May 1, 2017

Confederate Statues Coming Down in NOLA

Workers dismantle the 35-foot granite Liberty Place monument Monday on Canal Street in New Orleans. The statue, which commemorates a White supremacist uprising in 1874, is being removed along with three others honoring Confederates.

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

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - A monument to a deadly White supremacist uprising in 1874 has been removed under cover of darkness by workers in masks and bulletproof vests as New Orleans joined the movement to take down symbols of the Confederacy and the Jim Crow South.

The Liberty Place monument, a 35-foot granite obelisk that pays tribute to white people who tried to topple a biracial Reconstruction government installed in New Orleans after the Civil War, was taken away on a truck in pieces before daybreak after a few hours of work.

In the coming days, the city also will remove statues of Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and P.G.T. Beauregard and Confederate President Jefferson Davis, now that legal challenges have been overcome.

“We will no longer allow the Confederacy to literally be put on a pedestal in the heart of our city,” Mayor Mitch Landrieu vowed.

The removal of the obelisk was carried out early in the morning because of death threats and fears of disruption from supporters of the monuments. The workers wore military-style helmets and had scarves over their faces. Police were on hand, with officers watching from atop a hotel parking garage.

“The statue was put up to honor the killing of police officers by white supremacists,” Mayor Landrieu said. “Of the four that we will move, this statue is perhaps the most blatant affront to the values that make America and New Orleans strong today.”

Citing safety concerns, the mayor would not disclose exactly when the other monuments would be taken down, except to say that it will be done at night to avoid trouble.

He said the monuments will be put in storage until an appropriate place to display them is determined.

In Virginia, the Charlottesville City Council voted April 17 to sell its statue of Gen. Lee that stands in the center of the city. The buyer would be responsible for removing and transporting it.

The council also unanimously agreed to rename two parks in the city, one of which is named for Gen. Lee and the other for Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson.

New Orleans is a mostly African-American city of nearly 390,000. The majority-black City Council voted 6-1 in 2015 to take the monuments down, but legal battles held up action.

Mayor Landrieu, a white Democrat, proposed the monuments’ removal and rode to victory twice with overwhelming support from the city’s black residents.
Opponents of the memorials say they are offensive artifacts honoring the region’s racist past. Others say the monuments are part of history and should be preserved.

April 30, 2017

Congress Tries to Ban the CFPB from Regulating Payday and Car-title Loans

By Charlene Crowell

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Since its inception, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has faced an unrelenting onslaught of attacks. From lawmakers, to lobbyists and business organizations, many still maintain that the marketplace should regulate itself, and government should just get out of the way.

Count the Chair of the House Financial Services Committee, Dallas’ Rep. Jeb Hensarling, as a key believer who is determined to rollback regulations and hamstring regulators, if not eliminate them. On April 26, he convened a hearing to formally unveil legislation dubbed the Financial CHOICE Act. 2.0. Participating in the session were expert witnesses, the majority of whom echoed Rep. Hensarling’s views.

This bill deserves a new name; let’s call it something more akin to what it really would do:  financial harm. For Congresswoman Maxine Waters, the committee’s Ranking Member, ‘the Wrong Choice Act’ would be an apt and accurate description.

“I want to be very clear for anyone who is watching – that is exactly what this bill would result in,” said the Congresswoman during the hearing. “The Wrong Choice Act thoroughly dismantles Wall Street reform, guts the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and takes us back to the system that allowed risky and predatory Wall Street practices and products to crash our economy.”

Without a doubt, the bill encourages government to take a blind eye to lenders that repeatedly harm borrowers by trapping them into turnstiles of debt and re-borrowing that eventually leads to overdrafts, closed bank accounts and in the worst scenarios, bankruptcies. Today, consumers in 35 states are subject to triple-digit interest rates that range from 154 to 677%.

If Rep. Hensarling has his way, Congress will enact a bill replete with provisions that would reverse forward strides in consumer protection, many taken in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008 and others with origins dating to the Great Depression of the 1930s.

While many state officials have taken on predatory lending in several of its abusive forms, the CFPB worked in concert. As states exercised their respective authorities, CFPB investigated and enforced legal provisions of a federal law that stops unfair, deceptive, and abusive acts and practices in financial services, or UDAAP. As a federal consumer agency, CFPB also secured nearly $12 billion on behalf of American families through its decisive actions and national scope.

The Financial CHOICE Act 2.0 would eliminate CFPB’s use of UDAAP. That one reversal would make it easier for payday lenders, banks, debt collectors, student lenders, and others to trick and trap consumers without redress. In addition, By specifically removing authority to promulgate rules for high-cost payday and car-title loans, this harmful bill would also exempt further CFPB actions on high-cost installment loans too.

Even now, millions of Americans still feel caught in debt traps like payday and car-title loans with an average 300% annual rate. In states that allow these high-cost loans, payday and car title lenders strip away more than $8 billion dollars a year.  According to CFPB, nearly one in four payday borrowers relies on either public assistance or retirement benefits as primary income. The average borrower income is approximately $25,000.

All too often across the country, payday and car-title storefronts ply their trade in Black and Latino neighborhoods. The noticeable presence of these predatory lenders in our communities illustrates how our people are targeted to become financial victims, just as subprime mortgage lenders did in the years leading up to the foreclosure crisis.

Before CFPB’s creation, millions of Americans felt caught in debt traps like payday and car-title loans with no hope of breaking its debt trap. Now, by fighting predatory lenders at both the state and federal levels, 90 million people who live in the District of Columbia and 15 states have laws that cap triple-digit loan shark interest rates on these small-dollar loans and a consumer agency that will hold violators accountable. Collectively, these states save more than $2 billion a year that would otherwise be spent on payday loan fees.

In many ways, Hensarling’s bill proposes that the consumer watchdog become a toothless tiger with no bite at all.

“A key goal of the proposal is to weaken the successful CFPB into an unrecognizable husk incapable of protecting consumers,” said Ed Mierzwinski, Consumer Program Director with U.S. PIRG. “An important tool for regulators is the ability to challenge unfair and deceptive practices. The CFPB has been given a third prong, the ability to challenge ‘abusive’ practices as well.”

“Payday and car-title loans often drain hundreds of dollars from a person’s bank account in amounts well above the original loan amount,” noted Diane Standaert, a CRL EVP and Director of State Policy. “Instead of giving free rein to practices that intentionally push people deeper in debt, Congress should let the CFPB do its job to prevent these debt traps.”

Charlene Crowell is the deputy communications 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..

May 1, 2017

Tipoff Leads SWAT Team to Upscale Lagos Pad with Bundles of U. S. Cash

(TriceEdeyWire.com/GIN) – Neatly-bound bundles of fresh U.S. dollars, Nigerian naira and British pounds totaling over $50 million were recovered by an anti-graft “swat team” in a raid at the Osborne Towers, a luxury building in an upscale section of

The raid was orchestrated by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) acting on a new policy targeting corruption and ordered by President Muhammadu Buhari. The policy provides an incentive for whistleblowers who stand to receive between 2.5 percent-5 percent of the recovered amount when ill-gotten gains are found.

Since the policy was put in place, several raids, based on whistle-blower tips, have resulted in large cash hauls. According to their website, the EFCC recovered unreported funds of $817,000 in a Lagos Market and $41.5 million at a shopping plaza for a total of over $180 million since the beginning of the year.

Now, a referee will be required to decide who owns the massive trove as at least two Nigerian officials have claimed rights to it – Gov. Nyesom Wike of Rovers State or the director-general of the National Intelligence Agency, Ayodele Oke, who claims the cash was currency for “covert operations.”

Osborne Towers is one of the posh new highrises built for Nigeria’s pampered elite. Residents include a former governor, a recently retired officer the national oil company, and a TV personality, among others.

Activist lawyer Femi Falana in an open editorial expressed disbelief: “Are Nigerians to believe than an agency of the federal government kept about $50 million in an apartment without adequate security personnel to guard the money? Why was the fund not kept in a safe in the Office of the National Security Adviser?

But this week Nigerians weren’t the only ones having to explain the provenance of large sums of cash.  High level executives at Royal Dutch Shell and the Rome-based oil and gas company Eni, according to an investigation by the watchdog groups Global Witness and Finance Uncovered, knowingly took part in a “vast bribery scheme that robbed the Nigerian people of over a billion dollars.”

Titled “Shell Knew”, the report includes newly-unearthed internal emails showing that the oil companies were aware that a $1 billion payment for "one of Africa's most valuable oil blocks" would end up in the hands of convicted money launderer and ex-Nigerian oil minister Dan Etete, and from there "would flow onward for bribes."

"This is one of the worst corruption scandals the oil industry has ever seen, and this is the biggest development so far," said Simon Taylor, co-founder of Global Witness, which has been investigating the scandal for six years. The oil giants have long-denied that they were aware of any foul playing, saying that they only made payments to the Nigerian government.

"Today's new evidence shows senior executives at the world's fifth biggest company knowingly entered into a corrupt deal that deprived the Nigerian people of $1.1 billion," Taylor continued. "That is more than the country's entire health budget for 2016."

Shell is currently facing trial for charges of international corruption; an Italian court will begin hearings on April 20 to determine whether the trial will proceed.

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.

April 30, 2017

Booed in Berline
 By Dr. E. Faye Williams, Esq.

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - By now, those who read my articles know that I am a person of Faith.  My Faith informs my decisions and provides guidance to my life and my actions.  Two of the Faith principles upon which most of my personal decisions rest are: 1) Let us not love with words or speech, but with actions and in truth (1 John 3:18); and 2) (the axiom) I'd rather see a sermon than to hear one any day.  Of all the ethical constructs known to humankind, truth and honesty are the most important to me.

As much as I demand truth and honesty from myself, I demand truth and honesty from those who control, aspire to control or wish to participate in the control of the steerage of government.  Thanks to the current President, his daughter, Ivanka Trump, has been placed front-and-center as a high-level representative of the US Government and as the most intimate of policy advisors to the President.  Unfortunately for the Nation, while Ivanka Trump, a highly privileged young woman,  presents a less frenetic, less pathological image of misrepresented facts, she nonetheless distorts the truth as much as her father and those who support him.

Her perceived penchant for distorting the truth was highlighted on April 25th when she was booed and jeered by some in the audience at a panel discussion in Germany related to the empowerment of women. The source of the audience's hostility was based in her attempt to present her father as a champion of working-class women and families.  Most outside of the Trump-circle of politics see this characterization of her father as a monumental contradiction of the facts.

Few will deny that Ivanka has the full faith and confidence of her father.  Nor can it be denied that she has an elevated platform and great opportunity to steer her father in the right direction on equality for women.  During the presidential campaign, she spoke idealistically on such issues as fair pay, safe workplaces for women, affordable childcare, and paid family leave; yet we have seen nothing from the Trump administration that acknowledges concern or intent to act on these issues.

Ivanka claims to be a feminist; yet, through her silence, condones and gives approval to her father's bad acts against women through the years.  She offered no opposition to her father's praise of serial sexual predator, Bill O'Reilly.  She listens to the inflammatory rhetoric of her father's tirades; yet we see no moderation in his tone or temperament indicating she gets credit for her influence on her father, but we don’t see evidence of that influence. This leaves one to wonder if she even tries to influence him and steer him in a more favorable direction.

There is a contradiction between her words and deeds. As her business interests extend beyond US borders, so should her humanitarian concerns - but, they don't.  The Washington Post reports that workers in Chinese factories that produce her fashion line and associated brands work for little more than one dollar an hour.  The worker's 60 hour work-week yields around $62.00.  These "slave wages" source a large portion of Ivanka's multi-million dollar business!  Those who make her clothing can never afford to buy them, and one wonders how they live on such meager pay as Ivanka, an already highly privileged woman, gets richer and richer.

Can anyone recall Trump’s interest in "Make America Great Again," the "Buy American, Hire American," or the "America First" mantras issued from the Trump camp for months?  Ivanka’s off-shore business interests show Ivanka to be a hypocrite in the same vein as her father - talking loud and doing nothing.

Someone once said, "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

(Dr. E. Faye Williams, President of the National Congress of Black Women. 202/678-6788 www.nationalcongressbw.org.)