Connecting Central Appalachia to Los Angeles and Beyond

Harlan, Kentucky

Several important court and legal cases have been on mind for the last week or so. You may or may not have the heard of them, and you may or not agree with me that these cases are potentially related to one another.

I have been thinking much about the $83 million opioid settlement reached between the State of West Virginia and Walgreens. You can read about it here. As the article says, "The settlement resolves a lawsuit that alleged many pharmacy chains failed to maintain effective controls as a distributor and dispenser that contributed to oversupply of opioids in the state." West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey office claims to have won over more than $950 million in opioid litigation. Next on the chopping block is The Kroger Company and its pharmacies as they likely did not monitor their sales of opioids and sound any alarms so long as they were making profits from misery and substance abuse.

If you ask me, Kroger is making a big mistake by not trying to avoid the courts. Walmart, CVS and Rite Aid have reached settlements with the state totaling about $175 million since last August. CVS, Walgreens and Walmart have agreed to pay $10 billion in order settle similar lawsuits with state and local governments and Native American tribes elsewhere in the United States. Kroger looks like a vulnerable bad neighbor right now.

It's hard to keep the settlements and the court cases straight. The settlement that has gotten the most coverage was the one that included the OxyContin manufacturer Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family. The family has to pay something like $6 billion and. Their company is supposed to be taken over by another company that will put its profits into combating the opioid crises. None of this would have happened had there not been activists on the ground forcing action against the Sacklers. There are also the lesser-known settlements involving Johnson & Johnson, Amerisource Bergen, Cardinal Health and McKesson and twelve states that put $26 billion in corporate money into state hands and obligate these companies to put some safeguards in place regarding opioid distribution. Some counties in Ohio won $650 million from Walgreens, CVS and Walmart over additional opioid-related claims.

These billions of dollars are spare change when you balance it out over the companies that have to pay and consider the damage done and the callous attitudes and the corruption that brought all this to pass in the first place. This all sounds like lots of money, but remember that West Virginia led the nation in overdose deaths per 100,000 people, with 81.4 per 100,000 people just three years ago. Kentucky ran a distant second, with a death rate of 49.2 per 100,000 people. Heck, more than 564,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses between 1999 and 2020.

But it doesn't stop there. The Sackler family will not acknowledge that what they did was wrong, and they have no legal obligation to do so. Walgreens gets to pay their $83 million over an eight-year period, staggering their costs. The company contributed to an “oversupply” of prescription opioids in West Virginia and across Central Appalachia. At some point, either by accident or lack of oversight or callous disregard for human life, the drugs were being diverted for street and holler use. State medical, treatment, adjudication and imprisonment and costs hit hard. Communities were divided, families suffered, and people died. We are living with synthetic opioids like fentanyl poisoning our communities. I heard in church yesterday that dozens of houseless people in my community have died from overdoses since the beginning of the year. I often wonder why the companies involved and the Sackler family and the investors and salesmen and the bought-off "researchers" and doctors who front for these companies are not being prosecuted for running multi-state criminal rings and conspiracies. Once their payments are made the companies will try to walk away from the great damage they have done. In the meantime, they are positioning themselves as caring community partners who want what is best for us and are cutting jobs and raising prices.

The other legal case that is weighing heavily on my spirit is the City National Bank-Los Angeles County redlining case. Here the Department of Justice found that the bank engaged in discriminatory practices by refusing to underwrite mortgages in predominately Latino and Black communities between 2017 and 2020. These practices discouraged or prohibited home ownership and undermined community stability. A sort of "banking desert" was created in the Latino and Black communities as well. These communities were underserved, disregarded, ripped-off, and destabilized. City National will have to pay over $31 million dollars. The bank will create a $29.5 million fund to subsidize loans to Black and Latino borrowers. City National will also spend $1.75 million on advertising, community outreach and financial education programs in Black and Brown communities. The bank is not admitting fault or guilt but is giving in nonetheless. The settlement only covers what the Department of Justice could prove took place between 2017 and 2020. Mr. Mark Alston did an excellent interview with National Public Radio on the issues involved in the settlement.

Redlining and housing discrimination are not news in Los Angeles. City National Bank is just one institution of many that have engaged in these outrageous practices and profited from them, and this way of doing business goes back many generations. Richard Rothstein can give you an eight-minute lesson on how discrimination in lending has been linked not only to residential segregation and the deterioration of communities but to environmental disasters as well. A report by Ailsa Chang, Christopher Intagliata, and Jonaki Mehta will explain this to you in the most engaging ways possible. But whatever the history and tricks involved, systemic oppression and discrimination draw much of their power from the ability of elites to discourage, disappoint, divide, frustrate, and rip people off over time. Patterns arise and poverty and trauma are passed on from one generation to the next unless a healing and activist social movement arises and can counteract some of the damage done. The Department of Justice settlement is huge by their standards, but it cannot, by itself, reverse the traumas associated with discrimination and oppression. 

And that brings me back to my point that these cases, the ones from Central Appalachia and the most recent housing discrimination case from Los Angeles, are potentially related to one another. How so? Notice the patterns of corporate greed and the assumption that corporations will rip us off, even to the point of causing deaths, and they will continue to do so until they are caught. They arrived to where they are with an Us vs. Them way of thinking. They will fight having to pay for the damage done or will lowball the costs of that damage and will fight having to accept legal responsibility for their actions if they are caught. Racism figures mightily into their thinking, but they also see great opportunities for profits where large companies and industries have shut down and where people are desperate and where part of the population can convinced to support get-tough-law-and-order barbaric policies and take employment in law enforcement and the prison industrial complex. The Us vs. Them becomes Them vs. Them.

Something else ties what happens in Los Angeles to what happens in Central Appalachia and the so-called "Rust Belt." Mark Alston, mentioned above, has much that is helpful to say about housing discrimination in Los Angeles. He makes a good point that the money is too little and comes too late for many and that whatever advancements are made from this point depends much on who is designing and administering the next steps, but that the settlement may do some good. The Biden administration has done the right thing by prioritizing stopping and punishing redlining. But at the local and grassroots levels the settlements mentioned above will hit particular walls besides what Mr. Alston and West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey talk about.

Houselessness in Los Angeles and the conditions that are creating it and enabling it are swamping the region. Attorney General Morrisey has said that the money won in the West Virginia settlements will “provide help to those affected the most by this crisis in West Virginia,” but syringe laws and the state laws covering how naloxone is administered and paraphernalia laws and licensure requirements for harm reduction programs---all of them based on a fear-driven law-and-order worldview and the rejection of the idea that substance abuse is a disease or disorder---really limits the reach and the effectiveness of anti-drug and lifesaving efforts. In both L.A. and Central Appalachia, the money is there for companies or non-profits or state or local governments to administer programs, but the money is not there to empower people and give them the means of determining their own needs and destinies.

Now, imagine if a national peoples' movement came together and took on Big Pharma, the real estate industry, the banks, and all of the destructive and oppressive forces that destroy our communities and divide us. Imagine if people in Central Appalachia and L.A. and elsewhere were working from the same playbook and could see themselves and one another as leaders and if we operated from a point of solidarity with one another. If the small harm reduction efforts in West Virginia, the volunteer activists who pushed the Sacklers to the walls, and the leading poor and working-class Brown and Black activists in L.A. could win the kind of ground that they have then even stronger regional and national movements can win more, and they can win even more by being in solidarity with one another. 

 Los Angeles

Rhiannon Giddens - Build a House (Official Video)

The other day a white woman---a church-going white woman at that---told me that slavery is all in the past and that we have to forget and just go on. I disagree. We're still living with the legacies of slavery, and I encounter many folks who are starting up to fight the Civil War over again.

A company that handles some of my pension money made its foundational money in part on slavery and what slaves produced. The so-called right-to-work laws that prevent people from forming unions have their origins in the southern states and the remnants of the slave-owning aristocracy. For years the low wages and poor working conditions and lack of social services and the lack of justice in the southern states---all the legacies of slavery---formed a low point and caused a downward spiral across the entire United States and we are living with the effects of that still. I live with the memory of legal segregation---it was not so long ago.

It would indeed be great to move on, but that won't happen in the years that I have left on earth. Much water will flow under our bridges before the line moves in the right direction and we have justice here. My worry is that that water will flow mixed with blood.

If you can do some justice and make some peace today, please do it. If you don't have that opportunity, then just please use your time to do some studying and reflect. Think a little about the "house" referred to in the song above. Could that be our country? Do you really want to burn it down rather than share it with others?  

Two contrasting images

 

The couple above were living in their home on the Bayou Bourbeaux Plantation in Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana in 1940 when this photograph was taken. The plantation was then operated by the Bayou Bourbeaux farmstead association, a semi-cooperative established through the auspices of the Farm Security Administration. The photograph was taken by Marion Post Wolcott for the Farm Security Administration. Zoom in a little on the photograph and you will see that these are hard working people and that the man has a half-smile and that the woman and the child have that apprehensive look of people who are not used to being photographed. The child appears to be playing, or they are not working.

Natchitoches Parish has a history of free people of color, Creole, and mixed-race settlement. It is set in the historic Black Belt.

The photograph immediately above was taken in Greene County, Georgia and is also a Depression-era photograph. I do not remember who the photographer was, but I'm certain that this was also a Farm Security Administration photograph. I remember reading that this man was a plantation owner and this his operation had been in his family for many generations and that his property was heavily mortgaged at the time that this photograph was taken. He stood to lose everything that he had, I suppose.

I don't know much about Greene County, and the histories of working-class people, African Americans and Natives Americans there have not been recorded. I believe that the county has seen a loss of its Black population in recent decades.     

What stands out for me here are the different experiences and legacies captured in these two photographs. Those plantations were on stolen land. There remain the legacies of forced colonialism, slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the changes that took place in the southern agricultural economies that increased production and caused dispossession of so many people, and the Great Depression. But the couple in the photograph have something to smile about and just a bit of security while the plantation owner who is facing the loss of ill-gotten generational wealth and public humiliation is clearly worried, and perhaps angry as well. The couple and their child do not stand in for all Black people, and neither does this worried and angry man stand in for all whites. The four of them are victims of a system, but they were experiencing their lives quite differently at the moments when these photographs were taken.

Semi-cooperative and cooperative agriculture would not solve every problem faced by farmers and tenant farmers. It will not, by itself, take up the questions of the theft of land and the genocide of Native American and Indigenous peoples. Restructured semi-capitalist or non-capitalist forms of agricultural production will not guarantee equality or security. No one said that they would. But I can't help but think that the plantation economy was bound to fail, and should have done so, and that semi-cooperative and cooperative government-sponsored agricultural programs had a necessary role in building up alternatives to the old ways. And within those alternatives greater possibilities were presented and made possible.

The tragedies that attended these programs were that they were not carried out to in greater scale and did not last longer and prevail against the old political and social systems. We are still fighting the hold-overs and hold-outs of the old planter aristocracy, and the threat of civil war is once again in the air. It is to our lasting shame that we have not yet found the ways to bring poor and working-class people of color and poor and working-class whites together in one mass movement to create good and lasting change.

Would you rather be the hopeful family with a chance at doing better with and within your community or the lone worried and angry man in the rocking chair?

      

     

When a picture says much more than one thousand words

Ella Watson, Washington, D.C., August 1942 in a photograph by Gordon Parks

for the Farm Security Administration, Library of Congress

I Remember, I Believe performed by Sweet Honey in the Rock

 

We've Got the Truth, We're Tired of The Tricks! | October 31st Mississippi Moral Monday

Just click on the link and you will see the video. This is fundamental to what is going on in the United States, and particularly in the South and in Black and poor and underserved communities, today.

 

Some recent posts from Nazarenes United for Peace

 

"One of the most distressing aspects of the current political and social crisis we are experiencing in the USA is the rising passion of White Christian Nationalism. The virulent racism embraced by folks who claim Christ as their savior and lord denies everything Jesus stood for, what he gave his life to overcome, and what he poured out his Spirit to enable in his Church.

White Christian Nationalism is a reincarnation of what the Roman Emperor Constantine foisted on the Church of Jesus Christ 1,700 years ago. He used the Church to attempt to conquer the world, and to eliminate those who opposed him, who were not like those he preferred. It was grotesque, destructive, and utterly unChristian.

When Christians rely on any government to give them permission to “be Christian” something is terribly awry. When we allow people of other races, cultures or religions to be oppressed and marginalized we have become the antithesis of all Jesus taught and lived.

To be holy is to be being perfected in love, for all people, living a transparent holiness, protecting the rights and the welfare of others, even if it is not profitable for us, or if we disagree with their choices.
This was the vision of the Wesleys, the early Nazarenes, and the best of our church around the globe, even now.

Co-suffering love, selfless service to others, robust courage to live Christlike lives in a broken world, and the refusal to demonize anyone who differs with us — that is holiness!!" -- Jesse C Middendorf, General Superintendent Emeritus, Church of the Nazarene.

Notes To The Church At A Time Of Difficulty & Promise

The Poor People's Campaign & June 18 in D.C.

On Prayer

These are the names of the people killed in Buffalo last week. I'm hoping that we will say their names as memory and as prayer for them and their families and their communities and as repentance for having allowed and supported violence and racism and classism.

 

Remember their names and stand up against hatred

 

The (Not So) Great Replacement

 

Islamic Networks Group Statement of Solidarity with Victims and Families of Buffalo Shooting

From the Islamic Networks Group:

We at ING join the rest of the nation in expressing our grief and solidarity over the horrendous act of racist violence in Buffalo, New York, this past weekend. We mourn the deaths of the 10 innocent victims and pray for the healing of those who were injured, most of whom are Black Americans. Our hearts go out to all those who are mourning loved ones and to all the communities and individuals shaken by this latest manifestation of racism and bigotry in our country and the world.

We stand in solidarity with all those impacted by this heinous act against racism, bigotry, and hate.

The attack in Buffalo, clearly motivated by racism according to the words of the shooter himself, was no isolated incident. We need only recall Oak Creek, WI, Charleston, SC, Pittsburgh, PA, Poway, CA, El Paso, TX, and too many other places that have suffered similar lethal attacks based on the same hatred that took ten lives in Buffalo, to see that this tide of racist violence has reached epidemic proportions. Behind these crimes lies a racist ideology that is now openly espoused by leading media and political figures.

The suspect in the Buffalo shooting issued an antisemitic and racist manifesto against Jews, Blacks, and other people of color indicating that he acted out of fear that White Americans like himself were in danger of being “replaced” by non-White “others”—a fear vigorously stoked by talk show hosts and even some members of Congress, to the point where a recent survey showed that one-third of Americans accept the basic tenets of this theory of “the Great Replacement.” And behind this openly racist ideology lies the ongoing problems of structural racism and implicit bias that still afflict our country.

Racism and bigotry in all their forms not only threaten the lives and physical safety of people of color and of minority religions, they are polarizing Americans to the point that calm and reasoned political discussion are rendered impossible and threatening our democracy, including measures to restrict voting that are justified by barely concealed appeals to the sort of racist fear that led the shooter in Buffalo to open fire on peaceful shoppers in a grocery store.

We must not let our country “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” to fall prey to the scourge of fear, division, and authoritarianism that is currently spreading through much of the world.

The terrible event in Buffalo must serve as a wake-up call, leading us to work with even greater determination against all forms of racism and bigotry.

We at ING have developed tools and resources for this that have been utilized by educators, corporations, local government, law enforcement, community organizations and other groups and institutions across the country.

Our Intercultural Speakers Bureau (ICSB) offers panels with representatives from marginalized groups who explore the roots, history, and current manifestations of racism and invite audiences to take specific, concrete action against racism personally and in their communities.

Our online educator resources offer teachers a 14-lesson plan curriculum free of charge that examines the history and origins of dominant narratives about marginalized groups, the process of racialization that leads to implicit bias and racism, and their manifestations in society today. The curriculum concludes with lesson plans about the power of counter narratives through the voices of the affected groups, as well as individual and collective actions for countering racism.

We encourage you to go to our website (www.ing.org) and join us in our critical work towards an America that lives up more fully to our ideals of justice, equality, and human rights for all its citizens.

ING Team

Bishop Barber Speaks On The Murders In Buffalo

 

Our answer to injustice, violence, and oppression...