July 31, 2018

As Trump Distorts NFL players’ Messages, Let’s Instead Join Together
By Jesse Jackson

(TriceEdneyWire.com) -  As teams gear up for the NFL season, President Trump is reviving his destructive and diversionary attacks aimed at turning fans against players. The league office stepped in it by unilaterally declaring that players who do not want to stand during the national anthem should stay in the locker room.

The NFL players association had little choice but to force negotiations over that insult. Jerry Jones, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, is a decent guy. But he stuck his foot in it, too, recently announcing that the Cowboys had to stand for the anthem and couldn’t stay in the locker room – or else.

The league wisely told him to zip it while the policy was under negotiation. So it goes. So much of this is a false narrative. Fake news. Trump dishonestly insists that the players are disrespecting the flag. In fact, the players kneeling during the anthem were expressing a silent protest not against the flag, but against police brutality and the reality of structural racial inequality. Kneeling before the flag in silent, nonviolent protest is not disrespectful to the Stars and Stripes. Just the opposite. It is a sign of deference and respect, a call to honor what the flag is truly supposed to represent. Burning the flag is constitutionally protected but is a desecration. Burning a cross is a desecration. It is violent. Kneeling before the cross, or during the anthem, on the other hand, isn’t a desecration; it is a call for help.

Colin Kaepernick was and is concerned about Blacks being beaten and killed by police. He kneeled during the anthem to highlight how the values of the flag were being ignored on the streets. He wasn’t disrespecting the flag; he was protesting those who trample its values. He was being a patriot.

Now Trump wants to light the dynamite again. His politics prey and thrive on division. He hopes to divide us one against the other while his administration rolls back protections of consumers, workers and the environment, allows corporate lobbyists to rig the rules, and lards more and more tax cuts and subsidies on entrenched interests and the wealthy.

So, he purposefully peddles the false narrative that the players are disrespecting the flag.Jones, who is a Trump supporter, isn’t a bad man. Beyond the playing field, beyond contracts, he has been a decent guy. He paid for the funeral of Cowboy great Bob Hayes. But Jones has allowed himself to be turned into Trump’s pawn in this diversion. The reality is that we would not have the Dallas Cowboys in Dallas were it not for those protesting for their rights.

The victory of the Civil Rights Movement opened the way to a New South. The nonviolent protests and resistance pulled down the old barriers and walls in the South, clearing the way for the Cowboys and the Spurs and the Rockets of the New South, where Blacks and Whites could play on the same team and wear the same colors, where fans root for the colors of their team, not the color of the players’ skin.

Successful protests – at the cost of far too many lives – finally ended slavery and apartheid in this society. We should be honoring the protesters, not distorting their message. Kaepernick was right to protest what is going on in our streets. He has paid a heavy penalty for expressing his views in a nonviolent and dignified fashion. One of the best quarterbacks in the league, he has effectively been banned, a blatant conspiracy that ought to constitute a clear violation of anti-trust laws.Kaepernick stands among giants. Curt Flood in baseball and Muhammad Ali during the prime years of his boxing life were also banned, but in the process, they changed sports and the country for the better.There have always been politicians who profit by appealing to our fears. There have always been politicians who seek to divide us for political gain.We’ve come a long way, but we still have a long way to go to fulfill the flag’s values of liberty and justice for all. The players expressing their views in nonviolent and dignified fashion aren’t disgracing the flag, they are expressing its values. Let us turn against those who would divide us and join together to make America better.

July 30, 2018

 

New Legislation Seeks Debt-free College Degrees and Real Career Opportunities

By Charlene Crowell

 

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - If 17 Members of the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce can convince their fellow lawmakers of a comprehensive approach to higher education, every student across the country could gain the chance to earn a debt-free degree and a rewarding career.

 

The Aim Higher Act, introduced on July 24, proposes several significant improvements to higher education:

• Improves college affordability by investing more in federal student aid, and incentivizes states to reinvest in higher education;
• Cracks down on predatory for-profit institutions that target students and veterans with expensive, low-quality programs;
• Protects and expands the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program to make student loans simpler and easier to repay;
• Provides students the tools they need to graduate on time with a quality degree; and
• Invests in teachers and school leaders to improve training and quality of our schools.

Commenting on the legislation, Congressman Bobby Scott (VA-03) noted, “It provides immediate and long-term relief to students and parents struggling with the cost of college. It puts a greater focus on helping students graduate on time with a quality degree that leads to a rewarding career. And it cracks down on predatory for-profit colleges that peddle expensive, low-quality degrees at the expense of students and taxpayers.”

 

Congressman Scott also noted that the bill modernizes financial aid, and the importance of a quality education, whether it was at a four or two-year curriculum.

 

Those observations should strike a chord with the 44 million consumers with outstanding student loan debts that together total $1.5 trillion. Without serious intervention on the part of Congress, the cost of higher education will continue to climb, and with it both the number of borrowers and the nation’s collective indebtedness.

 

The measure also attracted support from a wide array of education stakeholders who promptly chimed in with their respective support.

 

“The cost of a college degree is rising at three times the rate of inflation,” said Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers. “Predatory for-profit colleges continue to scam our nation’s veterans, minorities, and other student loan borrowers…The Aim Higher Act takes some important steps forward toward making higher education a more affordable, accessible reality for everyone.”

 

“For too long, for-profit colleges have failed to serve the educational purpose for which they were intended,” added Ashley Harrington, a Policy Counsel with the Center for Responsible Lending. “The combination of high costs and low graduation rates by these bad actors have resulted in unfair burdens for student borrowers and taxpayers. This bill improves accountability for all higher education institutions and creates a sensible path to fix our broken student loan repayment system.”

 

In the early 1990s, when 22 percent of students were defaulting on their loans, Congress passed a package of reforms that drove down defaults. Yet another surge of abuses led to additional reforms in 2008 and 2009.

 

Earlier this year, a diverse 86-member coalition of organizations began working on behalf of students, consumers, veterans, servicemembers, faculty and staff, civil rights, and college access.  Together, they advocated for integrity and consumer protections in higher education.

 

Additionally, in March of this year, 31 state attorneys general (AGs) urged Capitol Hill lawmakers to enact legislation that would allow federal and state governments to work in cooperation to effectively respond to the student loan crisis that at the time included a loan default rate larger than any other loan category: 11 percent.

 

“The states have the institutional capacity, the legal framework, and the track record to protect their residents from abuses in the student loan market. The Department [Education] does not,” wrote the AGs who represented the following states: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Carolina, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia and Washington State.

 

It just seems sensible that every student borrower deserves to know, before a loan is incurred, how interest accumulates, when repayments begin, and the eligibility requirements for income-based repayments. Unfortunately, poor servicing practices have exacerbated, rather than clarified loan obligations – particularly in repayment. Another key provision of the Aim Higher Act is to efficiently and accurately report data that is more useful for students and families.

 

As Mildred Garcia, President of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities recently remarked, “The Aim Higher Act’s financial aid provisions would ensure that today’s students –and generations to come – could attain the American Dream.”

 

Here’s hoping Congress will take timely actions to advance the Aim Higher Act. Making higher education accessible, accountable, and financially manageable would benefit the entire country.

 

Charlene Crowell is the Center for Responsible Lending’s Communications Deputy Director. She can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

July 30, 2018

After a Turbulent Early Life, Dennis Derrico Makes a New One for Himself and an Example for Other Black Men
By Frederick H. Lowe

Dennis Derrico PHOTO/Rosemary Lambin 

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from NorthStarNewsToday.com

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Half way through a newspaper interview about his life, the negative effects caused by the absence of African-American men in the Black community and how with the help of others he has  been able to turn his life around, Dennis Derrico, a convicted murderer, began to cry.

As he talked, his eyes reddened and tears streamed down the sides of his face. His shaved head shook a little. I looked for a tissue in the office where we were sitting. I couldn’t find any.

He excused himself and went into the bathroom where he found tissue to wipe his face and his beard. He sat back down and apologized. He continued crying and gradually regained control. It was hardly a reaction I expected from a man who spent 22 years in prison.

“I missed my teens, 20s, 30s and part of my 40s,” he said with a laugh. He celebrated his 43rd birthday July 5. At one time, he may have been what many considered to be a hardened criminal and though that part of his life cannot be denied or forgotten, he has no plans to relive it.

A Michigan judge sent him to prison at 19 for stabbing to death a 42-year-old man during an argument in Detroit. At his sentencing, the victim’s mother said she wanted him punished but she did not want him sentenced to life in prison. He had been living with his grandmother after his mother sent him to Detroit so he would stay out of trouble in Chicago. 

He grew up in  Englewood, a Southside Chicago neighborhood.The Michigan Department of Corrections released him from prison on March 28, 2017, to Cherice,  one of his younger sisters who lives in the Chicago area. His mother died while he was in prison and he never knew his father.

He described both his mother and stepfather as functioning drug addicts. For the first couple of weeks following his release, he felt as though he had landed on another planet. “I had a lot of high anxiety,” said Derrico, adding that he didn’t know about computers before he was sentenced to prison. Now they were everywhere.

He watched television, exercised and didn’t do much else. Cherice than asked what was vision he had for his life.This prompted him to call a number of agencies, including the North Lawndale Employment Network, which was founded in 1999. The organization provides job opportunities for ex-convicts and is committed to the area’s economic development.

The network is funded by a number of organizations, including the Steans Family Foundation, whose goal is to revitalize North Lawndale, a neighborhood of 35,276 on Chicago’s West Side. Its boundaries are Arlington Street, Taylor Street and 5th Avenue on the north. 

Twenty-first Street, Cermak Road and railroad tracks on the southern, eastern and western boundaries.The neighborhood’s population is 89 percent Black, 7 percent Hispanic and 2.3 percent White. Martin Luther King Jr. lived there in 1966. Golda Meir, Israel’s prime minister from 1969 to 1974,  lived in the neighborhood and was employed by the Lawndale branch of the Chicago Public Library. Other celebrity residents included musicians Benny Goodman, Ramsey Lewis and singer Dinah Washington.

There are vacant lots next to newly constructed homes. Homes that are boarded up next to incredibly beautiful two-story greystones. At the Homan Avenue elevated train station, an abandoned car with two bullet holes in the driver’s side window had its front passenger side tire bumped upon the curb in front of the entrance to the “L” stop. A patrol car was nearby for a while. There wasn’t yellow police tape or curious onlookers.

Today, North Lawndale’s star is its location. It is 5 miles west of Chicago’s Loop. You can stand in the middle of Jackson or Madison streets and see the Loop office buildings and gentrification moving further west. On Madison Street is where the Chicago Bulls and Chicago Blackhawks play their home games.

In prison, Derrico began turning his life around. He took anger management classes and classes in conflict resolution. He also began working in landscaping with an eye to a vocation he would take up after he left prison.

He earned his GED (General Educational Development) and he read books about Black historical figures, including Frederick Douglass. Michigan is home to the "big  three" U.S. automakers. But Derrico explained that Michigan was also known as the prison state.

When he was sentenced in 1995, Michigan operated 52 prisons. The Michigan Department of Corrections  has closed many of them, currently operating 31 that house 41,000 inmates, a population larger than some small cities. The department also  supervises 71,000 probationers and parolees, according to its website.

Derrico served time in 22 of the state’s prisons during his incarceration. In most of the prisons, located in rural parts of Michigan, the majority White staff went out of its way to insult Black inmates, telling them they did not know how to work together and that’s why Blacks have not achieved anything.

“It hurt to be put in that box,” he said, adding that their hostile, racist comments did not define him. “I knew that it wasn’t me,” he said.

His belief in himself received a boost when the Department of Corrections transferred him to Mound Correctional Facility, which is in Detroit and has a large African-American staff. Mound’s name has been changed to Detroit Detention Center.

Black men, including Victor Muhammad, regional director of the Nation of Islam’s Prison Reform Ministry in Michigan, and Judge Greg Mathis, a popular judge on television, spoke at the center to discuss why so many Black men are in prison and what needed to be done to change that trajectory.

Judge Mathis, a Detroit native, has launched a prisoner initiative called Prisoner Empowerment Education and Respect or PEER.

“Judge Mathis is committed to reinvesting in the prison population,” according to his website. “African-American men make up 50 percent of the national prison population yet they are only 6 percent of the nation’s population.”

Derrico is now a crew chief supervising  seven others in North Lawndale Employment Network’s READI Chicago, which puts ex-offenders on an 18-month career pathway to regular jobs. The crew cleans beaches, parks and the city’s streets. Before joining READI Chicago, Derrico started with U-Turn Permitted, a four-week job readiness training program. He also worked for Sweet Beginnings LLC, which makes and sells an all-natural line of raw honey and honey-infused body care products. North Lawndale Employment Network has an office, a classroom and a bee aviary at 3726 W. Flournoy. Derrico and I recently met there.

“This is where it all started,” he said with a big smile.The READI job pays $35,000 annually, according to the website. His leadership qualities are readily apparent to others who have met him, including the late Mayor Harold Washington and Cook County Board President John Stroger. His success since leaving prison is a major source of pride for him.

“I have a car, an apartment and a family,” he said. Derrico compared himself to others who were released from prison about the same time or earlier than he, but who have not achieved what he has.Before he was sent to prison, there were plenty of signs along the way that he was headed there.As he talked about his early life, sometimes with a smile, I learned about his past. As a young teenager, he stole cars.

“That’s how I learned to drive,” he said with a laugh. He also burglarized homes. For his crimes, he  spent considerable time locked up.

“I spent so much time in the Audy Home I thought it was my home,” he said joking. The Audy Home is a  detention center for juveniles in Chicago. He also was a member of the Black Disciples, a street gang in Englewood, and at one point he carried a gun for protection against rival gangs. He repeated seventh grade twice before he was kicked out of middle school  for pulling a fire alarm. School officials transferred him to the 9th grade, but he didn’t last long there either. He dropped out of high school.Derrico said he wants to help and influence other black men by showing them how he has turned his life around..“The reason the Black community is the way it is because black men have been removed from the community. We as black men have not evolved,” he said.

He wants to start a landscaping business that involves planting flowers and trees to make Black neighborhoods beautiful. “We react to what we see around us. That is my vision,”  said Derrico, adding that his grandfather was a landscaper. On the block where North Lawndale offices are located, people have dropped empty soda bottles, candy wrappers and papers on the lawns and walkways.He also wants to earn a degree in social work with the goal of helping other Black men.Derrico is philosophical about the twists and turns in his life’s journey so far. He concludes, “I believe in a higher power. I was meant to go to Detroit. The life that I took there has now been given back to me."

July 29, 2018

Putin-Trump: Brothers From Another Mother
By A. Peter Bailey

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - It is very revealing and often disgusting to witness the national press coverage of the bromance between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. They go on and on about Trump’s refusal to condemn the Russian “meddling” in the 2016 presidential campaign.

They recite horror story after horror story about Putin’s mortal sins when dealing with individuals and countries that do things he considers a threat to himself and Russia.  Someone lacking a knowledge of history would be led to believe that the United States does not and has not ever committed such mortal sins.

Anyone with a knowledge of U.S. history is well aware that that this is a major fallacy.  This country, which the press is covering in the Putin-Trump saga as though it’s God’s gift to righteousness, has done practically every single thing to carry out its agenda as Russia has done and is doing to carry out hers.

It has assassinated or attempted to assassinate leaders and other people who it considers a threat to its program; it has participated in the overthrow of governments who are not sufficiently obedient to its desires; it has invaded countries whose policies it opposed.  The bastion of righteousness would react in the same way Russia acted on Ukraine if the countries on its borders, Canada and Mexico, attempted to sign a military pact with Russia or any other country.

The national press also doesn’t deal with the reality that Putin and Trump share two very basic beliefs. The first is acquiring as much money as possible by any means necessary. The second is that both are white supremacists who strongly believe that white males should now and forever be the dominant force in the international arena.  

Thus they believe that Russia and the United States are in the best position to maintain and advance their white supremacist goals.
This angle of the Trump-Putin connection needs to be explored by the national press rather than to continue weeping and wailing about what they consider Putin’s evilness and Trump’s ignorance. They both know exactly what they are doing.