Politics / Current Events

Last Sunday afternoon about a dozen old Jews and a handful of non-Jewish comrades, most dressed in black to signify mourning, gathered on a sidewalk outside the Jewish Community Center on Wyoming NE. The members of Jewish Voice for Peace--veterans of protest and organizing since Vietnam--hadn’t been able to come up with any better way to respond to Israel’s massacre of two-thousand people in Gaza than this grief circle.  So, in the hot noonday sun, against the noise of three lanes of Sunday afternoon Heights traffic, they recited the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, then read aloud the names of hundreds of Palestinian children killed...

Inequality has returned to the United States. Americans are now faced, not only with huge disadvantages in economic competition; politically, we are faced with the rise of a new ruling class. This year's elections will feature cascades of money from billionaires, dwarfing the contributions of individuals for whom politics used to be, but no longer is, a way to seek revival.

Community banks, locally owned banks, banks that had a direct relationship to the communities that they served, are becoming an endangered species while the big five banks no longer know the names of the families or businesses, the borrowers that they have packaged together in Collateralized Debt Obligations...

Dr. Arthur Rolnick—the keynote speaker at our 2014 NM KIDS COUNT Conference—made a compelling case for higher levels of investment in early childhood care and learning services. Many people in New Mexico agree that these kind of investments will help us improve the well-being of our children. Unfortunately, there has not been a consensus in Santa Fe on how to pay for these programs. 

Other states and countries are using a new financing tool—social impact bonds—to pay for preventive high quality early childhood programs like home visitation, childcare and early learning, and pre-K, which have a clear pay-off...

On the eve of the 9/11 anniversary of the terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—attacks that launched the U.S. on three wars, against al-Qaeda, Saddam Hussein and the Taliban—President Barack Obama went on prime-time television to announce a fourth war. It says something about the uncertainty of this new war that the U.S. can’t even agree on the name of the outfit we are fighting: ISIS, ISIL or the Islamic State.

The goal, or at least the vocabulary, of this new war seems modest, in Obama’s words “to degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIL. It is those two words “degrade” and “ultimately” that are intended to differentiate Obama’s war from the bluster of his predecessor’s three wars. Whether that is a distinction without a difference remains to be seen...

I couldn’t put it down even though it was a heavy lift. For the past month I have been lugging around the 900-page Bully Pulpit by one of my heroes, Doris Kearns Goodwin.  Her account of Teddy Roosevelt, William Taft and the Golden Age of Journalism (the book’s subtitle) makes a great counterpart to today’s gilded age—and that’s why I read it.   One hundred years later—are there any lessons we can learn?

First, the amazing similarities—the near total control of giant corporations, the unchecked trend toward mergers and consolidation, a gap between the rich and the poor...

I have a 17-year-old black friend, let’s call him K., who, with his family, used to live in the East Mountains and then Albuquerque. Now he is a freshman at Chandler/Gilbert Community College, where he won a scholarship. On Sunday night, Aug. 24, a little after midnight, he was riding a scooter back from a friend’s home to his apartment. He was neatly dressed and carrying a daypack.

“I was riding on the sidewalk because there was no bicycle lane,” he told me later. “I wasn’t doing anything wrong.” A Gilbert policeman drove past him, apparently noticed he was black, then did a U-turn and came back. The policeman, who was white, stopped K...

Albuquerque police have shot and killed nearly 30 mostly unarmed citizens since 2010.  With each killing, concern and protests grew.

Then, on March 16, 2014 the police shot and killed James Boyd, a mentally ill, homeless man, who had been illegally camping in the Sandia foothills. Unlike prior shootings, video footage taken by a police lapel camera was available and appeared to show that Mr. Boyd had been needlessly shot in the back while surrendering. The video immediately went viral and mass demonstrations ensued with the chant: “They say ‘justified’! We say ‘homicide’!”...

Why is our governor always surrounded by elementary school children? There she is on the cover of the Albuquerque Urinal for the thousandth time, and the picture could have been taken when she was running for governor the first time, or last month, for that matter.  

In fact that’s not the governor at all but a stand in that has been hired to do all the gov’s kid shots while the chief exec. is off destroying the educational system, beating homeless food stamp recipients into the caliche, selling our social services to Arizona, ripped up environmental protections, etc...

The continued dismantling of Northern New Mexico College now includes cancellation of ESL (English as a Second Language) classes and evening GED courses. The Barceló Administration and the NNMC Board of Regents have gone far afield from the mission of our publicly-funded community resource. We should look carefully at how Barceló has taken charge of our “Hispanic Serving Institution,” regularly displaying disregard for our distinct culture and history...