Oct. 8, 2019

To His Wealthy Donors, Trump is Their Grifter
By Jesse Jackson

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - To decipher President Donald Trump’s presidency, apply the basic rule of politics: Follow the money. Last month, for example, Trump performed at rallies in North Carolina and in New Mexico. He entertained adoring crowds, clad in Trump’s MAGA caps and T-shirts.

The rallies got featured on Fox and other news stations. Then Trump flew to California and went to a series of big-dollar fundraisers that were closed to the public, pocketing what his campaign boasted as more than $15 million in campaign funding, largely from anonymous wealthy donors. This is only a small part of the record campaign war chest that the wealthy are building for Trump’s re-election campaign.

The press treats the overwhelmingly White, working class audiences at Trump’s rallies as his “base.” But they are more his marks than his base. The anonymous wealthy donors in California have a far better claim to be the base that he serves. The donors got the tax cuts; the working people at his rallies got health care cuts. The CEOs got the roll-back of clean water and clean air regulations; his rally audiences got the fouled water and more kids with emphysema. Big oil and coal executives got lavish public subsidies; teachers and parents got cuts in school funding. Big Agra got billions in payoffs to make up for Trump’s trade war; family farmers were casualties, many bankrupted by the loss of markets, with Wisconsin’s small farmers suffering the worst. Auto executives enjoyed record profits; auto workers suffered more layoffs and plant closings. The rich saw their wealth soar; working people faced rising prices in housing, health care, college, cars — with incomes that didn’t keep up. Trump brags on the record-low unemployment numbers, but the jobs too often don’t pay a living wage and Trump and Republicans won’t even allow a vote on raising the minimum wage.

Not surprisingly, workers are beginning to protest. GM autoworkers are involved in the largest strike in years. Teachers in red states across the country have gone on strike to demand greater investment in schools. Nurses are on strike for decent wages and better staffing of hospitals and clinics. Fast food and restaurant workers have led marches for a $15 minimum wage and a union. Young people are marching to protest Trump’s refusal to address the clear and present threat posed by catastrophic climate change.

Trump regales the crowds at his rallies with scurrilous attacks on his opponents, lies and tales about his accomplishments, and boasts about the economy. He panders to their fears, fanning racial division, railing against immigrants and Muslims and the homeless. He’s pugnacious, funny and outrageous. They know he’s a bad guy, but they think he’s their bad guy. And that is the con. The anonymous donors who are contributing record amounts to Trump’s campaign don’t wear MAGA hats. They don’t go to public rallies. They roll their eyes at Trump’s rambling rants and racial taunts. They aren’t on strike or in the streets. They are getting a great return on their investment and are happy to ante up again.

The Trump economy doesn’t work for most Americans, but it works for them. Trump keeps his promises — and his payoffs — to them. They know Trump is a grifter, but he’s their grifter. They are all in on the con.

Oct. 7, 2019

Time for DC and the Nation to Move and Really Help Returning Citizens

By Barrington M. Salmon

Barrington M. Salmon

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Hurting clients, a hurting community and hurting taxpayers. Those are the reasons I was moved, a few months ago, to dedicate part of my “Criminal Justice Watch” website to reveal what has come to be known as “Hopeless Village” in the heart of the nation’s capital.

It was intended to shed light on some of the challenges and problems returning citizens have as they try to reintegrate into the communities from which they come. This is also a window to deal with the local and national dialogue on criminal justice issues as well as public service, such as how, more than ever before, citizens expect companies to live up to their societal responsibilities. It also raises the question of what happens when these businesses do not hold up their end of the bargain as good corporate citizens.

Washington, D.C.’s “Hopeless Village” situation exemplified these issues.  Despite a dire community need for -- and support for -- a new approach to the reentry of formerly incarcerated individuals, a major developer in the city has emerged as the biggest obstacle. With CORE DC ready to open a sorely needed reentry center in the city, Douglas Development – without clear reason - pulled the plug on a lease it had with the social-service provider for space out of which it would operate.

With the clarion question – why? - continuing to echo throughout the community, two things have become increasingly clear: First, any developer who blocks progress without bothering to explain is no friend of the community. Secondly, and most importantly, it’s time to move on.

There are those who would say that Douglas Development, as a private entity, certainly is within its right to change its mind without necessarily giving a reason. But whatever the reason, the public shouldn’t forget this at a time when the city is in desperate need of a space for CORE DC to begin to provide a structured, supervised; yet flexible environment that caters more to the needs of those in the facility, including social services, mental health, than adhering to rules for their own sake.

The issues facing returning citizens are so daunting that there’s no time to waste. When most return home, options for most jobs, housing, mental health counseling are rare.

In a 2016 report, Beyond Second Chances: Reentry Citizens’ Struggles and Successes in the District of Columbia, produced by the Council for Court Excellence, the authors note in the executive summary that: “The path home from time in the criminal justice system is a rocky one, no matter who has to walk it or where they are headed. But here, in our nation’s capital, that path is incredibly complex and laden with obstacles, such as overlapping local and federal jurisdictions, a lack of resources to help returning citizens, and systems that do not always serve the unique needs of specific populations.”

And in a letter supporting CORE DC’s decision to open a halfway house in DC, Washington, DC’s Reentry Action Network also stated what’s at the core of the needs of this constituency. “By opening a new halfway house in D.C., as opposed to Maryland or Virginia, the BOP ensures a more effective continuum of care for D.C.’s returning citizens and facilitates family reunification. Residents will be able to access community-based and government programs in the city while at the halfway house and post-release.”

Courtney Stewart, a prison reform advocate who was released from prison in 1985 and who chairs the National Reentry Network for Returning Citizens in Washington, D.C, told me that the way the city and federal officials deal with returning citizens is one of profits over people and power and money over all else.

Very rarely are the wants and needs of those returning home taken into consideration. Complaints from those who ended up at Hope Village are rife: rigid adherence to rules regardless of extenuating circumstances, a paucity of mental health services, prohibiting access to the Internet on-site, denying residents passes to meet with non-profits who had offered to help them and failing to provide required transportation assistance to residents.

As Stewart said: “The thing is that these people, the corporations who make up the Prison Industrial Complex, have been getting away with murder for a long time. They’ve been able to sustain the Prison Industrial Complex and they have ruined generations and generations of the Black community. It’s been so devastating, and we still haven’t recovered.”

Stewart said Hope Village is indicative of the careless way that returning citizens have been treated by those getting considerable amounts of money to provide services. And he’s not alone. A chorus of criminal justice reformers and advocates say the same.

“Hope Village could never do better no matter how many opportunities they get,” he said. “They’ve been in the city for 44 years…They’ve been a part of the problem. They supported profit over people. Looking at the roots and vines, they need to cut the tree down.”

The glaring question that comes to mind is, why has federal and city government officials allowed the problems and abuses at Hope Village to continue for so long? Yes, I’m sure they would argue that, on the whole, the good work outweighed the bad, but even such a statement ignores the very real needs of the people they purported to serve.

Another question to ask is whether policymakers, city leaders and the community has the political will to do what’s right. To their credit, public officials like Councilmembers Robert White and Kenyon McDuffie have signed on to ensuring that any barriers to CORE doing its job are removed. I hope that they are just the tip of a concerted effort by right-thinking elected officials to correct what is and has been an untenable situation.

It’s time for the city to fully embrace the concept of providing a full palette of services to the District of Columbia’s beleaguered returning citizens, and help CORE find the right spot so that it can do its part to transform the lives of people who have paid their debts to society but are still punished by a sometimes heartless, unfeeling city.

It’s not as if DC doesn’t have the talent, work power, creativity and innovation to create a system that finally provides services that will help returning citizens rebuild fractured and interrupted lives. It’s past time for society and our city to do the right thing.

Oct. 7, 2019

Dr. Cain Hope Felder, Intellectual Action Figure; Expert on Black Presence in the Bible, Succumbs at 76
By Dr. Barbara A. Reynolds

Dr. Cain Hope Felder

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Dr. Cain Hope Felder can never depart fully from the earth because he leaves so much of himself behind. Often you never know how entangled your life is with someone until you backtrack and discover how much they have influenced your life.

Dr. Felder died October 1. He was 76.   For decades he was a pioneer scholar and a professor of New Testament language and literature and editor of The Journal of Religious Thought at Howard University School of Divinity. Through research and publications, he countered the negative conceptions about Africa and Blacks in biblical history. “Despite the fact that the Bible has a favorable attitude about blacks, there is a mistaken impression that the Bible is the foundation document of the White Man’s religion,” he wrote in one of his many well- received books, Troubling Biblical Waters.

In 1993, Dr. Felder co-edited and produced the Original African Heritage Bible, a powerful broadside refuting the erroneous claims about Africa and Blacks in biblical history.

First, he refuted the claim that the Black race was cursed and detailed how Black men and women are fully a part of the salvation history within the Bible itself. For example, Moses himself, was black (Afro-Asiatic) and he married an Ethiopian woman according to Num. 12-1-10; The Queen of Sheba was a black African (1Kings 10-1-10 and 2 Chron.9:1-9) The New Testament mentions another black queen, Kandace, queen of the Nubians in ancient Ethiopian capital of Meroe( Acts 8:26).The Ethiopian Abimelech acts to save the prophet Jeremiah’s life thus becoming the beneficial of a singular divine blessing (Jer.39:15-18) and the dominant portrait of the Ethiopians in the Old Testament is that of a wealthy people (Job28:19). Nimrod, the grandson of Ham who was black,, was cited at “the mighty warrior” (Gen. 10:8).

On the issue of race, Felder writes that Jesus of Nazareth, His mother, Mary were Afro-Asiatic and probably looked like a typical Yemenite, Trinidadian, or African-American of today. Felder points to Matt. 2:15 and Hos.11:1, “Out of Egypt I Have called my son,” as Scripture that challenge the traditional perception of Mary and Jesus as White Europeans. The passage tells of how Jesus’ parents Mary and Joseph escaped to Egypt with the Christ child to hide from the murderous intent of King Herod, who feared someone rising up to displace him. Can you imagine the family depicted as White Europeans fleeing to a Black country to hide out?

Despite the depictions of Hollywood, Egypt has always been part of Africa. Felder also points to the literally hundreds of shrines of the Black Madonna that exist in many parts of North Africa, Europe and Asia showing the mother of Jesus as black with a black infant son, named Jesus. Felder concludes, In the mythopoeic world of the earliest biblical authors, it was believed that in the beginning man was formed “from the dust of the earth. This very dust was envisioned as the soil of Africa.”

Dr. Felder was ordained in the United Methodist Church and worked as the first national director Black Methodists for Church Renewal from 1969 to 1972. After earning a doctorate in biblical languages and literature from Columbia University, he took a position as an adjunct professor at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1978 before coming to Howard in 1981.

Dr. Felder was Herculean in my life, an intellectual action figure who groomed me as a student, which eventually enabled me to teach at the Divinity School in the very classroom where in fear and trembling I learned from him about the Black presence in the Bible and much more. In the mid-nineties there were many churches and institutions that did not welcome female ministers; Felder helped me and many other women overcome that bias.

I never will forget that first day when I stepped into Dr. Felder’s class . He was at the lectern, sliding in and out of Greek and Hebrew and pulling from old and new sermonic passages with the deft of a poet, but all of this pouring out so powerfully from one man overpowered me to a point I fled from the class. I returned only because there were no other options but for a time I identified with a lamb primed for the slaughter.

Behind all the rigors of intellectual scholarship, Felder left his mark not by his first name Cain—the son of Adam and Eve who killed his brother, but by his middle name, Hope. While he demanded excellence, he also showed through his challenge of White institutional racism in biblical studies that he was not requiring of his students anymore than the demands he put on himself.

In 2009, I was among the group that Dr. Felder let on a tour of Egypt and Israel. Biblical history came alive as we cruised down the Nile, reflecting on how Moses began his life as a Hebrew infant in a little ark floating away from terror onto his destiny as a liberator of his people. We rode camels alongside the pyramids. We went to Nubia, a place where I thought was just a byword until we actually visited there. In Israel our group took turns preaching at the Garden of Gethsemane and Felder baptizes us in the River Jordan where Jesus, himself was baptized by John the Baptist.

What was fascinating about the trips, Dr. Felder had toured Egypt and Israel so often, many of the officials knew him by first name, which made our trip uncomplicated.

I will truly miss Dr. Felder. I am just one of thousands who have been touched my his grace and greatness.

Funeral arrangements in DC are:

Lying-In State Friday October 18, 2019, 3:00pm to 7:00pm Emory United Methodist Church, 6100 Georgia Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20011. Family Visitation Saturday October 19, 2019, 9:30am to 11:00am Cramton Auditorium, Howard University 2455 Sixth St., Washington, DC 20059. Funeral Service Saturday October 19, 2019, 11:00am Cramton Auditorium, Howard University 2455 Sixth St., Washington, DC 20059.

Oct. 7, 2019

Impeachment Inquiry: Congress is Duty-Bound to Investigate Alarming Reports of Trump’s Misconduct
By Marc H. Morial 

NEWS ANALYSIS

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - “Any attempt by a President to use the office of the presidency of the United States for personal political gain—rather than the national interest—fundamentally undermines our sovereignty, democracy, and the Constitution ... Misuse of the office of the presidency for such a corrupt purpose would thus represent a clear breach of the trust placed in the President to faithfully execute the laws of the United States and  to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.” – Statement by Rep. Adam Schiff, Chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence,

Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, Chair of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, and Rep. Eliot L. Engel, Chair of the Committee on Foreign Affairs
Ever since Russian interference in American democracy first was disclosed in September of 2016, the words of George Washington’s 1796 Farewell Address have been invoked many times:

“Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.”
Credible allegations have been made that President Trump not only solicited a foreign government for election assistance, but also sought help in discrediting an U.S. intelligence finding about previous foreign interference and implicitly threatened to withhold military aid if his requests are not honored.

The gravity of these allegations cannot be overstated. Congress is duty-bound to conduct a thorough and comprehensive investigation to protect American democracy.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is correct when she says this is a sad time for our country. Regardless of where one falls along the political spectrum, no one should take any pleasure in the idea that the Commander-In-Chief could be abusing the power of his office for personal and political gain.

“Our tone must be prayerful, respectful, solemn, worthy of the Constitution,” Pelosi said.

Nor should the impeachment process be abused for political gain. It is a remedy for only the most egregious betrayals of the public trust. Only a fact-driven, evidence-based inquiry can determine whether that remedy is warranted.

The integrity of American elections is sacrosanct for African-Americans, who have bled and died in defense of the right to vote.  We at the National Urban League found reports that Russian interference specifically targeted African Americans so troubling that we devoted our 2019 State of Black America ® report to an examination of the attacks.

What we found puts the egregiousness of President Trump’s apparent efforts to absolve Russia into stark perspective. The greatest portion of Russia’s online disinformation effort was aimed at dissuading African Americans from voting. Russian trolls exploited the credibility of legitimate online movements like #BlackLivesMatter, posing as activists, and abusing that trust to tamp down Black voter participation.

One Russian-created fake account, @WokeLuisa, garnered more than 50,000 followers, and its posts were highlighted by dozens of prominent news outlets.

All patriotic Americans should be outraged. Our leaders should be doing everything within their power to protect the integrity of our elections and thwart foreign interference. If, instead, President Trump is trying to deflect blame for this attack on democracy away from Russia, it is right to question where his loyalties lie.

Marc H. Morial is president and CEO of the National Urban League.