It disturbs and infuriates me to hear about police officers shooting and killing people who are not threatening their lives! It's not like she was holding a weapon to this deputy, the officer shot her in the back. This needs to STOP!
"It terrorizes our community and it disrupts the lives of hard-working people. It's just really unnecessary. There's just no reason why they should be out here at all."
Gutierrez Bejar hopes the new administration will look for immigration solutions that focus on keeping families together and contributing to the economy.
"That helps the family stay together, helps the family go to work, and helps our economy in general, so it can be a win-win situation."
Proponents of current policy say it's about enforcing the law, but Gutierrez Bejar says it's more complicated than just that, with children who are legal residents often becoming the unintended victims.
More than 3,500 signatures are on the letter, asking for new policies that focus on keeping families together and implementing more humane practices in dealing with immigrants, including a stop to big workplace raids.
Town Hall Meeting with FCC Officials
While honing plans for the biggest recovery stimulus since the New Deal, you and your team have sent some great signals. You’ve said it cannot be structured as patronage “pork,” and that it must not include earmarks. You spoke of transparency today and Vice President-Elect Joe Biden has reportedly said you want a Web-based disclosure system to track the spending.
I applaud such change, and offer here some specific ways—drawn from proven state and local precedents—you can really scrape the rust off of Uncle Sam’s economic toolkit.
Make Spending Hyper-Transparent on the Web: I assume that you really don’t want the public a year from now to hold your Recovery Plan in the same contempt they have for Treasury Secretary Paulson’s bailout debacle. The solution: a Web-based disclosure system that reports where the money is going and what states and localities doing with it.
You can do this by simply augmenting the existing platform at www.usaspending.gov. That’s the website created by a bill you co-sponsored in 2006 with John McCain and others. For the Recovery Plan, disclosure needs to go deeper into sub-grantees and sub-contractors, and it needs to cover outcomes: jobs created, wages and benefits paid, and the demographics and neighborhood locations of the workers who get the jobs. Look to Illinois for a model website; it was created by a 2003 bill that you voted for as a state senator—and that Gov. Rod Blagojevich signed, for free!
Let’s face it: some of the governors and mayors (Karlos says: "like Bill Richardson and Marty Chavez") you’ll be writing large checks to are not exactly known as good-government types. A web-based system enabling taxpayers to see where their money is going will empower citizen watchdogs to keep the pressure on state and local officials who will control much of the money—and on private contractors.
Give People the Transit They Demand: Americans are stampeding with their feet—and their bond-vote dollars—to demand more and better public transportation. Since the Recovery Plan won’t be funded with gasoline-tax money, you are not bound to have road-building take up more than four-fifths of the Plan’s transportation budget. Spending a third or more on transit, bikeways and pedestrian improvements will give people what they want—while reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving America’s physical fitness.
It’s also a potent strategy for economic opportunity: too many carless families (who are disproportionately of color) are prevented from competing for jobs located beyond transit lines. And with the cost of owning a car approaching the cost of housing for lower-income families, making more jobs transit-accessible will be a huge cost-of-living benefit.
Build and Retrofit Everything Green, Public and Private: About two-fifths of greenhouse gas emissions come from the built environment, so building and retrofitting public facilities to green standards offers more job creation and climate change benefits. To their credit, some federal agencies are already building to the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design (LEED) standards and you’ve set a new goal of modernizing three-fourths of federal buildings.
But for real progress, you need to use the leverage of Recovery dollars to green private-sector construction: every private structure that gets subsidized in any way by Recovery Plan dollars should be built or retrofitted to LEED (or equivalent) standards. This is hardly radical; it is simply getting private property owners to act in their own self-interest (and the planet’s). Green Building Council members report break-even on retrofit costs in just two to three years.
Retrofitting is the lowest-hanging fruit for energy efficiency. Just ask Larry Summers: his Harvard revolving loan fund to retrofit campus buildings returned a whopping 35 percent annually—more than twice the University’s endowment!
Fix It First and Favor Mixed Use: All infrastructure spending is not equal. A “Fix It First” agenda that gives top priority to repairing existing roads, schools, and bridges will create many more construction jobs than building new ones. When you partially demolish something and then rebuild it, without having to buy new land, you devote much more money to work-hours. And in the case of highway repairs, the Transportation Equity Network has also shown that you can create more jobs for African-Americans who have been historically underrepresented in construction workforces.
You should structure some of the Recovery funds as a competitive pot explicitly designed to favor mixed use, affordable housing, and transit access. Take as a model California’s Infrastructure and Economic Development Bank. It rates applications to its Infrastructure Revolving Fund to give strong preference to projects that are located in already-developed areas with high unemployment or low income, include affordable housing and services such as day care or health care, and are accessible by public transit.
By forging a truly accountable and strategic Recovery and Reinvestment Plan, you can prepare America for major improvements in all the federal jobs, housing and transportation programs to be reauthorized over the next four years.
Greg LeRoy directs Good Jobs First, www.goodjobsfirst.org, and co-authored its “Uncle Sam’s Rusty Toolkit” and 2003 study that informed the Illinois disclosure law.
"A new book by RCLA Senior Fellow Frances Kunreuther with Helen Kim and Robby Rodriguez offers a comprehensive look at leadership and generational shifts in the nonprofit sector. Working Across Generations: Defining the Future of Nonprofit Leadership presents ideas and suggests strategies for how to approach generational changes in leadership so that the contributions of long-time leaders are valued, new and younger leaders' talent is recognized, and groups are better prepared to work across generational divides. In addition to research findings, the book includes practical tools and advice for leaders on how to assess warning signs of generational conflict and the organization's readiness to talk about generational change."
Richardson did explain Monday that he had held on to the hope of winning a cabinet post until Sunday in the misplaced hope that his administration would be cleared in time for the confirmation process before the U.S. Senate and that he had “underestimated” how long the federal inquiry would take.
As some speculate, maybe it's simply the result of increasing nervousness as the Obama team has to deal with the Illinois scandal--in which the governor there tried to sell Obama's senate seat. This line of reasoning says that it became untenable for the Obama team to have such close proximity to the possibility of corruption in New Mexico.
I think this speculation is highly plausible, and I suspect that it's for sure a big contributing factor to why Obama would not want to stick it out with Richardson.
But there's also the fact that the 2008 federal grand jury has completed its work.
