A Window into the Martinez Administration’s Environmental Policy Decisions
Yesterday, we released a new tool to shine a light onto Governor Susana Martinez and her administration’s decisions that affect our air, land and water.
Our new website, SunshineOnMartinez.org, serves as the public’s window into the decisions of Gov. Susana Martinez and her administration that impact the air we breathe, the water we drink and the land where we live and play. On the site, you can find responses to Inspection of Public Records Act (IPRA) requests, the original requests to the administration, related news, opinion and multimedia...
It’s Still About Choice
We’ve all been privy to public service announcements and commercial advertisements urging us to spend money we don’t have in order to save an economy being squandered by our elected officials and the corporations that increasingly pull their puppet strings. During the 1960s and ‘70s we often said we wished the military had to hold a bake sale to fund its B-52s and that ordinary people might have access to government funding for projects as worthy as peace and education...
Health Reform Update: Off to a Rocky Start
The Health Insurance Exchange is the only mechanism we have at the moment to extend health care to the uninsured and I was as disappointed as anyone with the Federal Exchange’s inability to handle the high volume of hits to its website and then to fix the problems two weeks into implementation. I hear it is getting better but still not smooth sailing...
Columbus Day, Chiapas Style
Tens of thousands of indigenous protestors and their allies in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas took to the streets on Saturday, October 12. While the date is officially called Dia de La Raza and celebrated as the Latin American equivalent of the Columbus Day holiday in the United States, indigenous Mayans in Chiapas tagged another name on the day: 521 Years of Indigenous, Black, Campesino and Popular Resistance...
Accompanying the Hibakusha to Los Alamos
Last week, I returned to Los Alamos, New Mexico, scene of our greatest crime, the birthplace of the atomic bomb, where preparations continue for bigger and better nuclear weapons. Even as the government is shut down and New Mexico has just been ranked worst in the nation for the well being of children, plutonium bomb making carries on at Los Alamos.
This time, I accompanied a delegation of 13 elderly Japanese peace activists from Hiroshima, Japan. Several of them were survivors and witnesses of the U.S. atomic bombing sixty eight years ago...
Los Ojos de Dios
“Eleven years ago, I woke up at 2 in the morning, wondering what would happen to unhealthy babies who had no love and who were not as blessed as mine had been. The next morning I felt energized. I was determined to end a cycle and begin research to find out where some of these children were; in sum, I needed answers,” says Patricia Silas, the founder of Los Ojos de Dios, an orphanage in Juárez, Mexico that is dedicated to the most needy of young children...
When pollution and poverty meet
Clear Lake, at 68 square miles the biggest fresh water lake in California, gleams serenely all the way east to the distant mountains. It all seems so pretty, so peaceful, so healthy, and in some ways it is, but it is not at all what I had been lead to expect.
After all, this lake, at 480,000 years the oldest lake in the United States, is the world’s worst case of mercury poisoning...
What a 21st Century Coup Looks Like
While going about our ordinary lives—though those cannot, at the moment, include accessing federal Internet sites, visiting a National Park, or being able to take advantage of a federally-funded health study—most of us seem oblivious to the fact that we are experiencing a coup...
Susana Backpeddles
A Few short months ago Gov. Susana Martinez was hobnobbing with the Koch brothers out at Tamaya. This was a Tea Party love fest where Vice-Presidential-Hopeful Sooz was shmoozing and political french kissing the likes of Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor, architects of the current exceptionally smart government shutdown pulled by Republicans in the House.
Anyone who thinks the Democrats or Obama orchestrated this ill-conceived and silly catastrophe, hasn’t been paying attention for the past thirty or so years since Ronnie Reagan said in 1981 that government wasn’t the solution but it sure was the problem...
What’s Happened to Albuquerque? Part 9: Pete Dinelli, but where are the constituents?
While I personally am going to vote for Pete Dinelli for mayor on October 8, I remain puzzled and disappointed by this election.
Dinelli is strong on badly needed police oversight and leadership restructuring, strong on marriage equality and women’s rights (he was the only candidate to oppose the move to ban abortions in Albuquerque after 20 weeks), and strong on water conservation and water quality issues, including the potential disaster of the Kirtland Air Force Base jet fuel spill.
What disappoints me is that none of those vital issues attracted in-depth coverage by local mainstream media. And if organized and outspoken constituencies formed around those issues, most of us didn’t hear about it because their activities weren’t covered...