The guilty children
Let me start by telling you that my children are guilty. Guilty of being born to middle class, not wealthy, parents, guilty of having special needs, guilty of being the kind of poor test takers who falsely convict their teachers of being bad at their jobs. Most of all they are guilty of being children living in New Mexico...
The outrage over Kendall Jones – What’s really going on here?
Via social media (Facebook) and one of our more sensationalist online dailies, we recently learned the story of Kendall Jones, a Texas Tech cheerleader whose penchant for hunting and killing exotic animals for sport has outraged many of those she hoped to impress. The Huffington Post article, headlined “Meet Kendall Jones, The Texan Cheerleader Whose Exotic Animal Hunts Outraged the Internet,” appeared on July 1, 2014. Jones’ Facebook post was probably uploaded around the same time. It is no longer available. Either FB or Jones’ herself removed it from public scrutiny.
This narrative raised a range of issues for me, some of them uncomfortably contradictory...
Dodgy Art Bar Finally Shuttered
All of us who are educated to Susana New Mexico standards and who have proudly displayed our third grade reading proficiency certificates know that art is exceptionally dangerous. We should avoid ahtsy fahtsie and those who create it as much as is humanly possible. That means on seeing a known artist, one should smile politely, lower one’s head, and without dispatch, cross to the other side of the street.
Think, if you will then, how really menacing and perilous art is when mixed with demon rum...
Value-Added Scores Finally Explained by NM Education Department
This summer, an ongoing action by New Mexico teachers is to send in Inspection of Public Records requests (IPRAs, for short), asking the Public Education Department (PED) to send evidence that backs up teacher evaluation reports received this year, and the means used to calculate the scores. We’ve waited. We’ve waited some more. Finally, some of those teachers received notices that the request is “burdensome,” and it would take the PED longer than expected.
Which is silly, since the PED happily reported the results of teacher evaluations to the press long before teachers were allowed to see them (and, of course, none of those press outlets thought to ask for substantiation). You’d think PED would have access to the reports quickly, since they just finished them up...
Tongues of Fire on the Border
With the defeat of Eric Cantor, immigration reform may be dead for the near future. Nonetheless, there are heroes out there who won’t be deterred by Congressional dysfunction. One of them is Reverend John Fife who was recently in Santa Fe.
Back in the early 1980s when wars were raging in Central America, refugees fled to the United States from death squads in their home countries, particularly Guatemala and El Salvador. The first church to respond to this crisis was Fife’s church, the Southside Presbyterian church in Tucson, Arizona. On March 24, 1982 he started the Sanctuary movement and initiated an “underground railroad “system to move refugees to other parts of the country and to Canada where they would be safe...
Immigrants or Refugees?
In the media barrage over the “flood” of Central American children arriving along the United States’ southern border, the refuge-seekers have been typically labeled as “illegal immigrants” by many media outlets.
But Central American migrant advocates have a diametrically opposed take on the crisis, contending that the children on the U.S. border should be considered not as immigrants but refugees meriting international treatment standards, which does not generally include detaining children, according to Human Rights Watch...
Marx, Freud and Mitt Romney: What Globalization Means
Taxation Without Representation!
That was the clarion call the American colonists employed to rouse their fellows against the British in 1776. The American Colonies were important for the nascent capitalist economy in England, because they represented not only a growing market for their goods (tea was only one of many products exported to America), but also a new source of natural resources to bring back to the homeland and turn into goods to be sold back to the colonists. The British had already monopolized tea imports from China and were reaping fortunes selling it, not only in their own country but to the American colonists as well.
My point is that capitalism has always been in search of new, expanding markets...
NM Twittersphere: APD, King & Martinez, WIPP
This week we have lots of coverage of the APD march to end police brutality that happened this past Saturday in Albuquerque. Martinez and King both make gaffes in the early stages of the governor's race. Also, concern, funding and the future of WIPP. In NM Twittersphere we curate the firehose of information coming through on Twitter where you can see media, links to informative articles, and viewpoints that happened through the week...
APD Update: Protest march, Perry questioned, family interviews
A “march to end police brutality” is taking place today in Albuquerque from 11am – 4pm at Roosevelt Park (Coal Ave SE & Spruce St SE). The march is put on by broad coalition of activists, family members of victims of police violence, and concerned citizens. The event will feature longtime Chicano activist and civil rights attorney Kiko Martinez as well as a number of other speakers. The event will feature music by Albuquerque’s Mala Maña (Mary Hawkes, the 19 year old killed by APD in April worked as their roadie), Sherri Gonzales Blues Trio, L@SOTR@S, and MC Def...
Running from the taxman? To what?
Changing tax rates nearly always has consequences, some of which are intended, some of which are not. If we are to believe anti-tax advocates, taxes inhibit economic development, distort our economy, and cause people to “vote with their feet” by moving to a place with lower rates. Most unbiased analyses show that taxes have a negligible impact on economic development and that other factors—such as an educated workforce, access to markets, and quality-of-life considerations—are more important in business location decisions. Could taxes be the reason that New Mexico has seen population growth stagnate in recent years after decades of growth? The answer is a resounding no, according to a new research report...