March 5, 2017

Dr. Ben Carson Takes Over at HUD

Vice President Mike Pence swears in Dr. Ben Carson as Secretary of HUD. Carson’s wife, Candy, and their granddaughter hold a Bible.

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from NorthStarNewsToday.com

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Dr. Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon, author, and politician, was sworn in Thursday as the 17^th secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development after being confirmed in the U.S. Senate by a vote of 58 to 41.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development has 8,300 employees and a budget of more than $40 billion.

Secretary Carson says he plans an ambitious listening tour of select communities and HUD field offices around the country, beginning in his native Detroit.

For nearly 30 years, Dr. Carson served as Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center in Baltimore.  He is a graduate of Yale University and the University of Michigan Medical School. He has written nine books, including four with his wife, Candy.

Feb. 27, 2017

Civil War Blamed for Starvation and Famine Looming in South Sudan

(TriceEdneyWire.com/GIN) – The government of South Sudan and the United Nations are reporting that some 100,000 people are facing starvation, with a million more on the brink of famine.

The announcement comes as international aid agencies are overwhelmed by catastrophes unfolding in four countries.

There have been warnings of famine in Yemen, Somalia and north-eastern Nigeria, but South Sudan is the first to declare one.

The famine is currently affecting parts of the Unity state in South Sudan, but humanitarian groups have warned that the crisis could spread if urgent help is not received.

Currently, some 20 U.S.-based charities are working in South Sudan, bringing medical equipment and supplies, the most needed type of food, clothing, shelter materials and other supplies. The groups are listed in CharityWatch, a charity watchdog which issues letter grade ratings (A+ to F) to nonprofit groups aiding victims. Groups that receive an “A” or “B” grade spend at least 75% of their budget on program services and spend no more than $25 to raise $100.

Under the heading “Donors Beware,” CharityWatch writes: “As with any charitable contribution, Americans wanting to help South Sudan relief efforts should send contributions to only those charities with an established track record of helping people in this region.”

ReliefWeb.int, a digital service of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which tracks countries in crisis and provides the latest reports, maps, infographics and videos, wrote in a report in December: “Alarmingly, 4.8 million people in South Sudan – more than one-third of the population - are food insecure.”

Serge Tissot, the Food and Agriculture Organization’s representative for South Sudan described those affected as “predominantly farmers as war has disrupted agriculture. They’ve lost their livestock, even their farming tools. For months there has been a total reliance on whatever plants they can find and fish they can catch.”

Food prices have soared by 800 percent, putting food out of the reach of impoverished families. Thousands of refugees have sought shelter in camps in Uganda.

“This famine is man-made,” said Joyce Luma, country director for the World Food Program in South Sudan, which has seen its facilities looted on several occasions by armed groups. “WFP and the entire humanitarian community have been trying with all our might to avoid this catastrophe, mounting a humanitarian response of a scale that quite frankly would have seemed impossible three years ago.”

But she warned that without peace and security, “there is only so much that humanitarian assistance can achieve.”

Meanwhile, workers at Save the Children-supported health clinics and hospitals in Puntland have reported a significant increase in severe malnutrition among children coming through their doors.

An estimated 363,000 children are already suffering from malnutrition in Somalia.

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.

March 5, 2017

Will Federal Lawmakers Turn Back the Clock on Fair Housing?
By Charlene Crowell

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - When future generations read the history of the nation’s first Black President, I believe there will be greater acknowledgement of his administration’s significant accomplishments. For now, however, an undeniable strategic war is underway to dismantle the very progress President Obama achieved.

General market media have extensively reported on reforms or repeals of the Affordable Care Act, Wall Street reform and the future of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It is equally important to share that a key Obama regulation that spoke to the future of fair housing is again under assault on Capitol Hill.

A 2015 U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) rule finally delivered on the promises first made with the 1968 enactment of the Fair Housing Act. While the Act outlawed housing discrimination, it also included another important legal requirement. To advance the purposes of the Act, federal agencies and federal grantees were also to forge inclusive and diverse communities as a means to reverse America’s housing history of segregation and Jim Crow.

Known as Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH), the HUD rule requires that cities, counties and states receiving funds for housing and community development engage in a planning process to help them take meaningful and deliberate actions to overcome historic segregation patterns, promote fair housing choice and create inclusive communities free from discrimination. Two HUD tools were shared to assist communities in the planning process, Data and Mapping and an Assessment of Fair Housing.

AFFH affects all public housing authorities and three other popular HUD programs: Community Development Block Grants CDBG), Emergency Solution Grants (ESG), and Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS (HOPWA).

From its beginning, HUD’s AFFH rule was met with attack and multiple legislative attempts to repeal it. The latest attempt is The Local Zoning Decisions Protection Act of 2017. If enacted, it would nullify the HUD rule. The bill would also ban federal funds from being used for any federal database that contains geospatial information on community racial disparities and disparities in access to affordable housing.

In the U.S. House of Representatives, the bill has already attracted 24 co-sponsors from 14 states. Half of the lawmakers’ support for the repeal comes from only four states: California, Florida, Tennessee and Texas. A companion bill was also introduced in the Senate with one co-sponsor.

Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, the bill lead sponsor in the lower chamber, shared in a prepared statement why he feels so strongly about appealing the rule.

“The AFFH rule marks President Obama’s most aggressive attempt yet to force his utopian ideology on American communities disguised under the banner of ‘fairness’. This overreaching mandate is an attempt to extort communities into giving up local zoning decisions and reengineer the makeup of our neighborhoods.”

For civil rights, housing and consumer advocates, the unique Black American experience was deliberately engineered – but from a different perspective: to deny housing opportunity, voting rights, economic mobility and even quality employment or education.

“AFFH is central to fulfilling the purposes of the Fair Housing Act,” said Wade Henderson, President and CEO on the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “It’s based on a simple and perfectly fair premise: if a city or locality seeks taxpayer funding for HUD projects, they should actively work to ensure that all taxpayers can enjoy the benefits without the prospect of unlawful discrimination. Indeed, the rule provides local jurisdictions with broad discretion to decide which issues to prioritize and address.”

“By attacking the AFFH rule, Rep. Gosar and other bill sponsors are seeking to re-codify housing discrimination into U.S. law,” noted Maya Rockeymoore, President and CEO of Global Policy Solutions, a social change strategy firm. “By disallowing the collection of federal data by place, race and other key demographics, the bill's sponsors seek to prevent local governments from making their communities the best places to live by limiting their ability to use critical data and information to inform their community planning decisions.”

Until the 1968 Fair Housing Act, local zoning laws across the country supported segregation along with redlining Black communities to exclude borrowers from mortgage and home improvement loans along with a litany of bad real estate practices that denied opportunities to build family wealth. Omitting Black neighborhoods from multiple listing services, door-to-door block-busting that attempted to create a sense of fear from lost property values due to integration, and restricted covenants that explicitly excluded many minorities from ever buying property in designated areas -- were all the kinds of tactics used to preserve segregated housing before the Fair Housing Act.

Fortunately, a growing coalition of progressive interests is conveying to Congress their firm intent to preserve HUD’s rule. Led by the National Fair Housing Alliance, to date more than 950 academicians, individuals and advocacy organizations spanning national, state, and local levels in civil rights, fair housing, affordable housing have joined the battle to preserve an essential component of the Fair Housing Act.

Speaking for the coalition working to preserve the AFFH rule Shanna L. Smith, president and CEO of the National Fair Housing Alliance said, “It reflects the strongly held American value that everyone deserves access to the opportunities they need to flourish, regardless of the color of their skin or the zip code in which they grow up.”

###

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..

Blackonomics

Making Black History, Part Four – Buy African Coffee  
By James Clingman

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - This will end my four-part series on “Making Black History.”  Although there are many things we can do to make our own history, I have offered four so that next year we can celebrate what we did in addition to only celebrating what others did to make history.  These offerings are quite simple and easy to do; it is my hope that we will bring them to fruition.

David Robinson, youngest son of Jackie and Rachel Robinson, moved to Tanzania, East Africa to do what many of us simply talk about: Reconnect.  After getting permission from his village council, he and fifteen men, equipped only with axes, hoes, and shovels, began clearing 120 acres of forest, which later became known as Sweet Unity Coffee Farm.  For months those men, including David’s New York-born son, Howard, unified in one purpose, toiled, persisted, and achieved their goal.

David’s sister, Sharon Robinson, wrote a book titled, Jackie’s Nine – Jackie Robinson’s values to live by, in which David reflected on the work that had to be done to start his coffee farm.  “Our fifteen men walking in single file, often in silence, fifteen men walking to accomplish one task,” he wrote.  He described seeing men of various Tanzanian tribes collectively committed to one purpose, laying aside any differences and subscribing to one agenda that would benefit the whole.  No complaining, no back-biting, and no jealousy, just working together to get the job done.

Robinson went on to write, “All men of my race, who had agreed to move together, to labor with one purpose, to toil until the land was open and fresh and planted with thousands of six-inch coffee seedlings.  In the early morning, with feet moving quietly in unison, I felt that which I named our farm: ‘The sweetness of unity.’  The thrill of many coming together to act as one.”

A few weeks ago I wrote about Sweet Unity Farms Coffee and asked my readers to purchase it and make it a regular part of their morning pleasure.  For those who do not drink coffee, I asked that you give it as gifts for Kwanzaa, birthdays, etc. in order to support Brother Robinson’s business and the small coffee farmers in the Tanzanian co-op.  I suggested that we make an incredible collective economic statement by buying one million bags of Sweet Unity by October 2017.

This time I want to be even clearer by letting you know that this is not merely a consumer/black business issue.  Your purchases of Sweet Unity Coffee go much further than to the bottom line of an income statement; profits from sales also go to help educate Tanzanian children and adults, and to purchase solar panels for homes in their villages.

We can make history the same way David Robinson and his entire family, both here and abroad, have made and are still making history.  Buy Sweet Unity Farms Coffee, and make it your coffee of choice, the way I and others have, thereby, living up to our “support black business” and our “connect with the Motherland” mantras, instead of just talking about it.  We can fire an economic shot heard round the world by doing this simple thing and by making Black history in other ways as well, especially when it comes to empowerment and self-determination.

To review my four offerings through which we can make Black history: In the next ninety days, at least one million Black voters should change their registration to Non-Party Affiliated (The way staunch Republican conservative, George Will, has done); form alliances to buy and develop the land in our neighborhoods on which we can start and grow businesses that can, in turn, hire our youth; make a pledge on www.blackamericanmade.com to purchase products made by Black people, and add Black made products to the website as well; and purchase at least one million bags of Sweet Unity Coffee this year, and experience the feeling that David Robinson had when he began to clear the land for his coffee farm—“The sweetness of unity.”  All it takes to empower ourselves economically and politically is a collective conscientious mindset and appropriate action.

Jackie Robinson was one of our “firsts;” let’s honor his legacy by making this effort a “first” too.  The U.S. coffee market is worth tens of billions of dollars.  Shouldn’t Black people claim a niche in that market, especially since our brothers and sisters grow and harvest the best coffees?

David Robinson ended his writing with sage advice, saying, “…I have seen the merit and often the necessity of joining hands to achieve a goal.  Unity is often not a state reached easily, but the inability to achieve it can often mean failure." Go to www.iamoneofthemillion.com, click on “Products” and buy Sweet Unity Coffee.