Inside these LA dispensaries, Black women are redesigning what cannabis culture looks like

When Kika Keith and her daughter opened a cannabis dispensary in South Central Los Angeles last year, they faced a design challenge: how could they create a store where older Black customers, who had seen all the ravages of the “war on drugs”, would feel comfortable making a purchase?

Donnie Anderson in front of the empty retail space he was renting in Los Angeles to eventually turn into a cannabis retail shop. He has given the space up due to the long delays with the city.

It had been a tough battle for Keith to open a dispensary as a Black woman, in a post-legalized marijuana market where most of the business owners had become white men. She and her daughter, Kika Howze, wanted their store, Gorilla Rx Wellness Co, to reflect their focus on neighborhood investment and their hip-hop aesthetic.

But they didn’t want to emulate the sleek hip-hop branding of youth-focused cannabis companies like Cookies or Stiizy, the kind of “shiny” dispensaries that had “music videos playing with girls’ breasts out”, as Keith put it.

They would have Los Angeles-born hip-hop stars like Kendrick Lamar and ScHoolboy Q on their soundtrack, but they wanted their dispensary to feel like a grocery store, with products more reminiscent of a Whole Foods vitamin aisle.

To design their community-focused dispensary, Kika Keith and her daughter Kika Howze focused on joyful colors and a family-friendly vibe.

“We want to model what a community-first dispensary looks like, and at the head of our community is our elders,” Keith said.

More than five years after California voters approved the sale of recreational marijuana, the legal weed market still faces plenty of economic and social challenges. But there’s also a wide variety of legal dispensaries across the state working to erase the stigma of criminalization and attract new cannabis consumers.

What California’s legal marijuana stores actually look and feel like has been a key part of that redefinition. New entrepreneurs like Keith are continuing to push the boundaries of dispensary design, particularly when it comes to appealing to a broader range of Black consumers, while simultaneously pushing back against the “whitewashing” of the legal cannabis market.

“Corporations conveniently forget that a lot of cannabis culture is centered around Black culture,” said Ebony McGee Andersen, the chief operating officer of Josephine & Billie’s, another South Los Angeles dispensary operated by and for Black women. “You can’t fake that. You can’t appropriate that.”

Across California, there have been all kinds of experiments in legal dispensary design – some more successful than others. The past five years has introduced giant weed tourist attractions like Orange County’s Planet13, a marijuana theme park of a store that features a fake smoke-filled VW party bus with surf boards on top, and Deli by Caliva, a chain of dispensaries modeled after 1950s-style neighborhood sandwich counters.

The Parent Company introduced dispensaries styled like old-school neighborhood delis to encourage ‘canna-curious’ customers.

There was, briefly, a luxury shop within a Beverly Hills department store called “The High End,” which sold luxury French rolling papers and $1,100 bongs. (The department store, Barneys, filed for bankruptcy later that same year.)

In Los Angeles, one of the clear winners in the race to define the aesthetic of the legal dispensary has been MedMen, a national cannabis company often referred to as the “Apple store of weed” for its sleek Scandinavian design and digital service.

But as new companies try to find space in the challenging legal market, opening another dispensary with the same bland “Apple store” aesthetic is not enough, said Melanie Coddington, the Oakland-based founder of Sungrown Studio, which specializes in dispensary design.

“Consumers want to know the owner’s story now,” said Coddington, who has designed at least 20 dispensaries across the country since 2019.

The store is named after Black artists Josephine Baker and Billie Holliday, who faced persecution for smoking marijuana, and is designed to resemble a cannabis speakeasy “tea pad” of the American Jazz age, where Black patrons could smoke and talk in a relaxing environment. There’s a timeline on the wall with a long history of centuries of marijuana’s medicinal and social uses, putting the recent painful decades of prohibition in broader context.

The store’s speakeasy-style entrance, where customers have to say a password to duck behind a velvet curtain into the main retail space, has resonated with customers, Andersen said, giving them a moment to take a breath and feel like they’re transitioning into a less anxious space.

It’s a contrast not only with the long criminalization of marijuana, but also with the uncomfortable atmosphere of many male-owned dispensaries, which were marked by “a lot of sexism and misogyny”, Andersen said.

Andersen and Beatty obsessed over the details of their store’s design, building a big bathroom for customers to use and selecting decor that would make the space feel “like your auntie’s living room”, so much so that they almost put a plastic cover on the store’s couch.

With older Black women customers in mind, they’re also careful to stock a wide variety of cannabis products that don’t have to be smoked or inhaled, like creams and salves, or cannabis-infused honey, something that older women in their own families who were against marijuana were more willing to embrace.

Gorilla Rx founder Keith, whose father was Rastafarian, was raised in a “really cannabis conscious” family, where the plant was important “for wellness and spiritual purposes”.

But in South Central Los Angeles, she said, the “war on drugs” left a legacy not only of incarceration and criminalization targeting Black families, but also of selective enforcement, with “grimy” illegal trap shops allowed to keep operating in Black neighborhoods, even as they were cleared out of wealthier and whiter neighborhoods on the city’s west side.

“It was really important that we created a space that was welcoming and inviting to our elders in the community and that had the ability to be wellness-focused and erase the stigma,” Keith said.

Montana Never Was a Coal State, But It’s Now a Legal Pot State

For years now we have heard Jon Tester and Steve Daines declare themselves “coal state senators” whenever they so willingly vote against measures to reduce or tax the use of coal and its planet-killing pollution. But as recently released data show, the state and local tax revenue and number of jobs created by Montana’s legalization of recreational and medical marijuana now outpace coal — a trend that is expected to continue.

Montanans voted overwhelmingly to approve Initiative-190 in 2020 to legalize adult recreational marijuana use. In fact, tens of thousands more Montanans supported recreational pot than voted for Senator Steve Daines, Governor Greg Gianforte or Congressman Matt Rosendale. If “bipartisan support” means anything to the politicians that continually blather about it, the vote for legalizing recreational pot indisputably garnered votes from across the political spectrum.

While medicinal marijuana has been legal in Montana since the voter approved passage of I-148 in 2004, adult recreational use only became legal in January of 2022. In a 2020 study titled “An Assessment of the Market and Tax Revenue Potential of Recreational Cannabis in Montana,”the University of Montana’s Bureau of Business and Economic Research predicted total sales of recreational pot would be a whopping $217 million this year, producing $43.4 million in state and local tax revenues. That number was predicted to rise to $259.8 million in sales and $52 million in tax revenues by 2026.

As reported in a recent article, the Montana Department of Revenue posted sales data showing total medicinal and recreational cannabis sales hit $72.9 million in the first three months of this year. Recreational sales outpace medicinal and with the tourist season upon us — and an expected 10 million or more visitors to the Big Sky State — those numbers are only expected to increase. It’s fair to say the sun is shining on the marijuana industry in Montana while coal continues its precipitous decline.

According to a report from the Governor’s Office of Budget and Program Planning, coal tax revenues last year came in at $45 million and are predicted to fall to $36 million by 2025 due to “continued decline in domestic demand.” Indeed, if one could say the future of the coal industry in Montana is black, very black.

When “The Marijuana Opportunity and Expungement Act” passed the House earlier this month, Montana’s Congressman Matt Rosendale voted against it —even though 37 states, including Montana, now have legal medicinal and/or recreational marijuana. Despite his title, apparently Rosendale doesn’t think he has to actually “represent” Montana’s voters.

So now the measure goes to the Senate and Republican Daines has already told Politico: “I oppose it.” Really Senator Daines? And why would you do that given that more Montanans voted to legalize pot than voted for you in the last election?

Democrat Jon Tester should answer the same question since, as also reported by Politico: “Sen. Jon Tester of Montana was similarly unenthusiastic about ending federal marijuana penalties. Legalization would ‘cause more problems than it solves,’ Tester said.”

Disgusting, isn’t it, how these politicians can laud themselves as representing a “coal state” and sweep the known and disastrous problems caused by coal under the rug — but are willing to happily vote against the overwhelming wishes of Montanans based solely on their personal opinions.

Montana is nowhere near a “coal state” – and never was. Given Montana’s indisputable vote to support legal pot, it’s clearly time for Daines, Tester and Rosendale to leave their phony anti-environment coal state excuses behind, admit Montana is now a “legal pot state,” and start representing their constituents’ priorities in Congress.

Julian Assange’s extradition to U.S. a step closer after judge’s order

A court in London on Wednesday formally approved the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States to face spying charges, sending an order to Britain’s interior minister for a decision and inching the WikiLeaks founder one step closer to a transfer.

The procedural step in the long-running legal battle was announced in an order from District Judge Paul Goldspring during a brief hearing at Westminster Magistrates’ Court. Assange watched by video link from Belmarsh Prison in London, according to the Associated Press, where he has been held since April 2019 after the Ecuadoran Embassy revoked his political asylum.
The order, which Assange has the right to appeal, heads to the desk of British Home Secretary Priti Patel, who will have the final say on whether to grant the extradition. The
order follows the British Supreme Court’s refusal to grant Assange permission last month to appeal against a lower court’s ruling that he could be extradited to the United States.

Described by one of Assange’s lawyers as a “brief but significant moment in the case,” the development Wednesday is the latest blow for Assange, who faces trial under the Espionage Act in the United States. The 50-year-old Australian faces 18 U.S. criminal charges stemming from WikiLeaks’ publishing of thousands of diplomatic cables and classified files in 2010. Assange would stand trial in federal court in Northern Virginia.

If convicted, Assange faces up to 175 years in prison. He has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.

Assange’s attorneys have four weeks to file submissions to Patel before she is expected to rule on the extradition, according to the AP. Mark Summers, one of Assange’s lawyers, told the court that they planned to submit “serious submissions” to Patel, according to the Guardian.

emphasis mine.

https://www.thecity.nyc/2022/4/19/23032983/feds-consider-taking-over-nyc-jails-corrections-us-attorney

Rikers Island is one step closer to being under total federal control.

The city’s jails “are in a state of crisis…and action is desperately needed now,” wrote Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams in a scathing court filing to a federal judge on Tuesday.

Williams threatened to push for the entire city Department of Correction to be put under a court-appointed receiver, who would have power to totally revamp the agency and ignore existing union contract rules.

The lack of “dramatic systemic reforms” would leave his office with no other choice “but to seek more aggressive relief” like a court-appointed receiver given total control, he wrote.

Currently, only the jail facility itself is under federal watch. Williams noted that more than six years of oversight by federal monitor Steve Martin has led to few improvements.

“We remain alarmed by the extraordinary level of violence and disorder at the jails and the ongoing imminent risk of harm that inmates and correction officers face every day,” Williams wrote to federal judge Laura Taylor Swain, who has overseen the case for years.

In an unusual move, Williams asked the court to order Correction Commissioner Louis Molina and a representative from City Hall to attend the next meeting with the monitor and the feds on Thursday so they can directly respond to any questions.

Williams said neither Molina “nor department operational staff” attended meetings on April 5 and April 14 to discuss the city’s broader plans to improve conditions.

On April 15, the Department of Correction Twitter account touted how Molina attended the New York International Auto Show at the Javits Center to display some of the agency’s new vehicle fleet.

On Tuesday, when asked about the court filing, Mayor Eric Adams blamed his predecessors and made vague promises of reform.

“Rikers was a mess,” he told reporters. “And we need to be clear on that. It did not start in January. And we’re going to move forward to make it a humane place.”

A History of Violence
Martin, a corrections consultant from Austin, Texas, was appointed federal monitor in the summer of 2015 as part of a sweeping settlement tied to a class-action suit by a group of city inmates who alleged abuses by officers that included excessive solitary confinement and beatings.

Then-Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara later joined the so-called Nunez case, named after the lead defendant, citing a “deep-seated culture of violence” against teen inmates at Rikers Island.

Under the terms of the court settlement, the DOC has taken some measures intended to reduce the use of physical force by officers, such as revising policy in 2017 to order officers to avoid blows to inmates’ heads with fists or batons unless their lives are being threatened.

But escalating violence and inhumane conditions have persisted and spurred calls for change from decarceration activists and local politicians who have asked Gov. Kathy Hochul to bring in the National Guard and pleaded with President Joe Biden to intervene.

The department has also been plagued by a staffing crisis, with at least 1,000 officers calling out sick on average each day.

Martin’s monitoring team has itself hired an “independent expert in correctional staffing” to analyze how and where officers are deployed. A highly anticipated report on that analysis has taken more than a year to compile and there’s no target date for its release.

The Correction Officers Benevolent Association has contended the city should hire at least 2,000 new officers, bringing the systemwide total to approximately 10,000.

But Martin and former jail commissioners have pointed out that hundreds of correction officers are assigned to administrative tasks like data entry, secretarial support, time keeping, social services and analytics.

Michael Skelly, a spokesperson for COBA did not respond to requests seeking comment on the possible push for a court-appointed total takeover.

‘A Drastic Remedy’
The appointment of a receiver is rare and typically seen as a last resort but not unprecedented.

In 2007, Chicago’s Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center was put under a receiver. Earl Dunlap, a nationally recognized expert, stepped aside in 2015 after implementing a series of reforms.

In 2005, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation was taken over by a court-appointed receiver. That takeover has had mixed results and remains partially in place.

Elizabeth Glazer, director of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice from 2014 until 2020, told THE CITY last year that she believed the appointment of a federal receiver, with emergency powers to make unilateral decisions, was the only possible solution.

She and former Correction Commissioner Michael Jacobson, who served during the Dinkins and Giuliani administration, also recommended that takeover in a Daily News editorial last week.

“It’s a drastic remedy,” Glazer said Tuesday, “but I don’t see any other way out at this point.”

“It’s pretty powerful medicine,” she added.

Democrats Panned for Move to Codify Title 42 With ‘Stephen Miller Bill’

Immigration justice advocates on Tuesday demanded that federal lawmakers reject a legislative package they derided as the “Stephen Miller bill,” which would codify a rule that has expelled more than 1.7 million asylum-seekers since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Texas-based group RAICES dubbed the proposal—officially called the Public Health and Border Security Act—the “Stephen Miller bill” after a chief architect of former President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda, including the use of Title 42 of the Public Health Safety Act to refuse entry to asylum-seekers, supposedly in the name of mitigating the spread of Covid-19.

President Joe Biden was applauded by rights advocates earlier this month when his administration responded to mounting pressure and announced the provision would no longer be in effect starting May 23, after immigration officials implement public health measures at border crossings.

“The Democrats co-sponsoring this bill are allowing political propaganda to determine the bills they support and shamefully pandering to white supremacists by seeking to codify this xenophobic and deadly Trump-era policy.”

But right-wing members of Biden’s own party, including Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) and Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), are co-sponsoring what RAICES called the “cruel and senseless” package introduced Tuesday, which would prevent the government from terminating Title 42 provisions until 60 days after the end of the national Covid-19 emergency declaration.

Title 42 of the Public Health Safety Act states that the government can prohibit “the introduction of persons” from foreign countries where there is a communicable disease that could spread in the U.S., and since March 2020 has been used to expel more than 16,000 unaccompanied children. People who have been turned away under the order have been sent back to their home countries, where many face violence and persecution, or to Mexico.

“Title 42 is a cruel and racist Trump-era policy crafted by white nationalist Stephen Miller to prevent Black and Brown immigrants from seeking their legal right to asylum in the U.S.,” said Allen Morris, policy and government affairs strategist at RAICES. “This ‘Stephen Miller bill’ is nothing but a cruel and craven homage to the racist right wing, politicizing access to asylum under the guise of public health and bipartisanship.”

“The Democrats co-sponsoring this bill are allowing political propaganda to determine the bills they support and shamefully pandering to white supremacists by seeking to codify this xenophobic and deadly Trump-era policy,” Morris added.

As the so-called Public Health and Border Security Act was introduced Tuesday, other conservative Democratic lawmakers who have not signed on as co-sponsors were reportedly pushing the White House to reverse Biden’s decision to rescind Title 42.

Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), a close ally of the president, told “Face the Nation” on CBS Sunday that he hoped the decision would be “reconsidered appropriately” because “we’re seeing infections rise.”

Kelly and Sens. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) and Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.)—who are all facing competitive reelection races—are also pressuring the administration to keep Title 42 in place, claiming border authorities need “more technology…access roads and, in some places, they need physical barriers” to cope with an influx of immigrants that may result from the lifting of the order in May.

The White House, said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council (AIC), has failed to explain to the public why Title 42 is “counterproductive, unnecessary, and actively harmful”—allowing right-wing commentators and politicians to spread “misinformation” about the supposed dangers that the end of the order will inflict.

While sending 1.7 million people into dangerous situations, Title 42 has not stopped people from crossing into the U.S., Reichlin-Melnick noted, citing statistics from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

As the AIC wrote last October, public health experts “assert that Title 42 expulsions themselves could pose a public health threat, as people are detained together ‘for days to weeks prior to transporting them’ for expulsions, which ‘heighten the risk of Covid-19 transmission across national borders.'”

RAICES on Tuesday noted that claims that the U.S. cannot cope with an uptick in migration numbers have been discredited in recent weeks as thousands of Ukrainian refugees have “presented themselves at the U.S.-Mexico border and were met with open arms ahead of their Black and Brown counterparts.”

“This hypocrisy and stark difference in treatment is evidence of Title 42’s purpose as a tool of racial discrimination—not public health,” said Morris. “We at RAICES, along with communities across the border, remain ready to coordinate with the government to welcome all people seeking safety at our borders.”

Amid Backlash, Democrats Consider Banning Consultants From Anti-Union Activity

The Democratic Party’s governing body is reportedly considering a plan to bar its consultants from anti-union activity following backlash over revelations that Amazon hired Global Strategy Group—a prominent Democratic polling firm—to assist its union-busting campaign in New York City.

“Democrats should ban consultants from not just specifically working on anti-union activity, but also working for actively anti-union corporations.”

Politico reported Tuesday that “a union-drafted addendum to any contract between a Democratic Party political committee and a consultant would forbid the consultant—or any of its parents, subsidiaries, or affiliates—from participating in an array of activities involving unions,” including “union-busting, aiding an employer in a labor dispute, or lobbying against union-backed legislation.”

A spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) told the outlet that it is “in the process of reviewing the proposal,” but Politico noted that “union officials indicated it was a sure thing.”

Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, issued a statement welcoming “Democratic Party committees’ decision to amend their contract and [request for proposal] processes in light of reporting that GSG had been working for Amazon as they sought to defeat the recent organizing drive.”

“By amending their contracts and RFP processes to exclude firms actively working with clients who seek to prevent or limit working people’s basic rights to act collectively or otherwise act against their interests as union members, the committees demonstrate their commitment to democracy and shared prosperity,” Shuler added.

On Twitter, Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, hailed the proposed amendment as a result of persistent worker organizing.

“Start in the workplace and the politics will follow,” Nelson wrote. “This is happening because workers are taking hold of our power. Every worker who has acted in solidarity with their colleagues made this happen.”

A day before Amazon workers at the JFK8 facility in Staten Island scored the first-ever union victory at the company in the United States, CNBC reported that Amazon “tapped an influential consulting and polling firm with close ties to Democratic political groups to help the company thwart” the organizing drive.

“Global Strategy Group, which served as a polling partner for a pro-Biden super PAC ahead of the 2020 election, has been working for Amazon since at least late last year to produce anti-union materials,” CNBC continued. “At JFK8… and three other facilities on Staten Island, GSG has put together videos featuring Amazon managers and executives, and has distributed flyers to staffers. Amazon has delivered anti-union presentations that workers have been required to sit through at meetings, which were often attended by representatives from GSG.”

“GSG employees have also been monitoring the social media accounts of Amazon Labor Union organizers,” CNBC added, referring to the independent, worker-led union that spearheaded the organizing campaign at JFK8.

GSG has long had close ties to the Democratic Party, previously providing campaign services to big-name lawmakers including Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.). White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, who has walked back some of President Joe Biden’s supportive comments about the Amazon unionization push, worked for GSG a decade ago.

As The Intercept’s Alex Weatherhead documented last month, “GSG’s partnerships have included numerous corporations with a vested interest in government regulation,” including Microsoft, Google, Pfizer, and Goldman Sachs.

News that Amazon—which spent $4.3 million on anti-union consultants last year—hired GSG to bolster its aggressive union-busting effort sparked outrage, with critics arguing that the Democratic Party cannot claim to support workers’ right to unionize while employing an anti-union consulting firm.

In response to Politico’s reporting on the DNC amendment, progressives demanded that the party go much further.

“Democrats should ban consultants from not just specifically working on anti-union activity, but also working for actively anti-union corporations,” said Jordan Zakarin of More Perfect Union. “Oh, add in every bank and every corporate lobby that actively funds campaigns to defeat Democratic legislation, too.”

‘Stunning Clean Sweep’ as Starbucks Workers Win 5 Straight Union Votes in Virginia

The nationwide wave of labor organizing by Starbucks workers continued to bear fruit Tuesday as employees at five of the coffee chain’s Richmond, Virginia stores overwhelmingly voted to unionize.

“Within 48 hours we had 70% of the store signed up for union cards.”

According to More Perfect Union, the votes at the five Richmond Starbucks were 17-1, 22-3, 11-2, 13-8, and 19-0. The stores are the company’s first in Virginia to unionize; workers at a Springfield location narrowly rejected forming a union last week.

“The movement of workers demanding dignity on the job wins again,” tweeted U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). “Congratulations to Starbucks workers in Richmond on your vote to unionize! I will see you Sunday!”

Sanders is scheduled to appear Sunday at Unity Fest, a free event “to support and celebrate the organizing efforts of Starbucks workers locally and across the country.”

Starbucks Workers United, the group coordinating the nationwide organizing effort, now boasts a record of 21 unionizations in 23 attempts.

Inspired by the historic unionization of Starbucks workers in Buffalo, New York late last year, the global coffee chain’s Richmond employees began their own organizing journey in February.

“It really came together fast for our store,” said Tyler Hofmann, a barista at the North Boulevard Starbucks. “My store manager went on vacation, and I was like, this is the time, we have an opportunity to organize.”

“My store was super supportive,” he added, “and within 48 hours we had 70% of the store signed up for union cards.”

Starbucks workers have defied what they say is a concerted union-busting campaign by the Seattle-based company. Last week, a group of 24 of the coffee giant’s employees urged the U.S. House of Representatives’ labor committee to compel billionaire Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz to testify about what they called an incessant and unlawful effort to thwart the nationwide unionization drive.

Last week, Bloomberg reported prosecutors at the National Labor Relations Board plan to formally accuse Starbucks of illegally firing a group of activists seeking to unionize their Memphis, Tennessee store.

Willow Lawn Starbucks workers find out they won their union election unanimously, 19-0. pic.twitter.com/JUai9NYzj5

— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) April 19, 2022

Thanks @JBPritzker for signing into law the bill that made a permanent VBM list an option for Illinois voters. I worked very hard to educate @StateRepAmmons & members of the GA to understand the importance of this. #ModernizeOurElections https://t.co/NrApI0m6Qi

— ChampaignCountyClerk (@ChampCtyClerk) April 20, 2022

Why Nina Turner Is Taking on the Establishment Again

One thing became abundantly clear in my one-hour conversation with former Ohio state Senator and Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign co-chair Nina Turner. From her decision to run (again) for Congress in Ohio’s 11th District, to the inflation and price gouging that squeezes working people, Turner comports herself with a sense of urgency that is maddeningly absent from the average Beltway barnacle.

“If your hair is on fire,” Turner says, recalling the words of former Cleveland Mayor Michael. R. White, ​“you ought to act like your hair is on fire.”

I spoke with Turner on March 15 about her congressional campaign, about centering ourselves in the now while looking critically at the past — and about staring soberly at what’s coming.

NINA TURNER: All over the world, we find oppressed people suffering — and they continue to suffer. Whether we’re talking about the war in Ukraine or the pandemic, the level of pain that everyday people are feeling in this country, and in this world, is suffocating. It is hard to keep faith; it is hard to believe that a better day can come. But we must.

I come from a Black liberation theology household, similar to Dr. Cornel West. My mother was steeped in that part of Christianity. We are in a horrible moment, but there is hope. And that hope has to do with each and every one of us, whether we have a fancy title or not, doing what we can, where we are, to be that change we want to see in the world. If we can hold onto hope, we will continue to make the impossible possible. As Nelson Mandela once said, ​“It always seems impossible until it’s done.”

We have to deal with these GOP states that say they believe in small government even though, this very moment, they are all up in everyone else’s business, whether we’re talking about voting rights, what they’re doing to the LGBTQ+ community in states like Florida and Texas, or the push to strip away a woman’s right to be able to control her own body. Democrats are going to have to stand up and not only call out these predatory policies, but do something about them.

One way to do something is to invest more money in state legislatures. I served as a state senator in the great state of Ohio at a time when Republicans had supermajorities (and they still have supermajorities in states like mine), and the Democrats fell down. They ignored state legislatures for the shiny objects of Congress and the presidency. Why can’t we do both? This is why we’re going through the gerrymandering hell we’re going through right now.

To understand the moment we’re in, we need to recognize that the attacks we’re facing have been years in the making. The judiciary didn’t get stocked with Republican appointees overnight. Every day a new state is coming out with a different version of anti-abortion or anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. It’s hard to wrap your head around where it’s all coming from unless you take a long view of how the Right — and the financial forces backing the conservative agenda — have strategized and manifested this assault over decades. Democrats, like you said, have not taken that threat seriously. Now it feels like we’re all scrambling for cover from a reactionary legal and legislative carpet bombing…

NT: So the question is: What will the collective do about it? Because we cannot keep going down this track and think that everything is going to be okay.

One way to deal with this malaise, this corrupting force, is to have good forces pushing back. And the fastest, most direct way to do that is through government. By their own actions, the Republicans are showing they are on nobody’s side, not even their own voters. So we got one party that has lost its ever-loving mind, and then we got another party that does not understand how to leverage the power of government on behalf of the very people who put them in office.

We need conscious-minded Republicans to stand up and resist this Trumpism that has taken hold in that party. And we need Democrats of good conscience to stand up and not accept things as they are, to use the power the people gave them in 2020 to do something to improve people’s material conditions.

Then we need faith-based communities to rise up and say what some of these Evangelicals are doing is wrong. ​“What would Jesus do?” None of that foolishness they doing! None of it.

And these corporations! Look at gas prices right now. The federal government needs to step up and regulate their behinds, because they’re taking this Ukraine crisis and raining down pain and misery on people while making record profits. People are suffering, and they’re just walking over people’s bodies to make another dollar. Where are the elected officials calling these fools out and hauling them into Congress to answer for what they’re doing? It’s untenable and it’s immoral.

ou served on Cleveland City Council from 2006 to 2008 and as an Ohio state senator from 2008 to 2014. You were the Democratic nominee for Ohio secretary of state in 2014 and a key surrogate for Bernie Sanders’ presidential run in 2016 — and the 2020 campaign’s national co-chair.

And then you ran in a special Democratic congressional primary in 2021 — the same seat you’re running for again now — after Rep. Marcia Fudge resigned to serve as secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Biden administration.

You began that 2021 race as the clear front-runner but lost to Rep. Shontel Brown with voter turnout about 17 percent. What will be different this time around, both in terms of the circumstances surrounding the primary and your campaign strategy?

NT: The opportunity that this regular election cycle presents is — new people, new district, new time. With redistricting, a great deal of this district is new, which means a lot of different people who didn’t get a chance to weigh in on the special election are going to be able to do so May 3.

Cleveland is the poorest large city in America. I am running because this community needs someone who’s going to fight for and beside them, and that is what I do.

Not much has changed in terms of the issue points. Medicare for All, of course. Raising the minimum wage. Workers need to be able to unionize without fear of losing their jobs— and if they are in a union, to fight for better wages, better benefits and better working conditions.

I was just with the Sherwin-Williams workers here in Cleveland who are on strike. I discovered from talking to them that they’re working with chemicals, and they don’t even get paid sick leave! It’s ridiculous.

We have a Starbucks here in Cleveland, the West Sixth Street store, where workers are trying to unionize, and I’ve been side by side with them. What these Starbucks workers are doing all over this country is beautiful. They are the next generation of unionists.

It takes courage to try to unionize. Amazon workers in Bessemer, Ala., I see you.

In These Times readers know what happened in 2021: we saw John Deere workers, coal miners, nurses and people from just about every sector or profession you can think of, rising up all over this country, going on strike or fighting to create a union

And think about this, too: Within all these different facilities you’ve probably got some Trumpites working there, you’ve got Berniecrats, Clintonites, libertarians, people from across the political spectrum. They’re catching hell from the system but they put all of that political ideology nonsense to the side and they stood up together. But I want to remind people that when workers go on strike, they don’t get their paycheck — it takes an inordinate amount of courage to lose that money and still stand strong. Most people live one or two paychecks away — or one health crisis away — from total ruin. To stand up and say, ​“Send me, I’ll go. I’m about to go on strike and forgo the wages that I make for the greater good,” takes a lot.

Even with record numbers of people voluntarily quitting their jobs and demanding better pay and treatment, and public sentiment being overwhelmingly in support of unions and workers, we are a far cry from the number of strikes that used to take place in this country. Union density has fallen to historic lows. The majority of workers have been working harder and longer and producing more than ever, while their wages stagnate. The labor movement has been under constant attack, and we’ve got a long, long way to go to rebuild it — but doing so, I believe, is imperative for democracy.

You were deeply involved in the fight to defeat Senate Bill 5, Ohio’s version of Act 10 in Wisconsin, which has been devastating for workers and unions. You have also been a strong advocate for passing the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act, which has been left on the chopping block in Congress. But you also found yourself sparring with the Cleveland Teachers Union a decade ago, which strongly opposed your position on charter schools and education reform. So, a lot has happened in the past 10 years.

Y

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/04/how-private-equity-took-over-air-ambulances.html

Kathleen Hoechlin was in the intensive-care unit, wondering if she would ever walk again, when she and her husband, Matt, started receiving the phone calls. It was January 2018, and the couple had just gone skiing in Mammoth Lakes, California. On the last run of the day, Kathleen skied over a small jump and landed on her back, shattering the L1 vertebra in her lower spine. With the nearest hospital ill equipped to handle the required surgery, she was loaded onto a small plane and flown 300 miles south over the Sierra Nevada mountain range to Loma Linda, where she underwent 12 hours of surgery to replace the vertebra with a metal implant. The phone call, which the Hoechlins received less than a day after the surgery, was from the air-ambulance provider, Guardian Flight, informing them that the plane ride had cost $97,269.

Kathleen Hoechlin recovering post-surgery at Loma Linda University Medical Center in February 2018. Photo: Courtesy Kathleen Hoechlin
The couple tried not to panic, holding out hope that their insurance policy would cover the cost. But when the explanation of benefits finally arrived, it showed that Guardian Flight was out of network and that their policy would cover only $17,569, leaving the Hoechlins responsible for the remaining $79,700. Guardian Flight continued to hound them, with Kathleen not yet out of the full-body brace she was sent home in. “They were calling the week I got home,” she says. “I just told them, ‘How can you sleep at night? I can’t talk to you when you’re asking me for this money while I’m trying to learn to walk again.’”

From then on, Matt dealt with the incessant phone calls himself and managed to negotiate the remaining balance down to $20,000 after telling Guardian Flight that he and Kathleen would have to file for bankruptcy if it were any higher. Between their savings, gifts from family members, and a GoFundMe campaign, the Hoechlins managed to pay off the remainder. “It left me with a lot of trauma and a lot of ‘aha’ moments,” Kathleen says. “Why is this happening, and why should patients have to go through this?”

I first came across Kathleen’s story after being transported by an air ambulance myself last April, albeit under less severe circumstances. I was also on vacation in Mammoth Lakes when I experienced intense chest pain that was later diagnosed as myocarditis. After keeping me for a night at Mammoth Hospital, the staff there ordered that I be transferred via air ambulance to a medical center in Reno, Nevada, where a cardiology team could do the required testing. I pushed back initially, worried about the potential cost of the flight, but the doctors insisted it was necessary. Within a few hours, I was strapped to a gurney with tubes in my nose, flying over Lake Tahoe in a small plane while two paramedics sat nearby, ready to administer nitroglycerin in case my chest pain flared up again. The air-ambulance provider, REACH Air Medical Services, sent me a letter two months later saying the flight had cost me $86,184.

I spent the next eight months fending off letters and phone calls from REACH requesting full payment. Eventually, my employer intervened and got my insurance company, Cigna, to renegotiate with REACH, leaving me responsible for a co-pay of only $132 on the out-of-network claim. Even so, the experience left me with some of the same questions as Kathleen Hoechlin: Why is this happening, and how could something as essential as an air ambulance possibly be so expensive, especially when an estimated 550,000 patients in the U.S. require one each year? That line of questioning led to at least one culprit: private equity.

At the start of the aughts, private-equity firms conducted about $5 billion worth of deals in the U.S. health-care sector each year. By 2019, that figure had jumped to an estimated $120 billion, a result of deep-pocketed firms looking to park their money in a sector perceived as recessionproof (people get sick even when the economy is bad) and ripe for consolidation. When major private-equity firms started buying up air-ambulance companies, it set off a flurry of acquisitions. In 2010, Bain Capital bought Air Medical Group Holdings for $1 billion, only to sell it five years later for double that amount to KKR, which, in turn, merged the company with yet another air-ambulance provider, American Medical Response, under the name Global Medical Response. (Tracking this shell game can be dizzying. In the three years between Hoechlin’s air-ambulance flight and mine, Guardian Flight merged with REACH Air Medical Services; both are owned by Global Medical Response.) In 2017, American Securities drastically accelerated private equity’s takeover of the air-ambulance industry with its $2.5 billion purchase of Air Methods, the largest domestic provider of air ambulances. (In 2016, during its final year as a publicly traded company, Air Methods posted a $97.9 million profit on $1.17 billion in revenue, and the year before had paid its CEO $2.5 million in direct compensation, including stock options.) That purchase established the industry’s current landscape, in which two private-equity firms, American Securities and KKR, control almost two-thirds of the national market for air ambulances, according to Medicare data.

As private equity tightened its stranglehold on the industry, it jacked up the already-high prices. Between 2008 and 2017, the median price charged by providers for helicopter air ambulances nearly tripled, jumping from $12,500 to $35,900 per flight, according to a study by the Health Care Cost Institute. As the Hoechlins and I experienced, air-ambulance providers are often out of network with private insurance companies. That’s not by accident: Private-equity-backed and publicly traded air-ambulance providers in particular tend to remain out of network to charge higher rates than what may be allowed under an in-network contract. Since patients don’t decide when or where they have a medical emergency that requires them to be airlifted to a hospital, they don’t have a choice in which air-ambulance provider they use. As a result, competition in the marketplace does little to keep prices down — the higher providers set the price, the more they may be able to get paid. When insurers deem the cost too high, they pass the enormous remaining balance on to the patient, a practice known as “balance billing.” Among privately insured patients, an estimated two in five air-ambulance flights result in a potential balance bill. About half the time, though, the insurance companies simply pay up, according to Loren Adler, associate director of the USC-Brookings Schaeffer Initiative for Health Policy. Private equity “saw an opportunity to say, ‘Look, the existing companies aren’t leaning into the surprise-billing threat enough from a moneymaking perspective,’” says Adler, who co-authored a white paper last year about private equity’s impact on the air-ambulance industry. “If you really lean on that a lot, sometimes you can fight with the patient to get paid. But I think a bigger part of the money thing is often you can cajole the employer to pay because they don’t want their employee getting stuck with an $80,000 bill.”

Private-equity firms have applied their balance-billing approach to other corners of the health-care sector they have encroached upon, including emergency-physician staffing, anesthesia, and ground ambulances — all services for which patients don’t typically choose their providers. In 2017, Blackstone Group acquired the physician-staffing company TeamHealth for $6.1 billion, only to be one-upped a year later by KKR’s $9.9 billion purchase of another physician-staffing company, Envision Healthcare. In the time since, both companies have faced scrutiny for their aggressive billing practices, with TeamHealth sending thousands of surprise bills to patients in 2017 and even going so far as to sue low-income patients over unpaid medical debts. (The company now insists it has a “long-standing policy” against balance billing and ceased its practice of suing patients after a ProPublica investigation called attention to it in 2019.)

Musk says he would bring free speech and transparency to Twitter. His record says otherwise

Elon Musk might be serious about taking over Twitter. Or his hostile bid might be just a rich man’s whim, a distraction he’ll abandon when it begins to bore him. Or maybe he’s punking everybody.

Because it’s Elon Musk, it’s hard to tell. Yes, he transformed the automobile industry with electric-car maker Tesla. His rocket ship company, SpaceX, reinvigorated an industry long dominated by plodding defense contractors such as Lockheed and Boeing. Remarkable accomplishments both.

But he’s been sued for defamation, has defended himself by saying no one takes him literally and was fined by the government for making fraudulent business claims. On Twitter, where he regales his 80 million followers with a 24/7 stream of pure Musk, he’s fashioned himself into a jokester, a provocateur, and, when the mood suits him, a clown.

In literary terms, he’s what you’d call an unreliable narrator.

In his bid to buy Twitter, he opened with a flourish that suggested levity, working the number “420″ into his proffered share price. The weed joke evidently fell flat: The board created a “poison pill” provision to deter him.

Now, in need of support from shareholders and potential financiers, he has turned to rhetoric, laying out a grand if fuzzy vision for the Twitter he would build.

Calling himself a “free speech absolutist,” he said he wants to make the social network what he regards as a friendlier place for free expression by “being cautious about” permanent bans and loosening its content restrictions. “A social media platform’s policies are good if the most extreme 10% on left and right are equally unhappy,” he tweeted Tuesday.

He also said he would make Twitter transparent about its inner workings, open-sourcing the algorithm it uses to sort and amplify tweets so it’s no longer a “black box.”

How seriously should such talk be taken? Rather than try to parse his words — always a fool’s errand — perhaps it’s best to answer that by looking back at his record as a chief executive.

Start with transparency. According to Musk, Twitter posts are “mysteriously promoted or demoted with no insight into what’s going on” and who or what is making the decisions. “Having a black box algorithm promote some things and not other things, I think this can be quite dangerous,” he said at the TED conference last week. He suggested posting Twitter code on the open source developer site GitHub.

There’s some irony around Musk’s critical use of the term “black box.” Tesla has its own algorithmic black box in its cars — the one responsible for automated driving.

Like Twitter’s algorithms, the code governing the operation of Teslas in Autopilot or Full Self-Driving mode is private and proprietary. That has made it difficult for regulators to understand the specific failures that have led to Teslas steering themselves into parked emergency vehicles, running down railroad tracks, confusing the moon for a traffic signal yellow light and other documented mistakes.

Also closely guarded are Tesla’s data on Autopilot injuries and fatalities. Musk says cars driven on Autopilot are safer than those driven by human drivers, but he has never served up the proof. University researchers have offered to evaluate the data while keeping it shielded from public view. Musk has never responded to their offers.

“We would like him to be a little more transparent with respect to the safety of his Teslas,” said Alain Kornhauser, who heads the autonomous vehicle program at Princeton University. “A lot of us think they’re safe. We’d like to do an independent evaluation and offer a second opinion. I think it would help him and help the world.”

To get details on a car’s performance before and after a crash, Tesla owners, police and lawyers have had to have a subpoena issued to compel the company to share data.

Musk has also bristled at the transparency requirements that come with being a public company CEO, time and again directing taunts and vitriol at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which is charged with regulating securities markets and protecting investors. In one profane tweet, he suggested that the E in SEC stands for “Elon’s,” a message universally interpreted as an invitation to the agency to perform a sex act on the mega-billionaire.

In the buildup to his Twitter bid, Musk was still thumbing his nose at the agency, dragging his feet in filing a mandatory disclosure form announcing his purchase of a stake greater than 5%. That led to a lawsuit accusing him of ripping off other investors and pocketing the gains by building up his stake still further before the news broke, sending the share price up. Meanwhile, he’s back in court trying to overturn a 2018 settlement with the SEC on fraud charges.

Musk did not reply to requests for comment. Almost alone among major public companies, Tesla does not have a media relations department.

Then there’s the question of Musk’s alleged free-speech absolutism. When it comes to the speech of others, particularly his employees and critics, his commitment has been anything but absolute. Far from defending their right to speak up, he has sought to stifle them with legal muzzles or responded with firings, lawsuits or even the hiring of private detectives.

Cristina Balan, who raised alarms about vehicle safety while working as an engineer at Tesla, is one of several whistleblowers who has encountered Musk’s wrath after going public. Shortly after scheduling a meeting with Musk to make her case, she was fired, and the company began slipping false information about her to a reporter. Balan’s defamation case against Tesla is still in the courts. “Musk is an absolutist about absolutism, which is the exact opposite of free speech,” Balan told The Times.

Tesla called her a criminal. Her fight could be a milestone for employees’ rights

Although many companies press employees to sign nondisclosure agreements, Tesla has been a particularly profligate user of them, and of arbitration agreements that prevent those suing the company from making their allegations part of the public record. Tesla requires customers testing its Full Self-Driving technology to sign nondisclosure agreements that say they should “selectively” choose what they post to YouTube because “there are a lot of people that want Tesla to fail.”

Even employees who think they’re playing by the rules may find themselves on the wrong side of Musk’s cone of silence. A member of Tesla’s automated driving team posted videos that showed Tesla’s Full Self-Driving feature working well in some ways and needing improvement in others. Although the videos contained no nonpublic information, he was fired.

Critics outside the company are hardly immune. When Tesla ran into image problems in China, the company responded by asking the Chinese government to censor critical posts by social media users there, Bloomberg reported last year.

Musk’s vendetta against Vernon Unsworth was more personal. When the cave rescue diver told a TV interviewer that Musk was only getting in the way with his plan to rescue Thai children stuck in a flooded cave using a miniature submarine, Musk called the man a “pedo” — or pedophile — on Twitter. (The children were rescued by other means.) Musk hired a private investigator to try to prove his accusation and called the man a “child rapist” in an email to a BuzzFeed reporter.

Unsworth sued for defamation but lost the case at trial, with Musk’s lawyers successfully arguing that a reasonable person would not take the content of his tweets literally.

Musk “is willing to go to great lengths to punish or retaliate against people who speak ill of him,” said Ed Niedermeyer, who struggled to find sources to talk to him, even off the record, for his book on Tesla, “Ludicrous.” Sources who did contact Niedermeyer, the writer said, emphasized that “Elon Musk is not a guy you want to cross.” One source, Niedermeyer said, told him Musk “is like a wild animal when he’s cornered.”

Musk sometimes paints a bull’s-eye on journalists who report negative news about Tesla. He once accused Business Insider reporter Linette Lopez of using inside information to benefit short sellers who were betting against Tesla. Insider trading is a crime sometimes enforced by the SEC.

“From the moment Musk made up lies about me to this very day I have an angry mob of his fans, mostly men, following me around the internet,” Lopez told The Times via email. “They comment about everything from my professional work to my physical appearance. Their attacks don’t have to be true or make sense. Musk’s mob is like an extension of his ego. They join him in whatever fantasy world he wants to live in, they are very aggressive about trying to enforce his reality no matter how warped it is.”

It may be that Musk, if his long-shot pursuit of Twitter comes to fruition, prioritizes unfettered speech and transparency for its users and employees. If so, it will be a departure from the way he has operated to date.

California lawmakers are holding a hearing TODAY on legislation that would prohibit employers from discriminating against staff & new applicants for using the devils lettuce while on their own time. #420day https://t.co/IUezNvyne4

— bryan (@BreatheNewWinds) April 20, 2022