Read About The Tarbaby Story under the Category: About the Tarbaby Blog
December 16, 2018
Lenny and Squiggy (Michael McKean and David Lander) from Laverne and Shirley perform their (shoulda been) big hit at the Shotz Brewery Talent Show..
Lenny and Squiggy (Michael McKean and David Lander) from Laverne and Shirley perform their (shoulda been) big hit at the Shotz Brewery Talent Show..
Posted by Down The Deep on Sunday, December 16, 2018
The market continues to slide into dangerous territory. The Dow and the S&P 500 are on pace for the worst December since the Great Depression. Globally, world markets have lost nearly $7 trillion in 2018, making it the worst year since the financial crisis.
Why have the markets soured? Trump’s tax cuts, which at first fueled a temporary frenzy in the stock market, have already worn off. Corporations plowed most of their savings in buying back shares of their stock — lining the pockets of executives, but providing no real benefit to the economy.
Meanwhile, Trump’s trade wars have made matter worse, causing the entire global economy to shake. His clash with China has been especially damaging, pitting the world’s two largest economies against each other. In other words, brace for impact.
Michael Sheetz December 18, 2018
Two benchmark U.S. stock indexes are careening toward a historically bad December.
Both the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 are on pace for their worst December performance since 1931, when stocks were battered during the Great Depression. The Dow and S&P 500 closed down 7.6 percent and 7.8 percent this month, respectively.
December is typically a very positive month for markets. The Dow has only fallen during 25 Decembers going back to 1931.
The S&P 500 averages a 1.6 percent gain for December, making it typically the best month for the market, according to the Stock Trader’s Almanac.
While the S&P 500 began dissemination in 1950, the performance data was backtested through 1928. It’s worth noting that historically, the second half of December tends to see gains.
– CNBC’s Gina Francolla contributed to this report.
This 9-year-old girl with cerebral palsy used to struggle to get her jacket on before recess. Then, her mom invented a coat that makes it easy for anyone in a wheelchair to stay warm 💜 https://cbsn.ws/2RKYNvR
Mom invents jacket for 9-year-old in wheelchair
This 9-year-old girl with cerebral palsy used to struggle to get her jacket on before recess. Then, her mom invented a coat that makes it easy for anyone in a wheelchair to stay warm 💜 https://cbsn.ws/2RKYNvR
Posted by CBS News on Friday, December 21, 2018
Shane Boyle died because he fell $50 short of raising enough money on GoFundMe to pay for his insulin supplies. We should not be having people die in this country because they can’t afford the high cost of their medication.
$50 Short on GoFundMe For Insulin
Shane Boyle died because he fell $50 short of raising enough money on GoFundMe to pay for his insulin supplies. We should not be having people die in this country because they can't afford the high cost of their medication.
Posted by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders on Friday, December 21, 2018
A new United Nations report outlines how low wages, dangerous working conditions, and immigration laws undermine agricultural workers’ right to food.
Campesinos Working in Tlalquiltenango, Morelos, Mexico. (Photo credit: Joseph Sorrentino / iStock)
The severity of working conditions for farmworkers around the world is so striking it can inspire disbelief.
Consider, for example, the fact that in the past few decades, eight cases of slave labor have been brought against employers in Florida’s tomato fields. Or the fact that as recently as October, six people who were forced to work on cocoa farms as children without pay won an appeal to sue Nestlé and Cargill on the basis that the companies knowingly condoned slave labor. In another example, more than a decade ago, Chiquita Brands International admitted to paying $1.7 million to a Colombian paramilitary group “to kill or intimidate” workers who were promoting collective bargaining on banana plantations.
The latter is one of several examples highlighted in a new report completed by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Hilal Elver, in an effort to call attention to some of the conditions affecting farmworkers using the lens of hunger. While other publications and organizations have highlighted the paradox inherent in workers who produce food struggling to feed themselves, this report is unique in its comprehensive outline of the problem as a global issue and its attention to the systemic causes of food insecurity.
More than one billion people around the world play a critical role in producing food, and the report shows they often work long hours for low wages, live in isolated rural areas, and lack rights afforded to workers in other industries, including the right to organize.
Elver sees correcting all of those issues as critical to workers being able to realize their “right to food,” and she’s used her position to dig deep into the root causes of food insecurity and expand the understanding of that “right” in the past. Her previous reports, for example, have looked at how the overproduction of cheap, nutrient-poor industrial foods are not solving the world’s hunger problem and how excessive use of pesticides threatens human health and the global food supply.
Her pesticide research, in fact, inspired Elver to dedicate this latest report to farmworkers’ rights. “I found out that agricultural workers are the real victims” of pesticide use, she said in an interview with Civil Eats.
The Food Chain Workers Alliance, WhyHunger, and the Rural Migrant Ministry recently co-hosted an event at the Church Center of the United Nations to release the report, and representatives from all three organizations offered insights from their own work to support its findings.
Suzanne Adely, from the Food Chain Workers Alliance, pointed out that in the U.S., food workers have higher rates of food insecurity than workers in any other industry. Jose Chapa, from the Rural Migrant Ministry, talked about his work advocating for a New York State law that would grant farmworkers the right to organize for better conditions.
In the end, Elver’s report and the experiences of all of the groups represented speaks to “the need for us to continually break out of sectoral silos,” said WhyHunger’s Alison Cohen. “We talk about labor, we talk about food, we talk about housing, we talk about water, we talk about the environment—and increasingly we’re understanding that these are all deeply, deeply interconnected.”
Civil Eats spoke with Elver after the event about those connections, the report’s findings, and how food insecurity among farmworkers can be most effectively addressed.
When you say “agricultural workers,” who exactly are you talking about? Do small farmers who work their land themselves count?
I sort of made a larger definition—whoever works, either with contract or without contract, producing food and giving their physical power to the system. For instance, if you look at subsistence farmers, they work together with their families—women and children are the workers [as well], but they don’t get a salary and they don’t have a contract. So [by] my definition… it doesn’t matter if they are paid or non-paid—[if] they are working in agriculture, that’s my argument. Maybe from a very legalistic point of view, they are not workers, but they are actually workers.
Your job is to report on the right to food, but this report is more about the labor issues that lead to hunger, including low wages and working conditions. Are you seeking to draw connections between systemic economic issues and food insecurity?
If you look at the whole economic system in relation to the production of food, especially in the last 20 or 30 years … when it became industrialized, these subsistence farmers became workers for the big companies. They have no way to make their own decisions. The companies are coming and they’re telling you what to produce. They give them a seed, they give them fertilizer and chemicals, they come and collect, and they make the decision about the price. So they are in a completely non-negotiable situation when they produce this food—it doesn’t matter if they’re the owner or the worker, whatever. This is the kind of system right now that we are dealing with.
How do conditions for agricultural workers in the U.S. compare to other parts of the world?
I looked at differences between developing countries and developed countries. The U.S. is not alone. For instance, if you look at Italy, Spain, and Canada, you find a similar kind of system, basically undocumented workers [doing agricultural work]—they’re not citizens, they have no rights, and they definitely are in an informal system.
I live in California, and I see with my own eyes what’s happening in the agricultural system. California is basically [a producer of] specialty food, or fruits and vegetables that need a lot of human power to collect. You see people collecting strawberries on the farm—they don’t have any documentation, they can’t even speak Spanish [because they speak indigenous languages]… Nobody understands them [which makes it easier to exploit them]. It is a serious kind of disconnect with producers and exploitation.
Your recommendations are mostly about governments exercising regulation to improve labor rights for workers—the section on the role of industry is very limited. Why?
It’s a very important role corporations play. They are basically promoting basic corporate responsibility, which means, “Okay, we’re going to do good things, but don’t investigate, don’t monitor me, it’s going to be voluntary.” Voluntary is never going to work. Some companies are good companies, and I’m not saying everyone is bad, but most of the corporate social responsibility should be regulated and monitored by third parties. It could be governments or worker unions.
Speaking of worker activism, you mention the success the Coalition of Immokalee Workers has had with their Fair Food Program (FFP). Did you see other examples of worker-led movements around the world?
I think that in the U.S., the FFP is very, very interesting. I really don’t know if there are other examples [like it]. In Italy, there was a citizen movement to deal with criminal activity. In Italy, Mafia-like organizations [are] buying people and selling them to corporations, and it created huge public outcry, leading the creation of a law [that mandates tougher penalties for farm owners who abuse workers]. This law is difficult to implement, but at least in 2016, they [created] it. That was a law that came not from workers but from citizens, from consumers.
Speaking of consumers, what can they do to promote the rights of agricultural workers?
Consumers should be conscious about what they buy, from whom, and how the food comes to their table. In order to do this, we have to raise the consciousness. This consciousness is very new. It takes time. We have to really question our supermarkets, for example. Supermarkets should be places where people question what they buy. In the U.S. and Europe, because of the internationalization of the food trade system, it’s very difficult to trace where you get the food or who is making the food, but it could be a starting point.
In the end, you’re talking about the right to food, but a lot of the countries that you talk about, including the U.S., haven’t actually ratified the international agreements that recognize that right. So how can state action be compelled?
In writing this report and exposing the situation to the governments, we’re saying ‘We’re aware you’re not following the international laws [that guarantee the right to food]. You don’t ratify, you don’t internalize, and you don’t do your job.’ That’s kind of a warning system. As many other human rights reports do, we don’t do naming and shaming, but we [do] have some examples. At least we can open a discussion.
This Christmas will be the third one I haven’t spent in my hometown. It’s a small town in southern Kentucky filled with more than its fair share of Donald Trump bumper stickers and Confederate flags. But even before Trump was elected president, it always made me feel claustrophobic.
The end of this holiday season will also cap the second calendar year I’ve gone without speaking to my parents, and by extension, the rest of my family. My holidays are no longer spent at my grandparents’ house with my parents, sister, uncle and random cousins. My parents helping to put Trump in office was the final nail in the coffin of a relationship that had long been rocky.
And despite people’s well-intended (but unnecessary) sympathy, life has never been happier for me.
My parents are passionate conservatives and attempted to raise me as a Baptist (I knew early on that wasn’t going to work for me). My parents complained about everything from interracial marriage and rap music to women going for summer jogs in shorts they believed to be too short. My mother literally highlighted Bible passages she claimed “proved” Barack Obama was the Antichrist. When NFL draft pick Michael Sam kissed his boyfriend on live TV, I nearly cried. I grew up in a house full of sports fanatics and this was a beautiful ― and groundbreaking ― moment. My parents only talked about how “gross” it was.
Because of my family’s beliefs, I spent most of my life hiding my politics, my interests, my dating life and my friends from them. For decades, they didn’t know the real me, only the facade that I put on for them. My parents had no idea that when I left the house on a typical high school weekend night, I was probably spending time with my gay best friend. They didn’t know I voted for Obama (shocker ― he didn’t turn out to be the Antichrist). They didn’t know I donated to Planned Parenthood. Almost everything I love or am proud of in my life would probably make them cringe.
Holidays always seemed to exacerbate the canyon that yawned between us and, for as long as I can remember, my anxiety has spiked during November and December. A chronic eye-roller, I had to siphon every bit of self-containment I could to make it through Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners ― and daily life, if I’m being honest ― with my family.
Because of my family’s beliefs, I spent most of my life hiding my politics, my interests, my dating life and my friends from them. … Almost everything I love or am proud of in my life would probably make them cringe.
Eventually I came to realize our vastly different beliefs had little to do with “politics,” a blanket descriptor often used in situations like this that greatly oversimplifies the rift between my family and me. Our differences have to do with vastly opposing views of what every human being deserves (health care, LGBTQ rights, a world without Confederate flags, etc). Trump being elected ― and my parents helping him with their votes ― was more than I could take. It was the wake-up call I needed, and it finally shook me free from the society-imposed guilt that kept me hanging onto my family ties for years.
The day after the 2016 election, my mother and I had a heated discussion on the phone ― the first extensive one we’d had about politics in years. She proudly declared her support for Trump and said my dad had voted the same way. I hung up. I always knew my parents were wildly conservative, but in my heart of hearts, I didn’t think it would go this far.
I let the anger linger in silence for a couple of weeks. By the time my parents realized I wasn’t contacting them anymore, I had gathered all my thoughts. My dad finally called, wondering why I was freezing them out. I was on my way to Kansas City at the time and had an uninterrupted 45 minutes while driving to deal with the situation. After that? I knew I would be done. I was at peace.
So I drove down Interstate 70, my phone to my ear, and finally let 23 years of differences bubble up into speech. I was the most open I’d ever been with either of my parents. I told my father, for the first time, about how I’d been groped on a New York City street. How could he vote for a man who had admitted to doing the same to other women? I brought up our differences when it came to topics like race, religion and women in leadership positions. It probably wasn’t a complete shock to them ― I’ve often slipped throughout the years and said “liberal” things. But I don’t think my parents ever knew our differences were this severe or would signify the end of our relationship.
In most arguments I engage in, my temper comes quickly. I get flustered, and I often cry when I’m frustrated. But this was the calmest I’d ever been during a confrontation. I never cried. I never yelled. I didn’t have to. We knew it was over.
Since that day, I’ve spoken to my parents only once. I showed up at their door with two boxes a couple of months later and went straight to my old room to collect whatever I might someday want to keep. My mom followed me down the hall, berating me about how “ridiculous” I was being. The entire interaction lasted about 10 minutes as I grabbed photos off the wall and old books I thought I’d want. I took what I could because I knew I wouldn’t be back. The saddest goodbye was to the family dog, Zoe. Every other separation was a long time coming.
It’s strange ― with romantic attachments, we’re taught to recognize the red flags and act accordingly. … But with our family relationships, we’re often guilted into staying no matter how toxic the situation.
It’s strange ― with romantic attachments, we’re taught to recognize the red flags and act accordingly. We’re told, “Remember your worth” and “Being alone is better than being in a bad relationship.” We’re told, “Get out if someone doesn’t respect you or your beliefs.”
But with our family relationships, we’re often guilted into staying no matter how toxic the situation. We’re pressured into trying to make it work with people who are often viscerally at odds with everything we believe in ― because it’s the “right” thing to do.
What’s more, we’re told that if we decide to leave or distance ourselves from our family, it’s “immature.” “Can’t you just talk it out?” we’re asked. Or better yet, we’re told, “Can’t you just not talk about politics?”
But what use is that? Why would I want a relationship that needs to constantly be policed to avoid fighting or the realization that we have nothing in common? Why would I want a relationship limited to surface-level conversations about work and sports in order to steer away from discussing topics that truly make us who we are? I know I can’t change the way they think or feel. They’re not changing my beliefs. How valuable is a relationship where you have to hide or lie about who you really are?
So, after years of dreading the holidays, I finally took control of my life and created my own version of home ― of family.
Last year, I crammed 15 of my friends into my tiny living room and hosted my first Friendsgiving in my own place. Some of my friends were gay. Some were black. One had parents who immigrated from Mexico. It was a hodgepodge of characters and identities, a mosaic that illustrated what already makes America great. And I knew that no one there would make racist or sexist comments while digging into their turkey. No one would claim Jay-Z was a devil worshipper (I actually witnessed this at a family gathering). No one would (unironically) talk about how nice of a guy Ted Cruz seems to be.
I didn’t have to feel anxious and I didn’t feel anxious. It was the first time on a holiday I’d ever truly felt at home.
This year, I took a week before Thanksgiving and drove eight hours back to the region where I grew up. Toggling between Kentucky (Louisville and Lexington) and Indianapolis, Indiana, I crashed in my friends’ studio apartments and spare rooms, drinking wine and revisiting old college haunts.
But at the end of the week, I turned south. I drove back to my hometown, rolled down the main bypass and straight through the traffic light that, had I turned left, would have taken me to the house I grew up in. I wasn’t there to see my parents. I wasn’t there to silently sit on a couch surrounded by relatives I had nothing in common with but my genes.
When people find out I’ve cut my family out of my life, they often apologize, and ask if I’m sad. But I’m not sorry, and I’m even less sad. My parents, unfortunately, brought me more stress and grief than anyone else in my life.
I drove back there not to see relatives, not to fight a losing battle, but to spend time with those who actually felt like family.
My best friend from high school and her husband hosted me for two days and made me an early Thanksgiving dinner. We sipped Kentucky bourbon and talked into the night about politics and old friends. I tried to explain all of Drake’s rap beefs, and we laughed in a way I wasn’t used to laughing during the holidays. This was the kind of Thanksgiving I’d been missing all those years: no anxiousness, no bitter fighting, no quiet resignation to just keep my head down and find a way to get through the meal.
When people find out I’ve cut my family out of my life, they often apologize and ask if I’m sad. But I’m not sorry, and I’m even less sad. My parents, unfortunately, brought me more stress and grief than anyone else in my life. Naturally, there are days I mourn the absence of strong family ties. But I certainly don’t mourn the loss of my own toxic family ties.
Avoiding Trump voters was the impetus for me to finally break away. But the journey was building my own happiness ― free of an arbitrary obligation to a family I not only had nothing in common with but whom I actively disagreed with on fundamental issues that illustrate who we are as people.
It’s not a situation I would wish on someone ― of course, there are times I wish I had blood relatives I was close to. But the peace of mind and the happiness I’ve found these past couple of holiday seasons without my family? I would wish that joy on everyone.
Ashley Scoby is a native Kentuckian, a University of Kentucky graduate and a recovering sports writer. She’s now a freelancer living in Kansas City, Missouri.
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In case you missed it, the entire executive and legislative branches of the government have descended into the lowest rungs of Chaos.
Over at the Justice Department, William Barr is preparing for his confirmation as the next attorney general. As such, of course, he will be in nominal charge of the Robert Mueller Probe Into Practically Everything. So along comes the New York Times to give the confirmation process a nice little nudge toward the abyss:
In a 19-page memo, Mr. Barr sharply criticized an apparent aspect of the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, that Mr. Trump may have committed a crime by trying to get the F.B.I. director at the time, James B. Comey, to quash the criminal investigation into his first national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, and later by firing Mr. Comey.
Mr. Barr argued that the Justice Department must not accept the notion that a president can violate a statute that criminalizes obstruction of justice by exercising his constitutional authority in an otherwise lawful way – such as by firing a subordinate, pardoning someone, or using his “complete authority to start or stop a law enforcement proceeding” – but with a corrupt motive.
And in case Mueller wasn’t hearing loud enough footsteps already, comes now CNN with the news that Matt Whitaker, the temporary, handpicked, interim replacement AG consulted with the DOJ lawyers who told him he didn’t have to recuse himself from overseeing Mueller’s operation. If you see ducks lining up in a row, you’re not wrong.
“At this moment, the President does not want to go further without border security, which includes steel slats or a wall. The President is continuing to weigh his options,” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement announcing the meeting. People attending the meeting included Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows, R-N.C., and former Freedom Caucus Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio.
The announcement came shortly after Ryan left a Thursday morning GOP conference meeting to take an emergency phone call from Trump, two people in the room told NBC News, with one member saying Ryan had been gone from the room for at least 20 to 30 minutes.
“Build Those Slats! Build Those Slats!” Not exactly a rip-roarer at the next rally.
One lawmaker told NBC that another member in the meeting stood up to say that Trump’s refusal to say in public he’ll sign the continuing [resolution] has left even rank-and-file Republicans “twisting in the wind.” Rep. Carlos Curbelo, R-Fla., left the session saying he felt worse about the resolution than he had going in, with member concerns ranging from the lack of disaster relief funding to continued worries over whether Trump would actually sign the measure. “I think the next few days could get complicated real fast,” he said.
But NBC’s Kasie Hunt shared the money quote on the electric Twitter machine shortly before noon on Thursday:
On the House floor, leaders scrambling to see if they can pass $5 billion in wall funding as Republicans say they want President Trump to tweet before they say “yes.”
“That’s what the fuck serving in Congress has come to,” one GOP member of Congress tells me.
My heart bleeds. Hope that tax cut was worth it to your donors because you’re going to be paying for it for the next decade, one way or the other.
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In her new book, Monica M. White details the cooperative practices of Black farmers in the Deep South and Detroit who played a key role in the Civil Rights movement.
When Monica M. White was growing up, her family would travel from Detroit to visit her grandparents in Eden, North Carolina, where they kept a small store in their living room. The store came with the ever-present promise of sweets, her mother’s warnings not to eat too much junk, and her grandparents’ determination to slip her snacks nevertheless.
It was only recently—when the sociologist and University of Wisconsin professor was researching for her new book Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and Black Freedom Movement—that White’s aunt explained the store was more than just her own personal candy jar.
“It was called The Community Store. My grandfather, Kenneth, along with eight other Black farmers, co-owned a car and the store was their co-op … I knew my granddaddy was a farmer, but I had no idea he was a member of a cooperative,” said White. “To hear about the collective … I still get goosebumps even just mentioning it, because it shows the serendipity of how we study who we are.”
Freedom Farmers tells the story of how Black farmers in the Deep South and Detroit—independent farmers who owned their property, sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and urban gardeners alike—banded together to counter white racism, fight economic deprivation in an age of increasing mechanization and commercial agriculture, and articulate a different vision of the future.
Many of these groups were founded in remote places that were hotbeds for grassroots labor agitation. Take Mississippi’s North Bolivar County Farm Collective (NBCFC). It was formed in 1965 when a group of Black farmers, many of whom were tractor drivers on a white-owned plantation, turned off their engines to demand a better hourly wage. After they were fired and evicted from their homes, they built a temporary tent settlement, Strike City, close to the plantation.
Two years later, the NBCFC was up and running, with its members loaning land, tools, and divvying up the resources and work. The collective fed farmers and their families, provided children with clothing so they could attend school, and launched conversations about the need to disrupt the entire food system—from decisions about what to plant to how to keep the power to process food out of factories.
Freedom Farmers is not your conventional Civil Rights narrative, couched in terms of campaigns for voting rights, school desegregation, and lunch counter seats, though there are familiar historical figures: W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and Fannie Lou Hamer, whose Freedom Farm Cooperative gave the book its title. It’s a timely, connective, and expansive book; one that reframes the whiteness of agricultural history and calls us to remember the fact that the Black freedom struggle is an ongoing labor movement in places far and wide.
It also locates Black farmers in a Civil Rights narrative that goes beyond their historic and continuing legal struggles against USDA discrimination. Freedom Farmers moves beyond stories of subsistence and survival; it centers Black farmers as unsung food justice advocates and organic intellectuals who imagined better communities, food systems, and politics. And then, depending on one another, they started building.
Civil Eats spoke with White about the book, the ethos of Black farming communities, and why she coined the term “collective agency.”
This book made me realize how much of Civil Rights history really focuses on the urban South. What did you learn about rural folks and Black farmers, specifically?
Doing this work on rural Black Southerners flipped what I thought I knew about the South. When we were kids in Detroit, [my friends and I] would talk about what we wouldn’t do if we lived in the South and how we wouldn’t put up with [racism]. That was an overly simplistic view of how oppression manifests and people’s reaction and responses to it. One thing that I have fallen so in love with is the farmer’s freedom. There’s a certain kind of freedom that people who produce food have; they feel a sense of agency. And I don’t think it’s ever discussed when we talk about who farmers are.
I learned the genius of what it means to be a farmer, especially a Southern Black farmer. For example, Ben Burkett [of the National Family Farm Coalition] can look at a bag of seeds and tell you how many bushels he’ll get out of that, what the profit will be. Farmers don’t get credit for knowing applied mathematics.
I’m also fascinated by what rural Southern communities offered us in terms of open methods of communications—the way they supported each other, organized, and cared for each other. I feel like this book taught me a lot about the South that I didn’t understand but came to know through meeting Black folks who were raised there, but (unlike my family) never left.
You define “farmer” broadly, to include those who don’t own the land but work it.
When I first came to [the University of] Wisconsin, I presented my early ideas on what has become the book. One of my colleagues said, “You use ‘gardener’ and ‘farmer’ interchangeably, and I think you need to really [differentiate].’ In the ag language, a gardener is someone who does it for a hobby. A farmer has a certain percentage of land, a certain percentage of their income, a certain percentage of land ownership. In a broad sense, I wanted to complicate the idea of farmers only being those who own the land. For me, the expansive definition really captures the people who feed us, the people who stand out in the weather and the bugs and all conditions to make sure that we have food—often at their own expense.
The book describes a heartbreaking but brief episode when landless Black farmers occupied an abandoned military base in 1966 Mississippi. That kind of protest seems like it was within the Civil Rights strategic playbook, but with very different “characters.”
When I found out about this story, it wasn’t too long after the Bundys and white nationalists occupied federal land in the West and didn’t have a license. I thought about how different we treated them from how we treated the sharecroppers and seasonal workers who occupied the Greenville Air Force Base.
In January ’66, about 70 folks occupied an abandoned Air Force base and they were like, “Look, this is federal land, we pay federal taxes, and so we want to use this space as a strategy for our survival.” They were unemployed or [some] may have been fired because of their political inclinations or efforts to vote. So folks brought in blankets and stoves and all kinds of resources. Their demands were: “We want land, we want food, we want jobs, we want shelter.”
And please be clear: They said, “We’re not asking for a handout, we’re asking for an opportunity to uplift ourselves, our family, and our community.” They were evicted in a violent sort of extraction [as opposed to the years-long conflict in which Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy illegally grazed on public land and negotiated with the Bureau of Land Management]. These were folks who were asking for land to grow food.
After the eviction, federal attention turned to the state and resources were then allocated to Mississippi in terms of food, shelter, and housing. It’s important to recognize that this occupation was right in that area where Hamer and her freedom farm was and in the Mississippi Delta. There was this air of resistance and resilience in the region.
You coin the term “collective agency” to describe how Black farmers mobilize, whether that’s in Mississippi or Detroit. Can you say more about that?
I didn’t feel like there was a way to help us understand what happens in cities like Detroit, where the economic bottom is falling out. People are left to fend for themselves, and they collectively engage in something that impacts or changes the political, economic, and social context of their future.
Agency is mostly defined as a very individual thing. The language has to capture that as an individual, yes, you make the decision that you’re going to grow food. But what about when several people decide they want to [farm] as a strategy for increasing access to nutrient-rich food and pool our resources together? What happens when we care about each other in terms of health, education, safety, security, and wellness and there’s this collective decision to move in these directions? I couldn’t find a way to explain it other than “collective agency.”
In my research in Detroit, folks would tell me, “I have a backyard garden … and I contribute to the food that’s grown in the community garden, I don’t harvest anything there. I do it because this is for us.” That’s a collective agency that we don’t talk about.
How do you connect Black farmers to other seminal Black thinkers in the book? You have a different take on the relationship between W.E.B. Du Bois (who is often framed as an elitist who only wanted to educate the “talented tenth,”) and Booker T. Washington, (who is often framed as telling Black people to stay on the land and not aim higher). Both frames lack nuance.
I was really cautious about this. But I thought: If Booker T. was talking about farmers, was that not 90 percent of the population? If Du Bois is talking about the talented tenth, what would happen if the two of them were actually in a room together to say, “Here’s 90, here’s 10, and this is how we’re going to get free.” Then as I read more and more about Du Bois, I realized that he stopped talking about the talented tenth, and really started investing in thinking about cooperatives in ways that people haven’t really understood until Jessica Gordon Nembhard’s book Collective Courage came out.
We don’t have to do binaries. What tools can we use from Washington? What tools can we use from Du Bois, George Washington Carver, and Hamer?
What’s your relationship to the soil? Because this book is chipping away at the idea that, after slavery, Black people wanted to remove themselves from agriculture.
I really love this question. I have some soil from [New Orleans’] Congo Square in a little container. I have soil from Hamer’s final resting place. I have soil from Burkett. I have soil from Tuskegee. Soil is a substance that I greatly revere. I have an immense amount of respect for the stories that soil holds. It’s not unlike the Equal Justice Initiatives Legacy Museum’s remembrance project [where people collect soil from places where people were lynched]. My connection to the soil is that I see freedom and a medium through which birth and death are connected.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Author photo by G. Greg Wells.
At Meadowlark Organics in Wisconsin, a young couple has partnered with an experienced farmer to take stewardship of his 950-acre sustainable operation.
“They have the desire and motivation to lift the heavy stuff off my shoulders,” says Paul Bickford from his place at the kitchen table in a recently renovated farmhouse. Bickford is the 65-year-old owner of Bickford Organics. “It’s nice to see what I envisioned, what I built, continue,” he says.
Bickford is speaking about the 950-acre organic grain farm in the Driftless Region of Southwest Wisconsin, which he has managed and owned through several incarnations across the span of four decades. Bickford is in the process of transitioning the farm to the young couple seated across from him.
Bickford’s successors, John and Halee Wepking, hold sweat equity in the farmhouse renovations. In exchange for their work, they live here with their growing family on the farm they now co-manage with Bickford, who lives just down the road. The couple holds no familial relation to Bickford, and met him through a Craigslist ad. But, Halee says, to the nodding of heads, “We have become a family.”
Even the farm’s title is in transition, with the old-guard Bickford Organics easing out of the spotlight to make room for Meadowlark Organics, a name adopted by the Wepkings to carry the farm into the future.
Meadowlark Organics is an organic farm that specializes in growing grains: wheat, rye, polenta corn, and buckwheat. They also grow hay and recently added a small beef herd of around 20 breeding cows to the mix. With plans to continue diversifying with the addition of a granary and flour mill, Meadowlark Organics is poised to lead the Driftless region of Wisconsin into a new era of local, value-added organic grain products grown with an eye for soil conservation and land stewardship.
All this has been made possible by Bickford, who—in wanting to ensure his farm found the right heirs—allowed an enterprising couple to realize their dreams in an industry where many newcomers struggle to ever achieve viability.
Though the Wepking’s children, a three-year-old and his baby sister, are with their grandmother on this day, a countertop collection of toy tractors suggests that the kids usually fill the kitchen with life.
“It’s my responsibility to see the operation survives because they have a family,” Bickford says. “I take that quite seriously.”
Bickford, who has carried the farm from its beginnings as a confined dairy, through its transition to rotational grazing, and on to its most recent incarnation as an organic small-grain producer, only began to think about retirement around 55.
Bickford’s children are now adults following their own paths—and though he has a son who farms with him, he would prefer to stay out of the farm’s management. So, Bickford has had to pursue a less conventional route to transitioning the farm.
Lucky for all, just the right eyes landed on the ad Bickford posted early in 2015. It read: “I am seeking a forward-thinking individual or couple to join my 950-acre organic farming operation … Ethics and trust are a cornerstone of organic farming and are important to my operation. I want to share my 40 years of farm experience with someone who is willing to work to improve my farm.”
The Wepkings met working in the kitchen at Prune in the East Village of New York City. A Wisconsin native, John had always dreamed of farming, and Halee, who is from Arizona and holds a degree in modern dance and years of professional experience in kitchens, was eager to support this dream. “I was always moving toward what felt important to me,” Halee says. “Farming, producing people’s food—that felt important.”
When the Wepkings moved back to Wisconsin, they hoped to farm on John’s family land. When that proved infeasible for reasons beyond their control, they began to look for other options.
The initial investment necessary to raise livestock alongside grains at a marketable scale limited the Wepking’s ability to start from scratch. To create the farm they envisioned, they sought an established operation managed by someone willing to build them and their vision into the farm’s future.
When the Wepkings answered Bickford’s ad, they were still wet behind the ears. But they shared Bickford’s values—they wanted to farm as land stewards using practices modeled by balanced ecosystem function. In teaming up with Bickford, they found a perfect fit.
“My first month on the job was a blur,” says John. He spent much of that first stretch alone on a tractor with three times the horsepower of anything he’d ever operated. Halee had given birth to the couple’s first child just a few weeks into the new arrangement, and through these earliest days Bickford was nearly absent—a fire had burned a building on his property, and as happens on farms, he was pulled in opposing directions.
Before joining Bickford, the Wepkings gained much of their understanding of farming practices through online research. Halee says they both gleaned as much as they could from resources such as Practical Farmers of Iowa and MOSES.
When they finally did get to work side by side, John says Bickford shared knowledge of another sort. The veteran farmer knows how fields will carry water after a rain, when to plant or weed, and what grows well where and why. In short, Bickford knows the intimate details of his land and its seasons.
Three years into their arrangement, their roles have developed definition. Halee takes the lead with the kids, manages marketing, keeps the books, and collaborates on planning decisions. Bickford is mechanically inclined: he likes his tractors and enjoys the hands-on aspects of farming. John, Bickford says, “is the boss.”
“John has very good skills at organization,” Bickford continues. He “has a grasp on the organic plans and the food that we’re going to grow.”
John soon demonstrates his ease with planning as he launches into a description their crop rotations. “When we started, it was a pretty typical Southern Wisconsin rotation of corn, soybeans, and small grain—in spring, start with small grain like oats or barley to establish alfalfa and make hay, then plow that alfalfa under for corn again,” he says. “What we’ve done is extend that into fall with planting grains.”
They also transitioned the spring grain mix to include spring wheat for bread flour, and last year, they started growing buckwheat. “So we’re looking at more of a six-to-seven-year rotation as opposed to four to five,” John says.
On top of these changes, with the aid of a Farm Service Agency (FSA) microloan, the Wepkings have introduced a small beef herd to the mix. The cattle allow the farmers to keep their soil nutrients in a closed loop, and the longer crop rotations allow them to, in Halee’s words, “limit tillage; manage weeds, pests, and diseases; and grow and conserve our soils.”
Bickford has always been open to adaptation, but thanks to the Wepkings, he has come to truly value diversification.
“Our current agricultural system is not going to support family farms as is, so we have to be thinking of how we diversify, where we capture value,” Halee says.
Along with the new crops, Meadowlark has expanded into value-added products such as milled flour and polenta that they sell to area co-ops, restaurants, bakeries, and consumers at markets and online. They have already invested in grain storage bins, and their long-term plans include a grain cleaning and production facility as well as a small flour mill. Ultimately their hope is to create an organic grain hub to supply the region with locally produced, consistent products on a scale that keeps pace with the burgeoning local markets.
ORIGIN Breads, an organic bakery based in nearby Madison, already bakes exclusively with grains sourced from Meadowlark Organics. When the small-scale bakery opened two years ago, owner and head baker Kirk Smock says he was faced with a decision: “Organic or local?”
With Meadowlark Organics, he and his customers get both. Meadowlark now plans their yearly production with ORIGIN Breads in mind, but allows Smock to pay for his purchases incrementally. The arrangement is somewhat unconventional, but Smocks says it is one of the many benefits to the relationships that grow through sourcing locally.
The focus on relationship-building is reflected in the farm transition. The Wepkings and Bickford have yet to work out the fine print, but they’re okay with letting the transition take shape organically. Bickford sees himself easing into full retirement within five to 10 years. In those years, the group plans to continue to evolve alongside their ideas about how best to delegate responsibilities and ownership. For now, they’re content to know they share a vision and common goals.
When asked what others might learn from their experience, Halee says, “You don’t need to have a certain salary; you need to be secure in your life. You need to have a path forward in your future. It’s about our common goal and our values. It’s about maintaining this land organically.”
Bickford chimes in, “And about feeding people healthy food.”
I was in Georgia on Other Business over the weekend, and I was lucky because the Atlanta Journal-Constitution broke a brilliant story that pretty much shreds what was left of the credibility of both the recent gubernatorial election and the new governor it produced, Brian Kemp. The Republican candidate, you may recall, also was serving as Georgia’s Secretary of State and, therefore, was tasked with overseeing a close election in which he was one of the candidates. The AJC added yet another big window into the veritable Plato’s Retreat of ratfcking that was that election:
It was Nov. 3, a Saturday, 72 hours to Election Day. Virtually tied in the polls with Democrat Stacey Abrams, Kemp was in danger of becoming the first Georgia Republican to lose a statewide election since 2006. And, now, a new threat. The secretary of state’s office had left its voter-registration system exposed online, opening Kemp to criticism that he couldn’t secure an election that featured him in the dual roles of candidate and overseer. But by the next day, Kemp and his aides had devised one solution for both problems, an investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows.
They publicly accused the Democratic Party of Georgia of trying to hack into the voter database in a failed attempt to steal the election. The announcement added last-minute drama to an already contentious campaign. More important, it also pre-empted scrutiny of the secretary of state’s own missteps while initiating a highly unusual criminal investigation into his political rivals. But no evidence supported the allegations against the Democrats at the time, and none has emerged in the six weeks since, the Journal-Constitution found. It appears unlikely that any crime occurred.
To recap: Kemp was overseeing his own election, and he was so bad at it that, three days before the polls opened, it was discovered that the registration system was ridiculously hackable. This called for some serious hackery in response. Kemp already had proven to be up to the task:
In 2015, Kemp’s office accidentally sent political organizations, media outlets and others a trove of confidential information about every Georgia voter. Kemp blamed a single employee, whom he fired. The following year, Kemp was one of just seven state election directors who rejected the federal government’s help to secure their voting systems. Kemp called the offer an “overreach” by the administration of President Barack Obama after hackers stole emails from the Democratic National Committee. “It seems like now it’s just the D.C. media and the bureaucrats, because of the DNC getting hacked – they now think our whole system is on the verge of disaster because some Russian’s going to tap into the voting system,” Kemp said…At that moment, the computer servers that ran Georgia’s election system were wide open to potential intruders. Voters’ personal data, passwords that poll supervisors used on Election Day, the coding for memory cards with which voters cast ballots – all of it was readily accessible.
Meanwhile, a guy named Logan Lamb, a specialist in cybersecurity from Kennesaw State, where Georgia’s servers are located, spent several months ringing the alarm bell before anyone in Kemp’s office deigned to get involved. Have I mentioned that Kemp was running for governor at the time, and that a story about incompetence centered on the office he already held might have proven to be a drag on that effort?
But it wasn’t until seven months later, when Lamb and a colleague found that the data still had not been secured, that officials shut off unauthorized access to the servers. Kemp said at the time that he expected the FBI to catch the “perpetrators.” “There were no perpetrators,” Lamb, who works for the Atlanta-based online security firm Bastille, said recently. “We are computer security professionals. We were trying to go through the process of responsible disclosure to make sure the system was secure.” For months, Lamb said, “anyone could just have downloaded” – or manipulated – all the state’s election files.
At this point, it might have become obvious to all but the dimmest voter that Kemp shouldn’t be entrusted to manage anything more complicated than a food truck. A new strategy was needed because, after all, those rats won’t fck themselves.
On Dec. 8, 2016, Kemp wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, demanding to know why the federal agency “was attempting to breach our firewall.” Kemp said a computer traced to Homeland Security had executed a “large unblocked scan” of the secretary of state’s website. The intrusion, Kemp suggested, was in retaliation for his refusing the government’s help before the 2016 election. Johnson replied four days later. He said a worker at his agency’s Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Brunswick, Georgia, had merely verified the professional licenses of job applicants – “a service, as I understand it, your website provides to the general public,” Johnson wrote.
Kemp wasn’t satisfied with Johnson’s response. “I will be elevating my concerns to the incoming administration,” he wrote back, and the same day, he asked Trump, then the president-elect, to investigate the Obama administration’s “failed cyberattacks” on Georgia. Republicans in Congress warned Johnson not to destroy evidence of what Rep. Jason Chaffetz, then chairman of the House Oversight Committee, called a possible breach of “state sovereignty” and a violation of state and federal laws. Finally, in June 2017, a report by Homeland Security’s inspector general said a digital forensic investigation found no evidence of a cyberattack.
This is pure bubblespeak, aimed at an audience conditioned for decades to believe anything that strokes their ideological G-spots. (That Jason Chaffetz had a cameo in this farce was almost comically predictable.) And it roped in the Department of Homeland Security, which had to hunt all the snipes Kemp had set loose in the minds of his voters. Was it time to turn things up to 11? Of course, it was.
Kemp’s aides broke their silence early Sunday. At 4:47 a.m., Candice Broce, the secretary of state’s spokeswoman, received a message from the online news site WhoWhatWhy, which says it practices “forensic journalism.” Its reporters had heard about Wright’s email and were preparing to post a story at 6 a.m. The website said it told Broce its story would describe a security breakdown in the secretary of state’s office, not a failed hack by the Democrats.
Exactly one hour later, a statement appeared on the secretary of state’s website, on the same page where voters search for sample ballots, find their polling place or check their registration. In all-capital letters, the headline announced: “AFTER FAILED HACKING ATTEMPT, SOS LAUNCHES INVESTIGATION INTO GEORGIA DEMOCRATIC PARTY. “While we cannot comment on the specifics of an ongoing investigation,” Broce was quoted as saying, “I can confirm that the Democratic Party of Georgia is under investigation for possible cyber crimes.”
This is great work by the AJC, especially the survey of how so many news operations, both in Georgia and nationally, ran with the phony accusation. Kemp’s people did what they did full in the knowledge that there wasn’t enough time before the election for them to get called on it. (That it also was picked up by Sputnik, the Russian misinformation laundromat, is even less surprising than Chaffetz’s appearance in the story was.) The Democratic party in Georgia admits in the story that its rapid-response operation wasn’t nearly as rapid as it should have been. But, in general, the AJC’s story is another one to add to the now towering pile of evidence that the Republican party has become unmoored from any attachment it still had to actual democracy.
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