Congressional candidate Jasmine Beach-Ferrara has marketed herself as a progressive queer minister devoted to “values of love and peace.” But she’s directed tens of millions in public cash to one of the worst weapons companies on the planet.

Above: graphic by Orion Solstice. Background photo by Ibrahem Qasim, used under Creative Commons license CC BY-SA 4.0

“The Saudi-led coalition used a precision-guided munition made in the United States in last week’s air strike on a detention centre in Sa’adah, north-western Yemen, which, according to Doctors without Borders, killed at least 80 people and injured over 200, Amnesty International said today. The laser-guided bomb used in the attack, manufactured by US defence company Raytheon, is the latest piece in a wider web of evidence of the use of US-manufactured weapons in incidents that could amount to war crimes.

…Among these was the approved sale of $650 million in missiles to Saudi Arabia, also from Raytheon, which Congress greenlit despite motions to block it. In December, the administration stated it ‘remains committed’ to the proposed sales of $23 billion in F-35 aircraft, MQ-9B, and munitions to the UAE — despite strong human rights concerns. Continuing to arm the SLC not only fails to meet the US’s obligations under international law, it also violates US law. The Foreign Assistance Act and Leahy Laws both bar US arms sales and military aid to gross violators of human rights.”
— Amnesty International report on Raytheon’s atrocities, Jan, 26, 2022

“I’m a minister by training and I’m taught the gospel of peace, I take those words seriously… This vote’s one I’ve prayed a lot about, as I do our most important votes. I’ve found a way to support this.”
— County commissioner Jasmine Beach Ferrara, voting to give $27 million in tax incentives to Raytheon

WARNING: The following piece contains graphic images and multiple descriptions of violence, war crimes and atrocities. These are shown to convey the real impacts of the decision made by a public official and congressional candidate, and are a reminder of the grim reality that lurks behind the empty rhetoric of Raytheon’s supporters. — D.F.

At the start of the 11th district Democratic congressional primary one candidate quickly became the assumed front-runner. Jasmine Beach-Ferrara is, we are told endlessly by her marketing, a “North Carolinian, christian minister, organizer, mother of 3, proud gay woman and Democrat.”

This pitch has gotten a widespread response. Beach-Ferrara’s campaign has raised $1.5 million so far, according to the most recent Federal Elections Commission filings. If one were just going by this spiel they would assume that she’s some sort of progressive, possibly even on the more left-leaning end of the party. Indeed some of the donations that poured in were from famous left-leaning anti-war activists (mostly outside of Asheville) who seemed to think just that.

But Beach-Ferrara’s actual record of using her power — especially in office — tells a very different story. This preacher devoted to “the bedrock values of love and peace” has also enthusiastically done the bidding of one of the most notorious arms dealers on the planet: Raytheon.

During the height of the pandemic, as her county had one of the highest death rates in the state and poverty grew even more severe, Beach-Ferrara directed tens of millions in tax breaks and public cash to Raytheon as part of a sweetheart deal. Indeed, she invoked her religious credentials to justify doing so.

Some of the practices used in that deal were so shady that one expert described them as “outright corruption.” Raytheon is notorious for environmental devastation and labor violations as well as its role in atrocities around the globe, and its Asheville deal even seemed intended to help bust a union at one of its other plants.

When local anti-war activists pressed her to change her vote by peacefully protesting outside her home and seeking to talk with her, records obtained by the Blade reveal that Beach-Ferrara reacted with disdain and contempt, even implying she might call the police.

When regional media began to look into the deal, finding it ridiculously favorable to the weapons behemoth and very light on any actual guarantees of well-paying jobs, Beach-Ferrara refused to comment.

As she revved up her campaign at the beginning of this year, Raytheon-built planes were dropping Raytheon-built bombs, slaughtering Yemeni civilians in attacks so brutal international human rights organizations condemned them as war crimes. It doesn’t seem to have fazed her.

She has, we are assured, prayed about this.

Warning signs

“Beach-Ferrara has earned praise for seeking common ground with her cause’s critics — in line with her activist idols, from Desmond Tutu to Nelson Mandela.”
— From a 2017 OZY profile of Beach-Ferrara

“The people’s patience is not endless.”
— Statement from Umkhonto we Sizwe, Nelson Mandela’s anti-apartheid militant group, 1961

Since she gained increased prominence in the late 2000s, Beach-Ferrara has been something of a media darling, getting coverage well outside the Asheville area as a queer progressive minister in the south. “The Queer Pastor Riling Up Conservative North Carolina,” as one glowing 2017 OZY profile put it.

For whatever the original faults of the Campaign for Southern Equality, the organization she runs, in their early years they did genuine work on equal marriage. This included civil disobedience at officials’ offices and participating in multiple lawsuits.

But after equal marriage was legalized nationwide in 2015 the organization shifted its priorities, and Beach-Ferrara moved her attention towards a burgeoning political career. The next year she won a county commissioner seat with significant support from left-leaning voters.

But some warning signs started to quickly appear that they were getting far more of the status quo than the “new kind of public official” some had hoped for.

There were her remarks during the 2017 women’s march, when she tried to “both sides” racist police violence, declaring that “the worry a Black mother feels when her son goes out and the worry the wife of a cop feels when she clocks in for her shift are real and true, and there is no reason these women should be pitted against each other.”

There were plenty of reasons. The previous summer Asheville police gunned down Jerry Williams and left his body lying in the street for hours. They continued to harass his family, especially his grieving mother. Fearing for her life, she eventually had to leave town. They also surveilled civil rights activists who spoke up.

When locals protested Williams’ murder the APD unleashed a vicious crackdown. This included then-police chief Tammy Hooper screaming at one activist (minister Amy Cantrell) while she was handcuffed to a chair. Hooper— a cis gay woman — would proceed to double down on open racism targeting local Black communities, blaming them for violent crime and repeatedly making excuses for police brutality.

This was well-known by the time Beach-Ferrara made those dismissive remarks in front of over 10,000 people in the middle of Asheville. Her speech is, as of this publication, still up on CSE’s youtube channel.

There was more. The 2017 OZY profile noted that “she is pro-choice yet believes the decision to terminate a pregnancy is always tragic” and that someone wanting to destroy abortion rights “doesn’t make them an enemy to women.” This is the kind of conservative hedging that’s fueled the Democratic party’s devastating refusal to actually defend abortion rights. The anti-choicers she sympathized with in those remarks were and are engaged in a multi-decade campaign of harassment and violence to end basic bodily autonomy. If that’s not an enemy, who is?

Indeed, in queer and trans activist communities the organization she leads also took on a very different reputation from the glowing profiles. In the years after the passage of equal marriage (notably an issue that impacted wealthier white queers as well as more marginalized ones), CSE quickly occupied a traditional “Gay Inc” role, a major non-profit that doles out some services but also focuses on deterring and co-opting more radical queer activism that might upset the status quo.

Some of this was reflected in its marketing. Over these years CSE often went with the “just like you” tack, reassuring well-off centrists that they too were monogamous churchy suburbanites who wouldn’t threaten the status quo.

More took place, damagingly, on the policy level. After democrats in the legislature agreed on HB142, a sham “compromise” that left most of the notoriously anti-trans HB2 intact, Beach-Ferrara and CSE offered a token statement before quietly dropping any practical opposition. In the coming years the group’s higher-ups would try to intimidate or derail other organizing that would press to actually fight HB142 or protect queer rights on the ground. Indeed, I’ve personally witnessed this happen on multiple occasions.

In summer 2020 when locals, including plenty of queer and trans people, were beaten, tear-gassed and had their skulls fractured by riot rounds, both she and CSE stayed pointedly silent. Her non-profit did, however, back art projects about the need for racial justice. They used these to bolster fundraising.

That year, according to CSE’s tax filings, Beach-Ferrara raked in $82,640 from the non-profit. Combined with her commissioners’ salary she made $111,556 that year, not counting any other private compensation out of the public eye. Lucrative work for a humble minister.

In her seat on county commission Beach-Ferrara primarily went with the status quo. While this was never a good thing — Buncombe was rocked by long-running corruption scandals during the early part of her first term — over the pandemic it became particularly devastating. As a massive local uprising against racism unfolded during 2020 she supported a budget that gave more money to the sheriff’s office and cut the health department. Around the same time she did the bidding of the hotel lobby and dropped all restrictions on the industry, spurring a major covid outbreak.

She was not alone in these actions, but they cut a particularly contrasting picture to her progressive marketing. Worst was to come. While local working class queers were in the street, Beach-Ferrara and her colleagues were secretly negotiating a massive giveaway to the worst weapons dealer on earth.

Christians for cruise missiles

“Since March 2015, Amnesty International’s researchers have investigated dozens of air strikes and repeatedly found and identified remnants of US-manufactured munitions. Amnesty International previously identified the use of the same US-made Raytheon bombs used on 21 January in a Saudi-led air strike carried out on 28 June 2019 on a residential home in Ta’iz governorate, Yemen, that killed six civilians — including three children.”
— Amnesty International report on atrocities in Yemen carried out with Raytheon’s weapons

As to workers’ wages, the agreement requires Pratt & Whitney to pay an average of $68,000 to its plant employees. But averages can be skewed by a handful of high salaries at the top, so examining median wages instead — lining up workers in order of pay and looking at the one in the middle — would better reflect how a project affects rank-and-file workers…

…But Kevin Kimrey, the director of economic and workforce development at Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College, which is partnering with the defense contractor to train workers, told the Asheville Citizen-Times that machinists and skilled floor laborers may earn just $40,000 to $50,000 a year. That’s below Buncombe County’s median household income of just over $52,000, while a parent of two earning $43,920 in North Carolina is eligible for food assistance.”

— Analysis of the Raytheon deal from Facing South, July 2021

The Raytheon deal was, even by the abysmal standards of Buncombe County “economic development,” ridiculously corrupt.

The basics went like this: in early 2019 Raytheon met with county officials because they wanted to build a new plant, technically one run by its Pratt and Whitney subsidiary. This plant would manufacture parts for airplanes, including not just commercial craft but also the fighter jets used by regimes like Saudi Arabia and the U.S. to slaughter civilians in wars around the world.

The local barons of the Biltmore Company would give Raytheon the land for cheap, leading to the devastation of a swath of forest next to the French Broad River. Then the county and the state would pour a total of $40 million ($27 million of it from the county) to the giant corporation in various grants and tax incentives. They also agreed to build the company its own infrastructure on their dime.

Raytheon is already an incredibly wealthy corporation, by some measures one of the richest in the world, with a net worth of over $141 billion. But here local government was giving it a massive set of incentives and building it whatever it wished on the public’s dime.

Supposedly they would be getting a glut of good-paying jobs, but the actual guarantees tied to the incentives were incredibly weak. A later analysis by Facing South confirmed what local activists had noticed from the start: that Raytheon wasn’t actually committing to paying that much to its rank-and-file workers, and its promised “800 jobs” included hundreds of temporary positions that would quickly disappear. Even a recent project in neighboring conservative stronghold Henderson County, not known for being demanding of corporations, had significantly stricter protections.

All of this was completely secret. Commissioners signed NDAs at Raytheon’s behest while they worked through the deal, a practice so flagrant that multiple states have drafted legislation to ban it. One expert later interviewed by Facing South termed it “outright corruption.”

Then came time to rush the deal through. The project, carefully omitting the word Raytheon, was unveiled in late October, just a few weeks before the commissioners were set to vote. The incentives package was only revealed in early November. Fortunately locals (including this publication) quickly figured out the actual force behind this and sounded the alarm. The Nov. 17, 2020 county commission meeting saw 22 people turn out in opposition.

With one exception, every single commenter that night was against the Raytheon deal.

“The 20,000 workers laid off from Raytheon just last month should be in a warning to us,” Ken Jones said. “What should we be doing is investing directly in our own local businesses and social services, which are now in crisis because of the pandemic, reparations to the African-American community should be top of the list.”

“Its precision bombs have been discovered in the wreckage of hundreds of civilian sites in Yemen, including hospitals, schools and infrastructure,” Susan Oehler said. “The bombs used came from Raytheon and the F-35s were from Raytheon.”

“Today we have corporate control of politicians, this applies on the federal and the local level,” Oehler continued. “I do not want to contribute to abject misery and environmental destruction in other parts of the world.”

“Pratt and Whitney’s plant in Connecticut released 5.4 million pounds of toxic chemicals while its West Palm Beach plant generated 47 toxic waste sites,” Lauri Harmon warned.

Of all the commissioners it seemed like Beach-Ferrara, with all her “bedrock values of peace and love” talk over the years, might be the most likely “no” vote.

She wasn’t.

First, ignoring the warnings raised about the  she touted bringing in Raytheon as part of “wealth creation strategies” that would supposedly alleviate poverty (the county had refused to spend any of its sizable cash reserves on direct covid relief).

“I’m a minister by training and I’m taught the gospel of peace, I take those words seriously” she said. “This vote’s one I’ve prayed a lot about, as I do our most important votes. I’ve found a way to support this.”

Raytheon’s tax breaks passed unanimously.

The preacher and the protesters

“Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are [those] who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its mighty waters.

The struggle may be a moral one or it may be a physical one, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will.”
— Frederick Douglass

“This forwarded message clarifies for me your coalition’s tactics of demands and escalation, an approach to organizing and politics I don’t participate in. For that reason, I am cancelling the 12/30 meeting.”
— Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, email to anti-war protesters, Dec. 26, 2020

While doing the exact opposite of what the public had demanded, Beach-Ferrara claimed she was “ready to talk about and need to talk about” the issue with opponents of the deal.

That promise to talk would soon prove hollow. The push against Raytheon didn’t stop in the weeks after the push. Indeed, a Reject Raytheon coalition — including longtime anti-war activists and a range of other locals opposed to the project — formed and started to raise the issue publicly.

Of all the commissioners Beach-Ferrara still seemed like the most likely to shift her position on the issue. On christmas night protesters held signs and sang anti-war carols outside her house.

As a tactic this is honestly fairly mild, well within even the standard playbook for pressuring a public official. The coalition was about to meet with her on Dec. 30. All parties involved noted that the protesters’ brief interactions with Beach-Ferrara’s family were cordial.

But emails obtained by the Blade, which qualify as public record under state law, show that the former activist reacted with deep offense. The next day she contacted some of the coalition’s main spokespeople:

Last night a group from your coalition held a protest in front of my house. I have three small children and am concerned about your coalition’s use of this tactic, particularly when we have a meeting focused on the goal of dialogue as soon as 12/30. Can you explain the rationale?

The right to protest is, of course, clear and protected. As an elected official my role is to engage respectfully with everyone in our community, including those who robustly oppose my policy positions. But the choice to involve people’s families and protest at their homes, particularly when it’s dark out, with no knowledge of either who is inside the house or neighborhood dynamics creates real concern and – in some cases – safety issues for all involved.”

In case you’re wondering, the invocation of “safety issues” is a passive aggressive threat to call the police if protesters show up at her house again.

The email continues.

I plan to attend the 12/30 meeting but am no longer comfortable with it being recorded because of a concern that my words would be subsequently taken out of context. My brief public statements to date on this topic have been taken out of context and distorted, including by the folks who showed up last night and spoke with my wife. In an era where there is so much fake news and misrepresentation of positions, my hope is for a dialogue in which we exchange ideas and can discuss perspectives, including differences of opinion, on policy issues.

I send this with the hope that we can achieve that and, again, request for clarification on the tactics your coalition is using and their rationale.

Take care,
Jasmine

The spokespeople responded shortly after:

Dear Jasmine Beach-Ferrara,

Our coalition was proud to carol outside of your home on Christmas evening, and was pleased to meet your kind and respectful wife. We fully respect the desire to spend time in comfort and peace with your family, however, you have a rare opportunity to stymie an organization that profits off of the destruction of peace around the world. The peace destroyed by war profiteering is far more upsetting than carolers with light-up signs.

We ask you to reflect on your love for your family, and your home, and the feeling of safety that we all get to take for granted. Your many blessings are only possible because of the tireless work of many activists against those that wield the power of the state in harmful ways. In fact, I myself feel quite inadequate following the leaders of the past. I feel quite weak against the war-for-profit industry and would be willing to bang pans outside the Popes house on Easter if I thought it might help.

There was much thought given to how to approach the action, and we did our best to have our intentions be clear and non-threatening. A more typical action of this type is a “wake up call”  which is very loud and very early in the morning, with far more yelling than singing. Given our aims, I don’t think even that would have gone too far.

We don’t want you as an opponent, we do want you as an ally. I believe that we agree about many things, but only you have the power to disrupt these plans. We have brought our concerns in Comission meetings but it has had no effect.

On the topic of being misquoted, You should be aware that you have been quoted in the Citizen Times as saying you were taught “the Gospel of Peace […] But…” If you don’t wish to connect your faith to the justification of this factory you may wish to make a public statement or some other retraction.

We do understand the need for sustainable economic development, and so we hope these plans can be canceled quickly so that county commissioner resources can be used in soliciting more productive opportunities.

This reply is stunningly polite given how Beach-Ferrara had, by that point, treated opponents of the Raytheon project. In response she cancelled the meeting in a huff.

This forwarded message clarifies for me your coalition’s tactics of demands and escalation, an approach to organizing and politics I don’t participate in. For that reason, I am cancelling the 12/30 meeting.

I understand the depth of your convictions and opposition to the Pratt Whitney project.

Moving forward, I’d invite you to participate in the many different forums that exist for community members to help shape and define our community’s approach to economic development.

The first line is striking: an official, and ostensible activist, declaring outright that she doesn’t believe constituents have a right to make demands — and keep applying pressure when those demands are not met— when it comes to sending public money to the most notorious weapons company on the planet.

It’s notable that for a figure so supposedly committed to dialogue it only seems to work in one direction: conservative and corporations get conversations and concessions, while anyone left of a war criminal gets aristocratic disdain and a back-handed threat.

World full of blood

“When the first strike came, the world was full of blood. People were all in pieces, their limbs were everywhere. People went flying. Most of the people, we collected in pieces, we had to put them in plastic bags. A leg, an arm, a head. There wasn’t more than five minutes between the first and second strike. The second strike was there, at the entrance to the market. People were taking the injured out, and it hit the wounded and killed them.”
—Mohammed Yehia Muzayid, survivor of the March 2016 Mastaba market strike, which killed 97 people including 25 children. Raytheon is one of the main manufacturers of the Paveway systems used in such attacks

The $27 million was just the start. The next year Beach-Ferrara once again fully jumped in to support Raytheon. This time it wasn’t just a tax waiver. The county was spending $5 million in cash to build the weapons company a center at A-B Tech to train its workers.

“I oppose, strongly, giving $5 million to advance the business objectives of Pratt and Whitney which is a subsidiary of Raytheon, which is one of the largest military manufacturers in the world,” Christina Malina said. “We have been bending over backwards to support their corporate interests and it is not in the interest of our community. That $5 million should go towards small, local businesses that are sustainable.”

“My faith in local government representation was completely decimated when I heard about the Raytheon project.”

“We’re immersed in a banality of evil,” Rachel Bliss said, reminding the commissioners that the amount they were shoveling towards Raytheon’s training center was more than their entire affordable housing budget.

“How can you justify bringing a company here that profits off of genocide,” Victoria Estes said. “You say it’s beyond your control but it isn’t. Not here. Not when you’re actively incentivizing the construction of the Pratt and Whitney plant. When these children get murdered, Pratt and Whitney profits, which means you profit as well. You are just as guilty as the people out on the ground committing these atrocities.”

The commissioners approved the handout unanimously, without comment other than to briefly note the training center could eventually be used for other companies too.

The timing was notable. At the same time one of the wealthiest corporations on the planet was getting a massive tax break and its own training facility, locals were about to take a major hit. That year’s county’s tax revaluation escalated a longtime pattern of giving extensive breaks to whiter, wealthier neighborhoods while claiming that housing values in working class Black neighborhoods had skyrocketed to an absurd degree. It was an open recipe for further gentrification and segregation in an area already hard-hit by both.

To make matters worse the commissioners, in a move Beach-Ferrara fully supported, hiked the tax rate even further.

So while Raytheon was getting a waiver and a building, Black elders on fixed incomes were hit with a sharply rising tax bill, especially as Asheville city government also hiked their property taxes. Later, after serious public pressure, the commissioners and city hall both agreed to a paltry refund program, but they refused to make it automatic, forcing locals to navigate a bureaucratic maze for a small amount of relief.

Protests against Raytheon have not stopped, even as the plant’s construction has barreled ahead and multiple protesters have reported surveillance for their work. Reject Raytheon crashed the holiday parade last year and temporarily blockaded the construction site this Earth Day.

It’s worth remembering that Beach-Ferrara, in doing the bidding of Raytheon, was voting in line with the rest of the county commissioners. But she’s the one seeking higher office, running with a reputation that years of her actions reveal to be a sham. If elected to congress she would be in a position to channel billions more to Raytheon and similar companies so they can rain death and destruction on even more countries around the world. There will be some hand-wringing, no doubt, and promises for dialogue with those opposing war crimes and genocide. But she’ll still support it, again and again.

It is on such officials: the cynical, the “pragmatic,” the corrupt, those who went with “the inevitable” — that such blood-soaked enterprises depend. Whether she wins or not she has taken her place enthusiastically among their ranks. Perhaps, as promised, she prays about it.

But there are not enough prayers in the world to silence the screams of the dying.

—

Blade editor David Forbes has been a journalist in Asheville for over 16 years. She writes about history, life and, of course, fighting city hall. They live in downtown, where they drink too much tea and scheme for anarchy.

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