• The number of transactions processed by these providers grew by over 90% from 2021 to 2022, with more than 7 million workers accessing approximately $22 billion in 2022;

• The average transaction amount ranged from $35 to $200, with an overall average transaction size of $106, and the average worker accessed $3,000 in funds per year.; and

• The average worker in their study had 27 earned wage transactions per year, and a strong growth in frequent usage of at least once a month rising from 41% in 2021 to nearly 50% in 2022.

• Many cash advance app borrowers are trapped in a debt cycle and the heaviest users drive the business model. Repeat use of advances is common and high-frequency users accounted for 38% of users and 86% of advances. Many users borrowed from multiple apps simultaneously. Nearly half of all borrowers had used multiple companies in the same month.
• App use is associated with increased overdraft fees and payday loan use. 
• Consumers across states are experiencing similar harms. The eighteen states analyzed had similar patterns of repeat borrowing and overdraft use.

Dec. 18, 2023

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Soil. It’s where our food comes from and the foundation of all life on land.

The way human beings have traditionally farmed in the modern era devastates the soil. It impacts the quality of the food that people and farmed animals eat, and thus our collective health. It’s not sustainable, vastly reducing the amount of farmable land available to us and our ability to continue to feed the planet.

There’s a solution. One that we need to consider carefully, that offers a path towards sustainability and environmental health. It’s called regenerative farming.

The recent documentary film Common Ground provides a groundbreaking look into this critically important crisis and how we can fix it with regenerative farming. Normally when I’m asked to watch the latest “environmental documentary,” I admit to being susceptible to that mild sense of dread we all get when we’re about to be presented with the problems of the world further solidified before our eyes. But Common Ground is anything but bleak. To the contrary, it offers desperately needed hope at a time when environmental degradation, the climate crisis, the extinction crisis, and threats to our natural resources are driving cynicism among even the most optimistic.

Common Ground explores how, as Gabe Brown, a Bismarck, North Dakota regenerative rancher featured in film, puts it, the current dominant system industrial agriculture, “is working to kill things,” while regenerative agriculture “works in harmony and synchrony with nature, with life.”

The status quo system of industrial agriculture abuses and degrades our soil with tillage, synthetic substances, monocultures – that is, the cultivation of just one crop in a given area – and not sequestering carbon. Regenerative agriculture, in short, doesn’t rely on these things. In contrast, it relies on methods that protect the soil and offers a sustainable, healthy alternative.

Even before today’s high-tech agribusiness, industrial farming methods used by small and large farmers alike were causing devastation to our topsoil. Brown points out that the Dust Bowl of the 1930s wasn’t caused by drought alone but by “copious amounts of tillage.”  

Common Ground uses historical examples in its storytelling that, as a lifelong student of history, I love. One highlight is a newly told account of the revolutionary agricultural genius, George Washington Carver (told by Leah Penniman, herself a farmer and author of the book, Farming While Black). While Carver is known in history books as “the peanut guy,” he was far more. Carver understood that to take farmers out of poverty, you had to build healthy soil. Peanuts, it turns out, put nitrogen into the soil. Using peanuts and various techniques he developed by studying nature, Carver taught an entire generation of Black farmers how to farm in harmony with nature, like the indigenous peoples of America. 

Common Ground also strikes an important chord in addressing climate. Healthy soil has the potential to sequester tremendous quantities of CO2. From large farms to urban gardens, the caretaking of soil can produce more profitable and more nutritious food and help mitigate the climate crisis. 

The entertainment industry, through film and television, can be a powerful catalyst for change. It can motivate, enlighten, and inspire us to tackle daunting challenges.

“The slap heard around the world” by Sidney Poitier’s character in 1967’s In the Heat of the Night was an important symbol of the right and need to stand up for Black dignity. And, of course, how can we forget the societal impact of the TV shows like All in the Family, The Jeffersons, and Good Times, created by Norman Lear – my dear friend who recently passed away at the age of 101.

Common Ground’s celebrity narrators open the film by passing on reflections in the form of a letter to current and future generations. One of them, Woody Harrelson, mentions that what viewers are about to receive are “hard truths.” I couldn’t help but think of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, which was instrumental in sounding the alarm and raising global awareness about climate change.

The impact and influence of An Inconvenient Truth got an important cultural boost when the film won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature of 2006. It would benefit all of us for Common Ground to gain similar recognition (for the Academy’s and America’s consideration).

To borrow a phrase from Woody Harrelson, “the one thing that’s keeping us all alive is that soil you’re standing on.” Let’s get hopeful again about environmental solutions (including soil). Let’s work to find our common ground. 

Ben Jealous is executive director of the Sierra Club, professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Never Forget Our People Were Always Free.”

Oct. 27, 2023

Former Congressman Al Wynn

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - In state legislatures across the country the “right to repair” movement is gaining momentum. Thirty-three states and Puerto Rico considered right to repair legislation during the 2023 legislative session. And while this might be a good idea for some products, policymakers should oppose any attempts to weaken regulated safety requirements for repairing life-saving and life-enhancing medical devices. Patient safety is too great a risk.

In theory, expanding repair options might seem like a good idea. It is the democratization of product repair. And certainly, there are many industries in which this is the right path forward.

In fact, advocates for this movement notched a symbolic win in California after tech giant Apple unexpectedly supported a bill that would require electronics companies to provide more access to the parts and instructions to fix their products.

What the right to repair movement ignores though is that not all product classes are created equal. And a one-size-fits-all solution is not a real solution, especially when it comes to regulated products like medical devices.

Medical devices are an important part of the healthcare services industry. Every single person has been helped by a medical device – whether it’s an EKG machine, a defibrillator, dialysis pump, x-ray machine, or any of the other more than 24,000 devices that medical professionals use every day.

Now imagine if that device didn’t work.

It is this risk that should give policymakers considering these right to repair laws pause. Given the influence medical devices have on public welfare, do we really want to introduce more risk? Risk that could impact functionality?

During my time in the House of Representatives, I served on the Subcommittee on Health whose jurisdiction included oversight over the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the agency in charge of the effective regulation of these devices to guarantee their quality and safety. I know firsthand the diversity and sophisticated nature of these products. By granting broad, open access by repair shops unregulated by the FDA, we could be undermining device integrity maintained by the whole regulatory system. 

Essentially, if a smartphone or tablet malfunctions from a bad repair job, there’s sure to be some headaches, but you’ll survive. On the other hand, if a sophisticated medical device experiences the same type of error because a hospital chose unregulated repair options, it can be a matter of life or death.

It is also important to consider possible unintended consequences this type of policy might have on underserved and racial minority communities, which are most often among the truly disadvantaged.

One report from researchers with UCLA, Johns Hopkins and Harvard shows that hospitals with a large share of African American patients have significant funding disparities and receive lower payments for care from programs like Medicare. Unfortunately, these facilities are the ones that will most likely use the unregulated repair option to fit necessary maintenance into tight budgets. Therefore, we could be unintentionally putting our community on the front lines of the increased risk a broad right to repair policy would enable.

Cutting corners in the medical field should never be an option. A 2016 study by the National Library of Medicine found that cutting corners was a “common practice” that contributes to adverse outcomes. That’s simply unacceptable.

Albert R. Wynn is a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, representing Maryland’s 4th Congressional District. While in the House, he served as a member of the Subcommittee on Health. 

May 6, 2023

(TriceEdneyWire.com) – I am blessed to have friends in every walk of life.  With few exceptions, when I speak with friends who are combat veterans and ask about their emotions in a combat zone, they speak of a heightened sense of awareness and almost paranoid preparedness for averting threat or danger, 24/7/365.

Many servicemembers can survive a combat tour without lingering affect, but the constant intensity of emotions or traumatic exposure to danger and/or injury has caused many to suffer with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD.  I do not minimize the impact of PTSD, but I have and still wonder why so many are unwilling to compare and contrast the stress and trauma of a combat tour with a lifetime of stress and trauma in an under-served and over-policed/regulated community.  Although I am not a mental health professional, I see the reality of PTSD in both experiences, with a greater likelihood of manifestation in the latter.

May is Mental Health Awareness Month and it is appropriate to discuss such issues.

In the past I have referenced Maslow’s Theory of Hierarchy of Needs.  Maslow asserts that self-actualization – higher order thinking/reasoning - cannot occur until the most basic survival needs are met, but few talk about what happens whether or not, or while survival needs are being sought.  I submit that the lack of any life sustaining/improving commodity is genuine cause for post-traumatic stress – what I equate to internal violence.

Absent depth and detail, I would like for you to imagine the constant internal conflict and mental upheaval trying to rear children or living in/under the described circumstances:

·        Living in an unending cycle of insufficient income.  “Juggling” money to pay essential bills, often losing a utility, or missing or watching your children miss meals.  Common to my own DC Metro area are professionals working two jobs to bridge the gap of economic insufficiency between fulltime incomes and poverty. 

·        Living with the knowledge that an unexpected toothache, illness or injury offers a real threat to the life and welfare of the affected individual AND family financial security.

·        Having to give your children “The Talk” indicates a monumental fear for their survival into adulthood.  Wondering and fearing (whether) “you” will be the next parent informed that your child has met an untimely death at the hands of street violence – “legal” or otherwise.

·        Substandard housing which endangers the life, limb, health, property, safety or welfare of the occupants.  Whether in a state of near-dilapidation, disrepair, with insect or vermin infestation, these structures, however familiar to the residents, impose undue stress.

·        Environmental racism of neighborhoods populated primarily by people of color and members of low-socioeconomic backgrounds —burdened with disproportionate numbers of hazards including toxic waste facilitates, garbage dumps, and other sources of environmental pollution.  The absence or lack of drinkable water in Flint, MI and Jackson,  MS, as well as, environmentally volatile locations like New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward which, after eighteen years, still suffers the ravages of Hurricane Katrina, are clear examples of environmental racism and a constant threat to the health and well-being of communities of color.

These issues only scratch the surface of the unending challenges facing those least likely to possess the resources to overcome them.  For many, these daily challenges are intertwined into a mesh of priorities that only make room for survival.  For too many, thoughts of addressing social isssues like defending voting rights, reforming the criminal justice system, expanding access to affordable healthcare, closing the racial wealth gap, advancing affordable housing, and a myriad of other problems of social injustioce become secondary.

As with our history in this nation, seeking good health seems insufficient.  We must fight vigorously to overcome the ravages of poor health.

(Dr. E. Faye Williams is President of The Dick Gregory Society, thedickgregorysociety.org and President Emerita of the National Congress of Black Women) She can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.).