May 6, 2023

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Over the next few weeks, the manufactured crisis over the “debt ceiling” will reach its boiling point. But this is pure melodrama, badly overacted with the outcome already known. The real question is about our priorities – and about who gets the gold and who gets the shaft.

On the debt ceiling, President Biden says he won’t negotiate over raising it. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy says Republicans won’t raise it without negotiations. This is like teenagers playing chicken in cars racing toward each other – only in this case a crash would blow up the world economy. That can’t happen – and so it won’t. The United States will pay the debts it owes. Our full faith and credit will not be trashed.

That will still leave the question about our priorities and the national budget. Who pays and who benefits? Here – beneath the posturing – is the real deal. Here’s a handy guide to what’s in the deck.

First on our annual deficits. The best solution to the deficit is economic growth. When the economy grows, more people get jobs and raises. As wages and profits rise, the government collects more in taxes and pays out less in support – on everything from unemployment insurance to welfare to food stamps. Deficits come down.

How do we get growth? For years, Republicans have passed tax cuts – largely for the rich and corporations – saying that would lead to more investment and more jobs. Turns out it mostly led to more inequality, slower growth and thus more deficits.

Biden argues that we need to invest in areas vital to our economy – in modern infrastructure, in research and development, in subsidies that get companies to locate plants in the U.S. and not abroad. Although his program has just begun, it seems to be working – with unemployment down, wages up, and deficits getting reduced.

That said, politicians in both parties still want even faster deficit reduction. The big question is one of priorities. Here common sense should apply.

Over the past years, the richest Americans have captured more and more of the nation’s income and wealth. The middle class has struggled, and the poor haven’t kept up. Common sense would suggest that the wealthy should pay more in taxes, rather than the middle class or the poor.

On the spending side, the military budget has been rising – and now is at levels not seen since the height of the Cold War. We spend as much on the military as the next 10 nations combined. Health care costs have been rising even as life expectancy has been declining. We spend nearly two times per capita than other advanced countries with far worse results.

We can reduce our military budget and still have the most powerful military in the world. And we can transform our medical system – moving as other advanced countries have done to the equivalent of Medicare for All, providing more service for less cost. Biden has taken a small step by controlling the price gouging on some prescription drugs, but much more can be done.

But common sense rarely surfaces in the Washington debate. Consider the Republican debt ceiling “proposal” that passed the House. Republicans oppose asking the rich and corporations to pay more. They oppose cutting the military budget (and in fact want to raise it substantially). They oppose controlling drug prices, or moving to Medicare for All or even having a public option in health care that would limit insurance company excesses. Trump and Biden have convinced them that they shouldn’t touch Social Security or Medicare – at least before the election.

That leaves all the cuts to come from domestic programs – and the pain to be borne primarily by the most vulnerable – and by the middle class. Low-income families will see cuts in food support, in affordable housing, in health care through Medicaid, in infant nutrition, in childcare. The poor and middle-income families will suffer cuts in public education, in clean water and air, in safe workplaces, in childcare. The country will suffer with the slashing of investments in renewable energy, energy efficiency and electric vehicles. All of us will pay more from extreme weather as climate change goes unaddressed.

All the fulminations about the debt ceiling come down to this. Will the wealthy pay a little more in taxes or the poor a lot more in pain and hunger? Will we invest in more smart missiles or more smart children? Will we support the obscene profits of the private health insurance companies or the essential health care Americans need? Will we fund wars abroad or curb the extreme weather that threatens our communities at home? Don’t be misled by the sound and fury over the debt ceiling. The real question is who pays and who benefits.

April 3, 2023

 Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and former President Donald Trump

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from BlackMansStreet.Today

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Former President Donald Trump has been indicted today by a Manhattan grand jury, making him the first former president in American history to face criminal charges.

Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan District Attorney, did not say what charges would be brought against Trump, but New York City where he is expected to surrender is on high alert.

Bragg has been investigating Trump for paying $130,000 in hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels, whose birth name is Stephanie Clifford, prior to or at the time of the 2016 presidential election. The money was intended to ensure that Daniels would never disclose that she and Trump engaged in a sexual liaison.

Trump was set to be arraigned on April 4.

“This evening we contacted Mr. Trump’s attorney to coordinate his surrender to the Manhattan D.A.’s office for arraignment on a Supreme Court indictment, which remains under seal. Guidance will be provided when the arraignment date is selected,” a spokesman for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said in a statement, referring to the state Supreme Court.

But law enforcement officials in New York were ready for a showdown with Trump followers.

Trump, who is running for president in 2024, said he expected to be arrested on Tuesday of last week and called on his most fervent supporters to come out in force and “take back America.”

Trump’s team would engage in negotiations for a surrender.

Besides Trump who anticipates being arrested, Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy called the possible arrest of Trump “an outrageous abuse of power” by Bragg.

Mike Pence, who served under Trump as vice president, said Bragg’s actions “reek” of “political prosecution.”

But former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said Trump wants to incite violence.

The FBI and NYPD are investigating a letter containing a death threat and white powder that was mailed to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, law-enforcement sources told NBC News.

The letter was addressed to Bragg and said, "ALVIN: I AM GOING TO KILL YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!” It contained a small amount of white powder that was tested and found to be harmless.

There were no evacuations or injuries, officials said.

It was the latest in what a senior law enforcement source described as "several hundred threats" aimed at Bragg and his office in recent weeks.

March 16, 2023
By Julianne Malveaux

The Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), the 16^th largest bank in the United States, failed because its leaders used poor judgment in making ill-advised investments. They invested heavily in long-term Treasury bonds that had low-interest rate returns. As interest rates rose (which meant SVB was losing money), they didn't have the required reserves to cover their outstanding loans. Instability in the tech industries, where they were heavily invested, contributed to the bank’s denouement. While the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation usually insures deposits up to $250,000, President Biden agreed that the federal government would cover deposits "at no cost to taxpayers." Because SVB primarily served start-ups and heavy hitters, about 85 percent of its deposits were uninsured. Ordinary Americans don't get the bailout that SVB depositors got, but Biden and others justified it by saying they wanted to avoid further instability in the banking industry. While the president says that taxpayer dollars won't be used in the SVB bailout, that remains to be seen.

Financial experts will examine the reasons for the SVB failure for months, if not years. Daft Republican legislators, with absolutely no facts, have concluded that the failure of the bank is a result of "woke" business policies. They've not defined what they mean by such policies, but some see their vacuous rhetoric as a swipe at diversity practices to which most banks adhere. The intellectually challenged Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green (R-GA) wrote, "the fools running the bank were woke and almost because broke ."Donald Trump, Jr., the business icon whose daddy's companies have regularly declared bankruptcy, also weighed in on this matter. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is pinning his presidential hopes on making anti-wokeness a national mantra, said the bank was “so concerned with DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) that they got diverted from their core mission." Wall Street Journal writer Andy Kessler suggested that the SVB board, primarily white male, may have failed because its 12-persin board – 45 percent women, with one African American and one GBLTQ+ member – was diverse.

Florida’s DeSantis is a leader among those who decry consciousness. His 2022 "Stop Woke Act" prohibits instruction on race or diversity that makes white folks feel "remorse or guilt ."The law prevents employers with more than 15 employees from mandating diversity training. DeSantis has rejected the Advanced Placement Black Studies curriculum for Florida public schools. These aren't dog whistles but outright shouts of racism and anti-blackness. These rabid Republicans will blame anything – bank failures, derailed trains, and more – on so-called "wokeness," and non-critical thinkers are perfectly willing to go along with those distortions. Would a bank with all white male directors have acted differently than the current directors of SVB did? One might argue that an all-white male board might have performed even worse. The financial press offers many reasons why SVB failed, and throwing "wokeness" into the equation is a distraction.

Though I get the concept, I've never been fond of "woke" rhetoric. It's been used as shorthand to describe conscious, racially and politically aware people, who are often progressive. A dear friend and diversity consultant, Howard Ross, says, "It doesn't matter whether you are woke or not; it's what you do when you get out of bed." In other words, anyone can mouth the rhetoric, but actions speak louder than words. It is unfathomable that a profit-making, predatory-capitalist bank led by white men can be described as mistakenly "woke" after its failure. Marjorie Taylor Green and her ilk are looking for excuses in the face of their stumbles, which include the loosening of Dodd-Frank regulation that might have prevented the SVB bank failure.

Dr. Julianne Malveaux is an economist, author and Dean of the College of Ethnic Studies at Cal State LA.

To Be Equal 
By Marc H. Morial 

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - “Ron DeSantis has clearly demonstrated that he wants to dictate whose story does and doesn't belong. He wants to control what our kids can learn based on politics and not sound policy ... He wants to say that I don't belong. He wants to say that you don't belong. Whose story does and doesn't get to count. But we are here to tell him, we are America. Governor, Black history is American history, and you are on the wrong side of history.” – Florida State Rep. Fentrice Driskell

Bayard Rustin, as most students of American history now know, was one of the key organizers of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. It was Rustin who introduced Martin Luther King, Jr., to the Gandhian tactics of non-violent resistance that guided the Civil Rights Movement through the 1950s and 1960s.

Because Rustin was a gay man at a time when same-sex relationships were criminalized, he often was forced to work from behind the scenes, allowing others to take the credit for his achievements. For decades, his transformational influence was downplayed and devalued. A warped history of the movement was allowed to take shape, one that historians only recently have begun to correct.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis wants to shove the legacy of Rustin and others like him back into the shadows, perpetuating a warped history of the nation.

DeSantis’ reactionary move to ban an AP course on African American studies is loosely based on his opposition to what he calls Critical Race Theory, a legal concept taught in law schools and little understood by the general public.  Right-wing activists and politicians like DeSantis have co-opted and corrupted the term to undermine any effort to confront or even to acknowledge systemic racism.

As CNN political writer Brandon Tensley noted, “Because so many Americans don’t know what CRT is, it’s the perfect tool for scaring white conservative voters with made-up problems – for mobilizing them against the racial awakening of the past year.”

The course itself is organized into four major units: Origins of the African Diaspora, including topics such as “The Strength and Reach of West African Empires” and “Intercultural Forces in African Kingdoms and City States;”  Freedom, Slavery, and Resistance, which covers the period from the origins of the transatlantic slave trade to abolition; The Practice of Freedom, focused on African-American experiences since abolition including Reconstruction and the Negro Renaissance, and Movements and Debates, which examines the Civil Rights Movement, Black feminism and intersectionality, and the diversity within Black communities.

DeSantis’ feeble efforts to rationalize the ban are so vague they are essentially meaningless. “Intersectionality is foundational to CRT,” his Department of Education howled, without even attempting to explain why either concept represents a threat. His “concerns” reflect a profound ignorance – or deliberate misrepresentation – of both the curriculum and the legal theory he claims to oppose, but the ignorance is largely the point. The ban, like the ludicrous Stop WOKE Act that the course allegedly violates, is less about the details of a specific curriculum and almost entirely about weaponizing white grievance and resistance to a multicultural democracy.

DeSantis has charted a course to the White House that cuts straight through the swamp of white supremacy.

After all, if white people experience “guilt, anguish or other forms of psychological distress” as a result of acknowledging systemic racism, they might be inspired to alleviate that distress by dismantling systemic racism.  That’s a terrifying prospect for people who are so accustomed to the status quo that even the slightest effort to level the playing field feels like an earth-shattering cataclysm.

It’s impossible to know whether DeSantis genuinely shares that fear. But it’s undeniable he’s eager to exploit it for political advantage. His opponent in his first gubernatorial campaign famously remarked, "I’m not calling Mr. DeSantis a racist.  I’m simply saying the racists believe he’s a racist."

Three Florida students are poised to sue DeSantis if he does not lift the ban and allow the AP African American studies to be taught in schools. But because the College Board has agreed to revise the course, it’s likely that future students will be taught a watered-down curriculum that avoids the harsh realities that cause “distress.”  This injustice gives DeSantis and his allies the power not only to distort the past, but to shape a future where structural inequalities persist and racism is allowed to flourish.