The Hidden Racism on America’s Farms

How America treats its black farmers, Ben Carson’s backdoor attempt to privatize public housing, PLUS: Chad Bolt returns with the news of the week ICYMI. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

This week on Off-Kilter, we continue our series of conversations about America’s farming crisis, which began last month with Debbie Weingarten, a former farmer and freelance writer who served as TalkPoverty’s writing fellow throughout the past year. In this week’s installment, we take a look at how America treats its black farmers — and why they make up just two percent of farmers nationally. Rebecca talks with two black sugarcane farmers in Louisiana — June and Angie Provost — who are currently fighting to keep their sugarcane farm, which has been in the family for generations, due to a web of racial discrimination and structural racism embedded in the nation’s farming policies… which have their roots in the Jim Crow South.

Later in the show, the latest way Trump’s esteemed housing secretary Ben Carson is working to dismantle housing assistance for low-income folks: by secretly privatizing public housing. Rebecca talks with Danielle McLean, the investigative reporter who broke the story for ThinkProgress.

But first, Indivisible’s Chad Bolt returns with the news of the week ICYMI.

This week’s guests:

• June and Angie Provost, sugarcane farmers from Louisiana
• Danielle McLean, investigative reporter at ThinkProgress
• Chad Bolt, associate director of policy, Indivisible

This week’s transcript:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality and everything they intersect with, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas. This week on Off Kilter, the hidden racism embedded in our nation’s farming policies, I talk with two Black sugarcane farmers in Louisiana who are facing the loss of their family farm following decades of racial discrimination. Later in the show thousands of public housing tenants are facing wrongful evication and more and surprise, surprise, we have Ben Carson to thank for it. I talk with an investigative reporter at ThinkProgress about her recent reporting that broke this story. But first, Chad I don’t get you all pod long which maybe no one is going to complain about because –

CHAD BOLT: Probably not.

VALLAS: When I do it means that you sing and there was a lot of singing last week in full disclosure for anyone who missed that episode.

BOLT: Probably too much.

VALLAS: I don’t know that it was too much, I think Will enjoyed it, he got to be the sound effects for once with you so that was special.

BOLT: That’s what we’re here for.

VALLAS: But Chad I don’t have you all pod long because we’ve got a lot of stuff that we’re talking about this week but there’s a lot going on in Congress, there’s a lot going on that’s related to what’s going on in congress and so I actually really want to start on a topic that you’re not going to complain at all about getting to talk about because it has to do with taxes and the Trump tax cuts. And it starts with some new numbers that we just got from the Treasury Department.

BOLT: Yep, that’s right, Treasury is out with new numbers that confirms much of what we knew would happen when Republicans and Trump pushed the tax law through congress but here we are. So the deficit grew 77% in the first four months of fiscal 2019 compared with the same period one year before.

VALLAS: 77% in a year, just for anyone who was tracking that.

BOLT: So this is big and like I said it reinforces that we knew the tax scam was a lie. The idea that these tax cuts would magically pay for themselves, in fact Secretary Mnuchin said at one point that he had a study that Treasury did that substantiated that claim and yet he’s never been pressed by anyone, the House Ways and Means Committee Richard Neal or anybody else to produce that study.

VALLAS: That’s a pretty bold claim when you don’t just say a thing that’s not true, that’s called lying. It’s like doubly bad and doubly lying when you also make up a study that doesn’t exist and then never produce it so that’s what you’re describing he did, right?

BOLT: Yes that is exactly what he did and he did it to justify a trillion and a half dollars in tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations that actually replicated in many ways the same approach that the state of Kansas took a few years back and we know that that turned out to be a disastrous mess. In fact, the tax cuts that they passed in Kansas were so devastating to their state budget and to their economy that they had to roll them back, they had to put off road repairs, they had to close schools early, it was a bad look for Kansas and the Trump tax scam replicated many of those same approaches.

VALLAS: It’s almost like they watched what happened in Kansas and they were like wow, that’s a trash fire, let’s do that everywhere! That’s basically what just happened.

BOLT: Exactly and we know this playbook. It’s to say oh my goodness look at these deficits, so serious, well now we’ve got to do something about it because we Republicans are the party of fiscal responsibility and so we’ve got no choice Rebecca, but to cut Medicaid, Medicare, education, housing, you name it, it’s gotta go.

VALLAS: I would just like to say I love your Republican voice if that’s what you’re doing right now, it sounds just like your normal voice except you make a lot of really good facial expressions that no one’s getting to hear right now.

BOLT: It’s a little more condescending.

VALLAS: It’s a little more condescending. It might have some audible scare quotes around it, no but we’ve talked a lot on this show over the past many, many months including with you about this two step deficit dance that is nothing new, it is straight up classic GOP playbook, blow up the deficit that they claim to hate, turn around and go my God has anyone noticed the deficit lately? And then claim that you need to dismantle everything that the American people rely on, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, everything else that requires tax dollars and say we just can’t afford these things. And that’s what we’ve been watching play out but these numbers actually tell us even more than what’s going on with the deficit, they also blow some pretty big holes in the case for the tax law on the corporate side too.

BOLT: Yeah, I was just going to note another thing of note here is the serioud decline in corporate tax payments over the first four months of the fiscal year, they fell 25% compared to the period on the year before, which basically means that corporate America is getting to keep a lot more of their profits and what we were told during passage of the tax law, listeners of the show will remember that —

VALLAS: Are you going to do your Republican voice again?

BOLT: Of course, Rebecca! We’re going to create more jobs, we’re going to raise wages for workers because that’s something that corporations do. Of course that’s not something they did, we’re seeing record levels of stock buy-backs, they’ve shared wealth with their stock holders, they have not by and large raised wages and created more jobs but they did keep it for themselves, their tax windfall.

VALLAS: So that’s what we know from treasury, would welcome Mr. Mnuchin on this show if he wants to show up with the study in hand because I have a few questions for him about who did it and what it found and does it exist but until he calls and says he’s got a little bit of time for Off Kilter, I think we’re just going to have to go with the Treasury Department’s word on this.

BOLT: Do you mean to tell me that Steve Mnuchin has never been on this show?

VALLAS: I know you’re shocking, in his defense we haven’t invited him until now but that invitation is open.

BOLT: I know, look that was our fault, Steve.

VALLAS: I mean yeah, I also really want Wilbur Ross on this show just because I really want him to show up with the velvet loafers but that’s a conversation for another day. Maybe when we do another check in on the shutdown, what do you think about that, right, is that time for Mr. Ross?

BOLT: Yeah.

VALLAS: So Chad the through line of this ‘In Case You Missed It’ segment is really going to be taxes this week which you are so here for, no one will be surprised to hear that because we actually got some really, really good news potentially out of congress when it comes to taxes in a couple of parts, the first one has to do with your favorite committee chair of Ways and Means?

BOLT: Yes, Chairman Richard Neal from Massachusetts, he’s the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, the tax writing committee on the House side. He finally shared this week that he is preparing in the next few weeks to get Trump’s personal tax returns.

VALLAS: So yay, a really big deal, perhaps actually connected to some of what we talked about last week about those critical six minutes of questioning that AOC did of Michael Cohen in that hearing last week, so tee’d that up really well here. But you also had a couple of references in how you said that that suggests that maybe you want to see Mr Neal go a little farther?

BOLT: It would be nice, yes. In fact he was great enough to share that he was preparing to do this in the last two weeks, I sort of wish he had prepared to do this a little sooner, would be great if we could have done this on day one but we’re here now, but the really important thing is that the request really needs to include not one Trump’s personal tax returns but also the tax returns of the over 500 business entities with which he’s associated. That is really where we learn the extent to which he has personally benefited from the tax law that we were just talking about that he pushed through congress, where we learn about his potential conflicts of interest, particularly as he’s conducting foreign policy on behalf of the United States and where we could also really learn more about the dubious tax avoidance schemes that he’s engaged in for decades as reported by The New York Times in October last year.

VALLAS: Incredibly diplomatic way to say tax fraud.

BOLT: Yes, it was I believe dubious tax avoidance schemes and outright fraud is how The New York Times characterized it.

VALLAS: So a lot of good news in that we’re finally hearing this out of Chairman Neal and yay, golf clap, we’re excited, we’re excited.

BOLT: And I appreciate that he wants to do this in a methodical way after a legislative purpose for doing it was substantiated and AOC was as you mentioned was helpful in that regard along with a couple other members of congress. So that’s good but we do need a sense of urgency as well.

VALLAS: And so happy to light the fire if it’s helpful to you Mr. Neal but thank you for taking this first step.

BOLT: He could come on the show too!

VALLAS: He could indeed, probably not the same episode has Mnuchin but maybe, that could be interesting, would love to have Richie Neal on this show so we’ll get that invite out too, maybe about this and we have those tax returns and he and I can talk about them.

BOLT: You should send the invite.

VALLAS: Not you?

BOLT: Yeah.

VALLAS: Is that your delicate way of saying it?

BOLT: That’s my hunch.

VALLAS: He might open my email and not yours?

BOLT: That’s my hunch.

VALLAS: Thanks for the free advice, Chad, always helpful. So staying with taxes because I noted there’s actually a lot on the tax front going on, there were two piece of legislation introduced this week that are really exciting in actually really different but complimentary ways. One of those is something that brings us another acronym because hey, Washington doesn’t have enough acronym, that acronym is FTT, what does that stand for?

BOLT: FTT it stands for Financial Transaction Tax, it’s a really exciting proposal from Senator Brian Schatz and Representative Peter DeFazio. So this would be a new small, extremely small tax on Wall Street trades. There are a lot of things to like about this, one is that it’s a progressive tax, which is good, in that it is born by the highest incomes, two it reduces or is at least intended to reduce the occurrence of high frequency trades by taxing them, high frequency trades are bad. They increase volatility in the stock market, they produce flash crashes, which is bad for everybody. And they really don’t add any value, what we’d like to see is stability and high frequency trades run counter to hoping to see that out of the market. And so two, it would hopefully reduce the occurrence of those and then three it raises a ton of revenue, $777 billion in new revenue, which Rebecca you’ve talked before about large sums of money like, what it could pay for.

VALLAS: Are we going to play the how much avocado toast can you buy for millennials with $777 billion, because Jeff Stein will be so excited.

BOLT: That’s at the top of my list.

VALLAS: Yeah, it’s definitely at the top of Jeremy Slevin’s list and I feel like we haven’t named him in an episode recently so Jeremy, that one was for you.

BOLT: So much avocado toast, especially if it’s on sourdough bread.

VALLAS: Yeah, that sounds really good, I can’t really digest bread very well, so I think I’d probably put it on some kind of a rice cracker but yeah.

BOLT: So maybe with your new revenue you’d do something else. Like cut child poverty in half or something like that.

VALLAS: You know it’s almost like you know me, Chad, that maybe I would find a different way to spend $777 billion were I to stumble upon it slash use a good policy like this financial trade tax to not only improve our economy but also raise revenue in the process, yes I think I probably would do things like end child poverty and homelessness and hunger and other stuff that we quote, “can’t afford to do.” So really exciting to see this bill, there’s another bill that actually was introduced this week as well that also has to do with taxes but in a pretty different way. And that bill before I actually say what it is and what it does, I want to back up a little bit because there’s another study that just came out and before anyone’s eyes glaze over this study is absolutely something that you need to know about and be aware of if you care about poverty. The story behind this study, which was done by the National Academy of Sciences is that back in 2015 Congress actually directed the National Academy of Sciences, and this was thanks to some of our favorite champions over in the house. I want to name in particular California Representative Barbara Lee who has been a long time fighter of poverty and particularly child poverty.

But they directed the National Academy of Sciences like hey, if you could get some of your smart wonks in a room and figure out how we cut child poverty in half in the next decade, what would that take and what would it cost? And now that report is out, so that is what I’m referring to here. And spoiler, but please still read the report and also I’ll plug Dylan Matthews’ at Vox for a really fantastic piece covering that we’ll also link to on our syllabus page, that report found that child poverty costs the US economy as much as $1.1 trillion every single year and that’s because of kids having worse health outcomes, lower earnings when poor kids become adults, all kinds of various long term consequences that stem from and this is another big finding from the report, the horrible detrimental and life long negative impacts that poverty has on the brain, especially when kids are in those early years of life. So we are doing serious violence to children by allowing them to be desperately poor in the richest nation on earth and this report really puts some numbers to that problem. Now part of the reason I mentjioned the $1.1 trillion a year that we’re effectively spending as a country by not acting to end child poverty, part of the reason I mention that is because so many of the headlines around this study were like child poverty could be cut in half in ten years but at a hefty price, I’m calling out NPR there because the story was really good there but the headline sends such a silly signal when the cost of cutting child poverty in half is literally one tenth the cost of doing nothing.

And I’ll toss one more little comparison point on there which is that for the cost of the tax cuts that the top 1 percent just got from that tax law we were just talking about that also blew a huge hole in the deficit, so for the cost of the tax cuts just the top one percent got under that law we could cut child poverty in half. So those are my proposed headlines for this very important study but the reason I’m mentioning it is because a bill was introduced this week in congress by two senators who may or may not be running for higher office, we’ll hear at some point, and those are Senators Michael Bennett from Colorado and Sherrod Brown from the great state of Ohio. We also had two house members championing this, Rosa DeLauro and Suzan Delbene, they joined forces to introduce a piece of legislation that would cut child poverty almost in half as this report calls for by massively strengthening the child tax credit and especially for really really young kids by creating something called a new young child tax credit. So amazing to see this legislation and I’m not just mentioning it because it’s out there, I’m not just mentioning it because CAP has done some work on this stuff over the years including helping to develop this idea but I’m mentioning it because it got 35 senate co-sponsors and 174 house co-sponsors just by the time it was introduced so I got to say, Republicans ball is in your court if you claim to be the party of family values, got a bill for you and it would mean a lot less poor kids.

BOLT: Yeah and I’m really glad you tee’d up this bill with the study just to really focus in on the part of the bill that gives an extra bill credit to kids up to age five because as you said those early, early stages of development are where children suffer the most harm from living in poverty and for that reason families are eligible for even more support if they’ve got children five and under in the house.

VALLAS: The bill is called the American Family Act, you can read about it on our nerdy syllabus page because of course you can and you’d be massively disappointed if you couldn’t.

BOLT: Are we moving on before I talk about refundability?

VALLAS: Chad I feel like it’s entirely your question because of your clock that we’re ticking away at so do you want to talk about the other really cool thing the bill would do?

BOLT: Yeah I wanted to mention really quick obviously the child tax credit itself is not new, we have one in the current tax code the problem, it doesn’t reach a lot of low income households because you do have to have, one you do have to have some income and two it’s not totally refundable. So what that means taking this bill, making it fully refundable just expands it to a ton more families.

VALLAS: And particularly the poorest families of all with the poorest kids of all who are most in need of this kind of help but who maybe because of job loss, they’re facing barriers to work or whatever the reason is, they don’t have enough income to perversely get the extra income boost that they most need.

BOLT: Yep.

VALLAS: So a really important extra piece of that. So Chad we’re going to lose you because you’ve got cool Indivisible stuff that you’ve got to do but I want to close with just 60 seconds on mythbusting on something I got to tell you I heard on Fox News. I heard on Fox News this week that Trump is doing something good for workers. I heard that he’s helping them get overtime that they otherwise wouldn’t be eligible for, is there any truth to this?

BOLT: The headline Trump is doing something good for workers, I would love for it to be true at some point but this is not that week.

VALLAS: Man, I was so excited.

BOLT: So let me take you back really quick to near the end of the Obama administration, Obama’s Department of Labor issued new regulations that required more workers to be eligible for overtime pay and specifically it required that workers making under $55,000 were eligible if they worked overtime to receive special overtime pay.

VALLAS: So an expansion because it would boost up that income threshold and more workers would be eligible.

BOLT: Exactly. So how did Republicans respond? Of course, states led by Republicans started a court challenge and of course a judge in Texas struck down the Obama regulation and by the time that happened Trump was president he decided not to defend the Obama regulation. And so that literally left the reg defenseless and so now Trump is putting out a new one but instead of matching the level that Obama went to, all workers making under $55,000 would be eligible, Trump is only saying yeah, he’s pretending he’s doing something great for workers but he’s only taking that income threshold up to $35,000.

VALLAS: So TL;DR Trump is actually screwing workers and trying to take credit for something that’s not even half as good as what the Obama era policy would have been if he had cared to defend it in court.

BOLT: Yeah, he let the first one die and now he’s coming back with a lame sauce version of the first one that he let die.

VALLAS: Well I have to say I’m so glad I fact checked that one because I was hearing that all over the place on Fox News these days.

BOLT: Lame sauce, that’s an official fact check.

VALLAS: Lame sauce, yeah. I appreciate, we’re going to come up with what the emoji is for that so that when we tweet about lame sauce we have a visual. Chad any nominations are welcome.

BOLT: Perfect, I’ll get right on it.

VALLAS: Appreciate so much you coming back and walking us through some of the headlines this week and we’ll talk with you next week but in the mean time go have fun with your Indivisibles.

BOLT: Appreciate it.

VALLAS: Don’t go away more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.

[MUSIC]

You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. A few weeks back I spoke with Debbie Weingarten, a former farmer and freelance writer who served as Talk Poverty’s writing fellow throughout the past year. We talked about america’s farming crisis, which is leading many farmers across the US unable to afford to eat the very food that they grow. She pitched me on a series of conversation. She actually did this on air so you may remember hearing this but she pitched me on a series about the farming crisis and on this next segment in particular, which looks at how America treats its’ Black farmers, which make up just 2 percent of farmers across this country. She put me in touch with two Black sugarcane farmers in Louisiana, June and Angie Provost, they’re currently fighting to keep their sugarcane farm, which has been in the family for generations and they’re at risk of losing the farm because of a web of racial discrimination as well as structural racism that’s embedded in our nation’s very farming policies and which have their roots in the Jim Crow South. I talked with them by phone, let’s take a listen.

Angie and June I’m so thrilled to have you both on the show.

ANGIE PROVOST: Thank you Rebecca.

JUNE PROVOST: Thank you.

ANGIE: We’re happy to participate.

VALLAS: So I’m going to turn the first question over to both of you, whoever wants to help start telling this story but you guys are in the process right now as we speak of fighting to keep your family farm that’s been in the family for generations and has been your family’s livelihood for generations and you believe that it’s because of racial discrimination, what’s going on? And why are you at risk right now of losing your family farm?

ANGIE: Well I can go into speak of the systematic problem that we have here in South Louisiana that can be traced to all over the country and that goes back to the residuals of slavery and Jim Crow, so systematic racist institutions that I believe have conspired against minority farmers and land owners. And June and I have not been excluded from that problem and facing that [INAUDIBLE] So what we are going through right now is fighting those [INAUDIBLE] institutions and corporations that are processing our product that have seemingly conspired against us to the demise of our farm and homestead. It’s a difficult problem, it’s a complex problem but June and I are very motivated to create change not only for us but for farmers in general and landowners in general.

VALLAS: So you mentioned this as part of a broader trend and I want to get into all of that but for our listeners’ sake, tell us a little bit of the specifics. What’s going on in your case, why are you at risk of losing the farm?

ANGIE: Well we can go into the history of who we are and how we came to the point where we’re at now because it’s such a crazy timeline of events. And what the story that we have it’s difficult to believe that it’s happening currently, in 2019. So I’ll let June start and tell you a little bit of who he is.

JUNE: Yeah, I’m a fourth generation sugarcane farmer and I started farming in 1994 the minute I graduated. I was so excited to jump in the field and get dirty. That was my dream. And I started farming 20 acres in 1994 and by 2006 I grew my operation to closer to 300 acres and by 2007, 2008 I purchased my farmer’s farm and I grew it to a 4,300-acre operation. So in Louisiana, an average size cane farm operation is 870 acre and I was over a 4,000-acre farm.

ANGIE: And in my history, my family’s history goes back into forced labor and sugarcane cultivation and we trace back into slavery as well. We’re both generational farmers, I began my own farm in 2014 as a means to secure my own interests in the agribusiness. We did notice by the whistleblowing of a USDA loan officer in 2014, looking back on reviewing some documents that we were treated in the same respect that we would hear farmers talk about in the [INAUDIBLE] with the disparate treatment of our loans or by the institutions like the bank, the mill.

VALLAS: And you’re referring actually to a big class action lawsuit that actually gets into a lot of the issues that you guys are facing, including broadly racial discrimination against Black farmers.

ANGIE: Exactly and Pigford was directed at the USDA but what Pigford didn’t address are those institutionalized racist systems that deal with banks, that deal with manufacturers, that are ironically all funded by the USDA through the Credit Commodity Corporation and so that’s one of the main issues that we have faced, we’re trying to address an issue with the USDA [INAUDIBLE] the Obama administration how they did the outreach program which was taken away during this administration which is a very sad fact. But you don’t have that same correction for the lenders, the mills and all of those that are actually handling and dealing with Black farmers on a day to day basis. So getting back to the big year for us when all of these tumultuous things started happening, was in 2014 when a whistleblower at the USDA alerted us that their lender in May and June of 2014 was it? They were photocopying their signatures to USDA [INAUDIBLE] to loan applications and lowering the approved loan amount. So of course that set off red flags for us. And thereafter we worked with Southern University here in Louisana, we reached out to a few lawyers, but it’s a very difficult as a Black person to find good representation so we went through the rollercoaster ride of doing that and at the same time we were discovering issues with June’s bank, the sugar mill started bringing up issues with a contract that June signed in 2007 with the mill, saying that they were unaware of that 2007 agreement. So 2014 was a very big year for us and just being, starting off of our fight.

JUNE: In 2014 I’d like to add too, the sugar mill I had a custom harvest contract for them to come in and custom harvest my crop for a fee, but they left ¾ of my crop in the field. That’s something that has never happened. So me riding after harvest season, every farmer’s crop is harvested, here I am riding and all I see is sugarcane standing in my fields. That’s a feeling that –

ANGIE: That’s just rotting in the field and the only reason why the mill that we feel that they decided to harvest your cane at the last minute is because we finally found an attorney that would serve the sugar mill with a specific performance lawsuit. And we led into the breach of contract issues that are ongoing right now. And so like again, 2014 was a very big year for us and leading into 2015, we started gaining more documents from the whistleblower at the USDA, we started pulling files and records to show that there had been so much fraud going on between the mill and the bank. And so that just led us on a journey to trying to correct these wrongs. And we always felt if this is happening to us and you see the decline in Black farmers that it had to happen to so many others. And so that’s what we’re working on right now. Everything’s currently still in litigation, we have attorneys that are in the midst of filing an amended lawsuit that was filed by Quentin Robinson at the latter part of last year [INAUDIBLE] lawsuit and so like I said everything right now is just currently under litigation and we are wishing, praying and hoping for the best.

VALLAS: And that lawsuit that you’re referring to that’s actually in the process now of being updated as you’re describing, it basically, it makes some really, really staggering allegations. It says that you guys have been on the receiving end of coercive contracts, of outright fraud perpetrated on you by this bank in conspiracy actually with the other big farm that you’re talking about, which I want to get into in just a second because they are well worth talking about some more here. As well as vandalism and retaliation for speaking out about how Black farmers are being mistreated. June, tell us a little bit about the connection here between racial discrimination and what has been happening to you guys that’s putting your family farm at risk here?

JUNE: When you talk about vandalism, we had so many different banks. Not only, for instance there was actually a chain, they broke the glass door, they tied a chain against the steering wheel, they took all the [INAUDIBLE] out, insert mud into everywhere, motor oil, hydraulic oil, that was, that’s not just some random teenager trying to vandalize your equipment.

ANGIE: That is somebody who understands and knows how a tractor operates.

VALLAS: And when you say they, who do you believe was doing this to your farmland?

ANGIE: I mean since we’re under litigation, it’s really difficult to say. But you can say it’s those who are against the progression of Black farmers in the community. Every single farmer, you can talk to farmers out there, and they always, there’s always an instance of oh hey your tractor, somebody breaking into your tractor or did something, flatten your tires, those are sometimes those can be common problems because not only do we have to address the racism that’s in the agribusiness community but you also have to address the competition that’s there. And so with us there just seems to be an extremity of what was done to us. Like June was describing, the physical attacks to the tractors but not only that, we had dead animals placed in equipment. We were followed by the sugar mill CEO, I remember the loan vice president, the bank vice president, of [INAUDIBLE] bank parking alongside my field, I believe the date was somewhere near around December 18th 2014, just parking, lurking there, right? And as a female farmer you can understand the worry that that placed me under.

So there are various people that we could suspect have been doing the harassment and reprise towards our farm, you can go in various directions. So on account of numerous police reports that have been filed and investigations that lead to nowhere in our small community, pin pointing who have been harassers have been an issue for us.

VALLAS: And it isn’t limited to the harassment that’s horrible that you guys are describing, the ways in which you and your land you believe because of retaliation for how you’ve been speaking out about the racism but there’s also been racial discrimination in that you guys as borrowers have been treated differently you believe than other borrowers by this bank because you are Black farmers. Tell a little bit of that piece as well.

ANGIE: Well that goes into the aspect of what Black farmers are required to do. And if anyone out there is listening and you’re a farmer of color or a minority farmer I know you understand me when I say this. The lack of proper [INAUDIBLE] allowances that we’re given or allowed to borrow, the expected collateral that tied to our loans, not to mention the supervised bank account. So we can only, we can only spend what they tell us to spend on our farm. And then institutions and tell us that when things go awry for us, that it’s our farming practices that are causing the problem. So you can see the issues that we have there.

JUNE: For instance, sugarcane farming here needs between six to eight hundred dollars an acre to farm sugarcane. I was in approximately $190 an acre, so that’s a huge difference there, it’s almost impossible.

ANGIE: It makes it impossible for a farmer like ourselves to catch up.

VALLAS: And there’s also, and you reference this Angie before when you described USDA as actually being the agency that was sued in that big class action lawsuit you referenced, which is called Pigford v. Glickman, that was a lawsuit originally brought in 1997 against the US Department of Agriculture, the USDA by Black farmers alledging racial discrimination in farm assistance and in lending, similar to what you’re describing having actually gone on with this bank. You were one of the people who ended up getting a small amount in a settlement from that massive lawsuit but this was hardly the first time that the USDA had come onto the national consciousness as part of the problem here and as one of the agents of racial discrimination when it comes to Black farmers. In fact, Black farmers have at times been known to call the USDA the last plantation.

ANGIE: The last plantation, yes.

VALLAS: Tell me a little bit about that story.

ANGIE: OK what that goes into, it speaks directly to the issues that I was speaking of, the USDA will tell you if you go to them and say hey this USDA guaranteed lender is treating me unfairly or I have suspicions about their loan servicing practices, the USDA will say well they are our customer, you’re there customer right? So they take themselves out of the equation which they’re directly part of the equation in saying that they’re the oversight. They are the [INAUDIBLE] lawmakers for these institutions. And you talk about policies and the actions of minority representation at USDA and it’s lacking. We have to step that up, we have to get equity and equality when dealing with these institutions such as the bank and the sugar mills because they are treated more favorably, corporations are treated more favorably than us the family farms. And that’s why I’m so excited to tell our story because I think it adds some inclusivity of the broader cause of farming problems. [INAUDIBLE] not only Black farmers saying these but there are dairy farmers saying this, you will hear ranchers saying this, you will hear many people, farm workers saying this, is that we need some sort of equity, equitable system and policy making and policy enforcement, that’s a major issue, policy enforcement by the USDA and by the US government. So those are those ideas of where that comes from, saying that we are the last plantation because it feels like there are these institutions, meaning the bank in our case, the bank and the mill have worked us near death. And so we look back and we researched and we figured out who’s funding these groups? Who’s funding these corporations? Who’s assisting them in making the unscrupulous decisions towards us? And it all traces back to the USDA.

VALLAS: And working people to death is not hyperbole in the slightest. You guys have literally been in the position because of what June was just walking through and putting some numbers to of having to do the work of four and five people because you haven’t had enough cash on hand from your bank to be able to actually afford to hire the labor that you need to farm the land. So not an exaggeration in the slightest but also there’s a long history of farming on the backs of in this case literally slaves, I actually want to roll the clock just a little bit farther back than this long standing racism enshired in the US Department of Agriculture and its’ treatment of Black farmers but especially as we’re talking about the sugarcane industry we would be remiss if we didn’t trace that back to the fact that that industry was really built on the backs of slaves, many of whom died because the farming was so brutal. June I want to bring you into that side of the story as well.

JUNE: You say something that’s so remarkable, in this community itself there have been over 60 African-American farms that are not farming now. And these are family farms. And you know how many fathers of farms have passing away at a early age.

ANGIE: Hard labor.

JUNE: My father for one, we can go down so many different families and all their fathers’ passed away at an early age, it’s not the worrying if you’re going to catch rain or if you’re going to have a drought, it’s always worried about will you get a crop loan? Will you get treated fairly? How soon will you get a crop loan? It’s those extra burdens that a lot of this white farmers do not have to face, they do not have to go through that agony. Just for myself, I’m a young farmer but the worries of trying to get your crop loan at a decent time, that takes a toll on your body.

ANGIE: That traces back to slavery and these systems that were designed during slavery to treat us as Black people as commodities. But that also goes into the fact of leading into Jim Crow, seeing us again as commodities, building this industry, Norbert Rillieux developed the sugarcane steam boiler, he was the mechanization behind modern day sugarcane processing. He died in poverty. And his story speaks to what we’ve all gone through as Black farmers. And it’s a tragedy that needs to be corrected. I get so offended when I hear people speak of reparations as blank check. Reparations is not a blank check. Reparations, we can go into what reparations and why we need it but the systematic design of slavery and Jim Crow are not only a tragedy for black people, but they’re a tragedy for poor white communities, for indigenous people, for the Latinx community because what it does is it creates a system of classism, so once you get out of the racist area of what’s going on you get into classism because as corporations and communities are using us as Black people for cheap and free labor they’re denied access to poor white people and poor indigenous folks of better opportunity as well. So it’s a really complex system that needs to be corrected. And you have to correct it before it’s too late.

VALLAS: Powerful words to end on, I’ve been speaking with Angie and June Provost, Black sugarcane farmers in Louisiana with a long history in farming who are battling to keep their family farm despite massive and institutional racism at the highest levels of this government. June and Angie, thank you so much for taking the time and for sharing this powerful story and I would love to have you guys back on the show for an update on what you guys are going through.

ANGIE: Sounds great, thank you.

JUNE: Thank you.

VALLAS: Take care.

ANGIE: Thank you.

VALLAS: Don’t go away, more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.

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You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. George Hinson lived at the station house in Philadelphia for 8 years. The former trains station had been converted into apartments serving low income Philadelphians many of whom like Hinson were recovering from addiction. But the building had fallen into a state of disrepair. According to residents it was invested with rodents and bed bugs, covered in mold, had faulty lighting, poor heating and ventilation. By 2015 the owner of station house decided to renovate it. Volunteers of America Delaware Valley, part of a national Christian based non-profit that provides services to homeless people and other vulnerable population renamed the building the lofts at 2601. In exchange for fixing the building, volunteers of America received low income housing tax credits through a US Housing and Urban Development program called Rental Assistance Demonstration or RAD. But Hinson never got to enjoy the upgraded apartments, he ended up homeless.

So opens a recent investigative reported published by Think Progress which uncovered the latest way that the Trump administration and Trump’s esteemed housing Secretary Ben Carson are working to dismantle housing assistance for low income folks. This time by secretly privatizing public housing. I spoke with Danielle McLean, an investigative reporter at Think Progess who broke the story.

Thanks so much for joining the show.

DANIELLE MCLEAN: Thank you so much for having me.

VALLAS: So I think the headline gives a little bit of a teaser of what this piece is about, “Trump’s Department of Housing and Urban Developments Wants to Expand a Flawed Progress that is Privatizing Public Housing.” What did you find?

MCLEAN: Yeah well essentially this goes back from the mid 1990s, let’s take you back there. So pretty much there’s been a steady decrease in money that’s going towards capital funding to fix up all of America’s public housing stock. So there’s 1.1 million units of public housing in the country and there’s about a little over $3 billion in funding that goes to capital repairs each year. The need for capital repairs goes up by more than that each year. So we’re not even getting close to getting on track to solving the amount of need of repairs through federal funds. So a lot of the public housing units are becoming decrepit. They are, mold is growing in them, rats if you have followed any of the news out of New York, public housing over there, it’s terrible conditions. Ben Carson wants to get rid of the $3 billion in capital repairs, he keeps proposing to get rid of it at all in the budget. Instead what he wants to do is he wants to double down on pretty much get this endless expansion of a program that was created under the Obama administration, it was created in 2012, it’s called the Rental Assistance Demonstration program.

VALLAS: Sounds kind of nice and Orweillian so we’re not sure what it does. What does RAD do?

MCLEAN: Exactly, it’s called RAD, RAD is rad. So essentially what it does is allows private developers to take over these public housing complexes that are in the greatest need for repairs and what they do is offer low income housing tax credit or private activity bonds to the developers, get them to help pay, helps finance the projects and redevelopment, these projects that are in desperate need for repairs, private developers get to own and manage these buildings but pretty much they need to keep each unit affordable long term, they have all these tenant protections to allow the tenants that are living in the public housing units before to continue living there long term and be able to live in safe and good conditions.

VALLAS: So basically it sounds like this RAD program, it sounds pretty rad, I want to apologize immensely to everyone hearing us saying this over and over but you gotta do it a couple of times with a program that has this acronym. A program created under Obama with a very good purpose, which was addressing this really, really horrific backlog of needed repairs in dilapidated public housing units as you’re describing. But now where does Ben Carson enter in? He’s trying to do what with this program?

MCLEAN: He’s trying to expand it ten fold pretty much, in fact when the program first started it had a cap, about 60,000 units and it was more of a pilot program, that cap has increased substantially over the last few years and Ben Carson wants to get rid of the cap completely and pretty much put $100 million into this program.

VALLAS: Which sounds like a great thing, people might be listening and going yo, if there’s a serious backlog we should definitely funding this program that solves this problem so where does this become a problem?

MCLEAN: For sure, when you are privatizing public housing you need to have strong protections are protected and you need to have strong monitoring, making sure that those protections that are in place are actually being followed by these private developers that are trying make money. And HUD’s monitoring is not very good.

VALLAS: And you actually describe and you speak to a whole bunch of people for this piece which we’re linking to on our nerdy syllabus page, I urge everyone to read it because it is worth reading all of and you get very angry, warning. But you talked to a bunch of tenants advocates who really described in painstaking detail just horrific situations of residents being mistreated in some ways in ways that violate HUD’s own policies that are supposed to protect tenants just like you’re describing, people being put in uninhabitable housing while their building is under construction or being illegally rescreened once the renovations have been completed so they can’t get back into their housing and so what you’re describing is that while on its’ face it might be a great thing that this program could get a whole bunch more funding, it’s being done in a way that doesn’t have the adequate oversight. Is that fair to say?

MCLEAN: Yeah, exactly, there’s a bunch of issues that I found. One of them is staffing levels for the agencies that are supposedly oversee different aspects of the RAD program in terms of monitoring have shrunken substantially over the past five years. It was a problem and an issue back in 2009 when there was hundreds more people employees, working at these different offices within HUD. Ben Carson continues to want to shrink these offices and a proposed further shrinking these offices, it was a problem, I spoke to the person, one of the people that helped administer the RAD Program, Sarah Pratt who is now an advocate but she helped oversee the program for the office of fair housing and equal opportunity for HUD back when it first started and she was telling me about there was all the issues that were helping with the rollout of HUD, they’re kind of rushing this program out and trying to get as many units renovated through this program as possible and there wasn’t really the oversight structure that was needed and put in place to make sure that these tenants are being protected. When HUD does do an investigation which is usually tipped off from different, they’re usually tipped off from different tenants rights organizations and newspaper articles and different things like that and complaints, they can take, I’ve been finding a year or two come after a report was filed to even come out with their findings, sometimes over a year. And so it takes a long time and meanwhile people are going homeless or people are being put in really serious situations and need intervention very quickly from HUD and they’re not getting that help and assistance quickly.

VALLAS: Sarah Pratt the person you were just talking about is quoted in your piece as describing this program as the wild, wild west of public housing because there’s so little oversight and so little recourse for tenants who have their rights trampled on and many of whom lose their housing in the process. You actually describe an investigation that went on in 2014 wherein HUD officials found that a housing authority had improperly evicted 27 families from a large apartment complex, that it was converting into different housing and this happened because it was able to sneak through under the radar because of the RAD program.

MCLEAN: Yeah exactly and that was actually an example of where HUD was able to intervene and stop the situation from happening and try to bring some kind of remedy to this terrible situation because this is a big, when you privatize something there’s people out there to make money. But these are, it was an early highlight of some of the issues that can happen but that’s why you need HUD to be in place to make sure that this is happening. They don’t even have the proper database system to track people as they go from getting public housing unit to receiving a housing voucher, which they have the option to do, instead of moving back into their old, newly renovated building or when they move into the newly renovated building. When you can’t track people through the system and this is one of the current heads of the program at HUD was telling me this, when you can’t track people through the system how can you tell when people are being displaced or being evicted and not given their rights that they’re entitled to. So that’s just one of many issues that are surrounding oversight with this program.

VALLAS: So this investigative reporting piece of yours, it’s a mammoth piece of reporting that I urge people to read because there’s just so much in here and we don’t have time to even scratch the surface, we could talk for hours before we started taping about all of the things you uncovered in this remarkable piece but I want to close on a note of where do things go from here and what is the fix? You started by providing the context that Ben Carson is, it sounds to some people uncharacteristically calling for new spending on something that might on the surface sound good but it’s becausehe doesn’t want to fund the capital repair backlog which advocates now say exceeds $50 billion, this is how dilapidated our public housing stock has become after years of neglect. Where do things go from here and do you see anyone stopping this massive privatization through the backdoor of public housing?

MCLEAN: Well Congress has been willing to at least provide some funding for these capital repairs, not much, not nearly enough but they’ve always bucked the Trump administration, Ben Carson from cutting it completely. Advocates say the best solution to this is by fulling funding public housing. I think there’s been some candidates that are running for president, Elizabeth Warren comes to mind, I think Cory Booker that have provided, suggested providing more funding for this program. Maxine Waters who now chairs the financial service committee which oversees this has been very vocal about fixing and resolving RAD and its oversight and she even talked about the need for reform after a government accountability office report outlined a lot of the issues surrounding oversight. But it’s obvious getting things done in congress is not an easy task. So at the very least there needs to be more resources and funding that goes to help give HUD the ability to oversee this program, at least they brought in ten new hires for the RAD program recently but none of them are 100% committed to overseeing the program and monitoring to make sure that tenants rights are protected and RAD violations are not occurring. So having some fulltime staff workers would probably help the situation, resolving basic tracking of people through databases and getting better technology in terms of tracking people would probably help out the situation more and providing more resources would definitely be helpful but until they do people are going to continue having long investigations and people are going to be going under the radar and being affected in ways that no one’s able to see.

VALLAS: Including possibly losing their housing as many of the people that you spoke in your story actually are facing. I’ve been speaking with Danielle McLean, a Think Progress investigative reporter whose piece you can find on our nerdy syllabus page, it’s called “Trump’s HUD Wants to Expand a Flawed Program that Privatizing Public Housing” And now you’ve heard why that is. Danielle thank you so much for taking the time and for this fantastic piece of reporting.

MCLEAN: Thank you so much for having me.

VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s episode of Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas, the show is produced each week by Will Urquhart. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @offkiltershow and you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the WeAct Radio Network or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.