Amendment 4
In a past life, I wrote a blog post about a thing I did on the Internet. It attracted some attention, and I ended up helping some activists and organizers with digital strategy. One of these groups was the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, or the FRRC. Their goal at the time - in 2018 - was to pass Amendment 4, restoring the voting rights to over 1.7 million Floridians.
Why didn’t those Floridians have the right to vote? They’d been previously convicted of a crime, served their time, but were now in purgatory - allegedly, they could apply to the governor directly to have their rights restored, but under former governor Rick Scott the process was nearly impossible:
Holding voting rights at bay, however, has struck many as cruel, paternalistic — and politically motivated.
Scott makes clear to those before him at quarterly clemency hearings in Tallahassee that they’re at his “mercy” and his decision is not based on any standards or rules.
During the meetings, the four board members often drill applicants with highly personal questions. One man had to discuss unproven accusations of sex with his teenage cousin. Another man was asked how many mothers gave birth to his six children. Many answer to whether they go to church regularly.
Felon disenfranchisement in Florida goes back to the founding of the state in 1845. Many of the states with such laws can trace them back to the Reconstruction era, when white supremacists passed Black Codes in an attempt to prevent newly freed slaves from gaining political power. Even today, 35 states restrict post-incarceration voting rights for their citizens.
So, Florida had a law on the books for a hundred and seventy years preventing people from voting if they were convicted of a crime, served their sentence, and completed their parole. Almost two million people in Florida couldn’t vote, many of them for their entire adult lives. Until I was asked to help the FRRC change the state constitution, I’d had no idea about it.
I cannot say enough good things about the FRRC and the people I worked with on the campaign. In the end we were successful - Amendment 4 passed with 64.5% of the vote. Coincidentally, Rick Scott was elected to the Senate in 2018, beating his opponent by less than 1% of the vote. Rick DeSantis - a Republican who’d stayed mostly mum about Amendment 4, in part because the right wing Koch Foundation was supporting it - won the governor’s race, and now was in charge of implementing the changes.
Or…not. The Florida GOP - still in power, thanks to the law their voters had overwhelmingly overturned - immediately rushed to impose restrictions on the amendment. They passed a law saying citizens must pay all court fines and fees related to their conviction before they could vote. If this sounds like a poll tax - which has been illegal in the US since 1964 - that’s because it is. It’s currently winding its way through the court - a recent victory in US District court threw out the GOP law - and DeSantis has vowed he’ll appeal it all the way. Whether the Supreme Court can find a rhetorical loophole to go against the 24th Amendment remains to be seen, but I am not optimistic.
To sum up - for the last two centuries, people in one of our most populous states have been denied the right to vote by laws written when slavery was still legal. Two years ago, the state voted to amend their constitution to give back one of the most basic rights in our democracy. The political party in charge of the state has decided it doesn’t think it can keep power under this new arrangement, and is going back to the same Jim Crow playbook to attempt to disenfranchise more than a million voters, many of them people of color.
Imagine if you lived in a place where the ruling class had such open contempt for you they’d dredge up slavery era tactics to keep you from having a say in elections. That is reality for almost 6 million Americans, right now, and an eye-popping 7.7% of all African Americans in the country.
Prison Gerrymandering
Whether or not prisoners are allowed to vote, their existence inside a prison is used to determine representation in Congress and state legislatures. The Census Bureau counts prisoners as residents of wherever their prison is located, not where they live in the outside world. NPR explains:
[…] since the first U.S. census in 1790, the federal government has included incarcerated people in the population counts of where they're imprisoned. This technical detail of a little-known policy can have an outsized impact on prison towns across the U.S. for the next decade.
Every ten years, when the census happens, prisoners are counted where they are incarcerated. In the last 40 years, as the number of prisons in the US exploded, many of them were built in small, rural towns, many of them in the South:
Prisons are built where rural disadvantage is already concentrated, and prison towns are shaped by the same classic ghettoization processes that once shaped cities: white flight, increased public housing, and de-industrialization.
[…]
The average rural southern town was 12 times more likely to receive a prison than a midwestern or northeastern town at the height of the prison building boom in the 1990s.
This presents an opportunity for Republican state legislatures to gerrymander prisons to create favorable maps - since prisoners usually can’t vote, they create districts politicians aren’t answerable to:
In many cases, rural, predominantly white towns see their population numbers boosted by population counts from prisons disproportionately made up of black and Latinx people.
In turn, states, which control how voting districts are drawn, and local governments can use those numbers to form districts filled predominantly with people who are locked behind bars and cannot vote in almost all states.
To compound the inequity, states send prisoners from cities to prisons out in the countryside, reducing urban population and starving cities of resources, while small towns get more federal and state dollars:
A recent study about Pennsylvania's state legislative districts by Villanova University associate professors highlights the impact this process can have on the political voice of incarcerated people's home communities.
It found a "substantial likelihood" that Philadelphia would gain an additional majority-minority district for Pennsylvania's state house if prisoners incarcerated in the state were counted as residents of their last known addresses.
"The incarcerated are not only missing from their communities," the study's authors, Brianna Remster and Rory Kramer, wrote, but "they are also advantaging other communities."
Given the current administration, the Census Bureau has said it will not consider changing the policy in any way for the 2020 census, locking in another decade of unfair representation and resource distribution in the country with the highest prison population in the world.
It’s not bad enough that we put millions of people into prison and take away their right to vote, we’re also using them as political pawns to funnel money away from the communities they will return home to, giving greater power to the people who support putting more of them behind bars.
Flint
Remember Flint, Michigan? The majority minority city that had to deal with GM closing plants, and then a serious health crisis in 2014 when the state government decided they should drink polluted river water to save a few bucks?
Some people in Flint still do not have access to potable water, six years later. The investigation into how it all went down is ongoing, but one thing is clear - city and state officials treated Flint inhabitants with reckless disregard. A recent VICE piece goes behind the scenes to detail how it went down. It’s a lot, so I will summarize.
Flint never really recovered from the 2008 financial crisis, and had been put under “emergency management” by the state of Michigan, which allowed the governor to appoint a city manager who had veto power over the mayor, and was able to make unilateral decisions on behalf of the city. Along with city and state officials, one of these managers determined that Flint was spending a lot of money paying the Detroit water system - DWSD - to deliver clean water to the city. They decided that cutting these costs were a good way to save money in the budget.
The political machinations behind it are somewhat convoluted, but the long story short is - the governor and his cronies wanted to hobble the DWSD in order to privatize municipal water systems, and attempted to do so by forcing Flint off of it. They snuck some language into an unrelated environmental agreement to finance the whole thing:
…an Administrative Consent Order (ACO)—that Flint entered into with the state of Michigan just one month before the water switch.
Essentially, the agreement allowed Flint, by then a nearly bankrupt city with a maxed-out debt limit, an exemption to borrow tens of millions of dollars to fund the environmental cleanup of a local lime sludge lagoon. But hidden within the agreement were provisions for something completely unrelated: Flint could join the KWA pipeline by borrowing more money. Or, as prosecutors plainly said in warrant requests, the ACO was a “sham.”
The KWA pipeline was their plan to funnel money to private companies to provide water service to Flint and some other Michigan cities. In the mean time, Flint was forced to use the Flint River as a water source, which is what set off the crisis. Money was never spent to fix the city’s water treatment plant, and the river water was not treated with the proper chemicals, so in 2014 the state forced the taps open, flooding Flint with unsafe, heavily polluted river water. Water so bad that GM stopped using it because it was corroding metal car parts.
The KWA pipeline financing debacle resulted in criminal charges. You’ll never guess what happened to those:
Three years later, Michigan's new attorney general, Dana Nessel, dropped felony charges related to the alleged KWA bond fraud against Flint emergency managers Darnell Earley and Gerald Ambrose (along with charges against five other high-profile state defendants).
Why did this happen? A person familiar with the investigation has a credible explanation:
“It would cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars,” the source told VICE, suggesting any criminal proceedings on the KWA bond deal would risk angry bondholders demanding their money back. If that occurred, ultimately, the state of Michigan, which signed off on the allegedly fraudulent ACO that led to Flint joining the KWA, would be on the hook.
Unlike the residents of Flint, who had little to no legal recourse against the state, the bondholders behind the KWA pipeline were large banks with lots of lawyers, like JPMorgan Chase.
Meanwhile, people in Flint continued to drink poison. There is overwhelming evidence, both in the VICE piece and in the last six years’ worth of reporting, that the Snyder administration, emergency managers, and Flint officials knew exactly what they were doing. There are emails. There are phone transcripts. Much of it is in the public record.
Earlier in the crisis, in response to the public outcry, Snyder sent his “fixer” Rich Baird to talk to families who made a stink and try to bribe them:
Weeks later, Baird, an imposing man with broad shoulders and white-grey hair, stood in the Murphys’ living room, bizarrely flanked by former Army National Guard colonel Scott W. Hiipakka, a state trooper, and Sheryl Thompson, an official from the state health department, according to Christina. Baird was there representing Snyder, or as he told them, his “best friend.” He told the Murphys that the Snyder administration would fully pay for a medical treatment for Adam called chelation therapy, which injects agents into the body to bind to heavy metals like lead and extract them.
State officials showing up at the houses of black Flint residents with police and military escort, offering to pay their medical bills if they stop talking publicly about their poisoned water? Normal stuff.
Another resident, Melissa Mays, was not having any of it:
Baird’s response wasn’t subtle, according to Mays. “How about I do this: If I come in and replace your interior plumbing, your fixtures, the water heater, and your service line, would that make you happy and would that make you quiet?”
She didn’t flinch: “I just looked at him and said ‘If you do that for everybody,’” she remembered. “He turned beet red.”
This is the language used by powerful men - mostly white - who believe they have nothing to fear from a poor, mostly minority population. They are merely an annoyance, and throwing them some money for a few home repairs should be enough.
As for Karen Weaver, the mayor of Flint, Snyder attempted to intimidate her into silence:
Weaver was even pressed to say the water in Flint’s schools was safe to drink, according to former city government officials familiar with the administration’s overtures to Weaver. Weaver didn’t, and soon after, the remaining free water-bottle stations Flint residents relied on were prematurely shut down.
When the stations were shuttered, Weaver attempted to reopen them by turning to the $48.8 million rainy-day fund that was allocated to Flint from the state’s 2017-2018 budget. But when Weaver looked, the money was gone. The Snyder administration had been using these funds—meant to be under Flint’s control—to pay for the water stations.
I have a hard time wrapping my head around the utter contempt for human life required to cut off clean drinking water supplies to a town you poisoned out of spite, because the mayor won’t lie for you, but there you have it.
Snyder was about to be term limited out of office at this point, so he didn’t have poll numbers to worry about. He could simply have done the right thing. Yet he did not, because he had no incentive to do the right thing. He believed he was untouchable.
As it has turned out, he was right. Because, six years later, nothing has happened to any of the people involved in this criminal conspiracy:
To date, Snyder, Baird, chief of staff Dennis Muchmore, treasurer Andy Dillon, MDEQ director Wyant, emergency managers Mike Brown and Ed Kurtz, KWA CEO Jeff Wright, and MDHHS’s Sheryl Thompson have not been charged with crimes related to the Flint water crisis. Stephen Busch, Liane Shekter-Smith, and Mike Glasgow were charged with felonies but took plea deals that led to felony charges being dismissed. Overall, 15 state and city officials were charged by the previous Flint water prosecution team led by Flood.
In June 2019, [State Attorney General] Nessel dropped charges against the eight remaining defendants, including the two highest-level Snyder officials, state health department director Nick Lyon and the state’s chief medical officer, Eden Wells.
No reasonable explanation has been given by Nessel’s office as to why charges were suddenly dropped, or why many of the conspirators were allowed to take plea deals to minor charges that let them off without punishment.
At least 115 people have died from disease related to the Flint River water. Many more have suffered serious medical problems, and things like lead poisoning can take years or decades to show effects. Our nation cared about the people of Flint briefly, but as the tragedy dragged on and the state government rushed to cover it up, people lost interest. Any news exposing the criminality in the Snyder administration has been met with a collective shrug - even from those whose job it is to prosecute these crimes.
Snyder is facing a civil lawsuit, and more of his crimes may come to light, but the statute of limitations has come and gone for most of the serious stuff, and it seems unlikely he will ever be held accountable for what he’s done. A city full of people was sacrificed as part of a political play to reward corporations and rich donors, and now a generation of Flint residents will be dealing with lead and chemical poisoning.
Lead Paint
Flint brought lead poisoning back into the news for awhile, but in reality the problem has been around for decades and the scope is stunning:
Flint is no aberration. In fact, it doesn’t even rank among the most dangerous lead hotspots in America.
In all, Reuters found nearly 3,000 areas with recently recorded lead poisoning rates at least double those in Flint during the peak of that city’s contamination crisis. And more than 1,100 of these communities had a rate of elevated blood tests at least four times higher.
In the US, communities of color are at much higher risk of lead poisoning:
The risk of lead poisoning falls disproportionately on minority children, as well, with black children nearly three times more likely than white children to have elevated blood-lead levels. One study found “extraordinarily high rates of lead toxicity” in black and Hispanic neighborhoods with “prevalence rates topping 90% of the child population.” The authors concluded, “Lead toxicity is a source of ecological inequity by race and a pathway through which racial inequality literally gets into the body.”
This is due in part to segregationist housing policies in the US:
Despite the federal mandate to affirmatively further fair housing, the majority of federally assisted housing is clustered in low-income, segregated areas at high risk of lead poisoning. Decades of government-sanctioned discriminatory practices have burdened communities of color with increased poverty, segregation, substandard housing, and environmental hazards.
The black population in America has nearly three times the poverty rate of whites, and make up a disproportionate number of recipients of housing subsidies. Environmental laws have failed to force landlords to clean up lead in housing projects. This is all working as intended - the US government has a long, dark history of forcing African Americans into poor quality housing.
Believe it or not, the harm doesn’t end there. As black families and children affected by years of living with toxic levels of lead seek compensation from the governments that failed them, predatory companies swoop in to steal their settlement money:
Traditional settlements are paid in one immediate lump sum. But these structured agreements often deliver monthly payments across decades to protect vulnerable recipients from immediately spending the money. Since 1975, insurance companies have committed an estimated $350 billion to structured settlements. This has given rise to a secondary market in which dozens of firms compete to purchase the rights to those payments for a fraction of their face value.
You may be familiar with structured settlements from television ads - J.G. Wentworth is one of the biggest companies in the space. However, what has been happening to victims of lead poisoning was something entirely different:
Rose, who court records say suffers from “irreversible brain damage,” didn’t have a lot of friends. She didn’t trust many people.
[…]
One day soon after, a notary arrived at her house and slid her a 12-page “purchase” agreement. Rose was alone. But she wasn’t worried. She said she spoke to a lawyer named Charles E. Smith on the phone about the contract.
[…]
The reality, however, was substantially different. Rose sold everything to Access Funding — 420 monthly lead checks between 2017 and 2052. They amounted to a total of nearly $574,000 and had a present value of roughly $338,000.
In return, Access Funding paid her less than $63,000.
This company targeted a brain damaged 20-year-old, isolated her from her caretakers, and stole her money. I can’t really put it any other way.
If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because it happened to Freddie Gray, who was murdered by the Baltimore police department a few years ago, leading to mass protests during which the same police department looted pharmacies. His money was stolen by the same company, and a judge signed off on it without anyone from his family present:
The court proceeding that would alter the futures of Freddie Gray and his siblings took place an hour’s drive south from their home in Baltimore, in the town of Upper Marlboro. At stake were hundreds of thousands of dollars, but none of the Grays attended the hearing.
The issue — and the company — was familiar to the presiding judge, Herman C. Dawson. Access Funding has petitioned his court more than 160 times since 2013 to purchase structured settlement payments. Dawson has approved those requests 90 percent of the time.
[…]
Gray had agreed to sell $146,000 worth of his structured settlement, valued at $94,000, to Access Funding for around $18,300. His sisters wanted almost the same exact deal, which in all would relinquish $435,000 of the Gray siblings’ settlement — valued at around $280,000 — for about $54,000, or less than 20 cents on the dollar of its present-day value.
It’s bad enough that the government has condemned many black Americans to live in toxic, unhealthy housing, but it’s also allowed vultures like Access Funding to come along and steal what pittance they receive for their troubles.
The CFPB filed suit against Access Funding in 2016. Four years later, it’s still in the court system.
The Case for Reparations
In 2014 I read an essay that opened my eyes to the systemic racism and ongoing struggle of black America. Ta-Nehisi Coates puts it much better than I ever could. If you haven’t read it yet, I cannot recommend it strongly enough. Until we understand what has come before now, we can’t move forward.
Police Reform Stuff
Philly has cut police funds in its latest budget.
The Atlanta police officer who murdered Rayshard Brooks was charged. The city police chief was fired over the incident.
A Seattle labor council expelled the police union.
More school districts around the US are cutting ties with the police.
A lawyer on Twitter is compiling incidents of police violence at protests - he’s over 550 now.
It’s Juneteenth. Hope we’re in a better place this time next year. Normal scam content to resume next week. Tips to scammerdarkly@gmail.com