April 29, 2025

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Are you better off than you were three months ago, when the current President was sworn into office on January 20?  That’s the question President Ronald Reagan posed to voters when he squared off against President Jimmy Carter in 1980.  Voters concluded that they are worse off and chose Reagan over Carter.  But the current President is lucky that no election is taking place tomorrow.  His approval ratings have tanked.  He has the lowest 100 day approval rating of any President since pollsters started asking this question.  Are you better off?

Don’t ask the thousands of federal workers who have lost their jobs, including those who used to work at US AID, or the IRS, or the Social Security Administration, among others.  Don’t ask the elders who are frightened about the future of Social Security.  Don’t ask the university professors who wonder if their free speech rights will be protected.  If you ask any of these folks, they are likely to tell you that they are worse off than they were 100 days since the President gook office, though some will tell you they are patiently hoping for things to get better.

When the current President was elected, he promised to lower prices and inflation.  Prices have not come down, nor has inflation.  Instead, this President has behaved like the proverbial bull in a China closet, wreaking havoc and creating chaos across the board.  The President’s basic economic policy is tariffs.  His rationale is that US-based manufacturing will grow if imports are more expensive than domestic goods.  But the United States has neither the workforce nor the capacity to significantly increase in the United States. 

No matter.  The President is stuck on senseless and can’t seem to make up his mind about economic policy.  First unreasonably high tariffs were imposed, then suspend for everyone except China.  The chaos and confusion make it impossible for businesses and consumers to plan.  Planning an automobile purchase?  Would you buy the car now or hold off, given looming tariffs?  What about electronics?  Initially caught up in the tariff wars, a call from one of the President’s tech bros suspended, for now, tariffs on electronics.  What will happen three months from now?

Co-President Elon Musk, who was allowed to purchase a major role in government, is moving unchecked from the federal organization, clowning with a buzz saw, while workers are apprehensive about their futures.  The federal government is experiencing brain drains, with many of the longest-serving workers preferring to retire than deal with the whiplash of trying to figure out what’s next.  Recession fears are now at the 1990 level, and consumer confidence is at its lowest level since 1952.  Musk’s economic acumen is demonstrated by the precipitous drop –71 percent – in his stock announced he will cut back on his work with the Department of Government Efficiency.

In his one hundred plus days, marked on April 29, this President has issued about 140 executive orders.  Though he was elected to manage the economy, few of these executive orders have to do with the economy.  Instead, he has leaped into the culture wars, including executive orders specifically targeting some of the Smithsonian Museums, especially the National Museum of African American History and Culture.  The executive orders, which are not laws, have introduced an atmosphere of fear and obeisance.  Law firms, universities, and others are happily kowtowing to this President’s racist, anti-diversity agenda. Too many, included elected legislators, are operating out of fear, too intimidated to say that the emperor is wearing no clothes. 

Our economy is suffering, and so is our international reputation.  Mexico and Canada, among our largest trading partners, are furious with us, so much so that Canadians elected a Prime Minister, Mark Carney, who was trailing in the polls until this President started attacking Canada.  Who can trust us or plan to do business with us after our vacillating policies have left them confused?  Who will lend us money when they can’t trust our stability.  Can the European Union use this uncertainty to strengthen the euro?  Will the euro supplant the dollar as the world’s default currency?

In addition to the chaos and confusion, there is also the delusion that this President continues to embrace – that he won the 2020 election.  This delusion fuels much of his decision-making, as many who investigated him have now been threatened with investigation.  This administration seems to revel in delusions, including delusions about history, delusions about prices (the President keeps saying grocery prices have dropped – they have not), and delusions about reality. 

If I had to grade this President on his 100 day performance, I’d give him lower than a failing grade, call it an F minus.  He is wrecking both the national and the international economy.  He has ushered in an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty.  And he has the nerve to say he “having fun” in the process. 

Dr. Julianne Malveaux is a DC based economist and author.  She can be reached at juiannemalveaux.com

JANUARY 20, 2025 

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - For Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday commemoration to be recognized on the same day that Dr. King’s very antithesis is inaugurated into the Presidency is to bring Frankie Beverly’s song Joy and Pain, to mind. 

We always experience joy at the very thought of Dr. King, his brilliance, his courage, his resilience.  We are reminded of his self-description as a “drum major for justice”, and his harsh criticism of church hypocrisy in the Letter From A Birmingham Jail.  From his Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance speech, “I have the audacity to believe that people everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture of their minds, dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits.”  King once described himself, in a letter to her wife, Coretta, as “a socialist” because he cared about economic justice and distribution issues.  In one speech, he thundered “if the world is two-thirds water, why do we pay water bills”?

The current President, in contrast, has surrounded himself with oligarchs and predatory capitalists, industrial titans who already have billions of dollars of government contracts who aspire to get even more.  Putting them in leadership is akin to placing the fox as the overseer of the henhouse, then hoping there will be chickens left when you return.  The joy of our MLK celebration is dampened, just a bit, by the current state of national politics and by the realized promises of the 47^th President. 

Forty-seven said he would pardon the January 6 disruptors and terrorists, and he did, even excusing those who assaulted police officers, even though 47 campaigned with police support.  The accounts of Harry Dunn and Aquilino Gonell, two Capitol Police officers who were attacked and eventually left their jobs, are harrowing.  Both are angered by the Republican members of Congress who have kowtowed to the 47^th President to the point that they have forgotten that Capitol Police officers saved their lives.  About 140 officers were assaulted, beaten, sprayed.  Several died from the stress.  This seems to be acceptable to the current Republican administration.  Joy and Pain.

It is amusing or pathetic, whichever you prefer, to hear Republicans attempt to redefine reality.  There was no insurrection, says the 47^th President, just a protest that happened “out of love”.  Where is the love for a man like Gonell, who served in Afghanistan, says he loves our country, yet experienced two or more surgeries from the January 6 physical attack.  The people who attacked him deserve incarceration, not pardons, but to maintain the fiction that there was no violence on January 6, pardons serve to paper over the lie.

In a frenzy of take-over ecstasy, the 47^th President issued about two hundred executive orders, including the pardons, rollbacks of Biden executive actions, increased border restrictions (declaring the US-Mexico border a “national emergency” even though border crossings are down), One of his executive orders attack federal workers, making it easier for them to be fired without cause.  Although our Constitution mandates citizenship for anyone born in this country, he is attempting, through executive order, to eliminate that right.  He will withdraw our country from the Paris Climate Accord, eve as we experience the devastating effects of climate change.  And he will withdraw us from the World Health Organization (WHO), which weakens health stability on the planet. 

COVID was a global, not a national, phenomenon, and we needed WHO-generated data to deal with the virus.  All in all, the executive orders are a naked power grab, an attempt to diminish the role of the Congress.  And while organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and others have filed suits against this President, he has so stacked the Supreme Court that they may well find in his favor. 

This consolidation of presidential power is dangerous and painful, but there is joy in the energy and spirit of the resisters.  Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network moved their planned outdoor rally from McPherson Park to the historic Metropolitan AME Church, where an overflow crowd listened and learned about ways to resist.  In more than eighty cities, including Washington, DC, the ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) Coalition held rallies of resistance against this new administration.  These actions are a necessary response to those who would widen the wealth gap, not narrow it.  As an example, the oligarchs say that tariffs would offset any losses from the extension of the Trump tax cuts.  But tax cuts benefit those at the top, while tariffs burden those at the bottom.

There is joy in revolution, but extreme pain at the attacks on democracy, on human rights, and on basic decency.  Our answer – litigation, when executive orders break the law; legislation, when new laws are needed and we have enough allies to pass them; and agitation, the culture of protest, or resistance, of truth-telling.  In the words of Frederick Douglass, agitate, agitate, agitate.  The current president thinks he can circumvent the Constitution.  Many Republicans don’t agree.  We’ll see.

Dr. Julianne Malveaux is an economist and author based in Washington, DC.

Jan. 20, 2025

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Ratepayers beware. Team Trump’s eagerness to enrich his fossil fuel industry cronies with his “drill baby drill” (and export baby export) agenda is going to raise energy costs for American households.

Burning fossil fuels is deadly on many levels. The pollution in our air and water from burning coal, oil, and gas kills people. The pollution from extracting fossil fuels from the ground and transporting them kills people. And the climate crisis and its extreme weather events – extreme heat waves, supercharged wildfires and hurricanes – kill people.

Just as our continued reliance on fossil fuels kills people and entire ecosystems, slowing down our transition to clean energy kills jobs. Because of President Biden’s signature legislative achievements, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), and the CHIPS and Science Act we have seen clean energy projects create more than 406,000 new jobs across this country. Hundreds of thousands additional jobs are being created as an indirect result of these new clean energy jobs. 

We are reshoring entire supply chains for the products and technologies that will be the foundation of the new global economy. American manufacturing is back. And after losing 65,000 American factories since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect 30 years ago, factories are now coming back – this time, building solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, and batteries. 

But it is not enough for fossil fuel interests and their allies in the Trump administration to put our lives and livelihoods in jeopardy. They are sprinting to make those factories empty once again, sending American jobs anywhere but America as they kill our pocketbooks with higher energy costs.

Energy from solar and wind power is not only already less expensive and more resilient than energy from fossil fuels, it keeps getting cheaper. So efforts by the Trump administration and its allies in Congress to slow the transition to clean energy are not just anti-climate, they are anti-consumer. When they say they want to come after the IRA or undo “Green New Deal” policies, they are talking about jacking up the cost of lighting and heating your home.

It is all based on the big lie that increasing fossil fuel production and supply will lower energy costs. That is hardly the case. Especially when we are talking about exporting those fossil fuels. And that brings us to “liquified natural gas,” or LNG. 

The US is already the world’s leading exporter of LNG. Methane gas is a powerful greenhouse gas – more than 80 times more powerful at warming that carbon dioxide. And the lifecycle of LNG – from fracking and transport to liquefaction and refinement to shipping and burning – is fraught with methane leaks, making it nearly as harmful to the climate as coal. But the LNG market is also volatile, and the oil and gas companies that have such ambitious plans for expanding exports to countries and markets that will pay far more for it than the domestic market rate. That drives up the price of methane gas here at home.

The Department of Energy released a report confirming that unfettered LNG exports would drive up domestic energy prices – further supporting the Biden administration’s pause of LNG export projects as the right choice. 

But Big Oil and Gas can get rich from the higher prices other countries are willing to pay, so they don’t care about household energy burdens here at home. And they are even willing to undermine our national security by supplying LNG to our rivals, like the Chinese government, who can then resell it and leverage their role as an energy supplier elsewhere in the world. All the while, domestic consumers potentially face paying billions more in annual energy costs.

President Trump has made big promises to Big Oil and Gas in exchange for their support of his reelection. At one campaign fundraiser, Trump told oil and gas executives if they collectively contributed $1 billion to his reelection they would essentially get whatever they want and it would be a “deal” for them. They got the message. In addition to many other high-dollar contributions from the industry, the CEO of the country’s largest LNG exporter Cheniere Energy kicked in $250,000. Cheniere continues to rapidly develop more export capacity at new and existing LNG terminals on the Gulf coast.

LNG is not the only way Trump could increase energy costs for everyday Americans. If his threatened 25% tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imports happen, prices at the pump could end up rising between 35 and 75 cents a gallon. That is according to GasBuddy’s head of petroleum analysis Patrick De Haan, who says the increases might be steepest in the Midwest and Rocky Mountain regions but would likely happen across all regions. And Trump’s baffling war on energy efficient home appliances threatens utility bill savings that would benefit millions of households and are especially important to low-income families. Those families spend as much as four times more on energy bills as a portion of their household income.

Trump has talked a big game on bringing down energy prices. But most of his proposed policies – from more oil and gas drilling to his attacks on clean energy and energy efficiency standards – are far more likely to drive the cost for consumers up. Americans need relief from punishingly high energy prices, not to be sacrificed on the altar of fossil fuel industry profits.  

Ben Jealous is the Executive Director of the Sierra Club and a Professor of Practice at the University of Pennsylvania.

To Be Equal 
January 10, 2025

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - "Every nation’s history includes unsettling truths that many would prefer to forget or deny. But true patriotism demands confronting the truths of our history—no matter how embarrassing or dishonorable—and undertaking the difficult work of learning from the lessons of our past in order to move forward. For the United States, that work requires reckoning with our shameful legacy of racial subjugation of Black people in this country—from slavery and Jim Crow to mass incarceration and police violence—as well as our long history of express discrimination against other people of color, women, and LGBTQ persons.
Without uninhibited discussion and examination of that legacy, we are ill-equipped as a nation to address its ongoing manifestations in present-day forms of discrimination and bias."  — National Urban League v. Trump 
 
At the current rate of progress, it will take between 100 and 300 years for Black Americans to achieve parity with white Americans.
 
First annually and now biannually, the National Urban League publishes the Equality Index, a calculation of the social and economic status of African Americans relative to whites.  Rooted in the Three-Fifths Compromise of 1787, which counted enslaved African Americans as “three-fifths” of a person, the Index would be 100% under full equality.  Currently 75.7%, the Index has moved less than 3% in 20 years, indicating a 180 year wait to achieve parity.
 
That squares with the findings of a McKinsey study showing it will take between 110 and 320 years at for "Black Americans to reach a level of economic prosperity and quality of life that’s on par with that of their White neighbors."
 
President-elect Donald Trump and his allies are determined to make sure that it takes even longer.
 
At the end of his first term, Trump issued an executive order banning policies that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion for federal agencies, contractors, and grant recipients.  The National Urban League immediately filed a lawsuit; Trump lost reelection and President Biden overturned it immediately upon taking office.

This time around, Trump isn't waiting to start stamping out racial justice initiatives. He's vowed to rescind President Biden's Executive Order On Advancing Racial Equity, issued on his first day in office. 
 
Seizing on the widely-accepted myth that increasing diversity is synonymous with "anti-white discrimination," the Trump administration plans to use civil rights laws to reinforce white privilege in every facet of society, public and private. Pete Hegseth,  Trump's nominee for Defense Secretary has promoted the racist fallacy that the long-overdue elevation of Black officers to senior leadership positions compromises military readiness. 
 
In fact, Trump's proposed cabinet includes only one Black member, a former NFL player whose only qualification to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development is his history of opposing affordable housing, protection for poor tenants, and aid for the homeless.
 
Trump will eliminate federal funding for any school that promotes racial equity or confronts the reality of racism in the nation's history. He has even vowed to direct the Department of Justice to pursue federal "civil rights cases" against them.
 
He plans to resurrect the failed 1776 Commission, which historians reviled as a plot to “elevate ignorance about the past to a civic virtue. 
 
Hoping to avoid attacks from the incoming administration and its most fanatical defenders. many private corporations are retreating from their commitment to DEI.  The board of Costco, in contrast, recently rejected an anti-DEI shareholder proposal.
 
While post-election surveys show that Trumps' election was largely a misguided reaction to the cost of groceries, Trump and his allies have taken it as   an endorsement of their every vicious and bigoted policies.  Americans overwhelmingly support corporate diversity policies. President Biden's administration — like most diverse institutions, was more innovative, adaptable, resilient, and able to solve problems more quickly because of its diversity.
 
If the incoming administration doesn't realize the benefits of DEI early on, the National Urban League and our civil rights allies are on hand to hold it to account.

Oct. 29, 2024

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - I was on a Black Women’s organizing call the other week, when one of the leaders challenged each of us to reach out to ten people to encourage them to vote.  I don’t know a soul in my close circle who does not vote, and I don’t seek out folk who proudly say they are not voters.  I do collide with a few from time to time, like when I was walking up the street one day when a brother, recognizing me, wanted to argue that voting was a waste of time.  I gave him five minutes (set my watch) and then moved on.  Most people I know are politically aware, political activists, civic and social justice activists and more.  Maybe my circle is too narrow, and I’m all right with it.

This column is not for those who “do the right thing”, vote despite their skepticism about our extremly flawed country and our equally flawed political system.  This column is for those who wonder about their votes and whether they make a difference. What’s at stake?  Every single election since I can remember – 1972 – we say that this is the “most important” election in our lifetimes”.  Tricky Dick Nixon had 61 percent of the popular vote and swept the Electoral College, winning every state except the District of Columbia and Massachusetts.  Nixon steamrolled the liberal McGovern.  Was it our most important election ever?  One can both argue that and also wonder how our nation might have evolved under a McGovern presidency.

I recall hearing the “most important election ever” every four years and while it sometimes reads as an exaggeration, sometimes it is more real than we would like to admit.  When the Supreme Court stole the 2000 election from then-Vice President Al Gore, that was a consequential election.  Did Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton concede too soon in her race against Mr. Trump?  To be debated, but many think so.  2020 was such a consequential election that the dark forces of Mr. Trump tried to overturn the government to steal the election.  Now he says he will pardon them if elected in 2024.

So in many ways this is a most consequential election.  What’s at stake?  Some think describing the 45^th President as a “threat to democracy” is extreme and untrue.  But Project 2025 shift our system from one with checks and balances to one with imperial power.  We have a robust civil service, that a President that adher3s to Project 2025 would shatter, in a system that would allow Presidential appointments to replace civil servants.  Black folks, especially Black women would lose from this shift.

All women, but especially Black women, lose when reproductive rights are restricted.  We are also when draconian policies eviscerate public assistance in the name of “welfare reform” and make even basic health benefits contingent on work.  We don’t have the infrastructure to require work, but we do have the ability to punish those who do not have jobs.

The Department of Education is on the Project 2025 chopping block, and its elimination would have a widen the achievement gap. Project 2025 would eliminate Head Start, one of our most demonstratively successful government programs.  It would eliminate Pell grants, which help hundreds of thousands of student from low and moderate income families to attend college.  It would eliminate race-specific programs and affirmative action, by outlawing programs that consider DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) in selection and allocation.  Indeed, project 2025 digs into the details of curriculum, regulating the ways subject matter is taught, including history, enslavement and other subjects.  Project 2025 would punish universities based on the way some subjects taught.  While Project 2025 purports to streamline government, instead it expands government by creating ideological regulators who would eliminate “left liberals” and “Marxists” from classrooms in elementary and secondary schools, and also in colleges and universities.

Contrasting the Project 2025/Agenda 47/Republican platform is to understand the redundancies of these closely related documents. Mr. Trump says that Agenda 47 reflects his positions, and he tries to distance himself from Project 2025, although more than 100 of his allies, associates, and former government appointees worked on it.  If you read these documents carefully, you’ll understand what’s at stake.

Dr. Julianne Malveaux is an economist and author.