 2023. The parents, Blair and Taylor Edwards, belong to a church called the Followers of Christ that believes in faith healing to the point of refusing to get medical treatment for most conditions. Unsurprisingly, this is very far from the first time that a child in this church has died from a treatable malady, nor the first time that adults in the church have been arrested for having denied their children medical treatment.

Baby Hayden Edwards was only two days old when his health started rapidly declining and he refused to eat. Instead of taking their child to the hospital like normal parents might have, they invited their friends and family from the church over to heal him — which the church does by praying over someone and anointing them with olive oil.

Incredibly, that did not work, his health only got worse and his lips started turning blue. By mid-afternoon he was dead. Medical examiners, upon seeing that Hayden’s skin had turned yellow, determined he was severely jaundiced. While infant jaundice can often clear up on its own, it’s obviously best to take the child to a doctor, especially if it is that severe. Certainly at the point when his lips start turning blue.

Via Oregon Live:

“When asked under what circumstances they would seek medical treatment for Hayden, [Blair and Taylor Edwards’] answers indicated that they never would and did not think they needed to here,” [Senior Deputy District Attorney Bryan] Brock wrote in records filed with the court.

Hayden was the fourth child Taylor Edwards delivered at home, records note. She is pregnant and due in June or July.

“Medical experts indicate that Hayden’s condition may have been caused by a hereditary condition and are concerned that the next child born may also have this condition, which they say is likely treatable with adequate medical care,” Brock wrote.

Yeah, it seems like it’s probably not the best idea to let these people “take care” of another newborn.

The Followers of Christ church first started in the 1890s in Oklahoma, but it didn’t really start picking up steam until the 1920s when a fella by the name of, swear to God, Walter White took over, moving to several different locations before settling in Oregon City, Oregon — though there are branches in Oklahoma and Idaho. Aside from the faith-healing thing, one of the peculiarities of the church is that they stopped accepting new members after White died in 1969, because he was the only person who could baptize anyone. Children who are born into the church are considered baptized because their parents or grandparents were baptized by White and no one is allowed to marry outside of the church. Given that it is estimated to have only about 1200 to 1500 members nationwide, jaundice may not be their only genetic issue.

Members of the church believe that if their faith healing doesn’t work and someone dies, that is God sending them a message that their faith is simply not strong enough. In No Greater Law, a 2018 A&E documentary about the Followers of Christ faction in Idaho, one of the members explained that, to them, getting a child medical treatment would be like throwing them into a fire, because of how the child will be sent to hell as a result.

Here’s my thing. If God wanted these people to faith heal themselves and their children, wouldn’t he have made them like, really good at it?

In No Greater Law, the members talk about how they do faith healing because Jesus did faith healing, because he went around healing blind people with spit (do not try at home, those of us who are not deities have a lot of germs in our mouths!), giving the lepers back their skin and what have you. Forgive my ignorance here, I’m no Bible scholar, but isn’t the whole point of those stories that when he did it … it worked?

Like, I can’t imagine that the New Testament would be a very compelling book, nevermind a Tony Award-nominated Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, if it were just full of stories of this guy walking around, trying and failing to heal people, and then telling them they better not seek medical attention.

So, clearly, it is canon in this universe that if God wants you to be able to magically heal people, you will be able to magically heal people. Would it therefore not follow that, because these people are not able to magically heal people and their kids keep dying of treatable illnesses, they should consider another route?

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At the very least, it is illegal in Oregon to just let your child die because you think you have magic healing powers — it’s still not illegal in Idaho, despite several attempts to make it so.

So, yes, just to be clear, almost all abortions are illegal in Idaho, the state is currently fighting for its right to deny them even in medical emergencies … but it’s totally fine if you want to just go ahead and let your born child die because you believe in a God that will send babies to hell if you take them to see the doctor. That, they have absolutely no problem with.

It’s unlikely that sending these parents to prison is going to have any impact on the church or lead to them taking their sick children to see the doctor, but at least it will keep them from being able to kill their next kid.

PREVIOUSLY:

A Chinook salmon cuts through the clear, cold waters of the Deschutes River of Central Oregon, his iridescent red scales glinting in the sunlight. And he’s not alone. He is just one of thousands of salmon returning to the spawning grounds where they were born.

Today, Chinook are the largest living species within Oncorhynchus, the salmon genus, reaching up to five feet in length. But seven million years ago, a now-extinct species of salmon in the Pacific Northwest, O. rastrosus, would have dwarfed their modern relatives. The fish could grow up to nearly nine feet long—and that’s not even the most intimidating thing about them.

Previous research described the fearsome fish as having two enlarged teeth, earning them the nickname “sabertooth salmon.” Now, a new paper in the journal PLOS ONE shows that these teeth were more like tusks, protruding straight out to the sides from the tip of their jaws, earning them a new moniker: the spike-toothed salmon.

“I'm a little bit over six feet tall and that salmon is broader than I can reach from head to tail,” says University of Oregon paleobiologist and coauthor Edward Davis. “It's an impressive animal. Thinking about trying to wrestle one of those on a fishing line is a difficult proposition.”

In the 1970s, researchers found the first fossil of the giant salmon species in eastern Oregon. To their dismay, the skull was crushed. The team made an educated guess, based on the anatomy of modern salmon, about how the ancient fish pieces fit together, including a “saber tooth” reconstruction for two fang-like fragments.

In 2011, Davis was approached by members of the North American Research Group (NARG), a collection of fossil hunters and amateur paleontologists. At the time, the site where the fossils had been found decades earlier was privately owned and off limits. But NARG members peeking through a fence believed that they’d spotted additional fossils at the site, and enlisted Davis to help them get a closer look. “That’s the benefit of all those volunteers and amateur paleontologists who are keeping their eyes peeled,” says Davis.

The club’s hunch was right. With the property owner’s permission, Davis and his team found additional bones in 2011 and 2014, including their holy grail.

Davis remembers the day in the lab that volunteer Pat Ward, going through the 2014 material, came running up to him, excited about what he’d just found: not one but two nearly complete skulls.

“We ran downstairs and sure enough, we had two skulls and they both had these sideways teeth,” says Davis. “Neither one of us had expected that. That was the moment when we realized that we had something special.”

The unique, tusk-like teeth protrude from the sides of the snout tip, curving slightly, like a weaponized mustache. They would have been useful for defense when making the perilous journey upstream, says Davis, but he thinks there may be more to the salmon's story.

Among several modern salmon and related species, at sexual maturity only males experience structural changes to their jaws, an adaptation used for fighting competitors and defending females during spawning. However, Davis and his team found the unique, tusk-like features on both male and female giant spike-toothed salmon.

“Whatever explanation we can come up with for the teeth has to be something that would be useful for both males and females,” says Davis.

He suspects the salmon could have used the spikes “like elbows to clear out the space around them and get to the best spots.” Modern salmon behavior includes females digging nests, or redds, by pushing their snouts into the sand—if the ancient salmon did the same thing, Davis says, “By having these spike teeth, they'd actually be able to bulldoze out a wider furrow.”

Alas, the reign of these giants wouldn’t last. While modern salmon are typically considered diet generalists, these ancient fish were specialized filter feeders. It's possible that, as oceans cooled, the spike-toothed salmon were outcompeted by other, larger filter feeders, such as baleen whales. The last giant salmon disappeared five million years ago and, even as oceans warm once more, we won’t see their like again.

“Just because it warms up a bit, I don't think we're going to see spike-toothed salmon swimming around,” says University of British Columbia zoologist Eric Taylor, who was not involved in the study but is writing a book on salmon. The evolutionary processes that led to these wondrous “tusked” giants were complex and occurred over millions of years, and are unlikely to reoccur. But, adds Taylor, “There'll be something else that none of us are going to be around to see.”

It’s been three years since Yasmeen Covington spent the night of her 29th birthday wearing a pair of handcuffs. It was her first and last brush with the criminal justice system, but she’s still paying for it. 

Shortly after her criminal case ended in 2021, Covington’s parents campaigned for her to leave the Bronx in New York and move to Charlotte, North Carolina, where they relocated years prior. Her parents wanted their daughter and grandson to get a fresh start by living with them until she was financially stable. It was tempting, but despite the accelerating cost of everyday essentials, she was able to stay afloat in New York with a job at a mental health shelter and provide healthy meals for her son with the financial assistance of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. But several months later, she decided to finally move. 

What Covington didn’t know was that moving to the Tar Heel State would become more of a financial strain than a taste of living a softer life. Since former President Bill Clinton’s welfare reform policy was enacted in August 1996, people with a federal or state felony drug conviction have been permanently banned from receiving SNAP and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) cash assistance benefits. 

The intention of the federal welfare reform plan was to reduce the number of recipients, mostly white people, and eventually eliminate the program altogether. The bill has been included in a series of other tough-on-crime laws that stemmed from the war on drugs that were enacted by Clinton and later found to have contributed to an overrepresentation of Black people in jails and prisons. 

Nearly 30 years later, the bill has become an economic hunger pain for the rising number of Black and brown women who will lose their SNAP and TANF benefits if a new felony drug conviction is added to their record. 

To prevent further harm to those affected by the criminal justice system, last year, U.S. Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey and U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen of Tennessee, both Democrats, introduced the Re-Entry Support Through Opportunities for Resources and Essentials (RESTORE) Act that will repeal the federal SNAP ban. 

It has received support from the National Library of Medicine and codifies an administrative waiver that allows incarcerated people to apply for SNAP benefits a month before their release. The RESTORE Act has been added to the Farm Bill that expires and passes every five years with new legislation. 

It’s unclear when it will be up for a vote this year. It may get reintroduced in May, a spokesperson with the Drug Policy Alliance, a nonprofit organization leading the effort to repeal the lifetime food ban, told Capital B in an email. 

And people like Covington are left in limbo. She wasn’t concerned about losing her SNAP benefits while living in New York. As of December, the Big Apple, 24 other states and Washington, D.C., declined to adopt Clinton’s policy. South Carolina remains the only state to abide by the entire federal lifetime ban. 

Now that she lives in North Carolina, there’s no guarantee that she or her son will become eligible for financial assistance, she said. Covington, 32, and her 9-year-old are among the residents living in states that have imposed their own variation of the federal policy that modified individuals’ eligibility for SNAP and TANF benefits.

In a half-dozen states, SNAP and TANF recipients are required to participate in some form of drug treatment and are subject to drug testing, regardless if the convicted individual has a substance use issue or not. In Covington’s case, she received a five-year probation sentence instead of incarceration, but she still had a felony drug conviction on her record.

Repealing the federal SNAP ban is a cost-effective resource that combats recidivism in a multibillion dollar prison industry, advocates told Capital B. Eliminating food benefit restrictions would also lessen the odds of another child entering the juvenile, foster, or criminal justice systems because they’re not hungry.

It’s not clear why more state lawmakers haven’t signed on to repeal SNAP and TANF restrictions, and federal lawmakers have expressed their concerns about the cost, Quiana Brifu, a policy associate with Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO) in Charlotte, told Capital B. 

CEO is a national organization that provides resources for formerly incarcerated and loved ones of an individual impacted by the justice system.

Restricting financial assistance to mothers like Covington, who got their first felony drug conviction after their first arrest, should be considered inhumane, insulting, and a waste of taxpayer dollars that should be allocated to community-led preventative programs, advocates said. 

“People don’t often think about how the war on drugs impacts people’s ability to eat and to provide for their families” or that a criminal conviction would block someone from getting housing or student loans, said Kassandra Frédérique, the executive director for the national nonprofit Drug Policy Alliance. 

From arrest to conviction, it may be virtually impossible for a person accused of a crime to digest the more than 40,000 forms of collateral consequences that may pop up at some point in their life if a jury renders a guilty verdict or a plea is negotiated with prosecutors.

“The criminal justice system did what it was supposed to do. The criminal justice system didn’t pick up the phone and call these other systems,” Frédérique told Capital B. “These other systems took it upon themselves to figure out how they are going to do the drug war.”

Prison pipeline

Without knowing those collateral consequences, people with a criminal record, on parole, or probation are more vulnerable to return to a jail or prison that might reconnect, rather than, detox them with the same, similar, or stronger drugs that got them arrested in the first place. 

The reality is, it costs more to incarcerate someone overnight for taking a sandwich from 7-Eleven without paying than it does to provide that same person a monthly EBT card with about $8.33 per day to feed themselves and or their family. In North Carolina, it costs $133.43 per day to incarcerate an individual in state jail and in federal prisons it costs $116.91 on average per day. 

“This is for people who’ve been incarcerated, who are leaving and now are trying to come back into society. And then you say, they can’t eat like, no, people should eat,” Frédérique said. “This is a public health issue. People should eat. Food security is important for anyone.”

This July will mark two years since the red flag on Covington’s background check would deny her, possibly for the fifth time, food stamp benefits or an umpteenth time for a better paying job. And her son remains on a waiting list for his own food stamp benefits, she said. 

Without SNAP benefits, Covington’s relocation has taken an emotional and financial toll on her, she told Capital B. 

To earn a living, Covington works almost daily double shifts at a gas station convenience store. Sometimes from sunset to sunset, Covington has a front-row seat to a large population of unhoused and justice-impacted individuals in Charlotte. 

During those lengthy work shifts, she has deep conversations with customers passing through to buy gas or a bag of chips. And sometimes she detects when someone in need walks in. Instead of following or eyeballing that person, Covington would rather they be up front about their financial woes and ask for their next meal free of charge. She doesn’t want the criminal justice system cycle to continue to target another hungry person. Covington then shares information about the Center for Employment Opportunities services that helped her. 

“I feel like you shouldn’t have to steal for food,” Covington said. “We shouldn’t have to do those kinds of things to survive.”

The post One Mistake Led to a Lifetime Ban of SNAP Benefits. This Reform Rollback Can End It. appeared first on Capital B News.