July 31, 2017

NAACP Applauds Failure of ‘Obamacare’ Repeal,
Urges Health Care Protection ‘By Any Means Necessary’

By Hazel Trice Edney

(TriceEdneyWire.com) – Just out of its 108th annual convention in Baltimore, the NAACP hailed what it described as a “victory” after the U. S. Senate failed to pass a “skinny repeal” of the Affordable Health Care Act (ACA) July 27. The organization then urged protection of health care “by any means necessary”.

“Affordable healthcare is a civil right that must be protected by any means necessary – and last night, 51 Senators did exactly that. We applaud the leaders who stood strong in the face of this ‘skinny repeal’ and refused to effectively sign death warrants on 16 million Americans, if not more,” said newly-elected Interim President/CEO Derrick Johnson in a statement. “Though we celebrate this victory today, we must remember that our health care system is still at risk of being hijacked and turned into a ‘wealth care’ system for the rich tomorrow. Many in Washington would still have the most vulnerable among us– namely children, the elderly, the disenfranchised – pushed to the margins of our society, unable to afford life-saving treatments, while padding the pockets of the one-percent.”

In a dramatic moment, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), just back from surgery for brain cancer, rendered the deciding vote. He paused before giving a thumbs down simultaneously with an emphatic “No.”  He was joined by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, cast a decisive vote to defeat the proposal, joined by two other Republicans, Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) The final vote was 49 to 51, including 48 Democrats also voting no, effectively killing the repeal bill.

The loss of the repeal bill represents a huge failure for Republicans who have for eight years, promised to repeal the law and eventually or immediately replace it with their own. At least 60 Congressional maneuvers have failed to end the ACA. Even the U. S. Supreme Court has upheld it.

Last week’s vote also represents a major loss for the Trump Administration. The President had pressured – even threatened - Republicans to pass the bill. But, so far, no version of a proposed Republican legislation has successfully made it to Oval Office for signature.

Among other complaints, Republicans and other conservatives claim one of their key reasons they oppose the ACA is that the bill interferes with the private relationship between doctors and patients – representing the “big government” intrusion that they philosophically loathe. Democrats admit the plan is not perfect. But the undercurrent is that the ACA was the hallmark victory of President Barack Obama’s eight-year tenure. The fact that Obama signed the bill into law amidst great Republican opposition March 23, 2010 appears to be the dominant reason for the Republican push to repeal it rather than fix parts of the ACA that needs repairing.

The McCain vote came on the heels of an eloquent speech he made days earlier in which he appealed to his fellow Republicans to return to the days of old - making deals across party lines for the good of the nation.

"We're getting nothing done," McCain said. "Our deliberations today – not just our debates, but the exercise of all our responsibilities – authorizing government policies, appropriating the funds to implement them, exercising our advice and consent role – are often lively and interesting. They can be sincere and principled. But they are more partisan, more tribal more of the time than any other time I remember. Our deliberations can still be important and useful, but I think we'd all agree they haven't been overburdened by greatness lately. And right now they aren't producing much for the American people.

He continued, "Both sides have let this happen. Let's leave the history of who shot first to the historians. I suspect they'll find we all conspired in our decline – either by deliberate actions or neglect. We've all played some role in it. Certainly I have."

The so-called ‘skinny repeal’ would have “ended the ACA’s individual and employer mandates. This would have provided states with greater flexibility to allow insurance that is not ACA-compliant,” Johnson pointed out in the statement, which was released the day after the failed vote. “We hope that last night’s actions will serve as a reminder that we will not allow our nation to be transformed into a land where democracy remains a reality for the rich, but just theory for the poor, working class and communities of color. Here at the NAACP, we commit to continuing to educate, agitate, litigate and participate until every American can rest easy at night, knowing that they and their loves ones will be able to receive quality, affordable healthcare.”

July 30, 2017

Election Races to Watch: Kenya, Rwanda, Angola

(TriceEdneyWire.com/GIN) - Major elections are taking place in three African nations next month: in oil giant Angola, East African powerhouse Kenya and tiny, rapidly developing Rwanda.

Rwandans go to the polls August 3-4. The undisputed favorite is the longtime president who has ruled since the end of the tiny nation’s horrific 1994 genocide.

Even the head of the European Union electoral commission said to the Voice of America (VOA) last month: “I think you would not lose any money if you bet on Mr. Paul Kagame.”

Still, the democratic exercise is an important one for Rwanda and its wealthy aid partners, says senior Horn of Africa analyst Murithi Mutiga of the International Crisis Group.

Elsewhere in East Africa, on August 8, voters in Kenya will choose between the incumbent, President Uhuru Kenyatta, son of Kenya’s first president, and Raila Odinga, whose father was a major liberation figure and the country’s first vice president.

The exercise is expected to be Africa’s most expensive on a cost-per-voter basis. Both public and private spending are at an all-time high, with both government and candidates spending hundreds of millions of dollars to secure the electoral process or campaigning to get elected.

In a comparison of cost per voter, Kenya’s 19.6 million voters will each cost the government $25.40. Rwanda will spend 5.5 billion Rwandan francs ($6.5 million). With 6.8 million registered voters, that’s less than a dollar per voter.

This will be 72-year-old Odinga’s last attempt at the presidency. If, as expected, Kenyatta’s Jubilee Alliance Party wins a narrow victory over Odinga’s National Super Alliance coalition, he could cry foul.

Finally, in Angola, the southern African nation will hold its first vote in decades on Aug 23 without President Jose Eduardo dos Santos at the helm. The 74-year-old, who has recently taken several trips to Spain for medical reasons, is stepping down after 38 years in power.

The poll itself is a two-way race, between the longtime ruling party and the established opposition. The winner will lead a nation whose fortunes are heavily dependent on oil, which accounts for about 45 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product and 95 percent of exports. A slump in oil prices has hit the economy hard.

The new president will face a foundering economy and gaping inequalities with state resources largely controlled President dos Santos and his family. 

GLOBAL INFORMATION NETWORK creates and distributes news and feature articles on current affairs in Africa to media outlets, scholars, students and activists in the U.S. and Canada. Our goal is to introduce important new voices on topics relevant to Americans, to increase the perspectives available to readers in North America and to bring into their view information about global issues that are overlooked or under-reported by mainstream media.

July 30, 2017

Police More Likely to Arrest Blacks and Hispanics During Traffic Stops

By Tom Abate

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from NorthStarNewsToday.com

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Researchers analyzing data from millions of traffic stops in the United States have found that black and Hispanic drivers are more likely to be cited, searched, and arrested at stops than white drivers.

The researchers note that such disparities alone are not necessarily indicative of racial bias. However, by looking at the rate at which officers discover contraband on searched drivers, they find evidence that minorities are held to a double standard and searched on the basis of less evidence.

These findings are based on a nationwide database—which the researchers created—of state patrol stops. The database contains key details from millions of records collected from 2011 to 2015 and is part of an effort to statistically analyze police practices.

“We’ve created a platform to help researchers and policymakers understand and improve policing…”

Along with these findings, the researchers are releasing their entire dataset, complete with online tutorials, so that policy makers, journalists, and citizens can do their own analyses through this new Stanford Open Policing Project.

“We have seen many anecdotal reports of bias but we need more than that to accurately show the experience of motorists who are minorities,” says Cheryl Phillips, a professor of journalism and part of the Stanford University Computational Journalism Lab. “We need an open and transparent platform where we can identify systematic bias and that will enable policy change.”

In an academic paper detailing their findings, the researchers explain how they assembled more than 60 million police reports from 20 states that collect enough information about traffic stops—including the race or ethnicity of drivers—to permit statistical inferences when looking at the data in aggregate.

“We’ve created a platform to help researchers and policymakers understand and improve policing,” says Sharad Goel, an assistant professor of management science and engineering and leader of the university’s Law, Order, and Algorithms Project, which uses computational tools to study criminal justice issues.

More searches, less suspicion

The intellectual heart of the project involved the development of a more nuanced and statistically valid way to infer racial or ethnic discrimination after a person is pulled over for a traffic stop. The researchers call their approach the threshold test. It quantifies the following question: once a driver is pulled over, what level of suspicion must an officer have to conduct a search, and how does this threshold of suspicion relate to the race or ethnicity of the driver?

Last year, the computer scientists released their first scientific paper on the threshold test, applying their statistical measure to 4.5 million traffic stops from 100 cities in North Carolina. That study found evidence of a double standard: officers required less suspicion to search black or Hispanic drivers than white drivers.

Applying this test to their newly collected records, the researchers found that the same basic pattern holds across the country.

“This is not a regional phenomenon; it’s national,” Phillips says. “For journalists, being able to examine both the local stops and the bigger picture represents stories that need to be told.”

Collecting the data

The project began more than two years ago when Phillips and a group of journalism graduate students began requesting traffic stop data from state police agencies. Some jurisdictions didn’t offer data electronically and among the states that made electronic records available, data often weren’t collected in a uniform format, creating barriers to systematic analysis.

In 2015, Goel and his students brought their computational skills to the effort. The team won a grant from the nonprofit John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to collect, analyze, and share this sizable data set.

The data negotiation process has become part of the educational experience in Phillips’ classes. And collecting the data, standardizing it, and bringing it into one repository means examining racial patterns in stops on a much broader scale is now possible for academic researchers, policymakers, and journalists.

“It took thousands of hours to corral the different state datasets into a consistent format for analysis,” Goel says, adding that, among other things, the researchers recommend uniform standards for collecting traffic stop data to facilitate public oversight.

Working with journalists and policymakers

The researchers plan to continue collecting data from other states. So far, the project has obtained at least some data from 31 states, though the analysis has been focused on the 20 states with data that were more detailed.

The project has now begun requesting similar data from cities. They also are creating tutorials to help explain the subtle differences between concepts like “discrimination” and “disparate impact” to help provide a shared vocabulary upon which to understand and improve police policies.

The team hopes to attract other researchers, policymakers, and citizens to join their open effort. For her part, Phillips is focusing first on giving journalists both the data and a more sophisticated set of tools to support their role as public watchdogs. The project has already heard from dozens of journalists interested in using the data and tapping the expertise of the computer scientists.

“In a time of shrinking newsrooms and declining resources, we think this is a new model for helping journalists do their jobs,” she says.

Tom abate is associate director of communications at Stanford University School of Engineering.

July 30, 2017

Congressional Maneuver Seeks to Deny Consumers Financial Satisfaction
By Charlene Crowell

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - The song, “I can’t get no satisfaction” may have been recorded decades ago first by Otis Redding and later by the Rolling Stones, but its message is still true today. Its lyrics, “I’ve tried, and tried” strike a resonant chord with anyone who ever felt they received less than they deserved.

When it comes to today’s range of financial services and products, many consumers don’t have satisfaction.

One of the reasons is that consumers are often denied the chance to join forces in court to hold bank and lenders accountable when they seem to have broken the law. Instead, financial contracts frequently contain forced arbitration clauses buried in the fine print. These anti-consumer clauses require that all disputes between consumers and the institution are dealt with in a secretive and often rigged arbitration system.

Among the financial products with high use of arbitration clauses are payday loans. An estimated 99 percent of storefront payday loans in California and Texas include arbitration. Here’s how it works:

The financial institution hires the arbitration firm, pays its fee, and in turn, almost always rules in the company’s favor 93 percent of the time and leading to repeat business-to-business dealings. And by the way – more often than not, there is no right to appeal.

On July 10, a long-awaited rule to remedy this dilemma, was announced by Richard Cordray, Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). A forceful and vocal coalition of civil rights, organized labor, consumer advocates and others had pushed for the rule to further address economic ills suffered disproportionately by consumers of color.

Earlier CFPB research found that even with limits on class actions, consumers receive – after attorneys’ fees – approximately $440 million more per year in these lawsuits than with arbitration. Over the past few years, 34 million more consumers received relief from class action lawsuits.

“Including these clauses in contracts allows companies to sidestep the judicial system, avoid big refunds, and continue to pursue profitable practices that may violate the law and harm large numbers of consumers,” said Cordray. “Our research showed that these little-known clauses are bad for consumers. They may not be aware that they have been deceived or discriminated against or even when their contractual rights have been violated.”

Civil rights organizations were swift to speak up in support.

“By leveling the playing field between corporations and individuals, this rule is an important step towards addressing the economic inequality that is so closely intertwined with racial injustice in the United States, ” said Todd Cox, policy director for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. Last August, the organization submitted comments supporting the rule – along with 110,000 others.

“These forced arbitration clauses block consumers who have been wronged from joining class action lawsuits or otherwise appearing before an impartial court that can consider their injuries,” said Vanita Gupta, President and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

“By forcing consumers into secret arbitration, corporations have long enjoyed an advantage in the process, and victims have often been precluded from sharing their stories with the press or law enforcement, Gupta continued. “The CFPB rule is simple. It says that consumers have the right to join together to enforce protections guaranteed by the Constitution, or federal, state, or local law.”

Unfortunately, not all reactions were supportive.

On July 20, Sen. Mike Crapo, Chair of the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee and Rep. Jeb Hensarling, Chair of the House Committee on Financial Services announced a coordinated legislative attack to roll back CFPB’s arbitration rule. Proceeding under the Congressional Review Act, Congress can fast track a veto of new federal regulation with limited debate and a simple majority vote in each chamber.

As of press time, Sen. Crapo’s resolution was supported by over 20 Senate colleagues representing 21 states. For three of these states – Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi – both Senators support the measure. On the House side, Rep. Keith Rothfus sponsored its resolution with the support of 33 colleagues.

Only July 25, the House passed its resolution on a highly partisan vote of 231-190. Only one Member of Congress crossed the aisle to vote against his majority party – Rep. Walter Jones of North Carolina. As of press time, the Senate had not yet taken the measure to a vote.

Since the 115^th Congress began in January, Congress has used the Congressional Review
Act a total of 14 times. Each time it was used to overrule regulations by the Obama Administration. Prior to this year, only once in 2001, has Congress taken this approach.

For policy advocates, the attempt to undo the lengthy and thoughtful process CFPB used in developing its arbitration rule is a step backwards, instead of forward.

“These clauses block consumers’ access to the courts and force consumers into an arbitration process rigged in favor of the company,” noted Melissa Stegman, a Senior Policy Counsel with the Center for Responsible Lending. “This also makes it difficult for consumers to challenge widespread, systemic misconduct by companies since it is often too expensive to pursue small-dollar disputes one-by-one in arbitration. “The Wells Fargo scandal highlights the real harm of forced arbitration clauses, as customers who attempted to bring class action lawsuits against the bank over phony accounts were blocked from the court – keeping the growing problem out of the public eye.”

Whether it’s a payday loan, or a credit card or maybe even a mobile phone, no consumer who has been financially harmed should be denied the right to seek some satisfaction and financial justice.

Charlene Crowell is the communications deputy director with the Center for Responsible Lending. She can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..