May 25, 2014

African Leaders Vow  'Total War' Against Kidnappers as U.S. Sends Troops to Search for Girls

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from Global Information Network

(TriceEdneyWire.com) – Still unable to account for the over 276 teenage girls kidnapped in Nigeria more than a month ago, the government of Pres. Goodluck Jonathan has agreed to step up the fight against the Boko Haram militants with regional and international support. Among that support is largely U. S. Air Force troops.

President Obama last week told Congress he has deployed 80 troops to adjoining Chad to help in the search for the missing girls. “These personnel will support the operation of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft for missions over northern Nigeria and the surrounding area,” President Obama said in a letter to Congress. He said the troops will remain deployed “until its support resolving the kidnapping is no longer required.”

Meanwhile, at a summit  in Paris,  Nigerian President Jonathan met with African leaders and agreed to wage a “total war” against the rebel group now said to be overrunning neighboring Cameroon and Chad. The meeting was hosted by France and attended by representatives of the U.S., the UK and the European Union. African presidents in attendance were from Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Benin.

The rebels, seeking to install a radical form of Islam, are believed to be better armed than the Nigerian military, with advanced weaponry thought to be coming from the stockpile of former president Moammar Gaddafi whose entire trove of military might was “liberated” upon his murder in 2011.

Nigerian foot soldiers have given evidence of the imbalance of fighting strength when they shot at their own commander after being ordered into a Boko Haram ambush. The deadly ambush led to over half a dozen casualties among the soldiers.

Speaking before the talks in Paris, UK foreign secretary William Hague urged West African nations to put aside their differences. "This is one sickening and terrible incident,” he said of the kidnapping, but (the insurgents) continue almost every day to commit terrorist attacks and atrocities of other kinds, so they have to be defeated in the region."

He said Nigerian security forces were not well structured to deal with the threat posed by Boko Haram.

"We can help with that, which is why we are offering to embed military advisers within the Nigerian headquarters," he said. "Nigeria has the main responsibility and must be the leading nation in tackling this and that includes to mount an effective security response."

Yet low morale and other problems within the Nigerian military – low pay, poor housing, ageing weapons – have even been cited by the soldiers themselves. “Our equipment doesn’t work and they give us just two magazines (about 60 bullets) to go into the bush,” one officer complained to Sky News.

Other soldiers told the Associated Press that some in their ranks actually fight alongside Boko Haram – a suspicion echoed by the President who admitted publically in 2012 that Boko Haram members and sympathizers had infiltrated every level of his government and the military.

U.S. State Dept. officials attending the Paris meeting said the group would meet again soon and that sanctions could be imposed against Nigerian officials in the next few weeks.

Meanwhile, supporters of the Nigerian President are said to be calling for postponement of next year’s general elections by 18 months. Their campaign is called “Preserve Nigeria’s democracy: Postpone the 2015 now.”

The Trice Edney News Wire contributed to the updates in this story.

May 25, 2014

Alarming National Study:Segregation is Back
Integration in Retreat 60 Years After Brown v. Board

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from the Richmond Free Press

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Segregation is once again in full flower in American public schools. Progress toward integrated classrooms has been rolled back since the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kan., decision 60 years ago, according toa report from the Civil Rights Project at UCLA.

That historic decision wiped out government-enforced segregation. But housing patterns and sharp increases in the number of Black and Latino students in recent decades has essentially made voluntary segregation of schools a fact of student life across the country.The return of neighborhood schools has meant that Black students today are once again more likely to attend predominantly Black schools, the report noted. And more than half of Latino students are now attending schools that are majority Latino, the report found.

The report was released May 15, two days before the nation marked the 60th anniversary of the decision that the nation’shighest court issued May 17, 1954.The report reconfirms numerous studies in the last 20 years.Like those reports, the new UCLA report shows resegregation of public schools began in 1986 when courts began phasing out busing for integration and has continued unabated since then. While civil rights laws have enabled Black families to spread into formerly Whites-only areas and expand their suburban presence, the Brown decision has proven to have had less impact than many hoped.

Today in New York, California and Texas, more than half of Latino students are enrolled in schools that are 90 percent minority or more, the report found. In New York, Illinois, Maryland and Michigan, more than half of Black students attend neighborhood schools where they represent 90 percent or more of the enrollment. Project co-director, Gary Orfield, author of the “Brown at 60’’ report, said that data show that the segregation of Black and Latino students results in a lower quality of education than is provided to White students and Asian students in middle class schools.The report urged, among other things, deeper research into housing segregation, which is a“fundamental cause of separate-and-unequalschooling.’’

Although school segregation is more prevalent in central cities of the largest metropolitan areas, it’s also in the suburbs. “Neighborhood schools,when we go back to them, as we have, produce middle class schools for Whites and Asians and segregated high-poverty schools for Blacks andLatinos,’’ Dr. Orfield said. Housing patterns, where people cluster by race and income, play a key role in school segregation and “that’s been a harder nut to crack,’’ said Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which argued the Brown case in front of the Supreme Court in 1954.

School quality often is entwined with poverty. A majority of Latino and Black students attending schools where they are the majority come from low-income families. “These are the schools that tend to have fewer resources, tend to have teachers with less experience, tend to have people who are teaching outside their area of specialty and tend to lack the opportunities, the contacts and thenetworking that occur when you’re with people from different socioeconomic backgrounds,’’ said Dennis Parker, director of the American Civil Liberties Union Racial Justice Program.

For students like Diamond McCullough, 17,a senior at Walter H. Dyett High School onChicago’s South Side, the disparities in education are real. Her school is made up almost entirely of African-American students. She said her school doesn’t offer physical education or art classes, and advanced placement offerings for a college-bound student like her are only available online.Miss McCullough noted the school is named after a famous musician, Walter H. Dyett, and the school no longer has a band class.

“We don’thave a music chorus class,’’ she said. “We barely have the basic classes we need.’’ Aquila Griffin, 18, said she transferred from Dyett to another high school 20 blocks away because she needed biology and world studies to graduate.The two traveled to Washington for a labors ponsored rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court in support of public education on the anniversary of the Brown decision.

“Many blame the schools for failing, or teachers, but they never blame the bad policies put in place in schools,’’ Griffin said. “A teacher can only teach to a certain extent with the resources. It’s the policies put in place that’s failing the students.’’ In the Brown decision, the Supreme Court ruled: “In the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.’’

In the aftermath of that ruling, scores of cities and towns implemented desegregation plans that often included mandatory busing, in some cases triggering an exodus of White students to private schools or less diverse communities. John Rury, an education professor at the University of Kansas, said the work at UCLA and in earlier reports show many of the advances in desegregating schools made after the Brown ruling have stopped — or been reversed. While racial discrimination has been a factor, other forces are in play, Dr. Rury said. Educated parents with the means to move have flocked to districts and schools with the best education reputations for decades, said Dr. Rury, who has studied the phenomenon in the Kansas City region.

In the South, many school districts encompass both a city and a surrounding county, he said. That has led to better-integrated schools. Still, around the country, only 23 percent of Black students attended White-majority schools in 2011. That’s the lowest number since 1968. Advocates point to rulings by federal courts that have freed school districts from Brown related desegregation orders since the mid-1980s. Those rulings they argue, have led the countryback toward more segregated schools.At the same time, a demographic change inpublic schools is contributing.Between 1968 and 2011, the number ofLatino students in public school systems rose 495 percent, while the number of Black students increased by 19 percent. Meanwhile, the number of  White students dropped 28 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

Charles Brothers, a retired social studies and psychology teacher who taught in a low-income school in St. Lucie County, Fla,. said the nation has not figured out how end resegregation. Brothers said, “I think we haven’t taken the time, and it’s across the board, politically and socially, to really understand what we really do want out of education and how are we really going to makeit available for everyone."

College Degree No Longer Guarantees Jobs for Blacks
By Frederick H. Lowe

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from TheNorthStarNews.com

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - For generations, Black parents' mantra was to tell their children to get a good education so they will get a good job. But Black parents will have to revise their thinking because a college degree no longer guarantees African-American graduates a job or a career.

This is because of the poor economy, which has affected everyone, and wide-spread job discrimination that affects African Americans, especially black men, according to a recently published study by Center for Economic and Policy Research, which is based in Washington, D.C.

The report, titled,  "A College Degree is No Guarantee," reported that in 2013, 12.4 percent of Black college graduates between the ages of 22 and 27 years old were unemployed, compared to a 5.6 percent unemployment rate of all college graduates. The jobless rate for Black college graduates was  up 7.8 percentage points in 2013 compared to 4.6 percentage points in 2007, the same year the Great Recession began in late December.

Last year, 55.9 percent of black employed college graduates were underemployed or working in jobs that did not require a college degree, the report stated.

Black college graduates with degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fare somewhat better than otherAfrican-American college graduates. But the jobless rate among Black STEM graduate was 10 percent and the underemployment rate was 32 percent. Technical degrees offer the best chance of landing a job for black college graduates, followed by degrees in leisure and hospitality and social sciences. Black college graduates with degrees in architecture, construction, communications, agriculture and natural resources had the worse chance of landing a full-time job.

"In part, these outcomes reflect the disproportionate negative effect of economic downturns on young workers, and in part, they reflect ongoing discrimination in the labor market," wrote Janelle Jones a research associate at CEPR and John Schmitt, a senior research economist at CEPR. "A college degree blunts both these effects relative to young black workers without a degree, but college is not a guarantee against either set of forces."

Still, however, companies refuse to hire Black men. The study mentions two tests, one in Milwaukee and the other in New York.  In 2003, Black and White job hunters with fictitious resumes applied for jobs. Black applicants were half as likely to receive a company call back for a second interview compared to white applicants.

Things had not changed that much in 2009 in the liberal city of New York.

"Black men were less likely to receive a call back than equally qualified white men, and black man with no criminal record fared worse than recently incarcerated white men.  Blacks also are last in hiring's racial hierarchy. Employers favor white men and then Hispanic men and finally black men, reported the study, which does not mention Asian or Indian men. This year in Chicago, 60 partners in a law firms rated the same legal brief consistently lower when told the author was black, compared to when they were told the brief's author was white. In addition, the reviewers were more likely to point out spelling, grammar and technical errors when under the impression the author was black," the study reported.  

A 2011 study also found that more than half of management, professional and related occupations - those where many college graduates work - have an underrepresentation of Black men.

The study reported, "Meanwhile, in typically low-wage service occupations, black men were overrepresented. The authors estimate that a $10,000 increase in the average annual wage of an occupation was associated with a seven-percentage point decrease in the proportion of black men in the same occupation." 

Blackonomics

The Cost of Doing Business    
By James Clingman   

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - “Let me issue and control a nation’s money and I care not who writes the laws.”  Mayer Amschel Rothschild.

I often wonder if most Black people in America really understand the across-the-board impact economics has on our daily lives.  Or have we just been beaten down so badly that we have fallen into a state of apathy when it comes to our collective pursuit of economic empowerment?  The above quote by Rothschild always reminds me of the kind of nation and world in which we reside.  It also makes me even more aware of Black folks’ economic position in this country, and our lack of emphasis on what’s really important vis-à-vis real power.

What are the messages being given to Black people by many of our leaders?  Well, they run the gamut from “civil rights” to “voting rights” to “gay rights” to “immigration reform” to someone calling one of us or all of us a name we don’t like.  Many unsuspecting Blacks are riled up about issues that do not and will not affect us one iota when it comes to being able to obtain power for ourselves; and we spend an inordinate amount of time caught up in nonsensical discussions that only keep us from devoting ourselves to self-empowerment.

Maybe we are simply unwilling to “pay the cost to be the boss,” as we like to say.  Or, maybe the “cost of doing business” is just too high for us.  Maybe we just want to continue to buy everything and anything other folks make and distribute rather than do those things for ourselves.  Maybe we are just content to be the primary consumers in this nation.

The engine of the U.S. economy is fueled by consumption, which is 70 percent of our Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and that does not include purchases of new housing.  Our current GDP is more than $15 trillion; do the math and see how much is being spent on goods and services.  Question:  Doesn’t it make sense for Black people to be producing and selling much more than we do presently?  With an aggregate annual income of more than $1 trillion, we could carve out a few niches in the business world and make a veritable killing.

When we look at per capita GDP by country, interestingly, we see that Liberia ranks among the lowest in the world.  Why?  Well, I have writings from Booker T. Washington to the officials in Liberia and Haiti warning them to be independent and to take full advantage of their land and natural resources by maintaining ownership and control over them.  He admonished them not to allow foreigners to buy their land and use it for their own economic advantage.  Unfortunately, they did not follow Washington’s advice, and Liberia ended up signing 100 year leases on its rubber tree plantations to Goodyear, and Haiti, now the poorest nation in the western hemisphere, failed to control its beautiful island and turn it into a primary tourist attraction.

We are so hung-up on meaningless and powerless political discussions, and instead of mimicking even the smallest measure of what Rothschild said, we obviously keep thinking the politicians are going to take care of us.  But they keep telling us things that will not move us forward economically.  When it comes to economic advocacy, where is our voice in Washington?

Let’s be honest.  Over the last 50 years, Black people have cast millions of votes.  We have helped elect thousands of Black public officials—and White ones too.  In 2012, Black people voted at a higher rate than other minority groups and by most measures surpassed the white turnout for the first time. What has that gotten us, as it pertains to what Rothschild said?  Suppose for the past 50 years we had cast our “little green ballots,” as Booker T. directed us, to build our own economic infrastructure and support system.  Had we done that, we too could say it does not matter who “writes the laws;” we would be true political powerbrokers.

Take reparations, in whatever form you support.  What politicians in DC are seriously advocating for what Louis Farrakhan called, Reparatory Justice?  John Conyers’ bill has been languishing for decades now.  The President says he does not support reparations for Black people, so where does that leave us?  How about the political talking heads on TV?  Are they devoting a serious amount of time talking about economic empowerment for Black people, or are they just trying to get us to vote a certain way?