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Biden Spins the Facts in Campaign Speech
Para leer en español, vea esta traducción de Google Translate.
At a campaign reception in Denver, President Joe Biden distorted some of the facts and the position of his predecessor:
- Biden claimed that the U.S. has the “lowest inflation rate of any major country in the world right now.” As of October, at least Italy and Canada reported lower inflation rates than the U.S.
- The president claimed to have “cut the federal deficit” by making some corporations pay higher taxes. But the deficit in fiscal year 2023, when the tax went into effect, still increased.
- He said that former President Donald Trump “is proposing …. cutting Social Security and Medicare.” But in January, Trump advised Republicans against cutting funding for the Social Security and Medicare programs.
- Biden said Trump’s “plan” was to end the Affordable Care Act, jeopardizing health insurance for 40 million people. But that worst-case-scenario figure is based on Trump not replacing the ACA with anything. He says he would replace it with something — though he has given no details on what that would be.
- The president claimed that 100 million people with preexisting conditions have protections “only” because of the ACA. That’s the case only for those buying insurance on their own; before the ACA, employer plans couldn’t deny a policy based on health conditions.
Biden made his remarks at a private residence on Nov. 28. He repeated some of the same claims in a speech the next day in Pueblo, Colorado. The president has stepped up his campaign appearances recently and has three fundraisers in Massachusetts on Dec. 5.
Inflation
At the Nov. 28 campaign event, Biden said that the U.S. has the “lowest inflation rate of any major country in the world right now.” But that’s not accurate, at least not according to the most recent data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development — or the White House’s own calculations.
OECD data as of October 2023 show that Italy and Canada — which are also members of the G7, a group of seven of the world’s most advanced economies — had lower year-over-year inflation rates than the U.S. While the U.S. inflation rate was 3.2% that month, Italy’s was 1.7% and Canada’s was 3.1%.
If the list were expanded to include other “advanced economies,” Denmark (0.1%), Belgium (0.4%), Latvia (2.1%) and Lithuania (2.8%) also had lower rates than the U.S., according to OECD figures as of October.
Even by the White House’s latest figures, Biden’s claim was not exactly right.
Because of differences in how countries calculate inflation rates, the White House Council of Economic Advisers said it “assembles and constructs harmonized inflation data for G7 countries, allowing for more apples-to-apples inflation comparisons.”
But last month the CEA reported that inflation in the U.S. was “among the lowest” of major economies – not the lowest.
“Measured on an apples-to-apples HICP basis to allow global comparisons, both core & headline U.S. inflation were among the lowest in the G7 in September, the latest month with complete G7 data,” the CEA wrote in a Nov. 14 thread on X, the platform once known as Twitter. HICP stands for Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices.
The language is notable because in June, the CEA had said “the U.S. now has the lowest 12-month harmonized inflation in the G7, both for overall and core inflation.”
In his Nov. 29 remarks, Biden also labeled some companies greedy for not lowering prices since inflation has been declining in the U.S.
“Let me be clear: Any corporation that is not passing these savings on to the consumers needs to stop the … price gouging,” Biden said, noting that Democratic Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania calls it “Greedflation.”
But a decline in the year-over-year inflation rate doesn’t automatically mean lower prices, as Biden suggested.
As the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis wrote in August, inflation is the increase in the prices of goods and services over time, and deflation occurs when those prices start to go down.
What the U.S. has been experiencing for the last year is known as disinflation, which is when the rate of inflation decreases but prices still go up – just at a slower pace. Prices wouldn’t be expected to go down until the year-over-year inflation rate is below zero, or negative, which has not happened.
Deficits
In his Nov. 28 campaign speech, Biden continued to misleadingly claim that he reduced the deficit, which he attributed to raising taxes on corporations.
“But by making sure they pay that 15% minimum tax, we paid for everything that we’ve proposed,” the president said. “We didn’t increase the debt. We cut the federal deficit. And we have more work to do.”
Biden was referring to the 15% corporate alternative minimum tax that was included in the Inflation Reduction Act that he signed into law in August 2022. As the Congressional Research Service explains, the CAMT “applies to firms with an average of $1 billion or more in profits in any three-year period and to foreign-parented U.S. firms with profits of over $100 million if the aggregated foreign group has over $1 billion in profits.”
The Joint Committee on Taxation did estimate that the tax, which went into effect in January of this year, would reduce federal deficits by more than $222 billion over 10 fiscal years, including by roughly $35 billion in 2023.
But the national debt has continued to increase under Biden, and the final deficit for fiscal 2023, which ended on Sept. 30, increased to roughly $1.7 trillion, or about $320 billion more than the almost $1.4 trillion deficit in fiscal 2022.
In his Nov. 29 remarks, Biden claimed to have reduced the deficit by “over $7 billion,” when he meant to say “over $1 trillion,” according to a White House transcript that corrected the president’s statement.
Deficits have declined from the record of $3.1 trillion in fiscal 2020, before Biden took office. But as we’ve explained, the primary reason that deficits went down by about $350 billion in Biden’s first year, and by another $1.3 trillion in his second, is because of emergency COVID-19 funding that expired in those years.
Budget experts said that if not for more pandemic and infrastructure spending championed by Biden, deficits would have been even lower than they were in fiscal 2021 and 2022.
Social Security and Medicare
Biden also claimed that Trump is pushing to cut Social Security and Medicare, which is the opposite of what Trump has said publicly.
On Nov. 28, Biden said, “Trump is proposing — and the MAGA Republicans — of cutting Social Security and Medicare.” In remarks the next day, the president said making sure that billionaires “pay their taxes” would allow the U.S. “to strengthen the Social Security and Medicare system instead of cutting them” like “Trump and Boebert want to do,” a reference to Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado.
However, in January, when lawmakers were negotiating an increase in the federal debt limit, Trump, in a video message, warned Republicans not to make cuts to those two entitlement programs.
“Under no circumstances should Republicans vote to cut a single penny from Medicare or Social Security to help pay for Joe Biden’s reckless spending spree,” he said. “While we absolutely need to stop Biden’s out of control spending, the pain should be borne by Washington bureaucrats, not by hard-working American families and American seniors.”
Some critics argue that Trump’s words cannot be trusted because of his past budget proposals. But on Medicare, those budgets included bipartisan ideas to reduce the growth of spending.
For example, in 2020 we wrote about Democratic claims that Trump’s budget for fiscal 2021 included cuts to Medicare and Social Security. While the proposal called for reductions in future Medicare spending, budget experts said that would not mean cuts in benefits. As for Social Security, we wrote that the budget proposed reductions to the Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income programs, but not to the Social Security retirement program.
We also wrote in 2019 about Democratic claims that Trump was “once again trying to ransack Medicare” with his budget for fiscal 2020.
In that case, Trump’s budget again called for reducing Medicare spending by hundreds of billions of dollars, largely by lowering payments to providers. In fact, some of Trump’s Medicare proposals were similar to cost-cutting measures that had been proposed by former President Barack Obama.
But Trump’s 2020 budget did propose changing out-of-pocket costs for Medicare Part D prescription drug coverage, which we said would increase costs for some beneficiaries and decrease costs for others.
Scrapping/Replacing Obamacare?
The Affordable Care Act — once again — has become a focal point of the presidential campaign.
After former President Donald Trump posted on social media that Republicans “should never give up” on terminating the ACA, or Obamacare, Biden resurrected talking points about what would happen to insurance coverage and preexisting condition protections if the ACA were repealed. The problem is, Trump claims he would replace the ACA with something else. The problem for Trump is that he hasn’t provided a plan, and he never released one while in office, either.
There’s support for the idea that whatever Trump might advocate wouldn’t be as comprehensive as the ACA and would lead to an increase in the uninsured and fewer protections for those with health conditions. But at the same time, Biden takes advantage of Trump’s vagueness to claim the former president wouldn’t replace the ACA with anything at all.
We’ll go through Biden’s statements and explain what Trump has supported in the past.
In Truth Social posts on Nov. 25 and 29, Trump said he was “seriously looking at alternatives” and would replace the ACA with something “MUCH BETTER.” (He made similar claims as president.) We asked his campaign for more details on what Trump’s health care plan might be, but we haven’t received a response.
Biden broached the subject at his Nov. 28 campaign reception. “Let’s be clear about what the Affordable Care Act means. There are 40 million people in America today who get their health insurance through the Affordable Care Act,” Biden said. “His plan is to throw every one of them off that — that legislation. It would mean the number of uninsured African Americans would go up by 20 percent. Latinos would go up by 15 percent.”
He made the same claims in his speech the next day in Pueblo, Colorado.
The 40 million figure is the number of people who were enrolled, as of early 2023, in insurance plans on the ACA marketplace, or exchanges — where people buy their own coverage, mostly with the help of premium tax credits — and those with Medicaid coverage thanks to the ACA’s Medicaid expansion policies, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. For marketplace plans, the law, which Obama signed in 2010, provides tax credits to those earning between 100% and 400% of the federal poverty level. As of February, 91% of the 15.7 million people with marketplace plans qualified for tax credits.
The Medicaid expansion allows adults earning up to 138% of the poverty level to obtain coverage in states that have chosen to participate. Forty states, plus the District of Columbia, have implemented the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, the most recent being North Carolina.
If the ACA were eliminated, the number and rate of the uninsured would increase significantly. Some who would lose coverage could get insurance through another means, but the jump in the uninsured would likely be tens of millions of people. Most of those who got coverage under the Medicaid expansion would likely become uninsured without the law, according to the nonpartisan health policy research group KFF. A 2020 report by the Urban Institute estimated that a net 21.1 million people would become uninsured in 2022 if the ACA were scrapped. At the time, there were fewer Americans with coverage either on the ACA marketplace or through Medicaid expansion, so such an estimate would likely be higher today.
As for Biden’s figures for the increase in the number of the uninsured by race, his campaign pointed to that same Urban Institute report. It found much larger percentage increases for the uninsured rates. If the ACA were eliminated, the report said, the uninsured rate for Black Americans would increase from 11% to 20%, and for Hispanic people from 21% to 30%.
As we said, Trump claims he would replace the ACA, but he hasn’t said with what. He hasn’t released his own health care plan, but Republican bills he supported in 2017 would have increased the number of people without health insurance by millions, as we’ve explained before. One GOP House bill would have led to 24 million more uninsured by 2026, according to an analysis at the time by the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation. The House passed that bill, but it failed in the Senate, despite both chambers being controlled by Republicans then.
In 2017, Trump also supported a so-called “skinny” repeal bill in the Senate, which would have sent a placeholder bill, with only some changes to the ACA, to a conference committee with the House. The House and Senate would have had to agree upon final legislation. But that bill, which also would have increased the number of people without insurance, failed, too.
In a court case challenging the constitutionality of the ACA, the Trump administration argued the entire law should be nullified. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled in 2021 that the plaintiffs lacked standing.
In a June 2019 interview with ABC News, while that lawsuit was working its way through the courts, Trump said he would be releasing a health care plan to replace Obamacare “in about two months.” But that didn’t happen.
Trump’s record indicates he would likely support a replacement that would lead to fewer Americans having health insurance, and it raises questions about whether Trump will release a health care plan. But the Biden campaign fills in the blanks to claim Trump has a “plan” to get rid of the ACA without anything in its place.
Protections for Those with Preexisting Conditions
Biden repeated a misleading talking point about the ACA’s preexisting condition protections.
“There are over 100 million people today who have — who have protections against preexisting conditions only for one reason: because of the Affordable Care Act. Trump wants to get rid of it,” Biden said at the campaign reception.
As we explained a few times during the 2020 campaign, the 100 million figure is an estimate of how many Americans not on Medicare or Medicaid have preexisting conditions. The ACA instituted sweeping protections for those with preexisting conditions, prohibiting insurers in all markets from denying coverage or charging more based on health status. But only those buying their own plans on the individual or nongroup market would immediately be at risk of being denied insurance.
Even without the ACA, employer plans couldn’t deny issuing a policy — and could only decline coverage for some preexisting conditions for a limited period if a new employee had a lapse in coverage.
As of 2022, 20 million people, or about 6.3% of the U.S. population, got coverage on the individual market. It is the case that the ACA’s broad protections would benefit people who lost their jobs or retired early and found themselves seeking insurance on their own.
As for Trump, he has said he supports preexisting condition protections, but while in office, he worked to reduce the protections under the ACA in several ways, as we’ve written before. In the lawsuit mentioned above, the Trump administration initially argued that the ACA’s preexisting condition provisions would have to go if the suit were successful. The administration later backed the full invalidation of the law.
The 2017 GOP bill Trump supported would have included some, but not all, of the ACA’s protections. Trump also pushed the expansion of cheaper short-term health plans that wouldn’t have to abide by the ACA’s protections, including prohibitions against denying or pricing coverage based on health status.
In late September 2020, less than two months before Election Day, Trump signed an executive order that said “[i]t has been and will continue to be the policy of the United States … to ensure that Americans with pre-existing conditions can obtain the insurance of their choice at affordable rates.” He said the order put the issue of preexisting conditions “to rest.”
But it didn’t. At the time, Karen Pollitz, who was then a senior fellow at KFF, told us the order was “aspirational” and had “no force of law.”
With this issue, too, Trump doesn’t have a plan that can be evaluated — and his record indicates he could support a plan that weakens the preexisting condition protections in the ACA. But Biden’s talking point suggests no plan means no protections, and it glosses over the fact that even without the ACA, employer policies still wouldn’t be able to deny insurance.
Biden ban on menthol cigarettes to be delayed amid political concerns, officials say
Officials originally planned to finalize the rules in August 2023 and later signaled to public health groups that they hoped to finish them by January, although the resulting ban was not expected to go into effect for several years because of anticipated legal challenges.
The debate over cracking down on menthol products comes as Biden ramps up his reelection campaign. Democrats have already voiced concerns that Biden’s flagging popularity could mean low turnout among Black voters whose political support propelled him to the White House.
More than 18.5 million people in the United States smoked menthol cigarettes in 2019. Among smokers who are Black, 81 percent choose menthols, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a far higher rate than for smokers who are White. Top civil rights and health groups have long maintained that the tobacco industry has a history of aggressively marketing to Black communities.
The proposed ban has revealed deep fissures in the African American community, with proponents saying that removing menthol cigarettes will save hundreds of thousands of lives. But high-profile opponents, including the American Civil Liberties Union and some prominent civil rights figures such as the Rev. Al Sharpton, assert that a ban would foster an underground market, leading police to disproportionately target smokers who are Black.
Public health officials warn that menthol enhances the effect of nicotine on the brain and can make tobacco products more addictive. The menthol creates a cooling sensation that makes smoke feel less harsh and easier to inhale.
The White House has been reviewing the planned ban, written by the Food and Drug Administration, on menthol cigarettes since October. The FDA is also pursuing a ban on flavored cigars and new limits on nicotine in cigarettes, although the process of finalizing those rules is set to be delayed until at least March as well.
Officials have insisted that the bans would not target individual consumers but that enforcement would focus on manufacturers, distributors and retailers.
The Biden administration’s regulatory agenda, set to be issued Wednesday, will contain the new target date of finalizing rules for the menthol ban by March. That agenda is not binding, and officials noted that the White House could still elect to finalize the new tobacco rules before next March — especially as public health groups amp up their own peer pressure.
“The timing matters,” said one official, who noted that waiting to finalize the rules could expose them to a regulatory process that allows a new White House to swiftly reverse rules issued in the final months of a prior administration. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has pledged to reverse the rules if elected, and President Donald Trump declined to ban menthol cigarettes during his time in office.
The White House said Tuesday it could not comment on pending rules. The FDA has explored a menthol ban for more than a decade and proposed the rules in April 2022. The agency said it remains committed to issuing tobacco standards for menthol cigarettes as “expeditiously as possible” but is limited from discussing the rules until they are published.
Health advocates and officials have spent years clamoring for bans on the products and expressed dismay about a further delay.
“This would be devastating,” said David Margolius, director of public health for Cleveland.
Margolius said smoking is the No. 1 cause of death in metro Cleveland — where 35 percent of adults smoke cigarettes, more than three times the national average — and the City Council is considering a ban on menthol cigarettes. But local attempts to crack down on smoking have been stymied by Ohio’s GOP-controlled legislature.
“Cities like Cleveland, and states with conservative legislatures, are really counting on our White House to protect our community, because we’ve seen that the state legislature won’t act, and they may even act to preempt any local regulation,” Margolius said. “We need the White House to act to save lives.”
California and Massachusetts have already banned the sale of menthol cigarettes. Critics in California say tobacco companies may be skirting the ban by selling “menthol-like” cigarettes.
Karen E. Knudsen, chief executive of the American Cancer Society, said her organization was among a coalition of public health associations that this month will take out ads in national newspapers, send letters to lawmakers and pursue other steps to encourage the Biden administration to finalize the rule.
“The cost of inaction is high,” said Knudsen, citing projections that a ban on menthol cigarettes would save as many as 650,000 lives during the next 40 years.
The products are a gateway to addiction, she said, noting that since 1980, the Black community had accounted for 1.5 million new menthol cigarette smokers.
Researchers and regulators have blamed the rise in menthol cigarette use on aggressive marketing to Black communities, an assertion cigarette companies deny.
“There is absolutely no reason for delay on a policy that has been studied for more than 12 years and is essential to the President’s health equity and Cancer Moonshot agenda,” Yolonda C. Richardson, chief executive of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, said in a statement. “If the White House gives in to the tobacco industry’s fearmongering now, it will further undermine public trust in government and make it even harder to move forward in an election year.”
Manufacturers sold 173.5 billion cigarettes in 2022, according to the Federal Trade Commission’s annual Cigarette Report, well below annual sales in the 1980s that often topped 600 billion. Among major manufacturers, menthol cigarettes made up 36 percent of the market, the report said.
Tobacco companies oppose the ban, insisting science shows menthols pose no greater risk than other cigarettes. R.J. Reynolds, which makes Newport, the nation’s top-selling menthol brand, said in a statement Tuesday that a ban would hurt small businesses, dent tax revenue and contribute to a dangerous illegal market.
“A ban on menthol flies in the face of proven science and is contrary to the FDA’s stated goal of reducing the health effects of tobacco use,” the statement said.
Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) in a statement Tuesday urged Biden to swiftly finalize the rule, accusing the tobacco industry of “funding scare tactics in hopes of a delay to protect its profits.”
Critics of the ban have echoed concerns about an illegal market for menthol cigarettes — including conservative groups and lawmakers who have attacked Biden and Democrats by playing up fears of crime and Mexican criminal groups already trafficking in deadly fentanyl. Earlier this year, Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.) sent a letter to the FDA claiming the ban on menthol cigarettes could embolden Mexican cartels to sell illegal tobacco products in the United States alongside “their extensive distribution networks.”
The proposed ban has split prominent Black lawmakers and other key figures. While members of the Congressional Black Caucus this year said they supported the rule and urged Biden to enact it, several former lawmakers and other opponents met with senior Biden administration officials — including FDA Commissioner Robert Califf and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra — on Nov. 20 to warn against cracking down on menthol products. The meeting was first reported by Stat News.
The meeting included high-profile civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who represented the family of Eric Garner, the New York man who died in 2014 after a police officer put him in a chokehold while being arrested on suspicion of selling loose cigarettes. Gwen Carr, Garner’s mother, has opposed the menthol ban, as has Crump; the Wall Street Journal reported last year that Crump acknowledged accepting money from Reynolds for Black youth scholarships but that he said it has not influenced his opinion.
Crump told “The Bakari Sellers Podcast” last year that the ban was “arbitrarily” criminalizing a product used by many African Americans smokers. “How about the cigarettes that White people smoke?” Crump said. He also compared a possible menthol ban to the 1994 crime bill, sponsored by Biden when he was in the Senate. Some analysts have said the crime bill resulted in the mass incarceration of Black men, sparking backlash in the Black community. As a presidential candidate in 2020, Biden acknowledged that his support for the bill was a “mistake.”
Benjamin F. Chavis, president of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, which represents more than 200 newspapers serving the African American community, said he supports pausing the proposed menthol ban, although he said a pause should last years to give time for a national racial impact study.
“I think the Biden administration has considered a pause so they can get more facts about the unintended consequences. I also believe that the ill-advised timing of an FDA ban on menthol cigarettes will have a negative impact on how Black Americans vote in 2024,” said Chavis, who said his association is not influenced by tobacco companies but acknowledged Reynolds sometimes places ads in member newspapers and sponsors association events.
Rep. Robin L. Kelly (D-Ill.), who chairs the Congressional Black Caucus’s health-care task force, said she understood the tensions given Garner’s death and other “things that have happened to African Americans, specifically with cigarettes.” But she renewed her call for the Biden administration to swiftly proceed with a ban and stressed that smokers should not fear it.
“It’s not the individuals that will be sought” by law enforcement, Kelly said. “It’s those selling the cigarettes, or the company selling cigarettes.”
Delmonte Jefferson, executive director of the Center for Black Health & Equity, criticized other African American leaders opposing the ban, calling them “paid mouthpieces” for the tobacco industry. He also blasted the administration, saying he doesn’t believe a ban will cost Black votes.
“When you ban menthol, you’re going to save Black lives,” Jefferson said. “You mess with the Black vote when you say, ‘I don’t value your life, I don’t value your health.’”
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It’s All Good: DJ Peter Poole on the transformative art of turntablism
One of local DJ Peter Poole earliest memories is the Christmas morning when he was four years old and received a Fisher Price turntable and some records. His family had just immigrated to Canada from New Zealand, where Poole was born, but had been forced to leave because his mother and brother, who were from Fiji, did not have the proper immigration papers.
Of the records he received that Christmas, one that stood out was Tijuana Taxi by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. It’s still “imprinted” in his memory, says Poole, who recalls playing it non-stop.
However it was Herbie Hancock’s pivotal performance of “Rockit” at the 1984 Grammy Awards that inspired eight-year-old Poole to want to become a DJ and learn the art of turntabling, which is the act of physically manipulating or “scratching” vinyl records and the mixer like an instrument, to make new sounds.
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The innovation was first developed by Black artists like Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee-Grandmaster Flash and Grand Wizzard Theodore, forming one of the core elements of hip hop and inspiring much of the most popular genres of music played today.
“The DJ is the pinnacle of [that] song. That Grammy show made a lot of kids want to learn how to scratch,” he says. “I used to move my zipper up and down on my coat to make scratch noises after that, like an air guitar.”
The years of practice and perseverance paid off, and on Dec. 2, Poole — also known as DJ All Good — earned a fourth-place win at the International DJ Association’s (IDA) world championships in Krakow, Poland.
“Made lots of friends, had a great performance overall. Fourth in the world is great,” says Poole. “One of the judges said he was a fan of the beatbox juggle I did in the 2020 [Canadian] DMC competition and I was like, ‘Whoa, you know who I am?’”
Performing a six-minute segment for the competition’s show category, Poole described it as a sort of “thesis statement” of his current skills, which includes beat juggling, scratching, looping and fading.
“Scratching is actually a lot like playing the violin, it’s moving the record back and forth using the hand just like a bow on the string of a violin. If you’re moving slowly, you’re gonna get a lower sound, if you’re going fast, you’re gonna get higher pitch,” he says.
“There’s also single turntable drumming, where I might have a kick and a snare on one record and instead of just putting on a record and letting it play, I’m actively manipulating that kick and snare to make a new beat.”
Beat juggling is often done with two copies of the same record, where the beat is isolated and then prolonged or manipulated by going back and forth with a cross-fader to create a new beat.
“This is based on the original, traditional idea of hip hop breakbeat juggling, where you find the hypest part of the song — the breakbeat — and then you just isolate that part. So maybe, like, a good example would be Good Times by Chic, having that one part on the one side, and then lining it up on the other side so it seems like the breakbeat ends up being a continuous beat, if that makes sense … so it’s not just basic looping, it’s changing the timing and manipulating two copies of the record so it sounds like a whole new song.”
Traditional vinyl turntablism peaked around the late 1990s as DJ battle culture also began to wane, says Poole, which is why he’s been doing his part to keep the “language” of turntablism alive.
In 2014, Poole bought a 26-foot U-Haul truck he fitted out with turntables and a portable DJ studio.
Dubbed The Turntemple, he hit the road to attend music festivals and shows where he does professional development for established and aspiring DJs, as well as workshops and outreach for at-risk youth.
Travelling to Krakow for the championship was particularly meaningful for Poole, who after competing in DJ battles and competitions since his first in 1998, managed to win first place in the Canadian DMC DJ championships in 2020. However he wasn’t able to travel to compete in the world finals in person due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“When the IDA thing came up, I was super excited and just exploding with joy,” he says.
“John Coltrane had this album, A Love Supreme, and it was his testament to God, he was asking the Creator humbly for the gift to make people happy with his music. It was a spiritual connection. It’s always on my mind, this sort of idea.
“But then this year, more so than ever, I just felt this heavy spiritual connection to what I’m doing. I love what I’m doing, I love DJing and I’m happiest when I’m doing it, and it’s an authentic way of sharing what’s in my heart. And I feel this connection, for lack of a better word, with God. Doing it makes me want to be not just a better DJ but to be a better human.”
RankTribe™ Black Business Directory News – Arts & Entertainment
Study looks at plant based, vegan diet to improve African American health risks
AUGUSTA, Ga. (WJBF) – In partnership with University of South Carolina, a local vegan restaurant wants to help people live a healthier life by eating a plant based diet. It’s the Nutritious Eating with Soul Study that hopes to take people on a 12-week journey to better health.
“Pre-diabetic, cholesterol, high blood pressure,” said Nutritious Eating with Soul Study participant Cleo Brown.
When Brown realized smoothies and juicing would not help her get off prescribed medications for her illnesses, she signed up to become vegan.
“I was like ok, until we started going through some of the videos of what you can and cannot eat. I was like yeah, this is probably not going to happen,” she said. “I might be one of the few that says, yeah vegan is not for me.”
But the retired army vet said it worked and her health is better. She’s part of the Nutritious Eating with Soul or NEW Study put on by University of South Carolina and Soca Vegan Kitchen located in the Sprouts shopping center in Augusta. The program calls for African Americans between 18 and 65 to eat a plant based diet for 12 weeks. Organizers told NewsChannel 6 the goal is to improve health among Black people at high risk for certain illnesses.
“High blood pressure, cardiovascular disease and the research tells us that whenever African Americans adapt to theses types of diets that are more focused on plants, have higher nutrients in them, their risks of those conditions decrease,” said John Barnhart, USC Research Assistant Professor.
Participants must attend an hour and a half class every Monday night during the study. They are taught how to cook breakfast, lunch and dinner and even taught how to shop as a vegan.
“We teach them how to be able to consume their diet, but in a healthier manner as well as being able to incorporate vegan soul food into their diet,” USC Graduate Research Assistant, PhD Student Alexis Bell shared.
It’s a lifestyle most meat eaters have a lot of questions about.
Soca Vegan Kitchen Co-owner Georgia Alexander said, “Can I get full off of vegan food? Is it all just leaves and grass and lettuce or whatever?”
“I’m a snacker and when I learned that there are vegan and plant based cookies and cakes that made me very happy,” Brown said enthusiastically.
The study is funded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. So participants will get $15 a week to eat their plant based meals. USC researchers said the study needs African American men mostly. This is the third of six co-horts with the next one happening in April. Onboarding begins soon. You can sign up here.
Alexander added Blacks sometimes don’t eat well because of historical factors.
“When it comes to African American people, the food that is provided is not necessarily beneficial for the long term health or for the life of African Americans. What we learned was that we were not educated very well. That there was socioeconomic reasons why we would choose to eat things,” Alexander said.
5 takeaways from college antisemitism hearing
… a centuries-long history of racism and white supremacy.” Gay denounced … for the mass murder of African Americans,” and demanded Gay answer “yes … RankTribe™ Black Business Directory News