MONEY

Petroleum and coal are among the most abundant minerals for 22 out of Africa’s 54 countries.

Most of the electronics we use today are based on a number of minerals – from aluminium to zinc.

In 2021, some 1.5 billion smartphones were sold around the world – up from 122 million units in 2007. As of 2020, nearly four in five (78 percent) people own a smartphone.

As of 2019, Nigeria produced most of the continent’s petroleum (25 percent), followed by Angola (17 percent), and Algeria (16 percent).

Metals including gold, iron, titanium, zinc and copper are the top produced minerals for 11 countries. Ghana is the

According to The World Mining Congress (pdf), the world extracted some 17.9 billion tonnes of minerals in 2019. Asia was the largest producer, accounting for 59 percent of the world’s total production valued at $1.8 trillion. North America was second with 16 percent, followed by Europe at 7 percent. Africa produced about 5.5 percent of the world’s minerals worth some $406bn.

Food insecurity, hunger expected to soar after cuts to extra SNAP benefits...continued from page 1

during COVID as local, state, and federal money poured in. But with the funding money gone, we’re trying to figure things out. The cost of living, rent, and evictions are going up. The cost of living is driving people into homelessness. Things are going to get pretty bad because of the cost of living.”

Miskey contends that separating food insecurity from gentrification, low wages, displacement, and homelessness is impossible. COVID-19 has laid bare the structural, institutional, economic, and racial inequities that separate African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans from their white counterparts,” she said. Marginalized communities have been hit particularly hard by many challenges, many not naturally occurring.

“Healthcare workers, people of color, and immigrants are making horrible wages,” Miskey said. “They cannot afford afterschool care for kids, don’t have money for affordable housing, and struggle to make ends meet. This is a war against the poor. They tell people that they did this to themselves. Millions of people have no opportunity or are intentionally excluded from opportunities. Racism is the #1 factor for excluding people.”

The SNAP emergency allotments were designed to alleviate food insecurity and stimulate the US economy throughout the COVID pandemic public health emergency.

According to DC Hunger Solutions, the cuts to SNAP benefits will affect more than 90,000 people in the District of Columbia. On average, when this “hunger cliff” hits, each SNAP participant will lose over $90 a month, DC Hunger Solutions officials explained on the website.

“As a result, average SNAP benefits will fall to a meager $6 a person a day. The “hunger cliff” will hit all age groups and all parts of the District of

Columbia. The steepest cliff will be for many older adults who only qualify for the minimum SNAP benefit — dropping from $281 a month to $30,” staff said.

The “hunger cliff” – a perfect storm of a striking reduction of benefits in the face of high inflation and climbing grocery costs – will exacerbate food insecurity and hardship in the District of Columbia and elsewhere. The District will lose more than $14 million in benefits monthly. Emergency food providers can’t fill this gap. Even before the cuts, food banks, pantries, and soup kitchens have reported high demand for assistance, DC Hunger Solutions said.

All over America, Miskey said, people are vulnerable, have health problems and, are aging, have been homeless for a long time, including seniors.

“It doesn’t take much: a single income, losing a spouse, an increase in the cost of housing. People are precariously housed. People have to put themselves in danger sometimes,” said Miskey. “People are stealing to survive. People need help, but needing help is seen as something weak or bad. Of course, the Republican Party sells the lottery mentality. People figure they’re going to be up there one day and dream that they’re going to get there.”

Daniel del Pielago agrees with Miskey that Republicans and others who support their ideas and agenda are committed to former President Donald Trump’s promise to dismantle the administrative state.

Del Pielago, organizing director of Empower DC, said these cuts and Republican plans to disembowel the social safety net – including Medicare and social security – is a deliberate policy choice aimed directly at the working class, low-income households, and the poor in this country.

“It’s part of this onslaught of safety net services being cut. I just heard from the city that they’re cutting the Emergency Rental Program 6½ months earlier than expected. And rents in May will go up 8.9 percent here in the District,” del Pielago said. “DC is super expensive, there are no livable wages for a certain population segment and there’s a sustained attack on low-income people. What we’re seeing in terms of the onslaught is the Trump effect coming into play. We have a bunch of people making these decisions which don’t benefit low-income residents and Black people. They were attempting, and now they’re having success.”

Miskey said as she views the challenges and devastation food insecurity has wrought on poor, near-poor, low-income, and middle-class Americans, she feels anger and frustration because most of this is and was avoidable.

“… I think our systems have massively failed people,” she said. “I shouldn’t say that. I don’t think our system has failed. I think our system was set up to fail. They are set up to keep up the status quo, ensuring that those people of privilege and wealth maintain their privilege and wealth.”

Meanwhile, everyone else is blamed for their supposed character defects or failures because supposedly all the opportunities are out there if you grab them, Miskey explained.

“The fact is, our system creates massive barriers for opportunity and doesn’t allow huge chunks of our communities to actually access those things. That’s the shame of our system, the shame of our government. As I said before, we’re a system where we have a war on the poor, not a war on poverty.”

Matthew Desmond, a Princeton University sociologist and the director of the university’s Eviction Lab, said America has a poverty problem, and poverty and food insecurity are deeply

HUD Secretary Fudge Pledges to Change Agency’s Ad Spending with Black-Owned Media

By Stacy M. Brown, NNPA Newswire Senior National Correspondent

HUD Secretary Fudge Pledges to Change Agency’s Ad Spending with Black-Owned Media...continued

and for the people.”

“I had a conversation recently with the Deputy Secretary of HUD (Adrianne Todman) and we will increase our spend with Black and brown media,” Asamoah asserted.

“A couple of things. We are disrupting the present systems with disrupting how we do money. We recognize that the federal government is the largest consumer of goods and services and roughly 10 percent has traditionally gone to Black, Brown, and small, and disadvantaged businesses.”

Asamoah continued:

“That’s not 10 percent

FTC Briefing Targets Scams Hitting API Communities in California...continued

The 18th Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Marcia Fudge (Photo: hud.gov)

With the federal government spending a pittance of its advertising dollars with Blackowned media and President Biden demanding that agencies expand contracting opportunities for historically disadvantaged businesses, including those owned by women and people of color, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge has made a specific pledge to African American publishers and media company owners.

“I will take a look at it, and if [advertising spending] is where you say it is, we will change it,” Fudge declared following a question from National Newspaper Publishers Association President & CEO Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis Jr. about the inequitable distribution of advertising dollars with the Black Press.

“You can hold me to that,”

Fudge asserted.

Chavis, Washington Informer Publisher Denise Rolark Barnes, and media mogul Roland Martin all pressed Fudge and others during a Black Media Roundtable at HUD in Washington.

The federal government spends about $600 billion annually on consumer goods and services.

A small portion of that money goes to small businesses owned by women, minorities, and those otherwise disadvantaged.

The most recent Government Accountability Office study found that federal agencies spent more than $5 billion on advertising over five years, with just $51 million, or 1.02 percent, going to Black-owned businesses.

“It’s been on our minds,” said Beth Lynk, the assistant secretary of public affairs for HUD. “We are asking [all contractors] what is your spend? Not just Black reach, but Black ownership in the media.”

Adjoa Asamoah, the senior advisor for Racial Equity for the Office of the Secretary of HUD, called Fudge a “secretary of, with each. We’ve been tasked by the President with leveraging the full power of the federal government’s procurement power.

“While ad spending directly is what we will look at, under Secretary Fudge we have looked at how we are spending our dollars and adjusted accordingly. Every single notice of funding opportunity that goes out this door, [the contractor] is required to state how you have demonstrated your ability to advance racial equity and what will you do in the future to advance racial equity. We are doing things differently.”

FTC Briefing Targets Scams Hitting API Communities in California

Federal and local agencies, community stakeholders, and ethnic media came together to raise public awareness and encourage people to report when they’ve been scammed.

By Peter Schurmann

“I trusted him, because he was an Army officer, and because he was good looking,” recalls Iwasaki, chuckling slightly at the memory. Today he lives monthto-month on a meager budget.

“Be careful out there,” he says, in reference to the growing minefield of scams and scam artists that in 2022 alone cost consumers $8.8 billion.

Iwasaki shared his experience during a March 30 forum on scams targeting API communities organized by the Federal Trade Commission to raise public awareness and encourage people to report when they’ve been scammed.

His was among a litany of cases discussed during the gathering, which was hosted by the FTC’s Western Regional Office in San Francisco and included representatives from federal and local agencies, community stakeholders, and ethnic media.

Community engagement key the public, Mendez said. She shared a story from a recent session in Louisville, Kentucky where a Korean reporter described a scam that one community member had fallen victim to. The FTC used that information to put out an alert in Korean that was then run across nearly two dozen Korean media outlets.

“Scammers are everywhere… they’re not just on the phone anymore. They’re in the mail, they’re in advertising, they’re online,” said Rosario Mendez, an attorney with the FTC’s Division of Consumer and Business Education Bureau of Consumer Protection based in Washington DC, who opened the briefing. She noted the record amount consumers lost last year – over $8 billion. “It’s more than we’ve ever seen,” she said.

“The ripple effect is very real,” she said, highlighting the role community engagement with her agency plays in helping to staunch the bleeding.

Katsumi Iwasaki is originally from Tokyo but has lived in the Bay Area for more than thirty years. After losing his partner of more than two decades to cancer, the soft-spoken octogenarian went on dating apps at the urging of friends to cope with the loneliness.

That decision would ultimately lead him into the perilous world of romance scams, costing Iwasaki both his life savings –totaling more than $400,000 –and “my love.”

Mendez’ office has undertaken a series of nationwide listening tours to meet with local communities and to hear directly from them about the types of scams they’re encountering.

The FTC can and does prosecute fraud cases, but its effectiveness depends on what it learns from

Representatives from local community based organizations shared resources available for victims of scams.

Making it easier to report scams

“This is the first convening of this type in the state with the API community,” said San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu in his opening remarks, calling the city the “capital” of the nation’s Asian American community when it comes to “deciding how our community is taken care of.”

Chiu’s office recently opened a hotline for residents to report potential scams. The portal is available in English, Spanish, Chinese and Tagalog.

Food insecurity, hunger expected to soar after cuts to extra SNAP benefits...continued from page 2

intertwined.

“Poverty is measured at different income levels, but it is experienced as an exhausting piling on of problems. Poverty is chronic pain, on top of tooth rot, on top of debt collector harassment, on top of the nauseating fear of eviction,” said Desmond. “It is the suffocation of your talents and your dreams. It is death that comes early and often. From 2001 to 2014, the richest women in America gained almost three years of life while the poorest gained just 15 days. Far from a line, poverty is a tight knot of humiliations and agonies, and its persistence in American life should shame us.”

Desmond said housing assistance and food stamp programs are “effective and essential, protecting millions of families from hunger and homelessness each year,” he said in a March 16 column in the New York Times. “But the United States devotes far fewer resources to these programs, as a share of

President Joe Biden and members of his Cabinet, lower-level staff won’t get Twitter Blue benefits unless they pay for it themselves.

“If you see impersonations that you believe violate Twitter’s stated impersonation policies, alert Twitter using Twitter’s public impersonation portal,” said the staff memo from White House official Rob Flaherty.

Alexander, the actor, said there are bigger issues in the world but without the blue mark, “anyone can allege to be me” so if he loses it, he’s gone.

“Anyone appearing with it=an imposter. I tell you this while I’m still official,” he tweeted.

In this photo illustration Elon Musk Twitter seen displayed on a smartphone screen with Twitter logo in the background in Athens, Greece on October 30, 2022.

After buying Twitter for its gross domestic product, than other rich democracies, which places America in a disgraced class of its own on the world stage.”

That disgrace is illustrated in the stats showing that 33 percent of Americans live in households making less than $55,000, he said.

“Many are not officially counted among the poor, but there is plenty of economic hardship above the poverty line,” Desmond said. “And plenty far below it as well. According to the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which accounts for government aid and living expenses, more than one in 25 people 65 or older lived in deep poverty in 2021, meaning that they’d have to, at minimum, double their incomes just to reach the poverty line.”

He said Americans must commit to becoming poverty abolitionists to break this cycle.

“Like abolitionist movements against slavery or mass incarceration, abolitionism

$44 billion in October, Musk has been trying to boost the struggling platform’s revenue by pushing more people to pay for a premium subscription. But his move also reflects his assertion that the blue verification marks have become an undeserved or “corrupt” status symbol for elite personalities, news reporters and others granted verification for free by Twitter’s previous leadership.

Along with shielding celebrities from impersonators, one of Twitter’s main reasons to mark profiles with a blue check mark starting about 14 years ago was to verify politicians, activists and people who suddenly find themselves in the news, as well as little-known journalists at small publications around the globe, as an extra tool to curb misinformation coming from views poverty not as a routine or inevitable social ill but as an abomination that can no longer be tolerated,” he said. “And poverty abolitionism shares with other abolitionist movements the conviction that profiting from another’s pain corrupts us all. Ending poverty in America will require both short- and long-term solutions: strategies that stem the bleeding now, alongside more enduring interventions that target the disease and don’t just treat the symptoms.” accounts that are impersonating people. Most “legacy blue checks” are not household names and weren’t meant to be.

This includes appropriately addressing the housing crisis, which forces most poor renting families to devote at least 50 percent of their income to rent and utilities; immediately expanding housing vouchers to reduce the rent burden; pushing for “more transformative solutions” like scaling up the country’s public housing infrastructure; building out community land banks; and providing on-ramps to homeownership for low-income families.

One of Musk’s first product moves after taking over Twitter was to launch a service granting blue checks to anyone willing to pay $8 a month. But it was quickly inundated by impostor accounts, including those impersonating Nintendo, pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and Musk’s businesses Tesla and SpaceX, so Twitter had to temporarily suspend the service days after its launch.

The relaunched service costs $8 a month for web users and $11 a month for users of its iPhone or Android apps. Subscribers are supposed to see fewer ads, be able to post longer videos and have their tweets featured more prominently.