June 23, 2013

Frederick Douglass Statue Erected in the U.S Capitol
By Shayla Mulzac

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - The unveiling of a statue to honor abolitionist Frederick Douglass, sometimes called the “father of the civil rights movement,” drew hundreds of people to the U. S. Capitol’s Emancipation Hall June 19.

It is the 101st statue erected in the Capitol Visitors Center, but only the fourth in honor of an African-American. While each state has only two such famous figures in the hall, this is the first opportunity for D.C. to welcome one of its very own. Congressional Republicans have refused to allow a second, declining to give the federal District of Columbia equality with states.

“Douglass's life as an active D.C. resident and his deep commitment to our equal rights are the reasons that his statue is here to be unveiled today as a gift from the almost 650,000 American citizens of the District of Columbia,” Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton said in prepared remarks at the unveiling.

Placement of the statue marks the culmination of the decade-long argument between DC leaders and Congressional Republicans over whether DC should be allowed to have the statue since it is not a state, but a federal district.

“Frederick Douglass stood even taller when he lent his stature as a world leader to his home town and refused to temper his demand for congressional voting rights and local self-government for the residents of the District of Columbia.”

The unveiling was organized and led by House Speaker John Boehner and in attendance were the descendants of Frederick Douglass, members of Congress, local leaders and Vice President Joe Biden.

Like Norton, Biden also used the tribute to the 19^th century abolitionist, author and statesman as an opportunity to push the issue of equal voting rights for the people living in the nation’s capital. Though he didn’t mention “statehood” per se, the vice president addressed Douglass’ work advocating equal justice and stated that Douglass supported voting rights for his fellow residents of DC.

He said he and President Obama both support “home rule, budget autonomy and a vote for the District of Columbia.”

Emancipation Hall is also home to statues honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, the reputed “mother of the civil rights movement” and abolitionist Sojourner Truth.

The Douglass statue stands 7 feet tall and weights nearly 1,700 pounds of pure bronze. The statue shows Douglass grasping a paper in one hand, his other resting upon a lectern complete with quill and ink.

June 23, 2013

Snowden Case: Is VP Cheney the Pot Calling the Kettle Black?
By Dr. Wilmer J. Leon, III

NEWS ANALYSIS

Snowden

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - "But over time that awareness of wrongdoing sort of builds up and you feel compelled to talk about (it)… eventually you realize that these things need to be determined by the public and not by somebody who was simply hired by the government." – Excerpt from Edward Snowden’s Interview with the Guardian

Edward Snowden, the former Booz Allen Hamilton infrastructure analyst who worked as a contractor for the National Security Administration (NSA) has leaked to the public the details of the NSA’s spying program PRISM. As a result of his actions he spent several days hiding in China. On Sunday, he arrived in Moscow and had reportedly applied for asylum in Equador at the time of this writing. He faces a Department of Justice (DOJ) criminal investigation, and is being called a traitor by many in American main-stream media.

On Fox News Sunday former VP Dick Cheney (or as author Andrew Feinstein called him the politician-entrepreneur) stated, “I think he's a traitor…I think it's one of the worst occasions in my memory of somebody with access to classified information doing enormous damage to the national security interests of the United States.”

Well, Cheney should know. But I question his assessment of “worst” occasions of somebody doing enormous damage to the United States. Unlike Cheney, Snowden has not facilitated the divulging of the identity of a CIA agent to The New York Times. Snowden has not lied to the American people in order to garner support of the illegal invasion of a sovereign country.  Thousands of US troops have not died as a result of Snowden’s actions regarding Afghanistan and Iraq.  Basically, Snowden has embarrassed the Government by informing the American people of its highly questionable spying programs.

Unlike Cheney, Snowden’s access to classified information has not provided him financial remuneration. According to Andrew Feinstein’s The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade,  “Over the seven years that Cheney served as VP, Halliburton [Cheney was CEO from 1993-2000] was awarded more than $20bn in contracts…As VP [Cheney] held 1.2 million Halliburton stock options from which he collected  millions every year in dividends…”

As Charles “Chuck” Lewis, the executive director of the Center for Public Integrity stated, “They have classified clearances, they go to classified meetings and they’re with companies getting billions of dollars in classified contracts.”

In 2004 Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA) published in Iraq on the Record: The Bush Administration’s Public Statements on Iraq, “a comprehensive examination of the statements made by the five Administration officials most responsible for providing public information and shaping public opinion on Iraq: President George Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.” The report found “…that the five officials made misleading statements about the threat posed by Iraq in 125 public appearances. The report and an accompanying database identify 237 specific misleading statements by the five officials.”

According to the report, between March 17, 2002, and January 22, 2004, Vice President Cheney made 51 misleading statements about the threat posed by Iraq in 25 separate public appearances. It said, “The statements began at least a year before the commencement of hostilities in Iraq, when Vice President Cheney stated on March 17, 2002: ‘We know they have biological and chemical weapons.’ The Administration’s misleading statements continued through January 22, 2004, when Vice President Cheney insisted: ‘there’s overwhelming evidence that there was a connection between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi government.’”

One can only wonder if Cheney and his henchmen’s personal financial interests played any role in their “patriotic” decisions to invade Iraq and Afghanistan and mislead the American people into supporting those actions.

Based upon this data, if anyone is going to be an expert regarding “doing enormous damage to the national security interests of the United States”, it is going to be Cheney.  This begs the question of why Fox News anchor Chris Wallace failed to challenge Cheney with this data during their Sunday interview.

During the Fox News Sunday interview, Cheney misrepresented the scope of the program when he stated, "When you consider somebody smuggling a nuclear device into the United States, it becomes very important to gather intelligence on your enemies and stop that attack before it ever gets launched."

Very few people will debate that scenario but according to The Guardian the NSA’s PRISM program required domestic telecom companies to provide “…communication records of millions of US citizens…collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.”

When did innocent American citizens become enemies of the state?

Snowden stated, "I think that the public is owed an explanation of the motivations behind the people who make these disclosures that are outside of the democratic model. When you are subverting the power of government that's a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy and if you do that in secret consistently as the government does when it wants to benefit from a secret action that it took.”

Snowden’s statement and motivations made me think about a few lines in the Declaration of Independence, “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

The Edward Snowden’s, Bradley Manning’s, and Dr. Daniel Ellsberg’s may or may not be traitors.  The American public and history will make those determinations. But when the likes of a Vice President Dick Cheney makes such assertions with his long history of duplicity and “51 misleading statements about the threat posed by Iraq in 25 separate public appearances” it makes me wonder how the pot can call the kettle black and go unchallenged.

Dr. Wilmer Leon is the Producer/ Host of the Sirius/XM Satellite radio channel 110 call-in talk radio program “Inside the Issues with Leon” Go to www.wilmerleon.com or email:This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. www.twitter.com/drwleon and Dr. Leon’s Prescription at Facebook.com

June 23, 2013

Blackonomics

A Hard Head Makes a Soft Behind
By James Clingman

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - “Stop that! I’m not going to tell you again.”  I am sure many of you have heard your parents say those words more than once.  Why?  Because you always repeated what they told you not to do, right?  Now that we are adults ourselves, some of us who are consciously aware of the state of the Black economy in this nation are saying the same thing to our people: “Stop that!” Stop spending so much and start producing more. Stop creating wealth for every other group and virtually none for ourselves. Stop capitulating to the whimsical and dangerous malaise of “instant gratification.”  Stop!

The latest piece of information that made me scream at our people when I read it was a well-written article, by Jeneba Ghatt, and featured in the online magazine, Politics 365.   The title itself, "Black Spending Power to Hit $1Trillion by 2015, But Black Wealth is Dropping", conjures up an immediate sense of, “Say what?” and “What the…?”  The inference I drew from the title comprised a conundrum, an enigma, a paradox, an oxymoron, an irony, an inconsistency, a contradiction, and just plain out of order.

My penchant for yelling, “Stop it!” has come from two decades of writing essentially what Sister Ghatt delineated in her article.  And let me commend Dr. Claud Anderson, Tony Brown, and others who have been yelling a lot longer than I have about the foolishness of Black folks bragging about, or buying into others who brag about, so-called “Black Spending (Purchasing, Consumption, or Buying) Power.”  It may be power, but only for those with whom we spend our trillion dollars; it’s definitely a weakness for us.

Can you see the untenable and downright ridiculous economic position Black people are in vis-à-vis having a $1 trillion annual income versus not having built a commensurate level of wealth with such a great deal of money?  What sense does it make to even discuss Black spending power if we are not willing to leverage that $1trillion into wealth for ourselves and our children?  It’s similar to how we brag about how “powerful” our votes are, but we get very little in return for them.

Here is an excerpt from Jeneba Ghatt’s article: “Although Blacks make up 13 percent of the U.S. population, they own merely 5 percent of all U.S. firms and only 1.8 percent of companies that employ more than one person… More than half of Black-owned businesses had less than $10,000 in business receipts in 2002, compared with one-third of White-owned firms and 28.8 percent of Asian-owned firms.”  Two questions:  Where have you heard or read that before? And, what does that say about our willingness to support Black businesses with Black dollars?

“Stop it!  I’m not going to tell you again.”  That is, until the next time I tell you the same thing, and the times after that, just as any good parent does out of love for their children.  But in addition to my continuing to rave about our economic condition, and offer ways to ameliorate our situation, I will continue to encourage folks like Ms. Ghatt to enlighten us.  It’s the same message with a different messenger, but all in the line of Booker T., Garvey, Bethune, DuBois, Elijah Muhammad, Luke Edwards, Robert Wallace, and Brooke Stephens.

In his own inimitable style (If you know him you will understand), Dr. Claud Anderson, author of Powernomics and President of the Harvest Institute in Washington, DC, responded to the article in part by saying, “Bragging about how much Blacks consume is like a crack addict bragging about how much money he spends to consume crack.  It’s the producers and sellers of crack that have the power, not the consuming addict.  All the crack addict has is a bad habit that consumes brain tissue and wealth.  Like the crack addict, we as a race, simply consume what others produce. We enrich those from whom we purchase…we have enriched every racial, religious, and ethnic group on this earth except ourselves.”

I am sure Claud’s parents told him a hard head makes a soft behind, and he is constantly telling us the same thing, calling for us to wake up and have our dollars start making some sense by putting them to work for us rather than for everybody else.

Ms. Ghatt ended her piece by also offering some wise words: “[The Nielsen Report] should be…a call to arms to better educate ourselves on saving and growing money so that it lasts longer than one pay period.”

I continue to say, “Stop the madness, folks.”  It’s way past time that we grow up, despite what was done to us in the early years of this country; it’s time we take charge of our own economic empowerment by holding on to more of that $1 trillion a lot longer than we do at present.

“The eagle flies on Friday, and Saturday I go out to play; Sunday I go to church and kneel down on my knees and pray.”  Yes, they call it stormy Monday. I wonder why.

June 23, 2013

The Minimum Wage for the Least and Left Out
By Julianne Malveaux

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - It seems that the term “poverty” has been sidelined from our national discourse, even though 15 percent of all Americans, and 26 percent of African Americans experience poverty. The Fair Labor Standards Act was signed on June 25, 1938, seventy-five years ago, so perhaps this is a good time to explore the roots of the minimum wage and why its establishment remains important.

The genesis of the Fair Labor Standards Act, was a note a girl wrote in Bedford, Massachusetts when Roosevelt was campaigning for his second term as President. The note said, “I wish you could do something to help us girls…We have been working in a sewing factory. Up until a few weeks ago we were getting our minimum pay of $11 a week…Today the 200 of us girls have been cut down to $4, $5 and $6 a week”.  In the middle of the Great Depression, young women were earning between ten and fifteen cents an hour.  Responding to the note, Roosevelt signed legislation that dealt with issues of the terms and conditions of work, including wages. 

The law limited weekly hours to 44, established the minimum wage at 25 cents an hour, and banned child labor. When the law was passed, it applied to industries that employed only a fifth of the workforce.  Private household workers (or “domestics”, mostly African American women), and farm workers (mostly African American at that time, though later mostly Latino) were exempted from the law.

There was enormous resistance to the legislation.  Indeed the bill was, at one point, described as “unconstitutional”.  Roosevelt signed 121 bills, including the Fair Labor Standards Act, after Congress had adjourned.  Essentially FLSA restored textile workers, and many like them, to the $11 a week that was considered barely livable.  In a fireside chat, Roosevelt chided the bills detractors, "Do not let any calamity-howling executive with an income of $1,000 a day, ...tell you...that a wage of $11 a week is going to have a disastrous effect on all American industry."

Fast forward.  Now domestic workers are included in the Fair Labor Standards Act, to the point that employers are required to issue these workers W-2 forms if they are regular workers, to withhold Social Security and other federally-mandated taxes from their pay, and to match Social Security contributions as required by law.  Of course, many of these workers are paid informally, or “under the table”, and they make less than the minimum wage.

Those who receive tips as little as $30 a month in tips earn just $2.13 an hour.  That’s certainly something to think about when providing your server between 15 and 20 percent at the end.  Some restaurants may offer more than the minimum $2.13 an hour, but many do not pay as much as minimum wage (currently $7.25).

While agricultural workers should, technically, earn the minimum wage, there are enough exceptions to this provision that many agricultural workers do not earn $7.25 an hour.  Additionally, undocumented immigrants have little leverage at the bargaining table.  They earn less than the minimum wage when they are desperate for employment. Small farms are also exempt from paying the minimum wage.

Someone who earns the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour who works 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, earns about $15,000 a year.  If they are an hourly worker without benefits who takes any time off, the $15,000 earnings drops off.  While many minimum wage workers are part-time workers, some cobble together several part time jobs to make enough money to live.

For full-time workers, parents, and others, the minimum wage is hardly a living wage.  President Obama has suggested raising the minimum wage to $9 an hour over a three-year period, taking the annual minimum wage for a full-time worker to almost $19,000 a year.  The Federal Minimum Wage Act would increase hourly wages to $10.10 by 2015, making annual pay about $21,000 by that year.  It would also index the minimum wage to inflation.  The feisty and fantastic new Senator from Massachusetts, lawyer Elizabeth Warren, has indicated that she considers $22 an hour (or about $45,000 a year) a living wage.

About two million people earn the minimum wage, and another 1.6 million actually earn less. These are the people recorded, not the actuality of those paid under the table. This represents less than five percent of the workforce, but this is why we should pay attention to them. African Americans, Latinos, and women are most likely to be represented in this 3.6 million. They are more likely to be young (though those 18-25 are adult and may be raising families), less educated and single. They are the least and the left out. They are young women raising families, students trying to scrap together living expenses, or those with qualifications but not opportunities.

These folks work in service and hospitality industries, serving our food, parking our cars, taking care of our mamas, and cleaning our rooms when we stay in hotels.  I don’t care if they are 4.7 percent of the labor force, less or more.  The bottom line is that it is overtime to raise the minimum wage!

Julianne Malveaux is a DC based economist and writer.