Every day when breakfast is served, Americans come face to face with the impact of immigrant workers without whom breakfast items would be too expensive for everyday consumption and/or if short on time, the nearest drive-through fast-food establishment, cars lined up for blocks, would charge an arm and a leg for a simple egg, cheese, and sausage sandwich. Without immigrant workers, costs will skyrocket beyond the reach of many Americans. And thankfully, undocumented immigrants are safer for US citizens than their own neighbors.
“A NIJ-funded study examining data from the Texas Department of Public Safety estimated the rate at which undocumented immigrants are arrested for committing crimes. The study found that undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half (1/2) the rate of native-born U.S. citizens for violent and drug crimes and a quarter (1/4th) the rate of native-born citizens for property crimes.” (Source: “Undocumented Immigrant Offending Rate Lower Than U.S.-Born Citizen Rate,” National Institute of Justice, September 12, 2024)
“Substantial research has assessed the relationship between immigration and crime. Numerous studies show that immigration is not linked to higher levels of crime, but rather the opposite.” (“Debunking the Myth of the ‘Migrant Crime Wave’,” Brennan Center for Justice, May 29, 2024)
In that regard, there’s been some chatter initiated by Texas Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales about 13,000 immigrants convicted of homicide. “A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security said the data sent to Gonzales is being misinterpreted, and goes back four decades, long before the Biden administration.” (Source: “More Than 13,000 Immigrants Convicted of Homicide Are Living Outside Immigration Detention in the U.S. ICE Says,” NBC News, Sept. 28, 2024)
Immigrant laborers get their hands dirty when nobody else will. They are absolutely essential to the food supply chain, e.g., according to the Migration Policy Institute they are 30% of crop production workers across the country. In some instances, their numbers dictate survival of a basic food industry.
Some food production enterprises will cease to function without immigrant workers, e.g., 64% if Nebraska’s meat processing workers are immigrants. No immigrants, no steaks.
“Foreign workers make up about 68% of the workforce on American hog farms. Immigration is a key part of pork production, and many producers rely on foreign labor because it’s difficult to find a local workforce.” (Source: “Immigration in the Swine Industry: Hiring Foreign -Born Labor, “Pork Information Gateway). Moreover, immigrants make up 40% of the overall meatpacking workforce. No immigrants, no pork.
California supplies 33% of America’s vegetables and 75% of America’s fruit and nuts via a workforce dominated 65% by immigrants. They are at the core of the food supply chain to America. Additionally, California is America’s 4th largest beef producer, and the state is America’s dairy leader. Immigrants do two-thirds of California’s agricultural work, supplying America’s all-important food chain. Without immigrants, breakfast costs will skyrocket beyond the reach of everyday Americans. Food inflation will eat America alive.
Iowa is one of America’s top pork and corn producers. A recent article in Bleeding Heartland, an independent website about Iowa politics, entitled “Anti-Immigration Plans Could Have Unintended Consequences for Iowa AG,” August 29, 2024: A major cattle producer in Sioux County claims: “If all of Sioux County’s immigrant labor left tomorrow, we’d have a huge problem. … We don’t have the people to replace them.” Moreover, according to the article: “It is not simply a matter of replacing immigrant labor with workers born in the United States. It is difficult finding people who want to do the backbreaking work of mucking out manure, hauling bedding for the animals, and moving thousands of pounds of feed for them every day.” No immigrants, no beef.
Bleeding Heartland’s article followed on the heels of a reversal of mean-spirited, lowbrow legislation: “In a victory for immigrant communities and families, on June 17 a federal district court in Iowa issued a preliminary injunction to block SF 2340, one of the worst, most far-reaching immigration laws ever passed in the state of Iowa.” According to Emma Winger, deputy legal director, American Immigration Council: “Sadly, we are still seeing copycat laws and proposed measures that would cause irreparable harm for immigrant families, including in Arizona, Texas, and Oklahoma. These types of laws create absolute chaos and human suffering and have no place in our legal system.” (Source: “Iowa Blocks Hateful Anti-Immigrant Law,” American Immigration Council, June 17, 2024)
And beyond the basic necessities of food supply, industry increasingly relies upon migrant workers. For example, in Ohio: “Unions, Businesses Eye Migrants to Fill Labor Gaps in Ohio,” Reuters, May 2, 2024: “Help accessing immigrant communities to find workers to hire has been among the top three requests the Columbus Chamber of Commerce has fielded from local businesses in recent years, said Kelly Fuller, the chamber’s vice president of talent and workforce development.”
In the U.S., the expansion of the labor force via immigrants has kept the economy growing and consumer spending up without driving inflation even higher. According to Brookings Institution economist Tara Watson: “Immigration is bolstering a U. S. workforce that would otherwise be set to decline as the baby boomer generation retires. And especially in some fields, we have long-run structural needs that Americans are just not going to fill,’ Watson said, pointing to a lack of home health aides and other direct care workers,” Ibid.
In Charleroi, Pennsylvania David Barbe of Fourth Street Foods claims: “We operate 26 production lines for sandwiches, dinner, and breakfast bowls.” Out of 1,000 employees, 700 are immigrants on the assembly line. “The hours are long and monotonous, and Barbe says he gets almost no local applicants.” (Source: “Charleroi, Pennsylvania, Business Owner Says Immigrant Population Works Jobs Americans Do Not Want,” CBS News, September 18, 2024)
Pennsylvania thrives on newfound immigrants: “It is hard to overstate the importance of entrepreneurship since new businesses are the main driver of job growth in the United States. Immigrants play a particularly important role in this—founding businesses at far higher rates than the U.S. population overall. Today, millions of American workers are employed at immigrant-founded and immigrant-owned companies.” Pennsylvania claims 70,200 immigrant entrepreneurs paying $13 billion in taxes with $4.4 billion paid to social security and 650,200 total immigrant workers in the labor force. (Source: Immigrants in Pennsylvania, American Immigration Council)
Immigrants may be a political football that is easy to kick around but ironically, America’s biggest risk of becoming a third world country is loss of immigrant labor, resulting in grocery store shelves become increasingly empty, restaurants using paper plates/plastic forks to replace migrant help, and local farmer’s markets experiencing vicious, sometimes deadly, street fights by local citizens over scarce precious food items.
America’s Economic Growth Depends Upon Immigrants
“Immigrant workers are responsible for 88% of labor force growth in America since 2019.” (Source: “Immigrants Will Be America’s Only Source Of Labor Force Growth,” Forbes, October 16, 2024).
Labor force growth is crucial to economic growth, raising living standards for all citizens. According to the Dallas Fed: “While technological advances and incentives for investment will contribute to productivity growth, immigration will be vital to propping up labor force growth… The United States would have experienced no labor force growth during the past five years without immigrants and their children. Between 2018 and 2024, the number of workers with U.S. parents declined by 1.3 million, while the number of immigrants and children of immigrants in the U.S. labor force grew by 5.4 million,” Ibid.
Immigrants have never been more important to America’s growth and future. Immigrant labor does the backbreaking work that regular Americans refuse, the backbone of America’s food chain and industrial assembly lines. They do hard work in a quiet reserved manner. They are irreplaceable and the single most crucial factor to America’s future economic growth, which would stagnate without their resourcefulness and dedication to hard work.
Every day when breakfast is served, Americans come face to face with the impact of immigrant workers without whom breakfast items would be too expensive for everyday consumption and/or if short on time, the nearest drive-through fast-food establishment, cars lined up for blocks, would charge an arm and a leg for a simple egg, cheese, and sausage sandwich. Without immigrant workers, costs will skyrocket beyond the reach of many Americans. And thankfully, undocumented immigrants are safer for US citizens than their own neighbors.
“A NIJ-funded study examining data from the Texas Department of Public Safety estimated the rate at which undocumented immigrants are arrested for committing crimes. The study found that undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half (1/2) the rate of native-born U.S. citizens for violent and drug crimes and a quarter (1/4th) the rate of native-born citizens for property crimes.” (Source: “Undocumented Immigrant Offending Rate Lower Than U.S.-Born Citizen Rate,” National Institute of Justice, September 12, 2024)
“Substantial research has assessed the relationship between immigration and crime. Numerous studies show that immigration is not linked to higher levels of crime, but rather the opposite.” (“Debunking the Myth of the ‘Migrant Crime Wave’,” Brennan Center for Justice, May 29, 2024)
In that regard, there’s been some chatter initiated by Texas Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales about 13,000 immigrants convicted of homicide. “A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security said the data sent to Gonzales is being misinterpreted, and goes back four decades, long before the Biden administration.” (Source: “More Than 13,000 Immigrants Convicted of Homicide Are Living Outside Immigration Detention in the U.S. ICE Says,” NBC News, Sept. 28, 2024)
Immigrant laborers get their hands dirty when nobody else will. They are absolutely essential to the food supply chain, e.g., according to the Migration Policy Institute they are 30% of crop production workers across the country. In some instances, their numbers dictate survival of a basic food industry.
Some food production enterprises will cease to function without immigrant workers, e.g., 64% if Nebraska’s meat processing workers are immigrants. No immigrants, no steaks.
“Foreign workers make up about 68% of the workforce on American hog farms. Immigration is a key part of pork production, and many producers rely on foreign labor because it’s difficult to find a local workforce.” (Source: “Immigration in the Swine Industry: Hiring Foreign -Born Labor, “Pork Information Gateway). Moreover, immigrants make up 40% of the overall meatpacking workforce. No immigrants, no pork.
California supplies 33% of America’s vegetables and 75% of America’s fruit and nuts via a workforce dominated 65% by immigrants. They are at the core of the food supply chain to America. Additionally, California is America’s 4th largest beef producer, and the state is America’s dairy leader. Immigrants do two-thirds of California’s agricultural work, supplying America’s all-important food chain. Without immigrants, breakfast costs will skyrocket beyond the reach of everyday Americans. Food inflation will eat America alive.
Iowa is one of America’s top pork and corn producers. A recent article in Bleeding Heartland, an independent website about Iowa politics, entitled “Anti-Immigration Plans Could Have Unintended Consequences for Iowa AG,” August 29, 2024: A major cattle producer in Sioux County claims: “If all of Sioux County’s immigrant labor left tomorrow, we’d have a huge problem. … We don’t have the people to replace them.” Moreover, according to the article: “It is not simply a matter of replacing immigrant labor with workers born in the United States. It is difficult finding people who want to do the backbreaking work of mucking out manure, hauling bedding for the animals, and moving thousands of pounds of feed for them every day.” No immigrants, no beef.
Bleeding Heartland’s article followed on the heels of a reversal of mean-spirited, lowbrow legislation: “In a victory for immigrant communities and families, on June 17 a federal district court in Iowa issued a preliminary injunction to block SF 2340, one of the worst, most far-reaching immigration laws ever passed in the state of Iowa.” According to Emma Winger, deputy legal director, American Immigration Council: “Sadly, we are still seeing copycat laws and proposed measures that would cause irreparable harm for immigrant families, including in Arizona, Texas, and Oklahoma. These types of laws create absolute chaos and human suffering and have no place in our legal system.” (Source: “Iowa Blocks Hateful Anti-Immigrant Law,” American Immigration Council, June 17, 2024)
And beyond the basic necessities of food supply, industry increasingly relies upon migrant workers. For example, in Ohio: “Unions, Businesses Eye Migrants to Fill Labor Gaps in Ohio,” Reuters, May 2, 2024: “Help accessing immigrant communities to find workers to hire has been among the top three requests the Columbus Chamber of Commerce has fielded from local businesses in recent years, said Kelly Fuller, the chamber’s vice president of talent and workforce development.”
In the U.S., the expansion of the labor force via immigrants has kept the economy growing and consumer spending up without driving inflation even higher. According to Brookings Institution economist Tara Watson: “Immigration is bolstering a U. S. workforce that would otherwise be set to decline as the baby boomer generation retires. And especially in some fields, we have long-run structural needs that Americans are just not going to fill,’ Watson said, pointing to a lack of home health aides and other direct care workers,” Ibid.
In Charleroi, Pennsylvania David Barbe of Fourth Street Foods claims: “We operate 26 production lines for sandwiches, dinner, and breakfast bowls.” Out of 1,000 employees, 700 are immigrants on the assembly line. “The hours are long and monotonous, and Barbe says he gets almost no local applicants.” (Source: “Charleroi, Pennsylvania, Business Owner Says Immigrant Population Works Jobs Americans Do Not Want,” CBS News, September 18, 2024)
Pennsylvania thrives on newfound immigrants: “It is hard to overstate the importance of entrepreneurship since new businesses are the main driver of job growth in the United States. Immigrants play a particularly important role in this—founding businesses at far higher rates than the U.S. population overall. Today, millions of American workers are employed at immigrant-founded and immigrant-owned companies.” Pennsylvania claims 70,200 immigrant entrepreneurs paying $13 billion in taxes with $4.4 billion paid to social security and 650,200 total immigrant workers in the labor force. (Source: Immigrants in Pennsylvania, American Immigration Council)
Immigrants may be a political football that is easy to kick around but ironically, America’s biggest risk of becoming a third world country is loss of immigrant labor, resulting in grocery store shelves become increasingly empty, restaurants using paper plates/plastic forks to replace migrant help, and local farmer’s markets experiencing vicious, sometimes deadly, street fights by local citizens over scarce precious food items.
America’s Economic Growth Depends Upon Immigrants
“Immigrant workers are responsible for 88% of labor force growth in America since 2019.” (Source: “Immigrants Will Be America’s Only Source Of Labor Force Growth,” Forbes, October 16, 2024).
Labor force growth is crucial to economic growth, raising living standards for all citizens. According to the Dallas Fed: “While technological advances and incentives for investment will contribute to productivity growth, immigration will be vital to propping up labor force growth… The United States would have experienced no labor force growth during the past five years without immigrants and their children. Between 2018 and 2024, the number of workers with U.S. parents declined by 1.3 million, while the number of immigrants and children of immigrants in the U.S. labor force grew by 5.4 million,” Ibid.
Immigrants have never been more important to America’s growth and future. Immigrant labor does the backbreaking work that regular Americans refuse, the backbone of America’s food chain and industrial assembly lines. They do hard work in a quiet reserved manner. They are irreplaceable and the single most crucial factor to America’s future economic growth, which would stagnate without their resourcefulness and dedication to hard work.
From the time the Europeans arrived on American shores, the U.S. government authorized more than 1,500 wars and attacks on Indigenous people and at the conclusion of the “Indian wars” in the late 19th century, of the estimated 10 million to 15 million native peoples, fewer than 238,000 remained. In the past I’ve written about these efforts in the Great Plains and upper Midwest. I’m now spending some time in Santa Barbara, California which has prompted my looking into that state’s role in the great American genocide. The Santa Barbara region was inhabited by Chumash people for at least 11,000 years and before the European invaders arrived the population was some 18,000. By 1900 it had declined to less than 500 and today it’s leveled off at about 5000.
A new California law, which takes effect on January 1, 2025, requires that public schools begin teaching about the state’s treatment of Indigenous peoples. The State Department of Education must consult with tribes when updating the social studies curriculum and several tribes are advocating the inclusion of material contained in UCLA professor Benjamin Madley’s book, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873. This is the first comprehensive account of the state-sanctioned murder of California’s Native People. Madley documents how state and federal governments employed their legitimizing authority for the genocide and Congress financially underwrote California’s extinction campaign.
The new legislation was set in motion five years ago when California Gov. Gavin Newsome publicly apologized for the “war of extermination” pronounced by Peter Burnett, the state’s first governor in 1851. Newsome said that at time, state law required that Indigenous peoples be removed from their land, children separated from their families, native people stripped of their language and culture and a system of indentured servitude was begun. Under Gov. Burnett, California’s Indigenous population was reduced by 80 percent.
In 1846, U.S. troops took control of California from Mexico and in 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the war with Mexico. Mexico ceded California and its other northern territories for 15 million dollars. On January 6, 1851, the new governor of California said the following about the “Indians” in his inaugural address: “That war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian is extinct. While we cannot anticipate this result with painful regret, the inevitable destruction of a race is beyond the power of wisdom of man to avert.” California Senator John B. Weller declared of the Indigene, “Humanity may forbid, but the interests of the white man demands their extinction.” This “myth of inevitable extinction” fueled the ideology that Indigenes were destined to vanish, that it was simply their fate and unstoppable.
And in case there remains any doubt that this was not official policy, we know that the men who “killed thousands of Indians from the 1840s to the 1870s were paid by the state of California and the federal government…they filed expenses and were reimbursed.” (Tom Fuller, “Hastings Law Grapples with the Founder’s Involvement with Native Massacres,” NYT, (pay wall, updated November 4, 2021). It should be noted that with the outbreak of the Civil War, California sent 15,725 volunteers to serve in the Union Army. However there so many volunteers that enough remained at home to serve as the primary agent of the killing machine. Furtherduring the Civil War the Union government’s treasury was running perilously low but Congress still allotted major funding to the California Volunteers for their Indigene-hunting operation. Madley calculates that at the end of the Civil War, only 34,000 Indians remained from from 150,000 in 1845. Limited attacks continued until 1871 when it was beginning to find any more Inidigenes left to kill. The decline was caused by killings, disease, starvation and massacres. Madley estimates that the “state spent 1.7 million — a staggering sum in its day — to murder some 16,000 people.”
My hope (perhaps a fantasy) is that Indigenous and non-Indigenous public school kids in California will be deprogrammed and learn that genocide, like slavery, was part of the inherent capitalist logic of dispossesion. Will they be exposed to the truth that there exists a glaring contemporay parallel to this history in Israel’s “plausible genocide” (ICJ) in Gaza and the future ethnic cleansing of the West Bank? Young Indigenous peoples understand that they are the descendants of genocide as the banner flown by the Oglala Lakota’s Youth Council in South Dakota reads, “From Pine Ridge to Palestine.” Will school chidren learn, as Middle East Eye‘s Jonathan Cook points out, that Israel is now finishing the job it began in 1948? At least as important, will they be encouraged to understand that, as in the 1840-1871 period in California, the U.S. government is not only backing this modern day war of extermination but its actions are wholly consonant with the objective of U.S. imperialism in its efforts to maintain America’s global empire? Will they learn that both Israel and the United States were settler-colonial state projects and not as the official narratives proclaim, “nations of immigrants.”
Three years ago, Erin Primer had an idea for a new summer program for her school district: She wanted students to learn about where their food comes from. Primer, who has worked in student nutrition within California’s public school system for 10 years, applied for grant funding from the state to kick off the curriculum, and got it. Students planted cilantro in a garden tower, met a local organic farmer who grows red lentils, and learned about corn. “Many kids didn’t know that corn grew in a really tall plant,” said Primer. “They didn’t know that it had a husk.”
The curriculum, focused on bringing the farm into the school, had an effect beyond the classroom: Primer found that, after learning about and planting ingredients that they then used to make simple meals like veggie burgers, students were excited to try new foods and flavors in the lunchroom. One crowd pleaser happened to be totally vegan: a red lentil dal served with coconut rice.
“We have had students tell us that this is the best dish they’ve ever had in school food. To me, I was floored to hear this,” said Primer, who leads student nutrition for the San Luis Coastal district on California’s central coast, meaning she develops and ultimately decides on what goes on all school food menus. “It really builds respect into our food system. So not only are they more inclined to eat it, they’re also less inclined to waste it. They’re more inclined to eat all of it.”
Primer’s summer program, which the district is now considering making a permanent part of the school calendar, was not intended to inspire students to embrace plant-based cooking. But that was one of the things that happened — and it’s happening in different forms across California.
Students participate in an annual food-testing event for the Los Angeles Unified School District, with a menu that included vegan chickpea masala. Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
A recent report shows that the number of schools in California serving vegan meals has skyrocketed over the past five years. Although experts say this growth is partly a reflection of demand from students and parents, they also credit several California state programs that are helping school districts access more local produce and prepare fresh, plant-based meals on-site.
Growing meat for human consumption takes a tremendous toll on both the climate and the environment; the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that livestock production contributes 12 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Specifically, cattle and other ruminants are a huge source of methane. Animal agriculture is also extremely resource-intensive, using up tremendous amounts of water and land. Reducing the global demand for meat and dairy, especially in high-income countries, is an effective way to lower greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate the rate of global warming.
The climate benefits of eating less meat are one reason that school districts across the country have introduced more vegetarian — and to a lesser degree, vegan — lunch options. In 2009, Baltimore City Public Schools removed meat from its school lunch menus on Mondays, part of the Meatless Mondays campaign. A decade later, New York City Public Schools, the nation’s largest school district, did the same. In recent years, vegan initiatives have built upon the success of Meatless Mondays, like Mayor Eric Adams’ “Plant-Powered Fridays” program in New York City.
But California, the state that first put vegetarianism on the map in the early 20th century, has been leading the country on plant-based school lunch. “California is always ahead of the curve, and we’ve been eating plant-based or plant-forward for many years — this is not a new concept in our state,” said Primer. A recent report from the environmental nonprofit Friends of the Earth found that among California’s 25 largest school districts, more than half — 56 percent — of middle and high school menus now have daily vegan options, a significant jump compared to 36 percent in 2019. Meanwhile, the percentage of elementary districts offering weekly vegan options increased from 16 percent to 60 percent over the last five years.
A view of the greenhouse used for a Los Angeles magnet school’s after-school program focused on climate knowledge. Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Student nutrition directors like Primer say the foundation that allows schools to experiment with new recipes is California’s universal free lunch program. She notes that, when school lunch is free, students are more likely to actually try and enjoy it: “Free food plus good food equals a participation meal increase every time.”
Nora Stewart, the author of the Friends of the Earth report, says the recent increase in vegan school lunch options has also been in response to a growing demand for less meat and dairy in cafeterias from climate-conscious students. “We’re seeing a lot of interest from students and parents to have more plant-based [meals] as a way to really help curb greenhouse gas emissions,” she said. A majority of Gen Zers — 79 percent — say they would eat meatless at least once or twice a week, according to research conducted by Aramark, a company provides food services to school districts and universities, among other clients. And the food-service company that recently introduced an all-vegetarian menu in the San Francisco Unified School District credits students with having “led the way” in asking for less meat in their cafeterias. The menu includes four vegan options: an edamame teriyaki bowl, a bean burrito bowl, a taco bowl with a pea-based meat alternative, and marinara pasta.
Stewart theorizes that school nutrition directors are also increasingly aware of other benefits to serving vegan meals. “A lot of school districts are recognizing that they can integrate more culturally diverse options with more plant-based meals,” said Stewart. In the last five years, the nonprofit found, California school districts have added 41 new vegan dishes to their menus, including chana masala bowls, vegan tamales, and falafel wraps. Dairy-free meals also benefit lactose-intolerant students, who are more likely to be students of color.
Still, vegan meals are hardly the default in California cafeterias, and in many places, they’re unheard of. Out of the 25 largest school districts in the state, only three elementary districts offer daily vegan options, the same number as did in 2019. According to Friends of the Earth, a fourth of the California school districts they reviewed offer no plant-based meal options; in another fourth, the only vegan option for students is a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “I was surprised to see that,” said Stewart.
In their climate-focused after-school program, students learn about farm-to-table cooking, composting, greenhouse sciences, and more.
Making school lunches without animal products isn’t just a question of ingredients. It’s also a question of knowledge and resources — and the California legislature has created a number of programs in recent years that aim to get those tools to schools that need them.
In 2022, the state put $600 million toward its Kitchen Infrastructure and Training Funds program, which offers funding to schools to upgrade their kitchen equipment and train staff. This kind of leveling up allows kitchen staff to better incorporate “scratch cooking” — essentially, preparing meals on-site from fresh ingredients — into their operations. (The standard in school lunch sometimes is jokingly referred to as “cooking with a box cutter,” as in heating up and serving premade meals that come delivered in a box.) Another state program, the $100 million School Food Best Practices Funds, gives schools money to purchase more locally grown food. And the Farm to School incubator grant program has awarded about $86 million since 2021 to allow schools to develop programming focused on climate-smart or organic agriculture.
Although only the School Food Best Practices program explicitly incentivizes schools to choose plant-based foods, Stewart credits all of them with helping schools increase their vegan options. Primer said the Farm to School program — which provided the funding to develop her school district’s farming curriculum in its first two years — has driven new recipe development and testing.
All three state programs are set to run out of money by the end of the 2024-2025 school year. Nick Anicich is the program manager for Farm to School, which is run out of the state Office of Farm to Fork. (“That’s a real thing that exists in California,” he likes to say.) He says when state benefits expire, it’s up to schools to see how to further advance the things they’ve learned. “We’ll see how schools continue to innovate and implement these initiatives with their other resources,” said Anicich. Stewart says California has set “a powerful example” by bettering the quality and sustainability of its school lunch, “showing what’s possible nationwide.”
One takeaway Primer has had from the program is to reframe food that’s better for the planet as an expansive experience, one with more flavor and more depth, rather than a restrictive one — one without meat. Both ideas can be true, but one seems to get more students excited.
“That has been a really important focus for us. We want [to serve] food that is just so good, everybody wants to eat it,” Primer said. “Whether or not it has meat in it is almost secondary.”
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The role of the death penalty as a toll of the racist system of criminal punishment has been long documented. In the case of Alameda County, California, the inside story of how prosecutors influenced jury selections to increase the likelihood of death penalty convictions demonstrates how the racism of capital punishment remains with us in the 21st century. For decades, prosecutors worked to limit jury participation from Black and Jewish individuals in order to produce juries that were more likely to support capital punishment. Michael Collins, Senior Director of Government Affairs at Color Of Change, joins Rattling the Bars for a revealing discussion on prosecutor misconduct, and what it tells us about the state of the criminal injustice system.
Studio / Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Mansa Musa:
Welcome to this edition of Rattling The Bars. I’m your host, Mansa Musa.
The death penalty in the United States of America. At one point in time, the Supreme Court had put it on hold because of the manner in which it was being given out. At that time, the way it was being given out is upon a person being found guilty of a capital offense, the judge made the ultimate determination whether they got the death penalty or not. Throughout the course of litigation and the evolution of the legislative process, the death penalty started taking on the shape of a jury determining whether or not a person gets the death penalty or not after they were sentenced.
What we have now, in this day and age; and when I first heard it, it startled me to even believe that this was taking place; but in California, they have, in certain parts, the death penalty being given out, but more importantly, the death penalty given out by the prosecutor and the courts through their systematic exclusion of people’s juries of their peers. The prosecutors, along with the courts, have systematically set up a template where they look at anybody that they think is going to be fair and impartial and have them removed from the jury. Subsequently, a lot of men and women are on death row in California.
Here to talk about the abuse of this system and the discovery of the process and exposing it is Michael Collins from Color of Change.
Welcome, Mike.
Michael Collins:
[inaudible 00:01:54] to be here. Thank you for having me.
Mansa Musa:
Hey, first, tell us a little bit about yourself, then a little bit about your organization before we unpack the issue.
Michael Collins:
I’m originally from Scotland, as you can probably tell.
Mansa Musa:
Mm-hmm.
Michael Collins:
In the US since 2010, so like 15 years or so. Was in Baltimore for 10, 12 years off and on, and then I’m now in Atlanta.
Color of Change, where I work, is one of the largest racial justice organizations in the country. I oversee a team that works on state and local policy issues. We do a lot of work on prosecutor accountability and criminal justice reform, which is how we became involved in this death penalty scandal.
Mansa Musa:
All right.
And right there, because when I was at the conference in Maryland, [inaudible 00:02:50] Maryland, one of the panelists was one of your colleagues, and the topic they was talking about was prosecutorial misconduct. And in her presentation she talked about, and you can correct me as I go along … And I think it’s Alameda County in California?
Michael Collins:
Yep. That’s where Oakland is. Yeah.
Mansa Musa:
Right. In Oakland, they had … Since 2001, the prosecutors always had set up a system where they systematically excluded minorities, poor people; anyone that they thought would be objective in evaluating the case, they had them excluded, therefore jury nullification, and stacking the jury that resulted in numerous people getting the death penalty.
Talk about this case and how it came about.
Michael Collins:
Yeah, it really was shocking when we first heard about it. You know, we had been doing work on prosecutor accountability in Oakland in Alameda County, and there was a prosecutor elected, a Black woman, called Pamela Price, who was elected on a platform of trying to reform the justice system and use prosecutorial discretion to kind of right the wrongs of racial injustice and do more progressive policies within the office. And she discovered, or one of her staff discovered, that over a period of three or four decades, prosecutors in the office had been systematically excluding Black and Jewish people from death penalty juries.
Now, in other words, how this happened was, when you go into a trial, there’s a process of jury selection, and prosecutors and defense lawyers can strike certain people from juries. Maybe people have seen some of this on TV.
Mansa Musa:
Mm-hmm.
Michael Collins:
You’re not allowed to … Constitutionally, you are not allowed to strike people for race reasons, for religious reasons. But there was a sense from these prosecutors, who were very tough on crime prosecutors, who wanted to … They saw the death penalty as a trophy almost to be achieved, and they wanted to win at all costs. And so they believed that Black people and Jewish people would be less sympathetic to the death penalty and more likely perhaps to find an individual not guilty; more squeamish, if you like, about finding someone guilty who would then get the death penalty.
Mansa Musa:
Right.
Michael Collins:
And so what Pamela Price, this district attorney, discovered was a series of notes and papers that documented the ways in which individual prosecutors were excluding people from juries in this way and really giving people an unfair trial.
And California has, for a number of years now, had a moratorium on the death penalty. They’ve essentially hit the pause button on the death penalty. But for a number of years it was really a state that carried out the death penalty [inaudible 00:06:28].
Mansa Musa:
Yeah, you’re right.
Michael Collins:
And also, one of the more startling things about this is Pamela Price, she came in, she discovered these notes. I think her reaction was, “This is crazy. How does this happen?” And it actually turns out that somebody sort of raised the alarm bell about this as far back as 2004; a prosecutor in the Oakland office who came out and he was like, “Listen, I was leading the trainings on this. I was somebody who was part of making these policies.” And the admission went before judges, it went before courts of appeals, and they threw it out, they didn’t believe this guy. And they kind of hounded this guy, the death penalty prosecutor, who essentially had a change of heart, and they hounded him out of town. And he now lives in Montana and practices law.
And I think he probably feels a sense of vindication about this, but it’s very troubling for us, the cover-up that’s gone on and the number of people that are implicated. So far, we know of at least 35 cases of individuals, but the DA is investigating this; it’s probably going to be more than 35 cases. Right?
Mansa Musa:
Right.
Michael Collins:
It probably extends beyond the death penalty to be honest. It probably extends to other, I would say, serious crime cases where, as I say, prosecutors wanted to win at all costs and used any tactic to get a guilty verdict, including essentially tampering with the jury.
And we are in a position now where I think what we want is some level of accountability. We want these individuals who have been sentenced to be exonerated. They were given an unfair trial. That’s abundantly clear. The judges and the prosecutors who were involved in this scandal, who stole lives and who essentially put people on a path to the death penalty, what is the accountability for them? And so that’s something that Color of Change is really pushing.
Mansa Musa:
All right, so talk about the … Because now you’re saying over three decades. First, how long has the moratorium been on?
Michael Collins:
Since the current governor took office. So I think it’s four or five years.
Mansa Musa:
Okay, so four or five years. So prior to that, they was executing people.
Michael Collins:
Yes.
Mansa Musa:
All right, so how many people, if y’all have this information, how many people have been executed in that period [inaudible 00:09:30] period?
Michael Collins:
We don’t have the numbers on that. I think what we are looking at just now is 35 cases where they’ve identified that are people who are now serving life sentences as a result of the moratorium. Because when the governor said, “We’re not doing the death penalty anymore” and hit the pause button on the death penalty … And again, I’ll stress that it is a pause button, right?
Mansa Musa:
Yeah, right, right.
Michael Collins:
A new governor, a new person could take office. It’s not like it’s been eliminated.
But when we kind of hit the pause button on the death penalty, there were a number of people who had their death penalty convictions converted into life sentences. And that was how part of this process was uncovered, because Pamela Price, this district attorney, her office was working on what kind of sentence that people … They were working with a judge to try and figure out some sort of solution to these cases where people were having their cases converted to another sentence, like perhaps a life sentence, life without parole, something like that. And in the process of working with a federal judge, that’s when they discovered these notes and files and [inaudible 00:10:49].
Mansa Musa:
Let me ask you this here.
Michael Collins:
Yeah.
Mansa Musa:
Okay, so I know in the state of Maryland where I served my time at, and I’m in the District of Columbia now, the sentencing mechanism, as I opened up, was a case came out, Furman Act versus United States. That’s the case that … Furman versus United States. That’s the case that they used to change the way the death penalty was being given out back in the seventies.
Because during that time, Andre Davis had just got arrested, so there was a campaign out in California to abolish the death penalty. But what wound up happening is they had a series of case litigation saying they violated the eighth amendment. So what ultimately happened was that the Supreme Court ruled that the way the death penalty was being given out, which was the judge was the sole person that gave it out, they changed it to now they allowed for after the person was found guilty, then the jury would determine whether or not they got the death penalty, that was based on the person that’s being looked at for the death penalty, or have the opportunity to allocute why it shouldn’t be given.
But how was the system set up in California? Is the person found guilty and then given the death penalty? Or is the person found guilty and then they have a sentencing phase? How is the system in California?
Michael Collins:
Yeah, I think a person’s found guilty and then there’s a sentencing phase. And there were a lot of articles about this and about the different lawyers in California.
I mean, I think there’s obviously a movement to end the death penalty, and it’s gathered a lot of momentum in the last five or 10 years. But I think if you go back to the eighties and the nineties especially, this era, whether you were in Maryland or whether you were in California, whether in Kentucky, just across the country, this very tough on crime era and harsh sentences, I think that the death penalty for prosecutors, or what we’ve been told and what we’ve read, the death penalty cases were almost like a prize for the prosecutors [inaudible 00:13:06] do the cases. It was the most complex cases, it had the most prestige attached to it, and they were really valued on their ability to win these cases. And so they would send their best prosecutors to do these cases. They would ask for the death penalty frequently.
And that’s why we have a situation where … At the very least, we know in a place like Oakland, which is not a huge place, we have 35 cases right now that they’re looking at; one of the cases has already been overturned, the conviction has been quashed of an individual. We expect that to happen in a lot of these cases as they examine the evidence, how much the death penalty was … The jury selection was a key factor in the conviction.
But yeah, I mean, it certainly was the case that the death penalty was used very frequently in California.
Mansa Musa:
Okay. So in terms of … And the reason why I asked that question, I’m trying, for the purpose of educating our audience, to see at what juncture was the exclusion taking place? Or was it across the board, because [inaudible 00:14:21]-
Michael Collins:
Yeah. So my understanding is the exclusion took place as they were selecting the jury. Right? You start off with a pool … Maybe some of your audience have been selected for jury duty, when you go in and you’re sitting in a room and there’s maybe a hundred people, and then eventually they whittle it down to 12 people and some alternates. And in that process, as a prosecutor and as a defense lawyer, you’re striking people from the jury and saying, “No, I don’t want this person.”
The reasons for doing that are supposed to be sort of ethical and constitutional, like, “What do you think of the … ” You’ll be asked, “What do you think of the police? What do you think of law enforcement? Do you trust the judicial process?” They’re trying to figure out, “Are you going to be able to properly serve on this jury? Are you tainted in some way?”
But the notes were really about a feeling that Black people were not sympathetic to the death penalty [inaudible 00:15:30] not convict; or Jewish people, because of their beliefs, because of their religion, were also not sympathetic to the death penalty. And so the prosecutors were trained and instructed to make sure, if they found out a person was … If they had a Jewish last name or something like that, or if a person was Black, ask some questions, figure it out, but essentially get them off the jury.
And there was even a case … I mentioned before, we’re talking a lot about prosecutors, judges were involved in this as well.
Mansa Musa:
Right, right.
Michael Collins:
There was a case where a judge pulled the prosecutor after jury selection into his chambers and said, “You have a Jewish person on the jury. What are you doing? Get that person off the jury.”
Mansa Musa:
Oh my Goodness.
Michael Collins:
And so the sort of depths of the scandal are beyond kind of prosecutors. It’s a real institutional crisis.
And that’s why we want the governor to get involved, Governor Newsom to get involved and provide resources to investigate this. We want the Attorney General to get involved and investigate this. Because this is a very clear and obvious scandal.
And it’s not enough to, in our opinion, re-sentence these individuals, exonerate them. Other people did some very, very shady things and very unethical things and illegal things and ruined people’s lives. And as far as they were concerned, these people were going to be killed. And so we want to make sure that there’s accountability for that. They treated this like it was a sport, like it was a competition, and people’s lives have been ruined as a result. And we want to make sure that people are held accountable for what they did.
Mansa Musa:
Talk about the … Okay, so talk about this prosecutor, the one that came in with this reform. Was this something she campaigned on and then carried it out?
Michael Collins:
No. So-
Mansa Musa:
What’s her background? What’s your information on her?
Michael Collins:
Yeah, it’s a good question.
So Color of Change has worked a lot on trying to reshape the way that prosecutors operate. I mean, historically, prosecutors, they are the most powerful player in the system. They will decide how much bail you get, how long you’re going to be on probation. Everybody likes to imagine trials like judge, jury and [inaudible 00:18:00]. Most cases are a guilty plea that are executed by the prosecutor themselves. So they have tremendous power. And very often, as we’ve seen with this scandal, prosecutors are just old school tough on crime; “I’m going to get the heaviest sentence and put this guy away for as long as possible.” That was their vision of justice.
And Color of Change, along with a number of other organizations, wanted to elect prosecutors that were more justice oriented, that were more reform minded, that were people who had a different view of the justice system and wanted to use some of that tremendous power within the prosecutor’s office to do good, to do justice, to reform them.
And so roundabouts of 2016, 2017, you saw a lot of prosecutors get elected that were more interested in things like police accountability; Marilyn Mosby in Baltimore, Kim Fox in Chicago. There was also Larry Krasner in Philadelphia.
Mansa Musa:
Philadelphia. Right.
Michael Collins:
And they came in and they did things like exonerations. They would investigate previous cases where the office itself had convicted somebody and they would find wrongdoing, and then they would overturn that verdict and the person would go free. They did things like non-prosecution of low level offenses or diversion, stuff like that.
Anyway, Pamela Price came in as the Oakland DA, a historically Black jurisdiction. She herself had a civil rights background, was not a prosecutor, and took office to really try to reshape the office after decades of having a tough on crime prosecutor, mostly white led office that [inaudible 00:20:07] locking up Black people and throwing away the key. And she came in with a lot more of a nuanced approach.
And I think … She didn’t campaign necessarily on this scandal, but I think it’s true to say that a lot of other prosecutors, the traditional tough on crime prosecutors, would’ve discovered these files and been like, “Just put that back. Forget it.”
Mansa Musa:
Right, right.
Michael Collins:
Because you’re opening a hornet’s nest here, because if you think about … There’s victims involved, there’s family members, there’s cases; some of these cases are sort of 20, 30 years old. It’s not easy what the office is going to have to go through to reinvestigate these things.
Mansa Musa:
Mm-hmm.
Michael Collins:
But I think this crop of prosecutors that has a different vision of justice and what justice is, and they do want to hold people accountable for wrongdoing, whether it is somebody who commits a homicide or a prosecutor who commits misconduct or a police killing, they apply that kind of one standard of justice.
And so she was very open and sort of found these files and then approached a federal judge and said to the judge, “Look, here’s all this evidence that there was this of systemic racism, anti-Semitism that resulted in people getting the death penalty.” And the federal judge was the one who said, “Okay, you need to review all these cases. You need to move forward with a full [inaudible 00:21:42].” So that’s what’s happening right now.
So that’s kind of Pamela Price’s story. Incidentally, she’s actually being recalled in California.
Mansa Musa:
Oh yeah, yeah. Larry Krasner. He was like … In Philadelphia, it was the same thing we have with them.
Michael Collins:
Yeah, it’s the same thing. There was a big backlash [inaudible 00:21:54]-
Mansa Musa:
Kim Fields. Yeah, yeah. Same thing we have with them.
Michael Collins:
… Prosecutors in this sort of … You know.
Mansa Musa:
Yeah, yeah.
Michael Collins:
And it’s hard because if she is recalled in November, I don’t really know what’s going to happen to these cases.
Mansa Musa:
Oh, I know. You know what’s going to happen. They’re going to go to the defendants and they’re going to sweep it up under the rug.
Michael Collins:
Yeah. Well, that-
Mansa Musa:
But talk about the community, because that’s what that lead me right into this because of what you say about her and the prospect that she might be recalled. Talk about your organization’s work in educating and mobilizing the community, because ultimately, if the community is engaged in the process because it’s their family members that’s being … Oakland is the birth for the Black Panther party. Oakland has a rich history of civil disobedience, police brutality. The list goes on and on. If the community … Where are y’all at in terms of organizing or mobilizing or having some kind of coalition around this-
Michael Collins:
Yeah, we have a coalition on prosecutor accountability where we try and … You know, we are not sort of … Prosecutors are part of a very broken system, right? We don’t want to be cheerleaders for these prosecutors. We talk more about accountability, so prosecutor accountability.
Mansa Musa:
Right.
Michael Collins:
So we have a coalition that we’re members of with Ella Baker Center and ACLU and a number of other local groups, where we meet regularly with the DA, but we try and push her to embrace more progressive policies. We try and push her to move more quickly on some death penalty cases. But at the same time, if she’s doing the right thing like she’s doing on these death penalty cases, we’re certainly going to defend her and go out there and support what she’s doing.
Mansa Musa:
Right, right, right, right. Because … Yeah. Right.
Michael Collins:
So we do community events. I’m actually in New Orleans just now where we’re holding an event with around about a hundred folks from across the country from different groups to talk about, how do you … Including people from Oakland, to talk about, how can you push your prosecutor and what should you do about it?
But as you know, it’s a very tough time for criminal justice reform, right?
Mansa Musa:
[inaudible 00:24:02] That’s right. That’s right.
Michael Collins:
[inaudible 00:24:02] public backlash, where coming out of the killing of George Floyd, there was actually a lot of mobilization of people on the streets calling for reform. And very quickly that’s disappeared and we’ve been attacked relentlessly. Anybody who engages in reform, police accountability, the establishment wants rid of them, the conservatives.
And to be honest, especially in a place like California, what we see is a lot of centrist Democrats running scared-
Mansa Musa:
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Michael Collins:
… Using the same talking points as Donald Trump on crime. And that’s just very unfortunate.
So it is an uphill struggle because there’s so much misinformation out there about crime and about prosecutors and about progressive policies. But we’re trying, we’re trying to educate people. And when you see something like this happen, we try and tell people, “Look, other prosecutors would look the other way.”
And that certainly is what happened. As I mentioned before, this scandal goes back decades [inaudible 00:25:11].
Mansa Musa:
Yeah, that’s crazy.
Michael Collins:
And this woman is in office and she has had [inaudible 00:25:13].
Mansa Musa:
But the thing about the thing that … To highlight your point about reform and how we had the upper hand in terms of George Floyd, but George Jackson said that, and he was the best [inaudible 00:25:30] person, he would describe it as reform; all the call for police accountability and divest, all those, the fascists and capitalists, they took them conversations and they twist it, and they twist it to the form like Cop City where we saying like, “Well, we’re doing this to create the reform that you’re talking about, so we want better educating, better training. But you’re trained to be paramilitary.”
And the same thing with what’s going on right now in terms of any type of social justice movement around prosecuting misconduct and what they call progressive prosecutors. I interned with a organization that that’s what they did. They got prosecutors, they educated them, got them involved and become progressive prosecutors. But all the progressive prosecutors are just doing what they was mandated to do, to find the truth for justice, search for the truth and justice, all them are being recalled, targeted, and organizations like yourself.
Talk about where y’all at now in terms of y’all next strategy around this issue.
Michael Collins:
So we are having conversations with the Attorney General’s office because the Attorney General plays this role where they themselves can identify that misconduct has happened, the unconstitutional jury instructions, and they can make a ruling. And they have more resources and more [inaudible 00:27:04] than the local DA.
So we met two weeks ago, I think, with the Attorney General’s office to try and push them to get more involved. We’re pushing the governor to dedicate more resources and get more involved in this, you know, somebody who himself opposes the death penalty. And we’re trying to keep the drum beat going in terms of [inaudible 00:27:31] attention. Good organizations like you guys; really appreciate you reaching out to us on this because it is so important that more people know about this.
I’m always surprised that it isn’t a bigger story. When I found out about this, I was like, “Oh, this is going to be front page.”
Mansa Musa:
Right, right, right. It should be. Yeah. Yeah.
Michael Collins:
But I guess there’s so much going on just now, I don’t know, you never can tell what’s going to [inaudible 00:27:55].
Mansa Musa:
But in terms of, how can our viewers and listeners get in touch with you and how do they … Tell them how, if they want to support y’all efforts, what they can do to [inaudible 00:28:07].
Michael Collins:
Yeah, so Color of Change has a website called Winning Justice, which is our prosecutor accountability work. And if you go on there, you’ll see a number of actions that people can take around this death penalty scandal, even with their own local prosecutors, trying to get involved, set up coalitions, actions that can be taken where you can push your own prosecutor, whether they’re progressive or not, to do more justice and engaging [inaudible 00:28:34].
Mansa Musa:
Right.
Michael Collins:
So yeah, it’s Winning Justice is our website. And if you search for it, you’ll find it and you’ll see a ton of actions and just our positions on a bunch of different issues and what we try and do with prosecutors to get them to engage more in reform.
Mansa Musa:
Well, thank you, Mike.
There you have it. The real news rattling the bar. It might be strange, it really might be a stretch of your imagination to believe that elected officials would actually say that if you are Black and you are Jewish, that you don’t have a right to serve on the jury because you might be sympathetic to the defendant, be it the death penalty, be it the defendant’s economic and social conditions.
But because they think that you might be sympathetic to that, that is saying like, “Well, you might just be objective to see that it’s a set of circumstances that contributed to the outcome of the charge. But no, as opposed to do that and search for the truth, what I do as a prosecutor, I put a playbook together and say, ‘These people, under all circumstances, cannot serve on the jury’, and do it for over three decades, not knowing how many people has been executed as a result of this malicious behavior.”
Yet ain’t nobody being charged, ain’t nobody being indicted, ain’t nobody being fired. They’re being awarded a medal of honor for this dishonorable act.
We ask that you look into this matter and make a determination. Do you want your tax dollars to support this type of behavior? We ask that you look into this matter and check out what the Color of Change has to offer in terms of their advocacy and see if it’s something that you might want to get involved with.
Health experts have long warned that pollutants like hexavalent chromium, PFAS and arsenic in drinking water are harmful to human health, even at low levels. While efforts to impose stricter drinking water contaminant limits in California, however, are repeatedly stymied by vested interests like polluters and utility groups, it’s the state’s low-income communities and people of color who bear the…
A coalition of educators and concerned parents from public schools in Oakland has publicly condemned district officials for failing to address a severe lead contamination issue affecting multiple schools. The group, led by Frick United Academy of Language teachers Stuart Loebl and Ella Every-Wortman, along with school counselor Catherine Cotter and other advocates, has expressed frustration over…
From mid-August through mid-November, the grape harvest in California’s North Bay wine country coincides with the state’s wildfire season. Every night at midnight during those 12 weeks, workers in bandanas and face masks walk quickly into the vineyards. For the next eight or 10 hours, as the darkness slowly becomes dawn, they practically run down the rows. Their curved knives cut grape bunches…
Last week, the research and advocacy nonprofit Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a comprehensive report that examines the structural origins, punitive state responses and associated social injustices that have catalyzed the catastrophic homelessness crisis in Los Angeles, California. While the report focuses on Los Angeles County, where the crisis is particularly stark, the same patterns are…
A fire broke out Monday at a sculpture park in California’s Mojave desert that’s run by Chinese-American dissident artist Chen Weiming, destroying studios, documents and residential structures – the second time in three years that a fire has engulfed the park.
The Liberty Sculpture Park, which opened in 2017, displays a host of outdoor pieces of art that are generally critical of the Chinese government, including a life-size sculpture of the “tank man” facing off against a tank, commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
Chen said he raced to the park on Monday night after receiving a call from volunteers and arrived to find thick clouds of smoke and fire. The local fire department dispatched as many as eight fire trucks to extinguish the blaze.
The county sheriff and fire department told RFA they are investigating the fire. Authorities have yet to comment on the cause of the blaze.
Chinese-American sculptor Chen Weiming (first from L), founder of the Liberty Sculpture Park, and volunteers at the scene of the fire in Yermo, California, Aug. 19, 2024. (Chen Weiming)
Chen and other park volunteers say they have reason to believe it was a case of arson perpetrated by agents of China’s Communist Party.
The first fire, which occurred in July that year, destroyed a sculpture critical of China’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, titled “CCP Virus Statue,” and the U.S. Justice Department later accused three men with ties to Beijing of starting it.
Yan Na, one of the artists and volunteers at the park, told RFA she believes that agents of the Chinese government are responsible for the fire.
“It was very targeted this time, burning documentation, computers, and photography equipment,” said the former art teacher from southern China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. “The fire involved the kind of black smoke that is produced by using gasoline … and based on this assumption, I think it was man-made.”
Yan said that the sculpture park was likely targeted because it uses art to highlight rights abuses by China’s government.
“They may [want to] achieve a kind of deterrence because … they burned our work area, so if someone was inside, their life would have been at risk,” she said.
A spokesman from the Chinese Embassy said he wasn’t aware of the case and had no comment.
‘Afraid of the truth’
Chen agreed that Beijing was likely to blame, noting the arrests pertaining to the earlier fire and that the park has been subjected to several acts of vandalism.
“What the Communist Party is afraid of is the truth, because the sculpture park uses artistic expression to inform the general public in the United States about the party’s evils,” he said. “Because of our perseverance and the support of our volunteers, we are becoming better known … so they carry out all kinds of despicable actions.”
The aftermath of a fire that destroyed ‘CCP Virus Statue,’ a sculpture critical of China’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, at the Liberty Sculpture Park in Yermo, California, on July 23, 2021. (Chen Weiming)
Chen said that he knows his work is having the desired effect because of the frequent attacks, and said he hopes incidents like Monday’s fire cause U.S. authorities to pay more attention to cases of Chinese state-sponsored espionage.
Chen launched the park in 2017 along Interstate 15 in Yermo, California, located 230 km (145 miles) southwest of Las Vegas, Nevada. It also includes a huge sculpture of “64” to remember victims of the June 4, 1989, massacre in Tiananmen – a number that is still censored by China.
Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Wu Yitong.
After personally participating in the forced displacement of homeless people in a Los Angeles encampment, Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday threatened to withhold funding from counties that don’t sufficiently crack down on the unhoused. Buoyed by the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court’s recent City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson ruling — which was welcomed by Newsom and other…
Janine Jackson interviewed Food Not Bombs’ Keith McHenry about criminalizing homelessness for the August 2, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: With wages, including the minimum wage, largely static, prices rising out of the reach of many who call themselves middle class, and rents outpacing wages in 44 of the country’s 50 biggest cities, you could be unsurprised that homelessness is at record rates. The latest federal count found 650,000 unhoused people on a single night, nearly half of them sleeping outside. The response of several localities is to criminalize the act of sleeping outside or, in some places, of having a shopping cart.
States are using their budgetary power to punish communities that don’t push people off the street, including places that have more unhoused people than shelter beds, and to arrest people who don’t have a safe space to go to. As of October, in Florida, any city that doesn’t enforce their ban on camping can be sued, including by individual residents or businesses. “We’re going to have clean sidewalks,” said Gov. Ron DeSantis, signing the law in March.
Other places have introduced fines, so that a person who asks for a quarter can get a fine of hundreds of dollars. This is being called a “crackdown on homelessness,” as though that were an isolated abstraction, and not a broad societal failure.
Keith McHenry is an activist, author and artist, and the co-founder of Food Not Bombs. He joins us now from Santa Cruz, California. Welcome to CounterSpin, Keith McHenry.
Keith McHenry: Thank you so much for having me. This is great.
JJ: Let’s start with California, and Governor Newsom’s directive to dismantle encampments throughout the state, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Grants Pass v. Johnson ruling that gave governments more authority to do that. Newsom says he’s directing state agencies to “move urgently to address dangerous encampments while supporting and assisting the individuals living in them.” Is that a thing that can happen?
KM: Even before Newsom’s executive order, he was giving out money to cities to clear homeless encampments. It’s called the Homeless Encampment Resolution Grants. And in Santa Cruz, $4 million was given to clear the camps around the homeless shelter. And, in fact, the management of the homeless shelter was all excited that they got the money, and that they could get rid of the homeless that were camped around them and in the neighborhood where the shelter is.
And this campaign, I think, is getting more and more aggressive, not only because of the removal of the protections from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the Grants Pass v. Johnson case that went to the Supreme Court, but because it’s being driven, in part, by this organization called the Cicero Institute, which was started by Joe Lonsdale in 2016, and he is connected directly to the Central Intelligence Agency. He received funding, along with Peter Thiel, who is most famous right now for being the backer of JD Vance as the running mate with Trump, and by Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir.
So Palantir is one of the largest surveillance organizations in the United States, the private company that was created after protest of Total Information Awareness, which was a government plan after the 9/11 bombing. And they are involved in a matrix of things surrounding homelessness, including creating AI to find homeless camps.
So there’s already, since Newsom’s executive order, you can see police and people just throwing away homeless people’s belongings in these sweeps, mentioning both the Supreme Court ruling and Newsom’s executive order, basically stating that they’re going to get rid of the homeless from California.
But Joe Lonsdale’s Cicero Institute has been providing model legislation to states across the country. The one that you just referred to, with DeSantis, was one of their victories. They also got a law passed in Kentucky where you can actually use the Stand Your Ground law to shoot homeless people that are not cooperating with your eviction of them from private or public land.
So this trend is frightening, and we’re already seeing it in Santa Cruz, and this is in San Francisco, it’s across the country, and the problem is, there’s no place for anyone to go. And in Newsom’s executive order, he claims that you’re supposed to store things for 60 days; this virtually never happens with the sweeping of the camp. The camps that were swept here in Santa Cruz in the last couple of weeks, people just didn’t get their belongings back, and we had to give them pup tents and sleeping bags and blankets, just to replace the equipment that was taken by the police and public works during these really vicious sweeps.
JJ: I hear that. And Miami Beach, I understand, is one of a number of places that allow arrests if the individual declines shelter placement. And I think that kind of line makes sense for a lot of people, for whom this is just a story in the paper—the idea that, well, they were offered shelter, and maybe even offered some kind of mental health care, or some substance abuse care. And aren’t those the personal problems that are driving them to the street? What’s wrong with that solution of, “Well, we’re offering them stuff”?
KM: The reality is there is no there that they’re offering. They’re just telling the public that there is some kind of shelter space. First of all, the shelters are already full, everywhere in the country, so you have to kick a homeless person out of a shelter, and that’s what they do here in Santa Cruz, to make place for a new homeless person. So when they cleared Coral Street in front of the homeless shelter, they evicted 10, 15 people out of another shelter, and then put the 10 or 15 people into that shelter, and then it’s a net gain of zero sheltered people.
But the other thing is, a lot of people do not want to go to shelters because, for instance, the shelter here is referred to as the “concentration camp,” and that’s because you can’t have your husband or wife with you, you can’t have your pets with you….
There’s one shelter that’s being proposed in San Diego where there’s 715 people in one room on bunk beds, and you get a little plastic box to put all your belongings in. And then you have to live in—just like the shelters here—very controlled, like a minimum security jail.
In our town, you’re not allowed to walk out of the shelter into the city. You have to get a van, because they don’t want homeless people walking by housed people’s houses. And therefore you’re limited by the staff as to when you can come and go.
I am very concerned with the increase in homelessness. Right now, there’s 81% of America is living paycheck to paycheck, and homelessness has already been increasing dramatically. According to HUD, it increased 12% last year. We have so many unhoused people, because of the rocky economy, that they will then be moving people into large camps outside of cities, like they did with the Japanese during World War II. I’m worried about it, because we are heading into what could potentially be a world war, and then a lot of the polite comments that can happen before war, and ideas, will just be out the window, and it’ll be okay to round up the homeless and place them in these camps, which will be presented as navigation centers, where they’ll somehow get a job somewhere in the future, or some kind of mental health help.
And here in California, they passed Proposition 1, and essentially they’re building mental hospitals, and then homeless people are becoming wards, basically, of the local county, who then controls all their Social Security benefits and everything. So it’s very tragic, and I think American people really actually do know, because so many of us have family members that are homeless, and probably struggled with their addictions, or with their having to sleep on our couch, and we’re getting tired of it. We’re all impacted directly in this, and there’s definitely solutions to ending homelessness, which is building things like single room occupancy hotels, and all the things that kept people off the streets before this catastrophe.
JJ: I just wanted to pick up on that, because I think a child would say, “Oh, people are unhoused. What about housing?” And yet, somehow, that seems like, ”Oh, no, no, no, we can’t do that. Well, we’ll put out signs, we’ll pay money to put out signs telling people, don’t give money to homeless people, but we won’t put that money into housing.”
Keith McHenry: “Millions of dollars have been spent just driving people from corner to corner, with no even slight effort, really, to house people.” (photo: KSQD)
KM: Governor Newsom here in California has spent $24 billion on homelessness. And, in the city of Santa Cruz, they gave us $14 million to help the homeless about a year and a half ago. And so far they’ve used $1 million to clean out a camp of about 400 people who had no place to go. Those people were just cleared out of the woods this weekend. So now they’re back downtown. And so millions of dollars have been spent just driving people from corner to corner, with no even slight effort, really, to house people.
And then there’s a very “Not In My Back Yard” campaign that happens. So every time there’s even a slight proposal to house some homeless people, build a building for them or open a hotel for homeless people, you end up with riots and protests, as you can see has happened in places like New York City. And then there’s the pitting of immigrants and homeless against one another, which is another divide-and-conquer tactic that is occurring, that’s also making housing homeless people very difficult.
So there’s just no policy, no national policy, no state policies, really, to resolve this, other than through criminalization.
Now, the criminalization is really dire. So, for example, in Santa Cruz, you get a $25 ticket each time you’re found camping. Of course, then they take most of your stuff when they give you that ticket. And then what ends up happening is if you fail to pay that, then you get a $350 fine for not paying your $25 ticket. And then two tickets in 30 days is a misdemeanor, and you can end up, ultimately, over time, spending months and months in jail for just the crime of being homeless.
And then each one of these tickets and late fees goes into collection. You get a job, finally, and then your wages are taken by the collection agency for your fines for having slept outside. So this is going to make ending homelessness in America much, much more dire, because more and more people will fall into that trap, because the system’s set up to be difficult.
JJ: And then don’t think about helping unhoused people with food, because that’s going to be a crime too. We talked with Megan Hustings back in 2017, when people from Food Not Bombs were being arrested in Florida for serving free food to homeless people in a public park. So even the places where other people might be trying to intervene, and trying to provide some support, offer some help, they’re being told no, no, that’s also a crime.
KM: Yeah, there was just a person arrested in Dayton, Ohio, for feeding the homeless there. In San Francisco, we were arrested a thousand times. I did 500 days in jail, and ultimately faced 25 to life in prison, when the city was so frustrated they eventually framed me on things that I never did. I also did 18 days personally in Orlando, Florida, for feeding the homeless at Lake Eola Park.
Fortunately, Food Not Bombs has pushed back across the country in that regard, and we won an appeals case in Florida, which ruled that sharing free food is a First Amendment–protected right. And the Dayton, Ohio, people are using that case to defend themselves.
And then we also have found in Houston, where we were ticketed nearly a hundred times, at $2,000- a-time fines, that they could not find a jury that thought it was reasonable to convict someone and force them to pay money for feeding the homeless. So they’ve kind of generally dropped that case. So we’re having some good fortune pushing back.
But the idea that a country that’s letting their people go hungry, and I answer the Hunger Hotline, 1-884-1136, and I get calls all day long, roughly 20 a day, from seniors who have no food, who get referred to me by UnitedHealthcare or Red Cross or something, for home delivery. And the system is breaking down. And the stories I hear of these 20, 30 people, sometimes—on a good day, it’s like 10 people—it’s just heartbreaking. And those are people on the verge of becoming homeless, that have a home but have no food, and live in America. Often they’re vets that have worked their entire lives, and now they’re in this precarious position, and it is just heartbreaking.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Keith McHenry from Food Not Bombs. They’re online at FoodNotBombs.net. Keith McHenry, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
The Yurok Tribe are one of the oldest existing communities in California. With a homeland stretching along northern coastal communities from Crescent City to Trinidad, there are estimated to be more than 6,000 Yurok alive in 2024. Yet despite living along the Klamath River for at least 10,000 years, the Yurok have in recent history had very little say over California’s natural resources.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) issued an executive action this week ordering the removal of unhoused people across the state from encampments they’ve been living in, empowering cities to enforce laws that bar people from sleeping outside in public places. Newsom did so after the Supreme Court ruled last month that such ordinances do not violate the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment ban on…
An ethnic Vietnamese congressman from the California State House of Representatives has written to the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam about the case of Buddhist “monk” Thich Minh Tue, who went missing for a second time on June 12.
On July 1, Thich Minh Tue’s younger brother Le Anh Thinwrote to the police at the commune, district and provincial level requesting help finding his brother.
The same day, congressman Ta Duc Tri wrote to U.S. Ambassador Marc Knapper, to express his concern about Tue, who became an internet sensation after going on a pilgrimage across Vietnam.
Tue, whose real name is Le Anh Tu, drew a wide following on social media in May when influencers documented his journey across Vietnam on TikTok and other social media platforms. Supporters were drawn to his simple lifestyle and humble demeanor.
Congressman Tri had already written to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom on June 4 to voice his concerns about religious freedom in Vietnam, after Tue and more than 70 mendicants were rounded up in a police raid and sent to their home provinces.
“Unfortunately, since I wrote that letter, the situation with Thich Minh Tue has deteriorated and my concern for his wellbeing has grown considerably,” the congressman wrote.
In a letter on his Facebook page, the congressman, who was once mayor of Westminster city, which has a large Vietnamese population, said he had no confidence in the Vietnamese government to give a truthful account of Tue’s condition.
“I hope you will stand with me for religious freedom as a fundamental human right and immediately call to end the religious persecution of Thich Minh Tue and for his release if he is in fact being held unjustly. The United States must continue to press this issue at every available opportunity with the government in Vietnam,” the congressman wrote.
Radio Free Asia emailed the Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the U.S. Embassy in Vietnam with requests for comment on the congressman’s letter but they did not immediately respond.
Family call for help
Thich Minh Tue does not claim to be a monk but he has become a symbol for many Buddhists by drawing attention to what many people say is the lack of religious freedom in Vietnam.
Freedom of religion is technically enshrined in Vietnam’s constitution but Tue does not belong to a Buddhist sect that is recognized by the state. Without recognition, religious groups are not allowed to organize.
According to Tue’s family, he told relatives on June 12 he would leave the temple where he has been staying for five to seven days before returning to continue practicing Buddhism.
On July 1, when Tue had still not returned, his family became worried.
In a video clip posted to the NSN YouTube channel on July 2, Tue’s brother, Le Anh Thin, said he was working with the authorities on Tue’s case.
“Yesterday I went to work with the authorities and they said that Mr Le Anh Tu is a normal citizen, he did not violate any laws, so they have no right to detain him,” he told RFA.
He said the police “did not know where the monk was and only accepted applications to help.”
A Buddhist monk in Ho Chi Minh City who has closely followed Tue’s story said the authorities forced monks to write commitments not to walk, beg for alms, wear robes or let their images spread on social networks, even though the Constitution and the 2016 Law on Religious Beliefs stipulate that citizens have the right to follow any religion.
The Ho Chi Minh City monk, D.H.T. Hoa, told RFA he believed the government’s methods were not transparent and legal.
“Thin and his family have just filed an application. We need to wait and see how the government reacts to this story, but things seem to be quite complicated,” he said.
“Because monk Thich Minh Tue has a citizen’s ID card, the local government must guarantee him all the civil rights stated in the constitution.”
An activist in Hanoi, who didn’t want to be identified for security reasons, said that Gia Lai provincial police were responsible for the safety ofLe Anh Tu.
“I don’t think that the danger … comes from the government but may come from those who are taking advantage of religious practices to profit from people’s offerings, because his asceticism awakens people and they no longer go to commercial temples like they did for a long time,” he said.
Translated by RFA Vietnamese. Edited by Mike Firn.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Vietnamese.
Los Angeles County supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to buy up and forgive millions of dollars in medical debt as part of a comprehensive plan to tackle a $2.9 billion burden that weighs on almost 800,000 residents. The measure, authored by supervisors Janice Hahn and Holly Mitchell, allows the county to enter into a pilot program with Undue Medical Debt, previously known as RIP Medical Debt…
California has a proud history of standing up for immigrants. During Donald Trump’s presidency, California defended its residents against dangerous anti-immigrant policies. In recent years, the state passed landmark legislation that allows California’s immigrants to access food assistance and health care. California was also the first state to dedicate public investments to immigration legal…
A California lawmaker has called on a U.S. agency monitoring religious freedom to advocate on behalf of a Vietnamese man who went missing after authorities “arbitrarily forced” him to end a Buddhist pilgrimage that had made him an internet sensation for his ascetic way of life.
For nearly a month, Le Anh Tu, better known as Thich Minh Tue, had drawn social media influencers who streamed his pilgrimage live, but along the way he also inadvertently became a symbol of what many people say is a lack of religious freedom in Vietnam.
On Sunday, officials said Tue stopped his trek after realizing it could threaten social stability, but monks with him said authorities forced them to disband in a midnight raid and took him to an undisclosed location.
Tue’s case drew attention from California Congressman Ta Duc Tri who, on Tuesday, sent a letter to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, or USCIRF, to express concern over his well-being.
“Recent media and witness reports indicate that the Communist regime in Vietnam has arbitrarily forced him to end his journey and cease his religious practices,” Tri said in a letter, a copy of which was posted to Facebook. “He has since disappeared from the public and his whereabouts are unknown.”
Tri, an Assemblyman for California’s Seventh District, called Vietnam’s treatment of Tue’s religious freedom “an affront to basic principles of human rights.”
“I respectfully request that you use your platform to advocate for Ven. Thich Minh Tue and his followers to continue their quest for spiritual enlightenment,” he said. “Doing so would reaffirm our own commitment to human rights and religious freedom around the world.”
Tri said Tue’s case “underscores the importance of keeping Vietnam on the Special Watch List for Religious Freedom” for countries where the government engages in or tolerates “severe” violations of the right, and which USCIRF makes recommendations to the U.S. government for in an annual report.
Questions over whereabouts
Tri’s letter came amid questions over Tue’s whereabouts after he was detained by police along with dozens of his followers in Thua Thien Hue province on Sunday.
The next day, the official Ho Chi Minh City Law Newspaper cited a leader from the Thua Thien Hue Provincial Police as saying that Tue had been “taken to the place he needed to go,” and that police in Gia Lai province, where his permanent residence was registered, had assisted him in applying for an ID.
A photo of a police officer taking Tue’s fingerprints at an identification registration office in what is believed to be Thua Thien Hue province became widely shared on social media on Monday, but a person who answered the phone at the Thua Thien Hue Police Station told RFA the following day that they had no knowledge of his case.
Thich Khong Tanh, a senior leader of the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam, or UBCV, told RFA he believes Tue could face punishment, but is likely safe in detention.
“There could be restrictions, probation, or isolation, and if necessary, they [authorities] might also consider using Monk Minh Tue [to serve their purposes],” he said. “However, in my opinion, they would not assassinate or harm him.”
‘True Buddhist clergyman’
Sporting a shaved head, patched garments and an alms bowl, Tue doesn’t claim to be a Buddhist monk, and is not part of the officially sanctioned Vietnam Buddhist Sangha.
But the 43-year-old seems to behave like a monk. His humble ways have drawn widespread admiration – and stand in contrast to senior monks in Vietnam who encourage followers to give offerings while living in large pagodas and flaunting expensive watches and luxury cars.
Thich Minh Tue (center L) stands among local residents, May 17, 2024 in Vietnam’s Ha Tinh province. (AFP)
The state-sanctioned Vietnam Buddhist Sangha, or VBS, announced on May 16 that Tue “is not a Buddhist monk,” which would technically mean he can’t openly practice Buddhism. Although the freedom of religion is enshrined in Vietnam’s constitution, religious groups or individuals require official recognition to practice.
On Tuesday, the UBCV dismissed the VBS’s claims, affirming in a statement that Tue was “a true Buddhist clergyman.”
The UBCV thanked Tue for “bringing a breath of fresh air into a Vietnamese society that has deteriorated in morality and lost faith in Buddhism,” and urged the Vietnamese government to respect his “choice of self-cultivation without interference” by allowing him to resume his pilgrimage.
Communist Party ‘lacks trust’ in the people
Tue’s case also drew attention from Phil Robertson, the director of Asia Human Rights and Labor Advocates and former vice director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia Division, who said that “no one believes the ridiculous story” that he had voluntarily given up his pilgrimage and returned home.
“Vietnamese government authorities are inherently paranoid about any social movement they do not directly control,” he said. “Once Thich Minh Tue started garnering a major group of supporters accompanying him on his travels, and a large group of followers on social media, it was just a matter of time before the authorities cracked down on him.”
Robertson said that the crackdown “reveals the Vietnamese Communist Party and government’s inherent lack of trust in the Vietnamese people.”
“This paranoia results directly in the severe ongoing crackdown against all independent persons and groups in society, rendering Vietnam as the worst human rights abuser in Southeast Asia after the Myanmar military regime,” he said.
Translated by Anna Vu. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Vietnamese.
In 2014, in the college town of Isla Vista, California, a 22-year-old man murdered six people and injured 14 others before killing himself. The killer didn’t suddenly “snap” one day out of the blue; he planned the attack and spiraled into crisis in the years leading up to it.
The horrific incident left violence prevention experts wondering: What were the missed warning signs?
One person who held some of the answers was the killer’s mother, Chin Rodger. She has long avoided the media, fearing that speaking publicly would only hurt the victims’ families more. But 10 years later, she’s come to see a greater purpose – that sharing what she knows about her son’s behavior before the attack could help others identify similar warning signs and prevent further violence.
By confronting and sharing the painful memories and evidence her son, Elliot, left behind, Rodger has contributed to the field of threat assessment – teams of people who specialize in collecting information on possible threats, connecting the dots and intervening before tragedy strikes. This week on Reveal, Rodger talks publicly for the first time with Mother Jones reporter Mark Follman.
Pasadena, California — After starting elementary school in the late 1960s, Naomi Hirahara and three other girls formed a clique called the C.L.A.N., an acronym that represented each of the girl’s first initials. Hirahara said she and her friends didn’t consider the racial implications of their group’s name until one of their fathers objected: “The Klan is very bad!” The group consisted of Hirahara…
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Inside the protesters’ encampment at UCLA, beneath the glow of hanging flashlights and a deafening backdrop of exploding flash-bangs, OB-GYN resident Elaine Chan suddenly felt like a battlefield medic. Police were pushing into the camp after an hours-long standoff. Chan, 31, a medical tent volunteer, said protesters limped in with severe puncture wounds, but there was little hope of getting them…
Candace Leslie was leaving church when she got the call she will never forget.
“All I heard was his girlfriend yelling in the phone, and she was like, ‘Cameron! Cameron! … He won’t get up. He won’t get up!’ ”
Someone shot Leslie’s son four times that Sunday evening in September 2021 outside his new apartment on Indianapolis’ northeast side.
Cameron Brown was 19. He was working at FedEx. He loved fishing with his grandfather and was trying to follow his footsteps into the U.S. Army.
Brown died at the scene.
“I just felt numb. I felt kind of disoriented,” Leslie said, remembering the chaos, the yellow police tape and officers scouring the scene.
Police recovered at least one gun. It was a Glock pistol. Unbeknownst to investigators at the time, the gun once served as a law enforcement duty weapon, carried by a sheriff’s deputy more than 2,000 miles away in California.
According to data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Glock was one of at least 52,529 police guns that have turned up at crime scenes since 2006, the earliest year provided. While that tally includes guns lost by or stolen from police, many of the firearms were released back into the market by the very law enforcement agencies sworn to protect the public.
Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, in partnership with The Trace and CBS News, reviewed records from hundreds of law enforcement agencies across the United States and found that many had routinely resold or traded in their used duty weapons – a practice that has sent thousands of guns into the hands of criminals.
Law enforcement resold guns to firearms dealers for discounts on new equipment and, in some cases, directly to their own officers, records show. Some of the guns were later involved in shootings, domestic violence incidents and other violent crimes.
A Kentucky State Police pistol sold to a retiring detective ended up in Buffalo, New York, where federal agents executing a search warrant on a suspect in a murder investigation in 2019 found the gun in a backpack alongside heroin and a bulletproof vest. In another case in Indianapolis in 2021, police seized a former Iowa State Patrol pistol from a man while arresting him for allegedly choking a woman. The gun was fully loaded with a round in the chamber.
Reporters surveyed state and local law enforcement agencies and found that at least 145 of them had resold guns on at least one occasion between 2006 and 2024. That’s about 90% of the more than 160 agencies that responded.
A box holds seized pistols from a 2013 case at the Vanderburgh County Sheriff’s Office in Evansville, Indiana. The sheriff was exploring legal ways to sell the weapons to help fund officer training. Police departments across the country often sell their old service weapons as well. Credit: Darrin Phegley/Evansville Courier & Press via Associated Press
Records from 67 agencies showed they had collectively resold more than 87,000 firearms over the past two decades. That figure is likely a significant undercount, however, because many agencies’ records were incomplete or heavily redacted.
Scot Thomasson, a former ATF division chief who is now a consultant for SafeGunLock, a Washington, D.C.-based company, believes police departments that resell weapons are violating their obligation to protect the public. “Taxpayers are buying firearms that are then resold for pennies on the dollar and ultimately ending up in criminals’ hands,” Thomasson said. “It is absolutely ridiculous.”
Many police departments resold their weapons while holding buyback events, which they say are important to pull guns off the street.
The Philadelphia City Council boasts on its website of having collected 825 guns in buybacks since 2021. But records show that Philadelphia police resold at least 886 guns over the past two decades, including 85 firearms between 2021 and 2022.
In some cases, departments added more guns to the marketplace than they removed.
The Newark Police Department in New Jersey staged a buyback in 2021, offering the public up to $250 for each firearm turned over. The event netted 146 guns. “Without question, 146 fewer firearms on our streets means less gun violence, fewer gun violence victims, and less risk of suicide or death,” the city’s public safety director said in a YouTube post celebrating the haul.
But five years earlier, Newark police resold more than five times that number of guns – nearly 1,000. One of those weapons surfaced in Pittsburgh, where police seized it from a convicted felon after he allegedly squeezed off more than a dozen shots in a neighborhood and then led officers on a foot chase.
A Newark police spokesperson said that the guns had been traded in as a cost-saving measure under a previous administration and that the department currently “has no plans to upgrade its service weapons.”
The Glock pistol involved in the killing of Cameron Brown in Indianapolis was one of more than 600 guns resold by the Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Office in Modesto, California, between March 2019 and August 2023, records show. Another weapon from the same agency found its way to Texas, where San Antonio police recovered it in connection with the shooting of a 15-year-old in 2020.
In an interview with CBS News, Stanislaus County Sheriff Jeff Dirkse defended the practice of reselling weapons as necessary to reduce the cost of new equipment. “You’re talking several hundred thousand dollars every few years, and that’s all taxpayer money,” he said. “It’s just a cost benefit to the department.”
Dirkse expressed sympathy to Brown’s family but said his agency was not responsible for the teenager’s killing. “Whoever did this, if he didn’t acquire that gun, he’s probably going to go acquire another one,” Dirkse said. “My organization had nothing to do with it.”
A family album holds photos of Cameron Brown, who was shot and killed in Indianapolis in 2021. Credit: Lee Klafczynski for The Trace
When a reporter told Brown’s family members that the gun involved in his death once belonged to a sheriff’s office, they were at first in disbelief and then angry.
“One more gun on the street actually changed our lives forever,” said Brown’s grandmother, Maria Leslie, a pastor. “We’re missing a piece of our puzzle.”
Now the family wants police to stop selling their weapons.
“I’m losing trust in the people who’re supposed to protect and serve us,” said Leslie, Brown’s mother. “There’s no reason for police firearms to be in the hands of young teenagers.”
Indianapolis Police Chief Christopher Bailey told CBS News that his agency has historically traded in its weapons, but he would consider changing that policy in light of Brown’s death. “I don’t want any weapon that we owned to end up being used violently against another person,” he said.
Brown’s killing remains unsolved.
A Rift in Law Enforcement
For decades, the ATF has worked on behalf of state and local law enforcement to trace recovered crime guns to their original owners, providing fresh leads to investigators and insights into firearms trafficking.
ATF data obtained by Reveal shows that between 2006 and 2021, the number of crime guns traced to law enforcement agencies each year more than doubled, from about 2,200 to more than 4,500. On average, more than 3,200 duty weapons were recovered at crime scenes annually over that 16-year period.
Records detailing some of the traces conducted between 2013 and 2017 indicate that the guns previously belonged to more than 800 different agencies, ranging from rural sheriff’s offices to police departments in the country’s largest cities.
Even more granular trace information used to be publicly available, making it easier for reporters to hold police accountable for their resale practices. The Washington Post in 1999 analyzed ATF data and identified 107 crimes linked to former District of Columbia police guns. That same year, a similar investigation by CBS News revealed more than 3,000 police guns had been connected to crimes – including nearly 300 homicides – since 1990.
The Tiahrt Amendment, passed by Congress in 2003 and named after the lawmaker who introduced it, now bars the ATF from disclosing most trace information to the public. In 2017, Reveal sued the ATF for refusing to respond to a public records request for statistical data on recovered police guns. The agency pushed back, citing Tiahrt. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided in favor of Reveal in 2020, ruling that the request fit within an exception to Tiahrt that allows the ATF to release statistical information.
Federal law enforcement agencies are legally required to destroy their used guns, but there’s no similar mandate for state and local agencies. As a result, decisions about what to do with old guns are left up to state and local leaders and police chiefs, who’ve taken a variety of stances.
Public safety concerns prompted Seattle police to stop trading in handguns around 2016. “If we’re selling them out, we just don’t know where those guns could end up,” said Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz. “We don’t want to contribute to the problem.”
When CBS News Minnesota showed our findings to Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara, he said his agency would stop reselling its guns.
“I don’t want us to be in a position where a weapon that was once in service for the police department here is then winding up used in a crime, or in an act of violence against a person, or even to shoot a police officer,” O’Hara said. “So going forward, we’re not going to be selling any weapons at all.”
Law enforcement agencies often trade their used weapons to a gun dealer for credit toward their next purchase, similar to how cellphone companies offer discounts on new phones in exchange for previous models.
William Brooks, a board member for the International Association of Chiefs of Police, said resales are essential for many departments to afford weapons upgrades. “Decisions about trading in old police service weapons should be left to individual communities and their police chiefs,” he said. “We believe that, should a community decide to destroy old weapons when new ones are purchased, they should commit just as fervently to fully funding new firearm purchases when their police chiefs call for them.”
Once sold by a department, weapons enter a secondary market where they can be resold to members of the public or other dealers. By the time they turn up at crime scenes, the guns may have been stolen, traded or resold multiple times with little documentation. They sometimes still have the department’s name stamped on the side.
Michael Sierra-Arévalo, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin and author of “The Danger Imperative: Violence, Death, and the Soul of Policing,” said trade-ins allow police to avoid public scrutiny, as they can purchase new guns without having to obtain budgetary approval from city leaders.
“There are certainly other mechanisms to acquire weapons. You can get a line item in the budget with the city, but that could come with all kinds of political hurdles to jump through,” Sierra-Arévalo said. “So I’m not surprised that when someone shows up and says they can help the police skip all of that, the police go with that.”
The Baltimore Police Department weathered public criticism in 2008 after one of its traded-in service weapons was used to kill two children as they walked home from a slumber party in Oklahoma.
At a news conference in April, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott said officers are given the opportunity to purchase their duty weapons for personal use before the guns are traded in for credit. If an officer buys a gun and wants to resell it later on, they must first offer it back to the department.
“We know that there are some issues around the country,” Scott said. “For BPD, we’re extremely diligent about what happens when we have weapons retire.”
The police department for Baltimore County – which is separate from the Baltimore city police department – takes a different approach. In 2013, it traded in its old guns to a firearms dealer, but under the terms of the agreement, key parts of the guns were destroyed, a spokesperson said.
“I felt throughout my entire career that police departments should not be in the business of putting more guns back out into our society,” said James Johnson, who served as Baltimore County police chief from 2007 to 2017.
In 2023, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a requirement that the Sheriff’s Department destroy firearms it no longer needed. Board Supervisor Janice Hahn said she hopes the decision can serve as a model for the rest of the country. “Those of us at the local level should do what we can to keep guns out of the hands of criminals,” she said. “We all can wait all day long for Congress to pass common-sense gun violence prevention laws.”
Police departments should not be in the business of putting more guns back out into our society.
James Johnson, Baltimore county police chief, 2007-2017
Some police departments argued that because they were reselling to gun stores and other federally licensed gun dealers, they were not technically purveying firearms directly to members of the public.
In an email, a spokesperson for the Fort Worth Police Department, Buddy Calzada, said it would be “inaccurate” to report that the agency resells guns to the public.
He then went on to explain how the department resells guns: “In rare cases, the department has traded small quantities of firearms back to the dealer the department purchased them from and received credit for newer weapons,” Calazada wrote. “It is important to note, any guns sold by a dealer are sold only to qualified buyers who have passed the Federal background checks.”
Internal records show that the department resold more than 1,000 guns to two dealers in the past 10 years. The department declined an interview request.
Appealing to Gun Buyers
Using sales records obtained by CBS News from dozens of police departments, reporters identified nearly 50 gun dealers whose business includes buying and reselling retired police weapons. Many are self-styled police-supply companies that also sell flashlights, handcuffs and other tools of the law enforcement trade.
Police-supply companies that buy and sell firearms have to hold a federal gun dealer’s license, which allows them to sell guns to members of the public. The license opens them up to inspections by the ATF, but internal records show that the agency has long been toothless and conciliatory, mostly issuing warnings instead of serious punishment when its inspectors find dealers breaking the law.
To encourage better practices among suppliers competing for lucrative public contracts, some California cities have passed measures to prevent local law enforcement from doing business with gun dealers that have been cited for serious violations during inspections. But in most of the country, there is no requirement for law enforcement to consider a dealer’s compliance history when awarding contracts.
Lindsay Nichols, policy director at the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said police have a moral and ethical responsibility to do business only with gun dealers that follow best practices. “There are plenty of conditions that an agency could put on a gun store as a condition of receiving their weapons,” she said. “There are lots of gun stores out there. You don’t have to sell to any one particular business.”
ATF inspection records show that one of the most prolific buyers of used police guns has a long history of violating federal regulations.
LC Action Police Supply, based in San Jose, California, bought more than 3,000 guns from 11 different law enforcement agencies between 2005 and 2023, including the gun involved in Cameron Brown’s homicide, according to records obtained by CBS News.
Over that same period, the ATF cited LC Action for 30 violations of federal firearms laws, including failing to conduct background checks and report suspicious gun sales, records show. One ATF inspector pushed for revoking LC Action’s license to sell guns after the company was cited for six violations in 2005, but the recommendation was overruled by agency higher-ups.
The ATF inspected LC Action four more times between 2009 and 2019, uncovering many of the same violations. The agency allowed the company to keep its license to sell firearms.
LC Action did not respond to multiple requests for comment via phone and email. When a reporter and a photographer from CBS News Los Angeles visited the company’s retail store and asked to speak with a representative, they were told to leave.
An ATF spokesperson said the agency does not comment on specific cases, but as a general matter, the outcome of any licensing action involving a gun dealer is dependent on the underlying facts and circumstances. The spokesperson added that the ATF’s policies and procedures were designed to maximize public safety by ensuring federal law is fairly and consistently administered.
Used police guns are popular among gun buyers because they’re relatively inexpensive and often in good condition. They also typically have high ammunition capacities and are designed to hold large- to medium-caliber rounds.
Larry Brown Jr., a firearms instructor and president of the Bass Reeves Gun Club in Atlanta, said he bought a used police gun because it was already equipped with glow-in-the-dark sights and a special trigger that made it easier to shoot, saving him money on upgrades.
“The price is on point,” Brown said. “Police trade-ins are typically better equipped and better souped-up than what I would buy new. That’s what made me buy the one I have.”
The demand for decommissioned police weapons has created a thriving market, with gun dealers snapping them up en masse.
Mark Major owns 2-Swords Tactical & Defense, a gun store in Lithonia, Ga. Credit: Alyssa Pointer for The Trace
“Every now and then, I’ll get a call from my reps saying, ‘Hey, we got a bunch of police Glock 22 trade-ins for a great price. They’re all in good shape if you’re interested,’ ” said Mark Major, the owner of 2-Swords Tactical & Defense, a gun dealer in Lithonia, Georgia. “Usually, police trade-ins are kept up by the armorer in the department. They do have some scratches and rubs on them from being in a holster, but they work.”
Online forums and blogs promoting the benefits of used police guns are common, and there are dozens of YouTube videos featuring gun dealers and enthusiasts showing off large shipments of the weapons to entice potential buyers.
In a video posted last month by AimSurplus, a gun dealer in Monroe, Ohio, one of the store’s employees shows off a rolling cart piled high with assault weapons, as well as several boxes of pistols and shotguns – all former police guns to be resold on its website.
“You guys love our police trade-ins,” the employee says. “And why shouldn’t you? They’re awesome. We just got a whole truckload in.”
In 2022, the state of California celebrated a record budget surplus of $97.5 billion. Two years later, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office, this surplus has plummeted to a record budget deficit of $73 billion. Balancing the budget will be challenging. Unlike the federal government, the state cannot just drive up debt and roll it over year after year. The California Balanced Budget Act, passed in 2004, requires the state legislature to pass a balanced budget every year.
The usual solutions are to cut programs or raise taxes, but both approaches are facing an uphill battle. Raising taxes would require a two-thirds vote of the legislature, which would be very challenging, and worthy public programs are in danger of getting axed, including homelessness prevention and funding for low-income housing.
A third possibility might be to increase the income tax base and state income by stimulating the economy with a state-owned depository bank. The state-owned Bank of North Dakota, which has raised record profits for its state, is a stellar example. In a review of states with the healthiest budgets based on data from the PEW Charitable Trusts, U.S. News & World Report puts North Dakota at No. 1 in Budget Balancing and #1 in Short-term Fiscal Stability.
California has an Infrastructure and Development Bank, which is already capitalized and has an established track record of prudent and productive lending, but it is not a depository bank and its reach is small. Transforming it into a depository bank would be fairly uncomplicated and could substantially increase its reach.
But first a look at what happened to the state’s copious revenues.
Saga of a Budget Crisis
California’s record surplus was largely due to tax windfalls and to $43.5 billion received in American Rescue Plan money during the COVID crisis. Anticipating that these inflows would continue, the governor and legislature enacted a record budget for 2024-25 of nearly $300 billion, the largest of any state. Much of the surplus was committed to expanding an array of social and educational services, including extending universal health care coverage to undocumented immigrants. When taxes came in, the tally showed a revenue shortfall of $26 billion.
Tech industry woes were a major contributor. The top 1% of earners pay nearly half of California’s income taxes, and 20% of its GDP comes from the tech industry. The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, which financed startups and attracted venture capital, speeded the sector’s decline. Massive Silicon Valley layoffs occurred and tech stock lost value, cutting capital gains taxes. And there has been a notable exodus from the state not just among the ultra-wealthy but by businesses, due to the combination of high taxes, stringent regulations, and elevated costs for labor, utilities, and energy.
Another contributor to the budget deficit were huge payouts for unemployment benefits, which skyrocketed during the COVID lockdown and business shutdowns. The state’s unemployment fund was exhausted, requiring a loan from the federal government. Twenty-one billion dollars remains to be repaid, and the interest rate on the debt has gone up. To meet the unemployment burden, California legislators are considering quintupling unemployment taxes and nearly doubling benefits, but the result could be more layoffs and more businesses leaving the state.
Plagued by Homelessness and Unemployment
Meanwhile, the wealth divide in California is enormous, with the highest unemployment rate and homeless rate in the country. This is despite $24 billion being spent on the unhoused over the last five years. Thirty percent of the nation’s homeless live in California, and nearly nine million Californians are on the brink of being homeless. Housing is too expensive for low-wage earners and there is a lack of available low-cost housing. But well-meaning legislation to help low-wage earners has had unintended consequences.
As of April 1, the minimum wage for fast food restaurant workers was raised by 25% to $20 an hour triggered by a strike by their union. But the move has negatively impacted many of the workers. Fast food restaurant owners operate on thin profit margins; and to cover these new costs, they have had to reduce workers’ hours, raise customer prices, engage in massive worker layoffs, move out of state, or close their businesses altogether. Almost 10,000 fast food jobs have been lost in California just since the $20 minimum wage law was signed.
As a result of these and other efforts to help low-wage earners, many vulnerable workers are suddenly finding or will find themselves out of a job.
Compare North Dakota
At the other end of the employment spectrum is North Dakota, which has the lowest unemployment rate in the country. As noted above, in a review of states with the healthiest budgets, U.S. News & World Report puts it at No. 1 in Budget Balancing and #1 in Short-term Fiscal Stability. North Dakota’s budget for 2024-25 includes cuts in individual income taxes, including eliminating the state individual income tax for 60% of the population and a reduction in that tax for the other 40%. The result is projected to be a 1.5% flat rate income tax, the lowest in the nation. Again compare that to California, where the top state income tax is 14.4%, higher even than other states known for their tax burdens.
North Dakota was the only state to fully escape the 2008-09 credit crisis, never slipping into the red. When the state did go over budget in 2001-02 due to the dot-com bust, the Bank of North Dakota (BND), the nation’s only state-owned bank, acted as a rainy day fund. To make up the budget shortfall, the bank declared an extra dividend for its state owner, and the next year the budget was back on track.
The BND is more profitable than some of the largest Wall Street banks. Its latest Annual Report (for 2022) states that it had a record net income of $191.2 million that year, up $47 million from 2021. Its asset size also set a record, at $10.2 billion. The return on investment was a healthy 19%. As the BND’s principal depositor, the state must keep its funds in the bank by law, thus protecting the bank from a run on its deposits. The Standard & Poor’s credit rating for the BND is A+/stable. The S&P report states, “BND has one of the highest risk-adjusted capital (RAC) ratios for rated U.S. banks.”
BND’s profitability has helped strengthen community banks and credit unions in North Dakota by making loans in partnership rather than in competition with them. In the Great Recession, it also bought loans from stressed local banks to prevent bank failures and keep the economy running smoothly. BND operates with very low overhead and stresses productive and local lending rather than lending to buy existing assets, the sort of speculative lending that leads to bubbles and busts.
The State’s Deposits Are Safer in Its Own Bank
The Bank of North Dakota was established in 1919 by a populist party of farmers who felt their farms were being foreclosed on unfairly by out-of-state bankers. They succeeded in bringing their state revenues back into their own bank, serving their own communities.
Today most government funds are deposited in these SIFIs (Systemically Important Financial Institutions), putting the deposits at risk. Under the Dodd Frank Act of 2010, a SIFI that goes bankrupt will not be bailed out by the government but will be recapitalized by “bail ins” – confiscating the funds of the bank’s creditors, including “secured” depositors such as state and local governments. Under the Bankruptcy Act of 2005, derivative and repo claims have seniority and could easily wipe out all of the capital of a SIFI. The details are complicated, but the threat is real and imminent. See my earlier articles here and here, David Rodgers Webb’s The Great Taking, and Chris Martenson’s excellent series drilling down into the obscure legalese of the enabling legislation, concluding here.
Even if the SIFIs remain solvent, they are not using state deposits and investments for the benefit of the people; and often they are betting against us. The BND, by contrast, is mandated to use its revenues for the benefit of the North Dakota public.
California Could Replicate the BND Model with Its Infrastructure and Development Bank
California already has an Infrastructure and Economic Development Bank (I-Bank), but it is not a true depository bank able to take deposits and leverage its capital. According to its website:
IBank was created in 1994 to finance public infrastructure and private development that promote a healthy climate for jobs, contribute to a strong economy, and improve the quality of life in California communities. IBank is located within the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development and is governed by a five-member Board of Directors. IBank has broad authority to issue tax-exempt and taxable revenue bonds, provide financing to public agencies, provide credit enhancements, acquire or lease facilities, leverage state and federal funds and provide loan guarantees and other credit enhancements to small businesses.
Its Infrastructure State Revolving Fund (ISRF) Program provides loans only to public entities (municipalities, counties, Joint Power Authorities, pension funds), but it also has a Small Business Financing Center (SBFC) that provides loan guarantees through independent agencies for businesses and farms having trouble accessing loans, among other outreach services. The ISRF is a revolving fund, limited to lending its base capital. It engages to some extent in leverage, but it’s the riskier version called “rehypothecation” (relending of existing collateral). As explained by Stan I-Bank’s first Executive Director Stan Hazelroth in a 2013 article:
When you loan $100 to an electric utility, say, to build new infrastructure, they take money from ratepayers and pay that loan back over time. These payments, based on the history of utility ratepayers over decades, are very reliable—so reliable, in fact, that bond buyers will loan money secured by the promise of those ratepayers to pay the utilities back over time.
The utility with the right to be paid back $100 can pledge those aggregate payments and secure an additional loan of, say, $80. When that loan begins to be paid back, bond buyers will loan you another, say, $60, which can also be loaned out. With just $100 in cash, in other words, you can loan out $240.
Thus a contract becomes a security, which can act as collateral for another loan and another for the lender. But reuse of the same asset for multiple loans can go only so far. Chartered at a 10% capital requirement, depository banks can issue up to ten times their capital in loans. (In 2020 the Fed lifted the capital requirement altogether, but 10% is still considered a prudent ratio.)
Banks do need to back withdrawals with reserves, which they acquire from their incoming deposits or by borrowing from other banks or the Federal Reserve; but the state has plenty of deposits to serve that function. Any bank in which the state deposits its revenues will back its loans with those deposits, and the I-Bank’s loans are actually safer and better for the public interest than those of the big Wall Street banks. If the I-Bank were to become the state’s banker and its reserve account were overdrawn, it would have the same protections afforded by the Federal Reserve system to all chartered banks: it could borrow reserves from other banks, the repo market, or the Fed itself. The BND is not a member of the Federal Reserve but has a master account with it, allowing the bank to transfer funds with other banks in the system and to act as a “mini- Fed” for the state, providing correspondent banking services to North Dakota’s many community banks.
One thing California and North Dakota have in common is that they are both big agricultural states. The BND helps its farmers with a variety of low-interest loans. Although most of its loans are in collaboration with local banks, two loans it makes directly are the Beginning Farmer Real Estate Loan and Established Farmer Real Estate Loan. California’s struggling farmers could benefit from that sort of direct aid as well.
The state itself could also realize significant savings from its I-Bank if the bank’s loan capacity were expanded. I was unable to nail down the current comparative figures for loans, but here is an example from an article I wrote in Yes Magazine in 2018:
Financing infrastructure through the municipal bond market accounts for half the cost of infrastructure due to the debt load involved. One example where this is made clear is with Proposition 68, a statewide ballot measure that voters approved in the June 5 primary election which authorizes $4.1 billion in bonds for parks, environmental, and flood protection programs. The true cost of the measure is $200 million per year over 40 years in additional interest, bringing the total to $8 billion. California’s IBank, which funds infrastructure at 3 percent, could finance the same bill over 30 years for $2.1 billion—a nearly 50 percent reduction.
The Golden State as Trendsetter: Time to Form a Bank
In 2019, two bills were brought to convert California’s I-Bank into a depository bank, one in the Senate, SB 528 (Hueso), and one in the Assembly, AB 310 (Santiago). SB 528 sought simply to convert the I-Bank to a depository ban. It passed the first two committees but was “suspended” in Appropriations. The second bill, AB 310, sought to extend the I-Bank’s services directly to underserved individuals and businesses. It was opposed by the state treasurer and the state controller on grounds that it was too risky, and it failed. But California State Treasurer Fiona Ma said in her opposition letter to AB 310 that she was sympathetic to its goals, and that “I respectfully propose AB 310 be amended, replacing the current language with a mandate to develop a feasibility study to be conducted by an independent, apolitical expert source. The technical experts in my office can assist to build the framework of the study as the state’s banker.”
There is actually no need to change the I-Bank’s existing programs, since it already has a variety of programs that help the underserved indirectly. Simply converting it to a depository bank would extend the reach of its existing services (for which there is currently excess demand), expand its profitability, reduce the cost of infrastructure and development for state and local government agencies, and protect any revenues deposited in it from a sudden crisis in the conventional banking system.
The remedy for unemployment is employment, and the remedy for the unhoused is affordable housing. An I-Bank expanded into a state-owned depository bank could provide both.
