Sept. 10, 2023

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - The Sacred Place Where Life Begins. That’s what the Gwich’in people call the coastal plain of Alaska where they live.

The Porcupine Caribou on who the Gwich’in have relied for tens of thousands of years for their subsistence way of life migrate hundreds of miles each spring to give birth to their calves there. So that Gwich’in name rings true.

It was that life that the Biden administration protected for years to come with the announcement last week that it was cancelling oil and gas drilling leases in the 19.6-million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and moving to prohibit drilling in another 13 million acres of protected lands bordering the refuge.

It wasn’t just the Gwich’in, who have been fighting drilling for nearly 50 years, and the caribou who won. The Inupiaq people who live at the edge of the Arctic Ocean, polar bears, musk oxen, Dall sheep, and birds you can find in all 50 states have roots in the Arctic Refuge.

That corner of Alaska is one of the world’s last untouched wild places, our country’s largest wildlife refuge, and the only one designed specifically for wilderness purposes. Its continued existence in its pristine, rugged state signals our commitment to nature and our appreciation of its wonder. It’s a sign of our national character.

But the value isn’t just symbolic. We’re on pace this year to produce more oil in the United States than ever before. Creating a glut will only extend our addiction to fossil fuels when we know that we need to move swiftly in the direction of burning less. And the trade-off is infrastructure needed to drill that will destroy the refuge forever.

It’s a trade that the American people repeatedly have said they don’t want to make. In polls in recent years, roughly two thirds of voters opposed drilling in the Arctic Refuge. After the President’s decision to allow another Alaskan drilling project to proceed months ago, this is the leadership most voters want.

The argument of proponents that Arctic drilling will boost U.S. energy independence and national security fall short when you know that all the oil under that part of Alaska is barely a year of the nation’s consumption by many estimates. We won’t drill our way out of the need for fossil fuels, but we certainly can drill our way to irreparable damage to the climate in just a few years.

Protecting indigenous people and their way of life in Alaska should demonstrate that we can stand firm to defend more communities on the front lines of climate change against the unabated greed of Big Oil. An unscathed, unmatched landscape shouldn’t be the test for doing right be our neighbors and by the planet.

Too often, we’ve allowed a few people lacking political power and desperate for economic opportunities to bear the immediate cost of bad environmental choices. The flaw is that more often than not, we all end up paying.

Whether it’s the cancer alleys created in the communities neighboring refineries along the Mississippi or coastal towns repeatedly crushed by extreme weather, they’re only the first to feel the burden. As the hottest temperatures ever recorded showed us this summer, no one can escape the toll that fossil fuel charges the planet.

Ben Jealous is executive director of the Sierra Club, the nation’s largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization. He is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Never Forget Our People Were Always Free,” published in January.

Sept. 4, 2023

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - The federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009.  Several states have a higher minimum, but a predictable few, including Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Alabama, are stuck at that low minimum.  If the minimum wage kept up with inflation, it would be at least ten dollars an hour today.  However, twenty-two states are stuck on exploitation and refuse to raise their minimum wage.

Restaurant workers get even shorter shrift.  The minimum wage for tipped workers is $2.13 an hour, which means they are expected to earn up to the minimum wage or more with their tips.  But tips are discretionary and arbitrary; sometimes people tip the expected 15 to 20 percent, and sometimes they don’t.  How can they eke out a living wage on other people’s arbitrary judgment?  Were they likable?  Friendly?  Kind?  It doesn't matter.  Did you get your food?  Was it hot and delivered in a timely way?  If I had my way, I'd charge enough for food to pay workers properly.  Tipping is a practice that harkens back to enslavement.  People should be paid for their work and not have to skin and grin to make a living wage.

In the wake of Labor Day, though, it makes sense to consider how workers experience exploitation and what we must do about it.  Workers around the country are resisting exploitation, whether it is Hollywood writers or on university campuses.  As of this writing, the United Auto Workers is on the cusp of a strike, which will have significant repercussions for our economy.  A United Parcel Service Strike was narrowly averted, and it, too, would have weakened the economy.  With labor productivity up, workers are unwilling to settle for paltry 2 and 3 percent annual increases when food and gas prices are rising by 5 and 6 percent.  There seems to be no willingness to increase wages to keep workers "even", and President Biden, with his "Bidenomics” seems to see the big picture, but not the small one.  People are hurting, and employers are pocketing profits and exploiting workers.

The Institute for Policy Studies released a report, Executive Excess 2023, in which they highlight the 100 companies that have the lowest pay and the greater ratio of CEO pay to median worker pay.  Some of these companies have federal contracts, which means when they offer low pay to workers, they also get subsidies from the rest of us, the taxpayers who support food stamps, medical care, and other amenities that workers who earn little qualify for.

The report shows that the ratio between CEO and median worker pay is 603-1.  The average CEO in the Low Wage 100 earned $15.3 million a year, while the average worker earned a scant $31,672 a year.  The most significant offender was Live Nation Entertainment.  CEO Michael Rufino earned $139 million, 5414 times more than the average worker who earned $25,673 a year.  Amazon, a large federal contractor, is among the most exploitative.  But they aren’t alone.  Too many companies rip their workers off and also enjoy federal largesse.

Given these massive paychecks and massive profits, why can’t we raise the federal minimum wage, and why can’t we pay workers more?  Predatory capitalism suggests that employers must extract surplus value from workers.  That means that, despite rising worker productivity, employers should attempt to pay as little as they can.  The outrageous CEO to worker pay ratios suggest that companies benefit from paying so little.  Will workers revolt?  Can they?

Too many workers are frightened to strike.  They need their jobs and their unions may not have sufficient strike funds to allow them to be out for a long period of time.  Do they need their jobs with exploitative terms and conditions of work?  Must they work with unfair pay?  Is it time for workers to unite?

What would happen if you went to your morning coffee shop to find no one there?  Waited for a bus to find no dirver, no bus?  Managed to get to work to find no coworkers?  Wandered to lunch to find no one serving?  Tried to stop at a supermarket heading home to find no one working and no food available?  Managed home to sort out a mess?  We depend on workers but we don’t want to pay them.  We agree with their labor actions but don’t want to manage inconvenience.  We thought about Labor Day, but we don’t think about workers.  When will we raise the federal minimum wage.

Dr. Julianne Malveaux is an economist, author and educator.

Sept. 3, 2023

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - On Saturday, August 26, three African Americans were murdered by a 21-year-old white gunman at the Dollar General Store in Jacksonville, Florida, who then shot himself. The murderer was motivated, Jacksonville Sheriff T K Waters reported, by an “ideology of hate.” The shooting took place 15 months after 10 African Americans were murdered in another racially motivated shooting at a grocery store in Buffalo.

Sept. 3, 2023

To Be Equal
 

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - “With Trump, you don't need to look for a dog whistle. It's a bull horn when it comes to race. And I do think that's deliberate. We've seen the -- I mean, slanderous attacks that he has put out against Fani Willis, you know, alleged things I won't even repeat. So, he's not really hiding that he's going to lean into that element, and this is, you know, taking place just outside of Atlanta. When you saw the courtroom, it was a lot of Black men and women who are serving in that courtroom  …  It's textbook Donald Trump but it comes as no surprise.” – Former White House Director of Strategic Communications Alyssa Farah 

If anything illustrates the depths to which Donald Trump and his supporters have sunk in responding to his racketeering indictment in Fulton County, Georgia, it’s his reference to those he falsely accuses of voter fraud as “riggers.” 

MAGA extremists, who have been using the word as a substitute for the n-word on far-right social media sites, responded with racist delight. 

Trump has put a dishonest, racist, and misogynistic spin on the old legal adage: If the law is against you, pound the facts. If the facts are against you, pound the law. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell. 

But amount of pounding and yelling can obscure the breathtaking lawlessness outlined in the sweeping indictment Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis filed this week against Trump and his 18 alleged co-conspirators.  By charging them under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act Willis has at last cast their brazenly corrupt conduct in the proper legal light.  

While the narrowly-focused federal indictment that Special Counsel Jack Smith filed against Trump earlier this month acknowledges six alleged co-conspirators, they are neither identified nor charged.  Fulton County’s indictment of 18 co-conspirators – and reference to 30 more unnamed, unindicted co-conspirators – illustrates the far-reaching scope of the massive scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential election. 

Trump’s alleged criminal enterprise operated not only in Fulton County, but “elsewhere in the State of Georgia, in other states, including, but not limited to, Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and in the District of Columbia.”  Its members engaged in “various related criminal activities including, but not limited to, false statements and writings, impersonating a public officer, forgery, filing false documents, influencing witnesses, computer theft, computer trespass, computer invasion of privacy, conspiracy to defraud the state, acts involving theft, and perjury.” 

Omitted from the federal indictment was an alleged conspiracy to breach voting equipment and access voter data. “In Georgia, members of the enterprise stole data, including ballot images, voting equipment software, and personal voter information. The stolen data was then distributed to other members of the enterprise, including members in other states.”  Nor does the federal indictment refer to a bizarre plan, advocated by Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, to use the military to seize voting machines around the country and re-run parts of the election. 

Future historians will rely on Fulton County’s case, not the federal government’s, for the full story of one of the darkest chapters in American history. The meticulous work of Willis and her team is all the more remarkable given the constant abuse and threats of violence, incited by Trump, that his supporters have hurled at them. Regardless of the outcome, Team Willis as well as the witnesses and grand jurors whom MAGA extremists also have targeted, will emerge as the heroes. 

July 31, 2023

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - The College Board is a nonprofit organization that runs an association of institutions, including over 6,000 schools, colleges, universities, and other educational entities as part of its membership. It develops and administers standardized tests and curricula used by K-12 and post-secondary education institutions nationally.

While the College Board provides resources and services to students, parents, and universities in promoting college readiness, it has no predetermined political agenda. The same cannot be said for the Florida Department of Education, which oversees its state’s public K-12 and college education systems. The department is under the direct responsibility and control of the governor. As of 2003, the commissioner of education, who manages the day-to-day operations of the school system, is no longer a position elected by the people.

It became an appointed position by the governor in addition to the six other members of the Board of Education. A governor is not a historian; therefore, providing an accurate depiction of history within a school curriculum should be left to those who are the most qualified to do so. By abusing his authority, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis adjusted the state’s education standards to align with his personal, politically, and racially motivated vision for a state “where woke goes to die.”

On July 19, the DeSantis-controlled Florida Board of Education approved new guidelines for its Black history curriculum requiring middle-school students to be instructed on how “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” The new standards teach elementary school students how to identify famous African American individuals but do not push their knowledge beyond surface-level awareness. The public school teachers are pushing back on the weak and inaccurate guidelines. The same is true of the College Board, NAACP, and Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only Black Republican U.S. Senator. “We resolutely disagree with the notion that enslavement was in any way a beneficial, productive, or useful experience for African Americans,” the College Board said in a statement to USA Today. “Unequivocally, slavery was an atrocity that cannot be justified by examples of African Americans’ agency and resistance during their enslavement,” While the new guidelines still allow teachers to provide instruction about Black history in schools, the Board opted to do so in a way that the NAACP says “convey a sanitized and dishonest telling of the history of slavery in America.”

These latest changes result from the state’s Stop Woke Act, enacted in July 2022. The law says discussions about race must be taught in an “objective manner” and should not be “used to indoctrinate or persuade students to a particular point of view.” It also states that students should not feel guilty for actions taken in the past by people of their same race or origin. This would not be necessary if the same history they are whitewashing focused on the stories of whites, such as John Brown, who held anti-slavery views and was a leading figure in the abolitionist movement. Our public schools should not protect the interest of one race at the expense of another.

The true story of the Black experience in America has always been shallow, filled with omissions in history books. The desire to develop a watered-down version of the truth is not just limited to Florida, and it predates the Stop Woke Act. Protecting the feelings of white students and their parents does not justify denying Black students the uplifting and encouraging experience of knowing their ancestors’ full stories and contributions. For example, when presenting the painful facts in depth regarding the transatlantic slave trade, it illustrates to a Black student the strength, courage, and resilience of enslaved Africans from which they are an extension. That important connection for all Black students gets lost in the skimmed-over teaching of valuable history. The long list of Black massacres is unknown to most middle and high school students today. The Orange County Regional History Center in Florida called the 1920 Ocoee Massacre “the largest incident of voting-day violence in United States history.”

For high school students, the DeSantis-controlled Board of Education will now require events like the Ocoee Massacre to be depicted as an “act of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans. From the DeSantis version of the massacre, students may never know that the massacre was a white mob attack on Black residents in northern Ocoee. The motive was to prevent Black citizens from voting in the 1920 presidential election. Most of the Black-owned buildings and residences were burned to the ground, and approximately 30 to 35 Blacks were killed. “Most of the people living in Ocoee don’t even know that this happened there,” said Pamela Schwartz, chief curator of the Orange County Regional History Center. Sadly, a culture of silence existed. For almost a century, many descendants of survivors were not aware of the massacre that occurred in their hometown. The memories of the victims from 1920 don’t deserve to be forgotten and then misrepresented. In 1920, the culture of silence concerning Blacks came out of fear. A traumatized community may never heal when racially driven politicians and appointees use their power and positions to perpetuate the white denial of the truth behind the sometimes-uncomfortable Black American experience.

David W. Marshall is the founder of the faith-based organization, TRB: The Reconciled Body, and author of the book God Bless Our Divided America. He can be reached at www.davidwmarshallauthor.com.