Feb. 21, 2016

Hyundai appoints Erwin Raphael to General Manager of Genesis USA

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from Target Market News

(TriceEdneyWire.com) Hyundai Motor America president and chief executive officer David L. Zuchowski has announced the appointment of Erwin Raphael as General Manager for Genesis USA. Hyundai's worldwide Vice-Chairman Chung Eui-Sun, announced late last year that the company would be launching Genesis, globally, as an independent luxury brand of Hyundai. Industry insiders expect Genesis will be heavy competition for Lexus, Mercedes-Benz and BMW in the U.S. market.

As General Manager of the newly formed organization, Raphael will be responsible for the strategic direction and management of Genesis operations in the United States, including sales and marketing. This summer, he will oversee the introduction of the Genesis G90, a sleek, new large luxury sedan that has been awarded 5-star ratings for safety and design. Mr. Raphael will assume his duties March 1, 2016.

Consumers recently got a peek of the brand's creative marketing strategy during the 2016 Super Bowl with a commercial featuring comedian Kevin Hart. USA Today's Ad Meter awarded the ad this year's best.

"The position of Genesis General Manager is a critical one to the growth of this brand in the United States and I couldn't be happier to have Erwin take this key position," said Zuchowski. "Erwin's depth of product knowledge, broad dealer experience and skill at flawless execution all will be called upon as he drives success for this new brand," he said.

Raphael has been at Hyundai for the last six years, serving in various roles. Most recently he was the Western Region Director and General Manager for Hyundai Motor America where he was responsible for overseeing the operations of more than 165 Hyundai dealerships in the 12 western-most states. He has held other leadership positions at Chrysler, Toyota Motor Manufacturing and International Truck and Engine Co.

"I'm delighted to assume the position of General Manager for the Genesis brand," said Raphael. "There's a lot of work to be done to make this brand the success we all know it can be. With the help of a great team, I know we will exceed expectations."

In addition to his operations roles at Hyundai, Raphael is a founding member and co-chair of Hyundai's Diversity Council where he advocates for greater dealer diversity, and multicultural marketing. A U.S. Army veteran, Mr. Raphael is credited with creating a stronger relationship between Hyundai and veterans returning from combat.

He holds undergraduate and advanced degrees from The Ohio State University in Math, Chemistry and Economics.

Feb. 21, 2016

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - A live oak tree that stands on the site where a Maggie L. Walker will stand in Downtown Richmond, Va. will be axed from the site, sealing a win for activists who argued that the tree adjacent to the historical Black statue would recall the days of lynching.

The tree’s fate was sealed last week when sculptor Antonio T. “Toby” Mendez met with the Richmond Public Art Commission’s Site Selection Team, led by architect Sarah Driggs. By a 7-0 vote, the team recommended that Mendez eliminate the tree from designs he is creating for the statue and plaza planned for the gateway to historic Jackson Ward at Adams and Broad streets — a recommendation he supports.

“The tree does not belong there,” Driggs said before the vote. She said the tree would obscure the view of the statue, and she cited concerns that had been raised about unwanted connotations.

As the Richmond Free Press reported in December, Jackson Ward resident Gary Flowers, formerly president/CEO of the Washington, DC-based Black Leadership Forum, led efforts to remove the tree. Joined by retired businessman J. Maurice Hopkins, Flowers said the tree would conjure up images of lynching if the statue were placed beneath it.

A rarity in Richmond, the live oak tree has been a feature of the intersection since around 1989.

Flowers did not attend Saturday’s meeting. When reached  for comment on the committee’s decision, he did not gloat.

“While we will be saddened to see the tree go, the point of the plaza is to honor the legacy of Mrs. Walker,” he said. “This decision means that Mrs. Walker’s image will be seen from 360 degrees so that those who come to the plaza will recognize her importance to the nation.”

Meanwhile, Melvin Jones, an advocate for the statue and a member of the site committee, supported the tree’s removal. He said the tree’s roots would be damaging to the planned plaza.

Mariah Robinson, a Jackson Ward resident who led a petition drive to save the tree, could not be reached for comment.

Mayor Dwight C. Jones, who had signed the petition and promised to save the tree, stated through his press office that the site selection team’s “recommendation does not make the decision final as that will be done by the Planning Commission.”
He said he would “continue to monitor this project as it works its way through the process.”

However, Mr. Mendez already was on board with the committee’s decision, apparently influenced by comments and concerns about the tree that were raised last month during a public meeting on the statue.

Mendez said after Saturday’s vote that the tree would “not be included” in the preliminary designs for the sculpture and plaza that he and other design team members would present to the public Feb. 20, at the Richmond Public Library’s Main Branch in Downtown. The city Public Art Commission, to which the Site Selection Team reports, hosted the event.

While the city Planning Commission will have the final say on Mendez’s design, it appears most likely that the commission will see only a treeless version. The Public Art Commission will send its recommendation, possibly by April, to the Planning Commission. The commission is expected to take its vote after the design goes through the Urban Design Committee and possibly the Commission of Architectural Review.

Feb. 21, 2016

Critics Fault Nigeria's 'Record Budget' for Familiar Waste and Excess

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from Global Information Network

(TriceEdneyWire.com) – Critics who examined Nigeria’s budget for 2016 are shaking their heads in disbelief at the sight of excess and waste so familiar from previous regimes.

A 37.8 million naira item appears over 369 times, and money for the presidential clinic exceeds that for all 17 of the country’s teaching hospitals combined, according to Oluseun Onigbinde, partner and co-founder of BudgIT, a Nigerian group that campaigns for transparency in public spending.

In some instances, BudgIT found, the same purchase of vehicles, computers and furniture are replicated 24 times, totaling 46.5 billion naira ($234 million), 795 million naira is set aside to update the website of one ministry, while no purpose is assigned to a 10 billion naira provision in the education ministry’s spending plan. A report on the budget appeared in Bloomberg News.

“The key line items you find in the budget are a disservice to the idea that this government has come to represent change,” Onigbinde, whose group first publicly raised the discrepancies, said in a February 9 phone interview. “It would have been better that they took a very good look at every line item and ensured that it was justified.”

“The budget has become an instrument of the corruption process in this country over the last few years,” Jibrin Ibrahim of Abuja-based Centre for Democracy and Development, said in a Feb. 12 phone interview.

“If the Buhari administration doesn’t succeed in stopping that process, then the anti-corruption war will be completely futile.”

President Muhammadu Buhari’s proposed 6.1 trillion naira budget was intended to help revive an economy reeling from the impact of the low price of oil, the source of two-thirds of government revenue. Brent crude, which compares with Nigerian oil grades, was trading at $33.21 in London on Monday morning, down 42% this year. Additional spending will be funded through tax revenue and the deficit of 3 trillion naira through borrowing, according to the Finance Ministry.

Now, in a late-breaking development, on Tuesday, it was announced that the head of the Budget Office has been removed from his position even as newspapers trumpeted the “budget padding scandal.”  A replacement has been announced although the scandal is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.

Buhari, 73, came to office promising to curb widespread corruption and end an Islamist militant insurgency ravaging the country’s northeast.

Other analysts see in the blunders signs that the government isn’t in full control.

“It’s ridiculous,” said Clement Nwankwo, executive director of Abuja-based Policy and Legal Advocacy Centre. “It doesn’t seem like the government managed to put together a first budget or has any control of its expenditure framework.”

Feb. 21, 2016

Missing from the Conversation: Black Women and Mass Incarceration
By Kimberly Tignor

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Now that we know that former Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw will spend the rest of his life behind bars for multiple counts of rape and sexual assault against black women, the national conversation has turned from recounting his heinous crimes to discussing an even more disturbing question: why did it take so long for most of us to notice this story?

The answer, as many commentators have pointed out, lies at the uncomfortable intersection of gender, race, and class. The Holtzclaw saga underscores a broader truth about America in 2015: our criminal justice system systemically undervalues and abuses—and our mainstream media routinely ignores—poor black women.

Katie Truslow (her name changed to protect her privacy)  is a Black women who has faced these injustices. Like 85 percent of incarcerated women, her prison story begins with physical and sexual violence. After her abusive ex-husband raped her during their divorce, Truslow began dating the drug dealer who protected her. When her boyfriend was indicted, Truslow’s connection to him was all the prosecutors needed to charge her with conspiracy. Truslow’s status as a black woman with little money made it easier for the criminal justice system to see her as a perpetrator rather than as a victim.

The theory of intersectionality explains our society’s ambivalence toward Americans who happen to women and black. Intersectionality posits that social categorizations such as race, class, gender, and sexual orientation overlap in ways that create unique disadvantages for individuals who belong to more than one category. American civil rights law focuses on only one disadvantaged status at a time. However, racial justice tends to be defined in terms of the needs of black men and feminism in terms of the needs of white women. Hence the relative obscurity of black women like Katie Truslow and the survivors of Holtzclaw’s crimes: they are victimized because they are women, they are ignored, stigmatized, and even incarcerated just because they are black and predominantly poor.

A similar dynamic explains the lack of data about incarcerated black women. Corrections agencies disaggregate prisoner data by race and by gender, meaning that we know plenty about black prisoners and about women prisoners. Because the data is not separated by race and gender, we rarely know how many of the black prisoners are women, and how many of the women are black. The lack of data limits the conversation. Activists and policymakers can have detailed conversations about black people and women in the prison system but must resort to imprecise statistics and anecdotal evidence to describe the state of Black women prisoners.

We extrapolated from the one data point included about black women in the Prisoners in 2014 report by  the Bureau of Justice Statistics provided that black women make up 23 percent of incarcerated women. By contrast, black women comprise only 14 percent of the U.S. female population. We also know that Black women are incarcerated at roughly twice the rate of White and Latina women.

Our national silence about black women’s experiences with mass incarceration does not render their absences inconsequential. Katie Truslow’s sudden absence was keenly felt by her daughters, who were only 7 and 9-years-old at the time of her incarceration. Of the 61 percent of black women prisoners who have minor children, more than three quarters were their children’s primary caregiver prior to their incarceration.

Against Truslow’s wishes, her girls eventually wound up living with the mother of her abusive ex-husband. Since Truslow was incarcerated, she was not there to protect her daughters, and the cycle of sexual abuse began to repeat itself. She describes one incident in which she had to call someone to track down her daughter when the girl ran away because of Truslow’s ex-husband’s sexual advances.

Truslow now worries that a different cycle will repeat itself—that of incarceration. She works with women who are reentering the general population after prison and sees the same stories filled with sexual trauma, domestic violence, and desperation time and time again. Truslow knows that story well: it is her story, and it is also the story of her daughters. And she worries that incarceration, like sexual abuse, is a “generational occurrence” and “a pain that will carry out to [her] daughter.”

To prevent that from happening, we must include the stories of black women like Katie Truslow and the survivors of Daniel Holtzclaw’s crimes when we speak about the injustices of the American criminal justice system. More importantly, we must take concrete steps to address the ways that system uniquely burdens women of color. Only when justice is holistic and inclusive is it complete.

Kimberly Tignor is the interim director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law’s Public Policy Project. The Lawyers’ Committee works to secure equal justice for all through the rule of law, targeting in particular the inequities confronting African-Americans and other racial and ethnic minorities.