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So this really happened Saturday night in Laurel at a softball game involving 12-year-old girls. A team from Hattiesburg played a team from Laurel in a United States Fastpitch Association (USFA) travel league softball tournament. 

The score does not matter. It will be forgotten in days, if not already. What happened will not be forgotten by those who witnessed the scene. 

This is from eyewitnesses: 

During the game, Kiara Thomas, the mother of one of the Hattiesburg players, persistently berated the umpires, using vulgar language. She was warned to stop. She did not. Finally, she was told to leave the premises. She left the stands but not before threatening umpire Kristi Moore of Ellisville, again using vulgar language. Thomas apparently never left the softball complex.

The game ended. Thomas accosted Moore just after she had exited the field. “You got something to say to me, b—-?” Thomas said. And then Thomas slugged her with what several witnesses described as “a sucker punch.” 

Thomas, wearing a T-shirt that said “Mother of the Year,” then left, but not before a witness followed her, took a cellphone photo of her license plate and called Laurel police. Thomas was stopped and arrested minutes later. She was charged with misdemeanor simple assault and bonded out at a cost of $425.25. An initial court date has been set for May 18. A preliminary hearing is set for Wednesday.

Meanwhile, Moore has a black eye (a severe contusion and nerve damage, her doctor said) and a bruised eardrum. Moore, the umpire in chief for USFA statewide, officiated the game Saturday night because another umpire became ill and could not.

Sadly, this is not an isolated incident. More and more, youth league umpires and high school umpires, referees and officials are the victims of both verbal and sometimes physical threats and abuse. Moore, who assigns umpires for tournaments across the state, says there is a shortage of umpires in travel leagues and recreation leagues because of the mostly verbal abuse from fans, primarily parents.

Robert Holloway, who coordinates umpires for the Mississippi High Schools Activities Association (MHSAA), says games have been postponed and even cancelled because of the shortage of umpires. “We’ve had to adjust playing dates and sometimes simply not play the games because we don’t have anybody to call them,” Holloway said. “Umpires are quitting and unfortunately few want to replace them.”

He blames the shortage of umpires on fan abuse. “We need some legislation for laws with some teeth in them in Mississippi like there are in some other states to protect sports officials,” Holloway said. Holloway said such legislation was proposed this legislative session but it died in committee.

Moore, who works as program director for Laurel’s AmeriCorps, said Tuesday that she began umpiring because she had a stepdaughter who played and “because I have always loved the game.”

The events of Saturday night have caused her to re-think her future in softball umpiring.

“That’s something I’ve got to decide,” she said by phone from Laurel. “I can’t say what I will do at this point, but it’s definitely on my mind. I am a single mom, raising two kids. When I got home Saturday night they both burst into tears. I don’t know … I’ve got to think about it. I mean, what if she had had a gun or a knife?”

Moore cancelled two nights of rec league umpiring this week.

Andrea Russell, another umpire, witnessed the scene. She wasn’t the calling the game but said she was there to watch Moore “in hopes of learning something. She’s the best.”

“Kristi made the right call and handled herself well under the circumstances,” Russell said. “She didn’t deserve what happened to her in the slightest.”

The incident has made Kristi Moore — and Kiara Thomas, for that matter — famous through social media.

“I’ve had messages of support from as far away as Nigeria, Australia and Canada,” Moore said. “The amount of support has been unbelievable, but it’s not the way I wanted to become famous.”

Attempts to reach Thomas were unsuccessful. In a cryptic Facebook post, since removed, she did not sound the least bit repentant. In all caps, she wrote: “I do not play that respectful s— and I will not let you make it once you cross that line. And nobody can ever make an example out of me. A misdemeanor that Im gone beat … f— yall thought.”

The post Ugly softball incident in Laurel is unfortunately a sign of the times appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Join us every third Wednesday of the month from 7:30 – 10:30 a.m. at Broad Street Bakery in Jackson, Mississippi for a free coffee courtesy of Mississippi Today, while you enjoy the company and conversation of Editor-at-Large Marshall Ramsey and special guests.

Open to anyone, we invite our readers to come meet Marshall Ramsey and other members of the Mississippi Today team. We value connecting with our reader community, after all — we report to you.

You’ll see award-winning editorial cartoonist Marshall at work, as he will create original sketches and cartoons while he visits with those attending.

The post Coffee with Marshall Ramsey appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Since Auditor Shad White arrested Gov. Phil Bryant’s appointed welfare director in 2020 within a sprawling fraud scheme, state and federal investigators and prosecutors have failed to publicly scrutinize the governor’s role — which is palpable in written communication they’ve possessed for more than two years. 

Much of that communication has been published for the first time in Mississippi Today’s “The Backchannel” investigation, which uncovers the depth of the former governor’s involvement within the scandal that plagued his administration.

White, a former Bryant staffer and campaign manager who the former governor later appointed as state auditor, sat down with Mississippi Today on Oct. 14, 2021, for an in-depth interview about the welfare department and his investigation of it.

Highlights of the interview include:

• White said that he believed it was the welfare director’s duty to reject any improper requests from the governor, not the governor’s responsibility to know agency spending regulations.
• White said that he had not seen any evidence of Bryant directing his welfare agency head to make specific payments to specific programs.
• White said that if there was evidence of Bryant directing payments, the welfare director awaiting trial should point that out to investigators or prosecutors.

Soon after the interview, Mississippi Today obtained thousands of written communications between the governor and principal players in the scandal that shed light on Bryant’s involvement. When we conducted the interview with White, we didn’t yet know much of what we’ve published in “The Backchannel” investigation.

Since the interview, the judge in an ongoing criminal case has reinforced the gag order against White, meaning this is likely his final on-the-record interview about the scheme until the criminal cases are over. Those cases could continue for the rest of the year or longer. For that reason, we are publishing the interview, which has been edited for length and clarity.

Two additional notes to consider while reading: Because the investigation was then and is still ongoing, White often spoke in hypotheticals while answering questions. Second, the interview was conducted just days after White issued civil demand letters for 15 people or organizations to return a total of $77 million in misspent welfare dollars.

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MT: Especially after seeing the demand letters, and particularly the one to John Davis, it’s just making me think more and more about how he is really being held accountable for this whole overarching scheme, a lot of which didn’t benefit him personally. Right? And lots of other people benefited much more than he did. I guess I just want to ask you generally, with the tack that you’re taking to try to be accountable for taxpayer money, how you think that’s going to change this good ole boy structure that the John Davis case illustrates, which is pervasive through Mississippi’s government.

WHITE: You know, I think the first and most important thing is that the demand that John Davis — which is obviously large. It’s $96 million when you add interest. That’s the largest demand that’s ever been issued by this office, period. The demand that is issued to John Davis sends this message that if you are legally responsible for making sure that money is spent in accordance with the law and you don’t follow the law and you do whatever you want to with it, and you spend it in ways that are maybe politically beneficial to you, then you’re going to be held accountable.

And I don’t know of another way to better send that message than to just enforce the law as it is written and hold someone to the standard that the law sets, which is, if you’re running an agency, handling all this money and you’re responsible for making sure that it goes to the actual program beneficiaries that the program was designed to serve, that you actually do that.

That’s, I think, the first thing. And then there’s the second layer under that, which is, if there is a criminal case to be made, that you have to be willing — and I say you, meaning investigators and prosecutors and the court system — has to be willing to enforce the criminal law, too. Now, you and I know that not every case is a DHS-level case. We see instances of misappropriation that don’t get anywhere near $77 million. We see instances of misappropriation that don’t come with a criminal charge because what was done did not violate a criminal statute. But in this case, you’ve got large dollar amounts and you’ve got civil and criminal cases that are possible.

And so when something like this happens, you have to do your job. You meaning me — I have to do my job. And prosecutors have to do their jobs and the court has to do its job.

And I think that that’s how you begin to unwind a system where people believe that rules are not real. Because that’s what I’m afraid existed for a long time in some corners of Mississippi, that people just believed that the rules were not real, but the rules are the law.

That’s where we’re getting these rules from. The rules come from regulations and statutes passed by democratically elected officials. And those are important. It’s important to me personally. It’s a value that I hold very deeply and I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking about it.

And so, we just have to have more people who are, one, in positions of influence, who are willing to follow the law, and more people who are willing to step up and enforce it if those individuals in positions of influence don’t follow the law.

MT: Right. But I guess when I think about John Davis, I think about how he was doing what everyone around him does and has been doing. And how is taking John Davis as an individual down, going to change the culture and the overarching structure of people doing favors for people. And I guess, let me take it a little further, because I’ve now consumed enough information and have details of the way that Phil Bryant and John Davis interacted. And Phil Bryant directed John Davis’ actions.

And how do we hold the state’s top official accountable in the same way that we’re holding John Davis accountable.

White: When you say, Phil Bryant directed John Davis’ actions, are you saying that there is specific evidence that Phil Bryant told John Davis to spend money in certain ways?

MT: Yeah.

White: OK.

MT: I mean, that’s clear.

White: We would love to see any evidence to that effect that anybody has. I would first say that. I mean, we have gathered tons of evidence in this case. But if there’s any documented evidence or anything like that, that exists, we need to make sure that we have it. That’s the first big thing I would say.

MT: I don’t think you’re going to find a piece of paper that shows Phil Bryant telling John Davis, for example, to give money to Prevacus. But there were meetings that took place, and there were examples of him directing him to do other things with money. And those specific things might not be part of the criminal allegations, but it shows the pattern of how they communicated.

White: Yeah. So, we know the meetings took place, right? That’s been publicly reported and there’s nothing illegal, obviously, about a meeting. Right? You would expect that right now, if someone came to Tate Reeves and said, “Hey, I have a potential drug that could be manufactured in Mississippi, and I would like to sit and talk with you about that potential.” If Tate Reeves’ team thought that was a real proposal, then the governor probably should take a meeting like that, I would think. So that’s kind of the first thing that comes to mind when we’re just talking about that meeting in particular.

Getting a bit more into the detail of the other thing that you mentioned, the emails where Phil Bryant is directing spending. I’d love to see those too, if you got ’em. We may already have them, but just to make sure that we are seeing everything that you’re seeing, I’d love to see them, especially if they’re public documents. The thing that I would say, regardless of what those emails say, the thing that I would point out too, is that: Let’s take a hypothetical. Let’s say that Bob Anderson goes over to Tate Reeves’ office today. And Tate Reeves says to Bob Anderson, “Bob, I’ve got a really good idea. I want you to spend TANF money on a community garden in inner city Jackson, and you should do it in this way, and this way, and this way.” And the way he describes it, violates TANF regs. Is it Bob Anderson’s responsibility to then say, “Yes, governor, I will do whatever you’re telling me to do”? Or is Bob Anderson’s responsibility to say, “Governor, actually, the way you described it violates TANF regulations and we can’t do that with that money”?

Now my personal position is that it is Bob Anderson’s job to do the latter. It’s his job to do the latter. Another sub question there would be, is it the governor’s responsibility in that hypothetical that I just set up to know all the TANF regs?

MT: Right.

White: The answer is no. If that is the governor’s responsibility, then it is impossible to be the governor of the state of Mississippi or any state, because you would have to be an expert in TANF regs, MEMA regs, DPS regs, and every federal grant that is drawn down by any of those entities. It would be impossible.

MT: Yeah, no, I get that. But so, the governor going to a state agency head and saying, “I want you to fund this,” isn’t that inherently improper? I mean, they’re supposed to be bidding to figure out who gets money. You’re not supposed to be able to go to a state agency and say — Maybe you could go to the state agency and say, “Hey, put out an RFP for this particular service that I’m interested in us providing to citizens,” but to go and say, “You need to fund this group”–

White: Fund specific vendors, is that what you’re saying?

MT: Yeah, yeah.

White: Because it’s two very different things for Tate Reeves to say to Bob Anderson, “Hey, I want a community garden with TANF money in inner city Jackson,” and for Tate Reeves to say, “I want this specific company to win this contract to provide a community garden in inner city Jackson.” Right?

MT: Yeah.

White: So just to be clear, you’re saying that there is proof of the latter and not the former.

MT: Yeah.

White: Is there a proof — What proof are we talking about here? Are there emails? Is it John Davis’ word?

MT: There are emails that describe Phil Bryant asking for a group to be funded by John Davis. And I’m not saying that that group doesn’t satisfy TANF purposes. I’m just calling into question why the governor would be telling him to fund a specific group in the first place.

White: Is the email from Phil Bryant, or is it from John Davis to somebody saying, Phil Bryant—

MT: No, no, no. It’s from Phil Bryant.

White: (Long pause) Cause I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anything quite like what you’re describing.

MT: OK. I mean, does that make you feel differently?

White: I would say that if there’s any sort of violation of bid laws where anyone in a position of power is saying that a specific vendor needs to be funded, and that would be in violation of bid laws or procurement laws, then yeah, there’s a problem. That’s just an obvious, I think that’s obvious.

MT: Yeah. And I don’t know that it is in violation of bid laws because I don’t know what law says that you have to bid TANF projects.

White: So these are specific TANF projects that you’re talking about?

MT: They were funded with TANF dollars, but I don’t think, I don’t think Phil Bryant was going to John Davis saying, ‘Can you fund this with TANF?’ I think he was saying, ‘Can you fund this for me?’

White: I mean, so this is getting a little complicated in the sense that there are a lot of ifs in here. So honestly, I’d have to just see what you’re talking about in order to come to an opinion on it, I think. Because there are a bunch of twists and turns inside this hypothetical that I’m trying to weave in my mind, of, what exactly is he telling him? And, what’s the tone? Is it, “Hey, if this is legal and allowable, then do this.” Or if that’s not there — all these little idiosyncrasies and small features will end up mattering, obviously.

MT: Yeah, I get what you’re saying. I think that for my purposes, the communication that I have, I’ve seen this a while ago and I didn’t think it rose to the level of its own story.

White: Yeah

MT: I don’t know that I feel that same way right now, because I think it illustrates the relationship that they had, and the kind of orders, or the kind of requests that Phil Bryant was making of John Davis that get a little further at the question of whether Phil Bryant should be held accountable for the misspending of this money.

White: Yeah. And let me tackle the question in a different, more generic way than just speaking specifically about these emails and that sort of thing.

MT: Yeah.

White: If John Davis believes that Phil Bryant has some sort of culpability here, then it’s obviously in his best interest to disclose all of that as soon as possible, whether it’s to me, or if he doesn’t want to disclose it to me, to the FBI, or federal prosecutors, or Jody Owens, or any of the other parties that are capable of seeing this, who have cases under their jurisdiction or investigations under their jurisdiction related to this.

MT: Yeah.

White: It is in his best interest to do that. And you would think that if he has anything like that, he would have taken it to one of those parties at some point before now, but he’s still free to do that.

MT: But if the nature of their relationship was where Phil Bryant would express what he wanted to John Davis and John Davis would make it happen, I’m not sure at what point Phil Bryant should be brought into the conversation of who is responsible for the misspending. Because John Davis didn’t — I don’t think John Davis personally spent $77 million dollars.

White: Well, here’s the thing. Let’s fast forward the clock a bit. Let’s say John Davis doesn’t pay anything on this demand. And let’s say that the Attorney General’s office sues John Davis in civil court to enforce the demand. If John Davis believes that he might be legally responsible for repaying any of that money because he was directed to do so, or because of the relationship between him and Governor Bryant and because the nature of the relationship absolves him of some sort of liability, he’s got the opportunity both now and at trial to present all that information.

But let’s go back to the hypothetical that I had a moment ago, where Bob Anderson is in Tate Reeves’ office. And Tate Reeves says to Bob, “Go make the community garden.” Now, Bob might say, “Well, it’s just our relationship that if Tate Reeves tells me to do something, I go and do it.”

Does that absolve Bob Anderson of responsibility for spending that money appropriately? No. In fact, regardless of how Bob thinks about his relationship with Tate in that hypothetical, Bob is going to be held responsible for whether or not that money is spent appropriately and legally. And Tate Reeves is not.

And it doesn’t matter that Bob thinks, “Well, it’s just this unspoken rule in our relationship that if I don’t do this, that I’m going to be fired.” That doesn’t matter. If someone comes into my office today and tells me to do something that I don’t agree with, that is a violation of law. I’m not going to do it.

If I were working for the state auditor and the state auditor walked into my office and told me to do something illegal, it doesn’t matter that I would be fired. I have a responsibility to not do it. So, in the hypothetical, Bob Anderson still doesn’t have proof of something that absolves him of responsibility.

MT: Yes.

White: I’m trying to figure out if what you’re describing is like that, when you’re saying “the relationship between John Davis and Phil Bryant.”

MT: Yeah. I think that gets close to it, but that’s the thing, I’m not saying that John Davis shouldn’t be held accountable. Can’t two people be held accountable? And if it’s not going to absolve him, why would he bring it up?

White: But the following question to that is, if you’re going to bring it up and think it absolves you, then why have you not presented it to any of the legal authorities, whether it’s me or the AG, federal prosecutors, and state prosecutors or anybody else? Why have you not presented that information to get yourself off the hook?

MT: No, because I don’t think he thinks it’s going to absolve him. I’m just saying there’s another person that should be also held accountable – potentially.

White: So he thinks that even if it doesn’t absolve him, that it could implicate Phil Bryant, and for whatever reason, he’s just not going to disclose that information.

MT: He’s probably, I would imagine, taking all of his cues from his defense counsel. So I’m not trying to get in his head, I’m just saying, regardless of what John Davis decides to do or say, or try to defend himself, there was another person who also is responsible for the money being spent properly.

White: But not in the same way. Not in the same way, I would say. Because again, go back to the Tate hypothetical. Is Tate responsible for knowing all the TANF regs? No. He’s just not.

MT: But if he’s just like telling an agency head to help out his nephew or fund this school that he wants to see funded because it’s going to go down otherwise. He’s not supposed to do that, no matter what money or what purposes the money was supposed to be going towards. Throw out the whole, “Does it serve a TANF purpose?” and just look at, is a governor supposed to be telling a state agency head who to fund? Or who to help out? Or if their friend needs their mom to get on the Medicaid waiver, he’s going to try to get the state agency head to help this person get on the program? You know, these are the examples that I think about when I think about the way that Phil Bryant may have had influence over John Davis’ actions.

White: Yeah. I mean, again, if there are specific instances where there’s specific language, where Phil Bryant is instructing John Davis to do X, Y, or Z, I mean, I really would need to see it in order to know if we — meaning me and the attorneys over here and the investigators over here — think that’s over the line or not. But again, the governor is elected and governs for a reason, you know?

So, if Tate Reeves is sitting there telling Bob Anderson, or just to be more specific, I mean, if Phil Bryant is telling John Davis, “Look, I really think that helping children in poor families is more important than helping poor adults. And I think that you should direct your TANF spending to do that as opposed to helping poor adults.” Does he have the right to do that? Absolutely he has the right to do that. He was elected, and as the elected representative of the people, he’s got a right to direct the agencies that answer to him under the law, according to his policy preferences.

MT: Yeah, no, I don’t think anyone’s arguing against that.

White: The question that you’re posing is what happens when you get more specific. And what happens if what he is suggesting to Davis does violate a reg. So, just say a reg, not a criminal statute or something like that, let’s say a reg. Again, I would just maintain that it is the agency head’s responsibility to say, “No.”

I’ll give you another example, if I walked over to the Lieutenant Governor’s office and the Lieutenant Governor told me, “Shad, the state auditor’s office will do XYZ this year, or we will cut your budget in half.” And I know that XYZ is illegal. It is my responsibility to say, “Lieutenant Governor, you may not know this, but XYZ is illegal and I will not be doing that. And you can do whatever you like to me as a result, but I will not be doing that.”

It is my responsibility because I would be the one who is held ultimately accountable for knowing the rules and regs and statutes that apply to my operations in my agency. And I don’t even necessarily think that the Lieutenant Governor would have reason to know some of those things.

In fact, it’d be impossible for the Lieutenant Governor to know all those things because he’s funding every state agency.

So there’s just a big onus that comes with running a state agency. And I feel like I can say that with some credibility, because I run a state agency. I’m responsible for complying with all the rules and regs that are applicable to me, every single day.

MT: Right. I guess I recognize that there might not be a path forward with the types of laws and things that you enforce, and I worry that like the larger, sort of, culture of state government, is not going to be addressed or taken down in the same way that these alleged embezzlers are.

What do you think about that?

White: This is actually something that runs through my head a lot and I’ll tell you why it runs through my head a lot. So, we get a call, let’s just say, again, this is a hypothetical, made up facts, but it’s very similar to things that we deal with all the time.

I get a call from a resident of a county. And the resident of the county says, “Look, my board of supervisors down here misspent a ton of money and I think they maybe even stole some of it.” So we go and we look, and as it turns out, the board paved a road that was barely driven on, which is totally legal, but is a complete waste of money.

And then on top of that, one of the board members received a kickback. So, we arrest the board member for the kickback and send him to jail. He gets prosecuted. But then the person who called the tip in, in the first place says, “Yeah, but they still spent the money on that road.” What is the recourse to hold them accountable for the money they spent on the road that was wasteful?

And the answer is, if there’s no criminal statute that applies to the actions that took place, the answer is that you have to vote those people out. And then the person who’s on the phone with me gets frustrated because they say, “Well, I don’t have unilateral power to vote these people out.” And so you have to go back to this point of: democracy is frustrating sometimes, but it exists for a reason.

And the reason in this case is that the voters get to decide whether or not the policy choices by an individual or the way they handle their business is something that they want in office or not. And that’s really where the accountability falls if there’s no statute that’s been triggered.

So I do think about it a lot, but there’s not a perfect answer to this because there’s not supposed to be a perfect answer. No one person’s judgment is supposed to rule the day. We decided to outsource those kinds of decisions to the voting public. And that’s just where the decision lies and that’s where the accountability has to lie, too, if there’s no statute has been violated.

MT: Yeah. If there’s no statute that’s been violated.

I think that the problem that I have, and that really bugs me about this story, as I learn more and more, especially looking at the forensic audit and seeing the different characters who are totally outside of the story that has been told, but these contractors who are politically connected getting these big contracts to do little to nothing. And you’ve talked about this before, the way that you’ve talked about these issues, it’s like, you’re pissed that money didn’t go to people who needed it. And in the case of corrections, you seem to express empathy for people who needed to be rehabilitated, who were not because money was not spent properly at the department of corrections. So these are just examples. It seems like you want things to be done more ethically, even if there’s no laws being broken by the actions that are taking place right now. And so how do we accomplish that?

White: Well those instances would be laws being broken, though, right? It would be if a parole officer is embezzling funds from prisoners–

MT: Well, yeah, but I’m not even talking about a parole officer, I’m talking about–

White: I take your point, keep going.

MT: I’m talking about the department of corrections commissioner taking a whatever, hundred thousand dollar buyout, illegal buyout, and has never been held accountable for that. You know? I mean, she didn’t, I guess, violate a specific statute or something, but you still express through your written reports that that was improper.

White: I would say she did violate a specific statute. So what we do when we audit is if you read something in an audit finding, the finding is describing spending that did appear to violate a statute or a reg. So I would say that, just like the comp time buyout of John Dowdy at the Bureau of Narcotics, which we audited, you know, that buyout was not appropriate under the law and he had to pay it back.

So in these situations that you’re describing, so far at least, we have both, we have something that is both unethical and illegal.

MT: So does anyone get charged with a crime?

White: Well, you know, criminal statutes and civil statutes are different in what we look for, this is just generally speaking about criminal statutes.

What we look for to see if there’s a violation of criminal statutes is, we’re looking for things like a personal benefit to someone, if it’s an alleged embezzlement. And we’re looking to see also that they intended to do this, knowing that what they were doing was not allowed. So, when you get to that point, when you’re trying to figure out if somebody intended to do something, you have a problem in the law, which is you’re trying to step inside their head, but that’s impossible. Right? So what do you do?

You look at circumstantial evidence to see if it seems like they knew what they were doing. So you looked to see if they concealed what they were doing while they were doing it. You look to see if they covered their tracks. Inversely, you would look to see if they were very open and apparent about what they were doing.

Did they walk down the hall and tell everybody, “Hey, I just bought a new Ferrari with the agency’s money. Isn’t this great? Everybody come down and see the Ferrari.” I mean, weirdly, that is proof that they were dumb and didn’t know that what they were doing was illegal. So we look at intent. We look at whether or not there’s a personal benefit. We look at whether or not they make fraudulent statements on a government document. And again, every fraud statute in every state in the country has an intent element, which means we have to show that they intentionally decided to lie and conceal what the truth was. So that’s where, speaking broadly, that’s where the line is between a civil case and a criminal case.

But, all that to say, the state auditor’s office is not in charge of deciding whether something is a civil or criminal case. We do not have that legal authority at all. We are an investigative body. So we go out, we identify facts. We figure out what actually happened with spending. And we ultimately present those facts to lawyers, prosecutors outside of my office, the AG’s office, the local DA, federal prosecutors. Prosecutors make charging decisions. Prosecutors are the ones who decide, “OK, well this, this is not just civil. This is criminal. And we’re going to take this to a grand jury.” And then of course, if it goes to a grand jury, a jury of a person’s peers is going to decide if the individual is indicted or not. So that’s how I think about it.

And that system has worked well because there are tons of different safeguards in there. And there are provisions in there that prevent any one person from being too powerful. And that’s, I think, important to remember in this case, is, I mean, you can see it yesterday or whenever it was that we released the demands. People say, “Well, why aren’t all these folks going to jail?” And they question whether or not I am fully doing my job because they’re not in jail. Well, they forget that I don’t make charging decisions.

MT: Yeah.

White: I don’t have that power. I absolutely do not have that power. I could not haul somebody into jail right now without having an indictment and a reason to believe that they have committed a crime. I just don’t. So if they have a problem with that, they have to take it up with the prosecutor.

MT: When you’ve given information over to prosecutors, have there been times where you felt like they didn’t follow up on something that you would have expected them to?

White: You’re talking about just in general with any case?

MT: Yeah, but also within this welfare stuff, certainly. How much are you guiding them through the information you’re giving them? Do you hand over the documents and are like, “These are the six guys who really did something?” Or is it more like, “Here’s a group of people who may have done something,” and the prosecutors are the ones that picked out the six guys.

White: To go to one end of the spectrum, there’s never a world in which we will dump 30,000 pages of documents at a prosecutor and say, “Hey, figure it out.” That’s not gonna happen. That literally has never happened, will never happen. They would just laugh at us. And then they would probably never take our cases ever again if we started doing things like that.

So your question is, “How specific do we get when we present files to the prosecutors?” I mean, we will look through files and spend time figuring out who we think has violated a criminal statute and speaking generally, because I don’t want to get too specific about DHS criminal cases, speaking generally, we’ve taken cases to prosecutor’s offices said, “Hey, here’s a summary of four different violations of criminal statutes by three different people that we think happened. What do you think?” And sometimes prosecutors agree with us and sometimes they disagree. In addition to that, especially if it’s a case that has a federal nexus, usually what happens if we do that with a federal office, is they say, “Thank you for your recommendation on these three people that violated those four criminal statutes. We’ll take it from here.” And usually the federal prosecutor will take the documents and take whatever we’ve said and hand it over to the FBI, and then they will do their own digging and come to their own conclusions about who should be liable for what.

So that’s kind of how that works. Is there a frustration between agencies over whether or not everybody who got indicted should have been indicted? Yeah, sometimes. But that’s just natural between law enforcement entities, I think. That’s a common occurrence. People have differences of opinions because when you have a bunch of smart people in a room who are looking at the same facts and looking at the same law, they can differ on what the application of the law should actually mean.

And that’s just to be expected, I think.

MT: Yeah. So going back to the things that you’ve said, that kind of, to me, illustrate your mindset about the way that public funds are supposed to be spent. There’s no body, there’s no agency in charge of that in Mississippi.

White: You mean how public funds were supposed to be spent generally at every agency?

MT: We’ve talked about this before, how your office can’t have a role in making sure an agency’s spending is effective or that they reach intended outcomes. So whose role is that?

White: Yeah, it’s the role of the agency. You’re right. That there is no big oversight body that runs, that manages spending for state agencies.

MEMA ultimately has responsibility for wisely and legally managing the funds that have been handed to them. And so too does DHS, and so on.

MT: Yeah. So that’s problematic that the agency gets to spend, gets to decide how it spends the money, and there’s no one looking out for whether that money is actually being spent the way it’s intended.

…What I’m talking about are purchases that are not illegal. But they also don’t satisfy the intended purpose. There’s no one checking to see if money is being spent in the way that will accomplish the goal.

White: I don’t know that I agree with that because if you spend money in a way that does not conform to the goals stated in statute of TANF, then you’ve spent money illegally. And so then that would trigger our authority.

It sounds to me like what you’re saying is some sort of area in between where an agency is spending money legally in a way that conforms with the stated goals in statute of TANF. But that’s just not a good use of funds.

MT: No. Or that it just doesn’t meet the goal.

White: If it doesn’t meet the goal though, I’m saying it’s actually illegal.

Editor’s note: The interview delves into specific examples in the forensic audit.

MT: The way that he was charged with going about helping people get jobs, did not help people get jobs. Not necessarily because he didn’t do the work, but because the work that they had him doing didn’t satisfy the goal. I mean, I think it’s happening all the time where we’re giving contracts that say, “Hey, you go do this thing.” And people just kind of flail around and don’t actually accomplish anything. And that’s perfectly legal.

The terms of the contract are satisfied, but they didn’t accomplish anything.

White: Yes. And so I’m tracking now, so the contract, as it is written describes a legal use of TANF money.

MT: Right.

White: But then the way the contract is executed just means that the money doesn’t actually help anybody, something like that.

I think that if that is the case, then again, the accountability comes back to the governing entity of the agency, whether that be the governor who appoints the agency head or the board who appoints an agency head. Because what you’re really talking about is mismanagement, right? You’re talking about legal activities, but activities that don’t make anyone’s life better.

And if that’s the case, then the accountability has to fall on whoever’s overseeing that agency. And in some cases, that’s the governor, who’s elected by the people and can be unelected by the people. And in some cases that’s a board, but the board is appointed by usually the governor or someone else.

So that’s where the accountability lies. I get the frustration. I get that it’s messy, but that is the system. That is it. And it’s important to think about the inverse of that system to what would it look like for one person to have oversight over all these agencies and to be able to decide unilaterally what mismanagement looks like. That would be a lot of power for one individual or for one body or something like that.

MT: I would think that the legislature would be held more accountable for that because they’re the ones setting the budgets and they don’t require the agencies to show that they need the money to satisfy a goal and then come back the next year and show how that goal was actually satisfied with the money that they were given.

White: No, that’s a great point. That is a great point. And I should have mentioned that. So you do have two forms of oversight. Let’s take DHS to be specific. You have the governor who appoints the head of DHS. So he is the person who is elected by the people to make policy decisions about what DHS is going to do and should be held accountable for that agency functioning well, through his appointee.

But also you have the people funding the agency, right? And they too, I think, bear responsibility to make sure that the money is well spent and they should ask hard questions about where that money is going. And and I can tell you, I think that if I misspent half of my budget here in the state auditor’s office, I would certainly hope that appropriators would come back to me and say, “What you are doing and how you are running your agency may be legal, but it is not appropriate because you’re wasting a bunch of money and we’re about to cut half your budget.”

MT: Which ultimately doesn’t help anybody. It still doesn’t help the person that the agency should be helping. But the last point I wanna make is just –

White: We’re getting very philosophical by the way.

MT: I know, I’m sorry.

White: I feel like we’re getting down to, like, is democracy good, now—

MT: (laughs) I don’t know how else to do my job.

White: I think you and I might come out on different sides on the “Is democracy good?” question.

MT: Let me, I just want to make one more point about the way that these agencies are operating very legally.

And what I see happening more and more as I gather examples, and I was not this cynical before I saw all of this. We were under a favor system in this state. That means that the people who are getting jobs in state government or contracts or whatever you want to call it, are people who already had wealth and power and the state is letting them maintain wealth and power. While no one else has the opportunity unless they were born with it.

White: But what about me?

MT: What about you? You don’t think that describes you.

White: It does not. I don’t think that describes me.

MT: Yeah.

White: So how does someone like me get into this position without being born into it, if the premise that you just set out is true?

I have no doubt that there are places where somebody’s daddy, who’s influential calls somebody else and gets them a job. That just happens in life. But I also have no doubt that there are times, including in state government, where people get into positions of power, regardless of who they were, who they are, or who their parents are or where they’re from.

I have no political connections. I grew up in a town of 700 people. My dad’s an oilfield pumper and my mom’s a school teacher.

MT: Yeah.

White: The first time they ever met a governor was when I worked for one. I don’t think what you said is totally true

MT: Well, you’re an exceptional case. I mean, you’re like a Rhodes Scholar. That’s a remarkable position to be in, that you created for yourself. It’s not common.

White: I don’t know. I don’t have a good way to assess how many people got into their jobs based on family and historic power and wealth versus something else. I just don’t.

Look, here’s another thing. I think sometimes people confuse agreement with ideology with coming from a privileged background. So for example, I saw the other day that somebody had criticized me for coming from privilege and not understanding what DHS was or what TANF dollars were intended to do. Now, that’s somebody who obviously has no idea who I am. They haven’t even bothered to Google me or figure out what my path was to this point. I think they leapt to that conclusion probably because they disagree with me politically. And they just assumed that somebody who’s a Republican, who’s in charge of something, must’ve come from privilege, which is just not true.

So we have to be careful, I think, to avoid falling into that logical trap. But, to your point, yeah, I do think that there are absolutely situations where people get jobs because of who they know, who their parents were, how much money they have, all that kind of stuff. And I don’t like that. I really don’t. You can ask my wife, I complain more about that, about people being born on third base and getting to home and thinking that they have accomplished something great–

MT: Yeah.

White: –than almost any other societal problem. But it doesn’t mean it is the universal rule in Mississippi, and I honestly don’t have a way of assessing whether or not Mississippi is any worse in that regard than anywhere else.

MT: Right. Well, going back to Phil Bryant, the Phil Bryant question is lingering and is not going to go away — how much responsibility he had or should have had for the misspending of tens of millions of dollars that. How does one person misspend tens of millions of dollars by himself?

That’s a system. That’s a broken system. That’s not a broken person.

White: Well, I do think you could say that it is a broken system and still believe that John Davis was the final arbiter of all these decisions, because John Davis didn’t misspent $77 million. John Davis misspent a bunch of money, and then he handed a bunch more money to MCEC and FRC, who he then failed to monitor, who also misspent a bunch of money. So, it’s definitely a system. There’s no doubt about that. It’s not one guy stroking checks day after day, spending the money himself minute by minute. You’re exactly right. That would be very difficult for one person to do. But it wasn’t one person.

And let me just take one step back, too, and talk about Mississippi in general, because now we’ll get to a point where I do think that some problems here are more acute than in other places. One of the reasons why this entire ecosystem of fraud was allowed to develop was because there was almost no oversight over nonprofits in Mississippi.

MT: Yeah.

White: So you have nonprofits operating out there sometimes without boards.

MT: Yeah.

White: You have nonprofits operating out there, who, the only way that they are subjected to regulatory oversight is through submitting some documents occasionally to the Secretary of State’s Office and 990s, and a couple of other things.

The Secretary of State’s Office doesn’t have investigators who are going around and looking for misspending at non-profits.

So yes, there is a system here that was, I don’t know that you would say it was put into place, but it existed, that allowed $96 million dollars, let’s call it what it is because of interest, $96 million that was misspent.

And I think there need to be real policy questions asked about why that system is the way it is. And I understand your argument about privilege and all that stuff. I, speaking honestly, I think those are the wrong questions. To me, the right questions are, “Why is it that nonprofits have no oversight in the state? Why is it that the accountants who audited FRC and MCEC have not been held accountable for their audits of those institutions?” You know, these are the kinds of things that when coupled together, create an ecosystem for fraud. It’s like a plane crash. A plane only crashes if there are multiple redundant systems that failed and what you have is multiple redundant systems failing.

I don’t know that I would wake up and say, well, is the thing that is failing in Mississippi the fact that a bunch of rich, privileged people who only belong to rich, privileged families are in charge of everything. That’s just not true. I just don’t think that’s true. Phil Bryant is proof that that’s not true, actually.

But is there a better set of questions to ask about why a system exists and what the underlying drivers of the system are? Yeah. I think there’s a whole bunch of questions to ask about that. And I think that the answers to those questions require a ton of hard work and a ton of thinking about why Mississippi is the way it is, why we have set up the policies in the way that we have set up.

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BAY ST. LOUIS – Marc Magilari leaned against a railing at a community civic center, perched above the railway as a CSX freight train roared by. 

It was the fourth train to come through Bay St. Louis that Wednesday, just after 4 p.m. Magilari, a spokesman for Amtrak, and a small camera had been keeping watch since 8 a.m. to survey the train traffic. It rolled footage of hours of empty tracks live on Twitch. 

In a railroad beef that’s been building for years, Amtrak has turned to live streams, snarky tweets and time lapse videos to help prove its point: Passenger and freight trains can coexist on the railways that run through Mississippi from Mobile to New Orleans. 

“We can help people in this town,” Magilari said during his Bay St. Louis visit. “That’s why we’re here.” 

Amtrak wants to expand access to public transportation. CSX and other freight companies say the addition of passengers at this time could heighten supply chain issues and harm businesses relying on the Port of Mobile.

Freight company officials say Mississippi’s railway corridor is congested; that Amtrak is over simplifying obstacles; and that the repairs and updates needed to accommodate passenger trains will cost taxpayers upwards of $400 million. In a statement, CSX called Amtrak’s and others live videos misleading.  

Amtrak contends that CSX’s explanations are largely scare or delay tactics because the transport company doesn’t want passenger rail to expand on its tracks, even if federal law says they’re supposed to share. It also disputes CSX’s hefty repair and update estimate. The project already has more $77 million in secured funding. 

The back-and-forth – which has been near constant since 2015 and beyond – is why a federal board has been tasked to find the truth and make a decision about the route’s future. Amtrak wants to run two round-trip trains between Mobile and New Oreleans – one in the morning and one in the evening – with four stops in Mississippi. 

READ MORE: The fate of Amtrak’s Gulf Coast return rests with a federal board

The Surface Transportation Board, a body of transportation experts selected by the president and approved by congress, entered its second week of an evidentiary hearing over the Gulf Coast route dispute on Tuesday morning. The hearing is based in Washington, D.C. but being live streamed to the public. 

It’s not just Gulf Coast leaders and Amtrak watching closely. The debate has turned into a test case that experts say could dictate the future of railroad expansion across the United States. 

By law, Amtrak can run passenger trains on tracks owned by a freight company as long as it doesn’t “unreasonably impair” businesses. The law stems from a 1970s agreement – often called the “great bargain” – between struggling railroad companies that needed debt forgiven and the federal government. 

The board is litigating what constitutes “unreasonable” impacts on business for the first time. And that definition could affect the 160 other communities Amtrak wants to grow or restore service to as part of its “Amtrak Connects” plan, as they would all share tracks with freight companies. 

Experts have said its unlikely freight rail companies will let up on the fight easily since Amtrak first filed a complaint with the board over a year ago. 

“This is their Waterloo,” said Thomas “Todd” Stennis, an Amtrak senior manager from Gulfport. 

In the second 8-hour day of the hearing last week, CSX’s legal team began laying what seemed to be the groundwork for an argument to appeal the board’s pending decision. 

In a statement to Mississippi Today, CSX said it doesn’t comment on legal strategies. 

CSX attorney Raymond Atkins – who was once the transportation board’s own lawyer – told the board last week that some of their questions of a witness could be veering into advocacy. 

“This is a unique case where you’re charged by congress and stepping into the role of a judge and you can overstep those bounds if your questioning is too partisan or too extensive,” Atkins said, referencing case law examples of decisions being overturned. 

Board chair Martin Oberman disagreed, saying while CSX’s team could continue to object to questions, he and other board members wouldn’t change how they were questioning witnesses. 

Oberman said that, if anything, not asking questions to get facts that make the record as robust as possible could leave room for the future decision to be overturned. 

“We are not a court, we are not a jury,” Martin said during the hearing. “We have some similarities to those bodies but we are an administrative agency with an obligation to protect the freight network to ensure the law is enforced in regards to the passenger rail network with a very broad and important public interest.” 

Public transportation advocates like Jim Matthews, the CEO of the National Association of Railroad Passengers, said it’s likely CSX will appeal a ruling that’s in favor of Amtrak. 

“But I think the (board) is doing an excellent job,” Matthews said. “And that bodes well for passenger rail because it makes an appeal based on the merits likely to fail.” 

But an appeal, regardless of its success or failure, would likely mean even more waiting for a region that hasn’t had access to an Amtrak route since 2005. 

“We’re not giving up,” Magilari said. 

After Amtrak’s live stream in Bay. St. Louis, Transportation for America – an advocacy group – posted a time-lapse video out of Pascagoula. 

The group’s camera ran from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. and captured seven trains, with a bridge moving up and down to accommodate each train. Like Amtrak, the advocacy group argues train traffic over this stretch of about 150 miles of railway isn’t excessive. 

CSX says that focusing on one point on the route doesn’t show the full scope of the corridor.

“Purporting that it is indicative of the operational realities of the entire line is grossly misleading,” CSX said in a statement. “Anyone that understands railroad operations, including Amtrak, would know that.” 

CSX says it averages eight to 10 through trains (that make limited stops), one to three coal and giant trains and “numerous local trains” on the track each day.

While the board could make a ruling that calls for the parties to go to mediation to solve the access quarrel, that route seems unlikely given how little the parties can agree on historically. A spokesman for the board said there is no mandated timeline they have to follow once the hearing is over to announce their decision. 

The board has made it clear it takes the weight of the case seriously. The hearings were first scheduled to only last a week, but by the end of day one it was clear it would stretch beyond that. As of Tuesday, April 14, 18 and 19 were scheduled as hearing dates. 

The post Snarky tweets, time lapse videos: How the Gulf Coast train beef between Amtrak and CSX is intensifying appeared first on Mississippi Today.

In a $5 million agreement, the University of Mississippi is researching essential oils for doTerra, a multi-level marketing company the Federal Trade Commission warned in 2020 to stop claiming its products could cure or prevent COVID-19. 

doTerra, a Utah-based company, calls this partnership “a natural fit.” 

The partnership was born several years ago after Ikhlas Khan, the award-winning director of UM’s National Center for Natural Products Research, and doTerra’s chief medical officer, Russell Osguthorpe, got to talking at a conference in Oxford. 

The pair came to an initial agreement for Khan’s center to study lavender oil, doTerra’s best-selling essential oil. In that deal, worth half a million dollars, doTerra provided 42 lavender essential oil samples in the hopes that Khan would publish a study in a peer-reviewed journal, which he did last year.

In early March, UM announced it had extended the partnership with doTerra by five years. The research will be funded with $5 million from doTerra, UM told Mississippi Today. In a press release, Osguthorpe extolled the partnership: “Together, we can help to create higher standards that will allow the world to see the true benefits of doTERRA essential oils.”

Companies have long sought to partner on research with public universities, which, starved for state funding, eagerly take private dollars. But UM’s partnership with doTerra raises questions about how a university’s stamp of approval can help multi-level marketing companies obscure an exploitative business model. 

In interviews, UM and doTerra both told Mississippi Today the partnership is focused on researching essential oils and is not related to doTerra’s business setup. John O’Hara, who leads the Better Business Bureau of Mississippi, questioned if consumers will understand the nature of the pair’s relationship. 

“Think about the credentials,” O’Hara said. “If they (doTerra) throw the University of Mississippi logo on their products, it does give them credibility.”

“Is the average Joe on the street going to understand that?” O’Hara continued, “Or would they look at it as, ‘the University of Mississippi is doing it? It must be good.’”

The Food and Drug Administration does not regulate essential oils as drugs, so companies are prohibited from claiming essential oils are medicine that can treat diseases. That hasn’t stopped doTerra. 

In 2020, the company was warned by the Federal Trade Commission for advertising its products as cures to COVID-19. In the letter, the FTC described multiple claims made by doTerra’s distributors, employees of the company that not only sell essential oils but recruit others to do the same. “An image of doTERRA-brand peppermint and lemon essential oil bottles, accompanied by the hashtags ‘#covid #prevention.’” 

doTerra responded to the FTC’s letter by saying it was “working to address concerns.” But earlier this year, a watchdog group asked the FTC to take further action against doTerra in a letter alleging its distributors were continuing to claim the company’s essential oils can prevent COVID.  

Josh Gladden, UM’s vice chancellor for research and sponsored programs, told Mississippi Today the university’s partnership with doTerra is focused on studying a potentially beneficial product. Gladden said it was his understanding that the FTC commonly issues warning letters. 

“In that particular case, you know, our understanding is that that was a claim made by someone in their (doTerra’s) sales department on social media, it was not an organized marketing strategy by the company leadership or company direction,” he said. 

Mississippi Today replied that doTerra’s leadership picked a multi-level marketing strategy. 

“That’s true,” Gladden said. “And how they actually get their product out there, you know, they’ve chosen a multi-marketing level approach, and that’s their choice on marketing. What we do feel confident, though, in is that the company itself is dedicated to producing a high quality product however it goes into the market.

“And honestly, in terms of the multi-level marketing strategy, I’m not gonna comment on that,” Gladden continued. “That’s their business model that they’ve decided on. But, you know, every company needs some strategy to do their marketing.” 

“What would you do with an extra $300 a month? $2,000 a month? $10,000 a month?” doTerra asks on a page on its website. “The more you put into your business, the greater the compensation.” 

Declarations like that pervade doTerra’s website. But the truth is that most of doTerra’s distributors don’t make thousands of dollars a month. In fact, a little over half didn’t make a single dollar in 2020, according to doTerra’s recent income statement. That same year, just 5% of doTerra’s distributors made more than $1,370 a month, a poverty-level wage — and that was before business expenses.

doTerra was founded in 2008 by former executives at Young Living, another multi-level marketing company that sells essential oils. To make money, doTerra’s distributors commit to buying at least $100 worth of products at a wholesale discount each month. Distributors also get bonuses by recruiting people to work in their “downline.” Even though this business model takes on a pyramid-like structure, multi-level marketing is legal. 

The gap between the promises MLMs make and the reality has led to numerous stories of harm: Distributors, driven into thousands of dollars in debt, forced to declare bankruptcy; strained or broken relationships; friends promising the new product they’re selling can cure illnesses. 

Still, doTerra claims it’s different. 

“There are many Multi-Level Marketing companies out there, but not all MLMs are created equal,” the company says on a webpage explaining why people should join. One reason doTerra stands out, the webpage says, is because its essential oils are the “most tested, most trusted” on the market. 

That kind of claim — “most tested, most trusted” — is where partnerships with universities come into play, said Robert FitzPatrick, an expert on multi-level marketing who authored the book “Ponzinomics.” These relationships help MLMs fight public perception, FitzPatrick said, but UM studying doTerra’s essential oils ultimately “doesn’t matter to the scheme itself. That has nothing to do with (doTerra) being a multi-level marketing company.” 

doTerra has partnerships with Oklahoma University, the University of Utah, and Southern Adventist University. But the multi-level marketing company is most proud of its relationship with Khan and the National Center for Natural Products Research. 

It’s easy to see why: For one, Khan’s reputation precedes him. In a video promoting the center, the dean of UM’s school of pharmacy described Khan as a “world-renowned individual” who has won “possibly every award that you can.”

“We’ve got other partnerships,” Osguthorpe told Mississippi Today. “But personally, we’re most proud of what we do with NCNPR.” 

Corporate-sponsored research at University of Mississippi is facilitated by the Industry Engagement Council, an office in the Brandt Memory House, a historic building that also contains the university’s foundation. In 2019, its director, Hughes Miller, helped form the council, which calls itself “your gateway to Ole Miss.” 

As director, Miller assists a wide variety of research partnerships at the university. That could be a contract with Viking Range for students to study manufacturing or a law school fellowship program with companies like FedEx, C-Spire, or Yates Construction. In Miller’s work, “discovery calls” and non-disclosure agreements are common. But the particulars of each agreement vary. In doTerra’s case, Khan cultivated the partnership. 

“It’s never cookie cutter,” Miller said. 

As Miller sees it, corporate-sponsored research supports economic development in Mississippi. It’s also beneficial to the university. Each year, sponsored-research contributes $60-$75 million to UM’s Oxford campus alone, Gladden told Mississippi Today. The University of Mississippi Medical Center brings in just as much. 

That’s money the Legislature could be providing in public funding, but appropriations for the Institutions of Higher Learning have never recovered from the Great Recession. Public universities in states that have seen a decline in funding for higher education have more of an incentive to take dollars for privately funded research. 

In pursuing sponsored-research, the university contemplates the appearance of each partnership, Gladden told Mississippi Today. “We ask, what is the history of this company? What is the reputation of this company? Do we want to hitch our wagon? What is this gonna look like from the outside?” 

Gladden said UM has turned down corporate sponsors whose business practices it does not support, but he would not name those companies.

“That’s gonna be a case-by-case assessment,” Gladden told Mississippi Today. “Now, our scientists and our researchers probably wouldn’t be focusing so much on that. But our university leadership could be focused on that. So, if you’re asking where do we draw the line, that’s sort of an impossible question because it depends a lot on the details.” 

UM has more uniformity in the guidelines it provides researchers for how to ethically conduct a corporate partnership that include disclosing conflicts of interests. Companies are still able to have input on study design and framing. Khan said NCNPR kept doTerra updated on the results of the lavender oil study but the company did not have a say in whether the article was published. 

In late March, hundreds of scientists, researchers and policymakers, including officials at the Food and Drug Administration, gathered in Oxford for the International Conference on the Science of Botanicals. Since it was first held in 2000, ICSB has grown into the largest annual event at the Oxford Conference Center, a brick building just off MS-Highway 7. 

Under Khan’s leadership, ICSB became known for its “nonthreatening atmosphere,” according to NutraIngredients-USA, a publication that covers the dietary supplement industry. At the conference, private companies and FDA officials mingle and discuss the often contentious topic that is federal regulation. This year, doTerra was a title sponsor. Osguthorpe, the company’s chief medical officer, spoke during a session called “industry perspectives” that also included a scientist from Amway, another multi-level marketing company.  

The initial lavender oil study that Khan worked on proposed a new way to measure the quality of essential oils, including ones that are adulterated, or mixed with another substance. Khan said he hopes his new framework will become “a tool for everybody,” including regulatory agencies. 

“I think that what we’re using our relationship to do is to substantiate and scientifically better understand the product,” Osguthorpe said. “It has nothing to do with a business model.” 

Almost a year after Khan published the study, doTerra is using it to claim its lavender oil is the “purest on the market” and “the gold standard against which all other lavender oils are measured.” On a website called “Source to you,” doTerra says NCNPR’s study shows that “2/3rds of lavender oils on the market are contaminated and of inferior quality.” 

“I mean, they can extrapolate that,” Khan said, “but in our paper, I don’t think it says anywhere that DoTerra products are superior quality. I don’t see any mention of anything superior to anything.” 

The study actually found 51.9% of the 27 unidentified lavender essential oil samples doTerra provided were adulterated or of poor quality, while 62.5% of samples NCNPR sourced from other places were adulterated or of poor quality. 

This year, Khan’s center is studying peppermint oil with its funding from doTerra. After that, it might be cinnamon oil. He said the market will decide which essential oil doTerra would like NCNPR to study next. 

Khan said he views the partnership with doTerra as a matter of uncovering scientific knowledge and that it has nothing to do with the company’s multi-level marketing model. 

“I don’t think we’re going to not partner with them because they have a bad reputation,” Khan said. “For us to tell them, ‘we can’t help you because you had an FTC violation before’ — where else are they gonna go to get it (the study) done right?”

“The thing is, the company does exist, they’re here, they are selling it,” Khan continued. “If they’re asking us a scientific question that we can solve, I really don’t think it’s the right thing to turn down anybody or any place, if they’re trying to do things right.”

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The tidal wave of alleged misspending identified by auditors at the Mississippi Department of Human Services was not confined to the headline-grabbing payments for publicity events with famous athletes, inspirational talks from a former pro-wrestler and construction of a new volleyball stadium.

Auditors say some disputed payments also included grants to established programs, such as the T.K. Martin Center at Mississippi State University that helps children with dyslexia learn to read.

The problem is not with the worthiness of the recipients but with how officials awarded the grants in violation of federal regulations, the auditors say.

The examples also show how then-MDHS director John Davis cut corners and skirted guidelines to further his own agenda and to try to satisfy the aims of former Gov. Phil Bryant. Behind his support for valid programs, Bryant’s requests also served to placate a campaign donor and the agriculture school, one of the state’s most powerful lobbies.

New communication obtained by Mississippi Today shows Bryant asking Davis about funding for specific vendors — encouraging Davis to pre-select grant awards — and the director eagerly complying.

“Yes sir we can definitely help,” Davis replied to his boss in one instance. “You can go ahead and tell them I will be reaching out to fund them. I will do today.”

The exchanges shed light on a larger scandal that began after Davis exploited his agency’s nonexistent bid process for federal block grants that came with virtually no federal oversight. Under his leadership, the agency started making upfront, multimillion-dollar payments to two private nonprofits, Mississippi Community Education Center and Family Resource Center of North Mississippi, to run an umbrella program they called Families First for Mississippi.

Davis maintained control over how Families First operated while he treated the private nonprofits and the public agency as one in the same.

But they weren’t the same because the nonprofit spending was shielded from public view,  creating a black hole and concealing a raft of legal and ethical issues until state auditors finally caught up with them.

Davis and five others have pleaded not guilty to criminal charges while the state attempts to claw back payments identified as improper. Officials have not accused Bryant of any wrongdoing in the case.

Mississippi Today reviewed communication between Davis, Bryant and other welfare officials in the months leading up to the start of the state auditor’s welfare investigation to understand the closed-door decisions behind the public spending. Some of those text messages are reprinted here exactly as they appear without correction.

In this story, we examine two examples of Bryant asking Davis, his appointee, if he could fund a specific organization without using normal channels.

“Any way we can help?” Bryant worded his request both times.

In one case, Davis responded within minutes, assuring the governor he would reach out that day to fund Willowood Developmental Center, a nonprofit that serves adults and children with intellectual and developmental disabilities in Jackson.

Willowood was already under a separate child care grant with the department when Bryant sent Davis the request for Families First funding. And even though Willowood never ended up receiving additional MDHS funding after the exchange, Davis’ response reveals his agency’s cavalier and preferential grant award process – and Bryant’s involvement in it.

“If it’s wrong to try to help Willowood and those poor children out there, then I will have to say I was wrong, but I don’t think I was,” Bryant told Mississippi Today.

In the other case, Davis initially told the governor it would be against federal regulations for his agency to fund the T.K. Martin Center for Technology and Disability at Mississippi State University. But, then Davis found a way to award the center a grant anyway.

“Perhaps he did,” Bryant said. “And I hope it was proper and legal and ethical and moral because I remember people at Mississippi State, and I don’t remember who, calling and saying, ‘This is a wonderful program for these poor children and we’re going to lose it.’”

Both programs were associated with Families First for Mississippi, the now-defunct program that attached its name to many existing organizations across the state and promised to pump resources directly into the communities of needy residents. 

In reality, the initiative was little more than a smokescreen for the widespread misspending of a federal grant called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), intended to help the state’s most vulnerable residents. According to a Mississippi Today analysis of audit reports, independent accountants found that between 70% and 86% of purchases by the two Families First nonprofits violated federal rules – including welfare regulations, which are already some of the laxest guidelines of all federal grants.

For more than two decades, Families First was a catch-all phrase for services Mississippi provided with its TANF dollars.

Dating to the 1990s, after Congress overhauled the welfare system, small organizations across the state received “Families First grants” from the Mississippi Department of Human Services to offer parenting and anger management classes, after-school programs, tutoring, and job-preparation activities. Sometimes these entities received grants directly from the state agency and sometimes they received subcontracts from other MDHS subgrantees, making them what auditors call “third tier recipients.” The contractors were supposed to advance the state’s goal of helping low-income families “achieve self-sufficiency.”

But the state also used its welfare money and the Families First program to supplement the budgets of existing programs and private organizations that don’t seem to directly relate to poverty, such as services for children with disabilities – programs often absent from Mississippi’s notoriously underfunded public school system.

The state has broad flexibility to spend welfare dollars not just to help people out of poverty, but to prevent others from falling into it. Ideally, the money would be distributed as part of a cohesive plan for battling poverty in the state or through a competitive process to boost the most promising programs. But records show that under Davis, the agency often awarded grants at his discretion, sometimes on the suggestion of political leaders.

Davis said when he became director, Bryant instructed him to significantly consolidate the number of TANF grants to a manageable number, resulting in the large contracts with the two nonprofits. This was just one of multiple areas of the agency that Davis said Bryant instructed him to outsource, including child support enforcement.

The T.K. Martin Center, formed in 1997 and named after a former MSU dean and vice president, received a “Families First grant” in 2017 to open a program to help kids learn to read. It was called the IGNITE Dyslexia Clinic.

Willowood, a roughly $6 million-a-year, nearly 50-year-old charity funded primarily by government grants and run by a board of prominent community members, had received Families First funding throughout the 2000s, its director told Mississippi Today.

Both Willowood and T.K. Martin programs overlapped with another federal grant that investigators and auditors have yet to examine as closely as they have TANF: the Child Care Development Fund (CCDF).

From 2015 to 2019, MDHS had stopped giving Families First grants to Willowood but instead funded the center through a CCDF subgrant, which the nonprofit used to operate its day care center.

When the TANF program was in strife during the months leading up to Davis’ forced retirement – after his agency had cut the budgets of several subgrantees and Families First was bleeding funds – the agency also pivoted to CCDF to help T.K. Martin.

The Child Care Development Fund is a federal block grant, similar to TANF, that states can use to provide child care vouchers to low-income working parents or improve the quality of day care centers. In 2018, child care advocates complained that the agency had not approved a new voucher in five years.

A week after Davis told Bryant his agency couldn’t legally fund T.K. Martin, the welfare director visited Mississippi State University to tour the facilities and discuss funding with college president Mark Keenum, emails show. They struck a deal that day, according to text messages. 

Nancy New, the nonprofit founder who partly ran Families First, also crossed paths with both programs. She is one of the central figures in the welfare scandal who has pleaded not guilty to several criminal charges and is awaiting trial.

New joined welfare officials when they visited T.K. Martin in April of 2019, according to an emailed itinerary.

New also attended a luncheon at Willowood with “special Guest Brett Favre,” a calendar entry from October 2018 shows. Willowood’s director told Mississippi Today that Favre’s cousin sat on its board and arranged for the former NFL star to speak at Willowood’s event and fundraiser.

Favre became a high profile figure in the welfare scandal after the auditor revealed that the New’s nonprofit had paid the athlete $1 million in welfare funds to promote Families First and to speak at events that the auditor said he didn’t attend.

“That was not one of the speeches he was quote-unquote supposed to make,” said Willowood’s executive director Curtis Alford, who added that Willowood did not pay Favre for the appearance. 

A couple months after the event, Davis signed a $182,275 CCDF subgrant with Willowood “to promote self-sufficiency by promoting the optimal development of children” — language that more closely aligns with the purposes of TANF. A week later, calendar entries show, the News planned to attend a tour of Willowood.

Independent accountants found that Family Resource Center of North Mississippi, one of the Families First subgrantees, had illegally funded the dyslexia program at T.K. Martin Center in 2017 and 2018. 

Overall, auditors determined that the nonprofit misused more than $11.5 million in federal grant dollars, including $717,000 it improperly paid to Mississippi State University. That included the grant that went to T.K. Martin. No one from the north Mississippi nonprofit has faced criminal charges.

In the spring of 2019, while the Family Resource Center faced reported budget cuts and its grant to T.K. Martin had expired, Davis received a flurry of messages. 

He heard concerns about the reading program from First Lady Deborah Bryant, U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith and the head of the Republican Party in Starkville where Mississippi State University is located, texts show.

“Things like this disturb me,” Deborah Bryant said in an email to her husband, referring to the story of a mom whose 6-year-old daughter was at risk of losing the life-changing services she received from the clinic.

Bryant, who struggled with dyslexia as a kid, forwarded his wife’s email to Davis. “Anyway we can help?” he wrote from his personal email account.

Davis said he couldn’t. He told the governor that his agency would be violating federal regulations if it funded the center – even though MDHS had already indirectly funded the center through Families First.

“My attorneys told me that after they reviewed the scope it is all clinical based diagnosis and treatment,” Davis told Bryant in the April 17, 2019 email. “They advised me that they are of the opinion that it cannot be funded with TANF or any other MDHS funds.”

A footnote in the forensic audit referenced this email, but didn’t mention that the recipient was Gov. Bryant. Auditors determined that TANF money could not be used for the services at T.K. Martin because the program did not target needy families. The audit never acknowledges that the center eventually received child care funding.

“Thanks John,” Gov. Bryant responded. “Let me know if I can help find funding. We always want to follow the rules.”

The same day as the email, the Columbus Dispatch published a story addressing concerns that MSU might be closing T.K. Martin, which included vague quotes from university officials saying that a new plan for funding “is still being formulated.”

Behind closed doors, the university was discussing funding with Davis. A week later, welfare officials visited the campus to discuss the program. 

With the help of a deputy director named Jacob Black, who also attended the April 24 tour, Davis found the funding workaround. The day of the visit, Davis texted Bryant, saying he had “FOUND A WAY TO FUND THE T.K. Martin Center you ask me about.”

Later that day, Black texted Davis, recommending they add T.K. Martin into its application for renewed federal preschool funding, which was set to open in a few months. The federal agency eventually rejected Mississippi’s application and the state never got that funding.

“I think we can bridge the gap until that funding starts next spring. I will make that happen,” Black wrote.

Davis thanked Black for “always thinking ahead.”

“I am just tying to keep up with my teacher,” Black responded. “Thank you for being that teacher.”

Davis relied on Black, who is an attorney, to provide legal advice and ensure the agency was complying with the law. Their communication suggests Black knew how to get creative with funding. Once, when Davis asked Black by text if he could find $2.5 million to shore up New’s nonprofit, he agreed to find a way.

“Let me figure out how to do it without creating an audit finding,” Black wrote. 

Davis and Black seemed to get along; the director once told his deputy that the governor “thinks a great deal of you.” 

But Black apparently wasn’t as loyal to Davis as he appeared. Black was one of the employees who took information about Davis’ alleged misspending to Phil Bryant’s office in late June of 2019, according to a former agency spokesperson. Bryant alerted State Auditor Shad White, according to the auditor, prompting the investigation that identified rampant misspending and possible theft. Officials have not made public what exactly the tip entailed, calling it an exempt investigatory record. After Davis was ousted, Black remained a top agency official and even became interim director for about a month in early 2020 before current Gov. Tate Reeves replaced him with former prosecutor Bob Anderson. Soon after, Black left MDHS to take a staff attorney job at Medicaid.

Days after the MSU tour, Davis told Gov. Bryant the funding to T.K. Martin was a done deal, even though the agency didn’t yet possess a “scope of work” document from the center and wouldn’t officially ink the grant for almost three months. 

“They are being funded,” Davis texted Bryant on April 26. “…They sent a memo out telling the staff at TK Martin everything is good … I told him that’s all I needed to know. So, we are slick.”

Officials never publicized – even in a press release about T.K. Martin published weeks later – that the welfare agency provided the stopgap. 

Mississippi State spokesperson Sid Salter did not return several phone calls for this story, but he told Mississippi Today by email, “Your assertions regarding ‘closed doors’ or ‘workarounds’ reflect neither the spirit nor the letter of what transpired at the meeting” with Davis. 

That July, days after the investigation into Davis began, Black signed the official MDHS subgrant agreement with T.K. Martin for $149,978. Since MDHS awarded the grant after Davis left office and the money came out of the child care fund and not TANF, the main grant under investigation recently, forensic auditors have not examined this expenditure. 

In the subgrant file, there is a non-solicitation grant sheet, on which officials must explain why they are awarding funds outside of a bid process. On the document, there is a box that asks agency officers to “explain in detail the reason(s) that quotes, bids or proposals were not requested to obtain an award of services.”

The box is empty.

“Any assertion that MSU did not appropriately apply for the MDHS grant is simply not factual,” Salter wrote.

Although T.K. Martin is no longer receiving funding from MDHS, the university representative said the program is on solid footing. “MSU is proud of the T.K. Martin Center and openly advocates for funding to keep TKMC programs operating because those programs serve deserving clients,” Salter said by email.

Last year, Gov. Reeves awarded T.K. Martin $242,000 from his Governor’s Emergency Education Response (GEER) pandemic relief funds for IGNITE, its dyslexia and reading clinic. A relatively new program, IGNITE was propped up in 2017 by the allegedly illegal Families First grant from Family Resource Center. The clinic curiously shares the same name, Ignite, with other welfare-funded programs run by Christian ministers and former WWE wrestlers within Gov. Bryant’s welfare-funded “faith-based initiative.”

Bryant made a similar intervention on behalf of Willowood, the Jackson center that provides services to adults and children with special needs and runs a day care center that often takes kids who are in state custody.

From 2000 to 2010, MDHS had given Willowood an annual Families First grant averaging around $130,000, which allowed it to run fatherhood initiatives or programs at Mississippi’s youth detention center. But in recent years, Willowood hadn’t received that funding, so it stopped providing those services.

Alford, the Willowood director, told Mississippi Today that around 2018, he began discussing the changing landscape of the state’s welfare program with other community leaders, asking, “How do you get back into the Families First deal?” 

“They said, ‘Well, Nancy New is controlling a lot of that money now,’” Alford said. “I reached out to her to see if we could get back into that loop of money.”

But the help never came.

Willowood board member David Marsh wrote Bryant a letter in March of 2019, just a few months before the auditor’s investigation began and Davis abruptly retired.

“You have been a friend to Willowood for numerous years and we can’t thank you enough for your support,” wrote Marsh, owner of a local construction company. “We humbly ask that Families First reinstate the $150,000.00 that Willowood desperately needs.”

Marsh, whose company Benchmark Construction has donated $6,200 to Bryant’s political campaigns over the years, told Mississippi Today that he had known Gov. Bryant for decades. Marsh said Bryant helped Willowood fundraise when he was state auditor. 

“I thought that would be beneficial if he knew that Willowood needed help,” Marsh said. “… So I just reached out to him because I know him personally and wanted to see if there was any opportunity to get that (Families First grant) back.”

Gov. Bryant sent a picture of the letter to his welfare director, Davis, with the message, “Anyway we can help these guys?”

Davis said yes. “You can go ahead and tell them I will be reaching out to fund them,” he responded. “I will do today.”

Though the Families First program collapsed before Willowood received another grant, the exchange shines light on Bryant’s role in the channeling of funds not just at the state agency level, but through the privatized Families First program run by Nancy New.

Auditors have accused Davis of having inappropriate involvement in New’s funding decisions, demonstrating his favoritism and undue influence over the nonprofit. But in the case of Willowood, Bryant appeared to wield the power.

After Marsh sent the letter, Alford said he received a call.

“In just a couple days,” Alford said, “Nancy New called me and said, ‘I understand that the governor says that y’all are supposed to be getting money from us and we’re not giving it to you.’”

“She said she was going to try to fund me something and then she got arrested, I’m assuming, shortly after that because I’ve never heard another word from her,” he said.

This is Part 3 in Mississippi Today’s series “The Backchannel,” which examines former Gov. Phil Bryant’s role in the running of his welfare department during what officials have called the largest public embezzlement scheme in state history.

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Read more about the story here in Bobby Harrison’s analysis.

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OXFORD – Haley Morgan lost her job at a liquor store when she came out as transgender last year. 

The 23-year-old cycled through job interviews where she shared her new, chosen name. She didn’t get calls back. 

That May, her college town’s Starbucks became a lifeline. The Seattle-based coffee chain had policies that supported trans workers and provided health insurance that could cover hormone replacement therapy.

But store managers never stayed for long, creating a chaotic workplace. And the one manager who did stick around made Morgan’s work life a nightmare. 

“He was explicitly transphobic,” Morgan said. “He’d say things like my appearance gives away the fact I’m trans. He’d refer to me as a man as a way to belittle me.” 

Workers at the Starbucks just outside University of Mississippi’s campus were already frustrated that the new manager was given the position at all. He hadn’t worked at a Starbucks before. The situation got Morgan thinking about a strategy she was seeing at Starbucks stores across the country: unionizing. 

The reasons to do so kept piling up in her mind: inconsistent scheduling, pay that has yet to hit $15 an hour, confusing performance metrics.

As a lifelong Mississippian, where federal data shows just 5.5% of workers are in unions, Morgan’s understanding was theoretical — what she learned through bits of American history in grade school and as a public policy major at UM. But as she saw the number of unionized Starbucks stores grow, she felt more confident trying. 

Since a Buffalo Starbucks voted to form a union in December 2021, seven others have won union elections. More than 100 others have started petitioning to hold their own.

“Why not Mississippi?” Morgan thought. 

On March 3, Morgan and eight coworkers signed a letter to the CEO expressing their intentions to unionize while pointing out consistent problems they’d seen at their location: lackluster leadership, understaffed shifts, and inappropriate comments and treatments from management. 

Their efforts come amid a growing movement nationwide led by younger members in consumer-oriented jobs known for high turnover, not the stereotypical blue collar trade work usually associated with union representation.

Amazon workers in Staten Island won their election last week. The workers who wrap Amy’s burritos in California and the people who box Hershey’s chocolate in Virginia are organizing, too, demanding better conditions and pay. 

“The kind of grass roots efforts we are seeing are real and part of a broader pattern,” said Jarod Roll, a labor historian at the University of Mississippi. “Whether (young people) are leaving high school or leaving college, living-wage jobs or jobs that allow them to buy a house or pay off debt are hard to find. And that, in part, is the result of intense anti-union efforts over the last 50 years.”

Brenda Scott has been a voice for workers over three decades and is the president of Mississippi Alliance of State Employees. At one point, her group represented 6,000 workers in 1989. Now that number is fewer than 2,000, as workers have left and lost interest. It’s a challenge, she said, to keep people engaged rather than “on the bench.”  

Mississippi’s so-called right-to-work laws make it so workers can opt out of joining and paying dues to recognized unions, just like the rest of the South. 

“The Mississippi labor movement has a lot of work to do,” Scott said. “Our numbers are low.” 

In 2020, Mississippi’s number of union workers was at about 7,400. In 2021, that number was down to 5,900, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Over the last decade, the number of unionized Mississippians has rarely reached 7% of the workforce.

“We older leaders, we need to engage with the younger leaders,” Scott said. “They’re not only leaders of tomorrow, they’re the leaders of today.” 

The last major Mississippi union campaign at the Canton Nissan plant in 2017 failed. But less than a month after Morgan’s announcement at the Oxford Starbucks, workers in Hattiesburg held the first ever strike at a call center contracted by the federal government. They, too, are working to unionize.

In Mississippi, the unions that do exist include educators and teachers, the Teamster brotherhood, boilermakers, electrical workers, steel workers, and communications workers from AT&T. Some of those unions are more in name than action. Their numbers are still small considering the workforce at large. 

Morgan is now experiencing what those who have dedicated decades to mobilizing workers in Mississippi have long seen: workers aren’t often familiar with the concepts and abilities of unions and they’re terrified of losing their jobs or health insurance. 

“It’s really hard to explain what a union is when there is no real concept of bottom-up organizing in Mississippi,” Morgan said. “The Nissan plant was a huge thing in the news, so a lot of the times that is brought up: It didn’t work there so why would it work here?” 

The Nissan campaign targeted thousands of workers in a single plant. It had over a decade of work built up behind it. But come election day, workers voted 2,244-1,307 against the United Auto Workers. 

Sanchioni Butler, a UAW organizer, spent a decade building support from clergy members to community leaders in addition to educating plant workers on unions. 

“I learned that fear is real,” Butler said. “I’ve seen some of the strongest people fold because of the fear of losing what they have.”

Then-Gov. Phil Bryant and business leaders came out hard against union efforts at Nissan. It would hurt the company’s competitiveness, they said, in turn hurting its workers. A National Labor Relations Board complaint accused a plant supervisor of threatening workers with lost wages and a plant closure if a union came in — something Nissan denied. 

Similar back-and-forth has played out between workers and management at the Maximus Federal office in Hattiesburg, where workers answer calls about Medicare and the Affordable Care Act.   

“In order for workers in the South to win, they have to stand together and have courage,” Butler said. “Somebody has to take a stand. The organizer can’t do that. The workers are the ones who have the power to vote in their best interest.” 

In its annual report on unions, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that the national median weekly earnings of nonunion workers was about 83% of the wages of their union counterparts — $975 versus $1,169. 

A recent study by Oxfam, a nonprofit that works to end poverty, found that 45% of Mississippians are earning under $15 an hour.

While the Maximus workers aren’t in a recognized union, they’ve still put pressure on the company with some results alongside other Maximus call center workers in Louisiana and members of Communications Workers of America. Maximus bumped wages up to $15 per hour before a presidential federal contractor order required it; the company lowered health insurance costs; and shareholders voted to have a third-party racial equity audit to examine the company’s impact on communities of color. 

The workers — largely single mothers and women of color — are still pushing for higher wages that compare to the $55,000 salaries federal call center workers make at the Internal Revenue Service. Maximus also doesn’t offer every worker paid sick days. 

While Starbucks touts investing in baristas’ pay, Morgan has yet to see an increase to $15 an hour in her paycheck. She said she and her coworkers are still around $12 with the promise it will eventually reach $15. Morgan says it’s unclear when that will happen. 

A Starbucks spokesperson told Mississippi Today that $15 an hour for baristas will become the baseline starting wage this summer. The average wage, at that point, will be $17 nationwide, according to the chain.

Morgan would work at Starbucks full-time, but the store isn’t offering it. To ensure she brings home at least $600 every two weeks — just barely enough to cover her rent and other expenses — she works on a food delivery app. 

“Different managers said different things,” Morgan said, referring to the hourly pay increases. “And it’s hard to hold any of them accountable.”

A union, she thinks, could mitigate issues like that.

Workers can either sign enough union cards to spur an election hosted by the National Labor Board or they can have a large enough number of cards signed that the election isn’t needed.

Neither the local Starbucks or Maximus workers are at that point yet — getting there has long been a challenge in Mississippi, especially. 

“There was a conscious effort to erase unions, demonize unions, that goes back to the 40s and 50s,” said Roll, the UM professor. “And it all goes back to maintaining Mississippi’s cheap labor economy.” 

That economic structure originated from Mississippi’s reliance on the free work of enslaved Black people and then their cheap work through tenant farming and sharecropping.

By the 1940s, white male Mississippians in grain processing, timber and other trade jobs did create influential unions. Hall said those gains were stomped out by politicians and business leaders with accusations of communism during the McCarthy era. 

“There’s a history that they were here and they were successful that often gets overlooked,” Roll said. “And the suppression of those unions shows how much a threat they were seen as by employers and politicians.” 

Morgan has been inspired by the work of former UM classmate, Jaz Brisack, who led the Buffalo Starbuck unionizing efforts. She isn’t sure she’d have found the confidence to begin organizing without Brisack. 

Morgan’s manager, who workers say also made racist and sexist comments, was put on leave to be investigated. But Morgan said Starbucks ethics and compliance investigators didn’t call her to discuss what happened until after workers shared their letter about unionizing publicly. 

Recently, Morgan was told the manager was fired. In a statement to Mississippi Today, Starbucks said it “separated” from the manager for “policy violations.” 

Starbucks has consistently said it supports its workers’ right to unionize but thinks a union would come between them and their workers, which it prefers to call “partners.” It says it’s continuing to “listen and learn” from its stores.

Morgan said hours are still inconsistent for her and her coworkers. She has to stay at about 20 hours each week to hold onto her health insurance. Most weeks she’s lucky to hit 25. 

“Not many jobs are going to support being trans in Mississippi,” Morgan said. 

It’s not as simple as just quitting and finding something better — an option critics often jump to. 

“We like working at Starbucks,” Morgan said. “That’s why we want to unionize. We care.” 

The post Starbucks employees and others trying to unionize in Mississippi face decades-old hardships appeared first on Mississippi Today.

State Sen. John Horhn of Jackson discusses how Mississippi’s capital city fared in the 2022 legislative session. He said the delegation managed to secure more than $78 million for various projects across the city, but that state funding for drastically needed water and sewer infrastructure will fall far short. He said part of this problem is because of lack of leadership from city government.

Listen to more episodes of The Other Side here.

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