Politics / Current Events

The wait for protection and national recognition for Chicago’s Pullman District is finally over, thanks to President Obama’s action on February 19.  By using his authority under the Antiquities Act, as Presidents of both political parties have done before him, the President established Pullman Historic District National Monument. Through his action, and with bi-partisan support, the President has preserved an important, multi-faceted chapter of our nation’s history in perpetuity. The legacy of the Pullman workers resonates across class, across race, and across our country, including right here in New Mexico...

Those who know me know that March 8th, International Women’s Day is, of all the year’s holidays, the one that most deeply claims my attention and my heart. This began in the 1970s, when I lived in Cuba and the date was widely celebrated. For years now, I’ve written an open letter—sent to the women I know, and also to the men I believe are truly concerned with women’s rights.

This year, as I sat down to compose my letter, I happened to glance at the front page of the International New York Times. Three headlines grabbed my attention...

Few countries have been linked to the United Sates as long, as intimately and as painfully as Nicaragua. The relationship has always been complex, defying any generalities, and the odds are it is soon going to get a lot more complex.

As my wife and I are getting ready to depart for our first trip to Nicaragua, about which I will be writing on our return next month, I want to set the scene by discussing the peculiar, even unique, way the relationship between the countries has played out over the past century and a half...

There are many lessons in the pages of our nation’s history, which we seem unable to assimilate, so we must repeat them in an endless cycle of disillusionment and destruction. We appear arrogant in our dealings with other nations, unilaterally deciding what’s best for the world, at the same time endlessly proselytizing about democracy. When foreign nationals feel that their internal lives are being manipulated and disrupted by U.S. intervention through military and monetary power, a blowback is inevitable. The infamous outlaw and revolutionist Pancho Villa raided the United States in 1916, his actions being an example of this backlash; we may extrapolate this lesson to September 11, 2001...

If there is human life one hundred years from now, and analysts refer to our time, it may well be dubbed the Age of Lies like the Age of Enlightenment or the Age of Reason. Going much farther back into the mist of prehistory, they may call it the Period of Lies, like the Cretaceous or Jurassic. Of course for this to happen those analysts would have to retain some understanding of what constitutes truth and how to sort impressive advertising from what really was. This may be difficult because lies beget lies and the habit of truth is (sometimes permanently) eroded...

It’s been a couple of weeks since my credit union, Numbfecu became Nusenda, and praise be, I have survived the name change. Yes, this is one of those delightful and quirky kind of New Mexico stories that always leave you laughing and never leave you numb, not like yesteryear, not like say the day Susana came swooping down like a Cooper’s hawk on our social services and shuttered places like Hogares in the North Valley, places that had been operating for forty years. All these local providers who had been serving New Mexico communities for so long were all criminals. In fact so heinous were their crimes, that they had to be driven away before anyone could assess their evil, which was disclosed by a Grand Audit showing just how crooked all these social services really were...

Two weeks ago, the New Mexico House Regulation and Public Affairs Committee tabled popular 36% interest cap bills designed to protect borrowers from triple digit interest loans that lock them in poverty.

The committee dismissed testimony in favor of 36% caps from a broad range of financial counseling, social service, tribal, religious, senior citizen and other groups.  It preferred to consider an industry proposal for consumer protections that lenders promised was forthcoming.  Once the loan sharks were handed the keys to the bait tank, advocates of loan reform were skeptical that meaningful proposals were in the offing...

John Adams once wrote, “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes and murders itself. There never was a democracy that did not commit suicide.” The unrelenting war on all forms and manifestations of a democratic social contract has led to bloody revolutions in every era, on every continent, and in virtually every culture. They all begin as slight disturbances, ripples on the surface of daily events, minor perturbations in the status quo that eventually take on a destructive life of their own, not unlike the early gentle rumblings of an earthquake...