Cecilia Munoz Senior vice president for the research, advocacy and legislation at the National Council of La Raza (NCLR)Cecilia Munoz Senior vice president for the research, advocacy and legislation at the National Council of La Raza (NCLR)
President-elect Barack Obama has named a national Latina leader to a top White House staff job.
The Obama transition team today announced the selection of Cecilia Muñoz as his Director of the White House Office for Intergovernmental Affairs. That office directs White House outreach to state and local governments, as well as constituency groups.
The Detroit-born Muñoz currently serves as senior vice president for the research, advocacy and legislation at the National Council of La Raza (NCLR). She has been a prominent voice on civil rights issues, education and immigration.
Muñoz, 46, is the youngest of four children of parents who had moved to the Michigan from La Paz, Bolivia, so that her father, an automotive engineer, could attend the University of Michigan. Muñoz, who grew up in the Detroit suburb of Livonia, attended the University of Michigan and received degrees in English and Latin studies in 1984.
In addition to her La Raza post, she also is the board chair of Center for Community Change and serves on the U.S. Programs Board of the Open Society Institute and the Board of Directors of the Atlantic Philanthropies.
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Those who have followed the debate on the Mexican Cross Border Program, might have noticed as time passed, Todd Spencer and OOIDA for example kept changing their reasons for opposing FMCSA Cross Border Program. First it was “Safety issues”, then economic issues, both which have been debunked here and in other places.
Jimmy Hoffa continues to rant about those “dangerous and unsafe” Mexican trucks putting the American motoring public at risk, without offering one iota of proof to back up his accusations.
Even Steve Sommers on America’s Trucking Network has toned down the rhetoric, insisting his opposition to the program is from the viewpoint of American’s losing jobs, which ain’t gonna happen.
So what the truth behind the opposition? Could it be pure old “Mexican bashing”, the xenophobia that is sweeping America, pushed in part by groups who are preying on the fear and insecurities of Americans, while putting their hands in the pockets of those who respond to their promises of ridding America of Mexicans? I think the truth lies somewhere in between.
Let’s backtrack 15 months to June 22, 2007 and an article that appeared in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review in reponse to an Editorial by Trib staff titled MEXICAN BACKFIRE Dimitri Vassilaros came across with this scathing and totally false editorial.
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Vicente Fox, 66, governed Mexico from 2000 to 2006. His term was marked by low inflation and prudent fiscal oversight,
SAN CRISTOBAL, Mexico – Eighteen months after leaving office, former President Vicente Fox is taking a page from Jimmy Carter’s playbook and engineering his legacy as a champion of democratic values and government transparency at home and abroad.
In a wide-ranging interview at his ranch near historic Guanajuato, Fox discussed his new projects and chided the United States for abdicating its role as global leader, questioned presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama’s position on free trade and dismissed Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez as “a loudmouth.”
The United States no longer initiates ambitious projects such as the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe after World War II or former President John Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, which spurred economic cooperation in the hemisphere, said Fox, a strong U.S. supporter.
“We don’t see this happening anymore,” Fox told The Miami Herald. “We see walls being built. What is the U.S. afraid of?”
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Some Social Conservative Disillusionment
Some Americans are having a change of heart about mixing religion and politics. A new survey finds a
Majority now says church should stay out of politics
A narrow majority of the public saying that churches and other houses of worship should keep out of political matters and not express their views on day-to-day social and political matters. For a decade, majorities of Americans had voiced support for religious institutions speaking out on such issues.
The new national survey by the Pew Research Center reveals that most of the reconsideration of the desirability of religious involvement in politics has occurred among conservatives. Four years ago, just 30% of conservatives believed that churches and other houses of worship should stay out of politics. Today, 50% of conservatives express this view.
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How appropriate is it that on July 4, 2008 we are freed from the hateful thoughts and rhetoric of this vile excuse for a human being.
Former Sen. Jesse Helms, who built a career along the fault lines of racial politics and battled liberals, Communists and the occasional fellow Republican during 30 conservative years in Congress, died on the Fourth of July.
He was 86.
Helms died at 1:15 a.m., said the Jesse Helms Center at Wingate University in North Carolina. The center’s president, John Dodd, said in a statement that funeral arrangements were pending.
This is the man that led the opposition in the Senate during the debates to create a federal holiday in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.
This is the man who clashed frequently with President Clinton, whom he deemed unqualified to be commander in chief. Even some Republicans cringed when Helms said Clinton was so unpopular he would need a bodyguard on North Carolina military bases. Helms said he hadn’t meant it as a threat.
Like so many other not-so-fine wines, Jesse Helms may have mellowed as he aged but his various changes in positions on social issues did not and cannot change the fact that he stood against so many and supported the denial of protections and rights under the Constitution to so many.
He will probably join Jerry Falwell and so many others who took this country down the wrong path. And I doubt it will be in Heaven.
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I saw this item on WorldNet Daily and thought it was some more of their silly rabble rousing alongside of such potential wet dream candidates for the right wing loons such as George Noory for President in 2012 perhaps with fellow loony tune Jeremy Corsi as his running mate.
A New Jersey newspaper reported Dobb’s refusal to comment, but one site took the ball and ran with it, attempting to assist Mr Dobbs in his quest for public office.
America’s Voice Online the voice of true Americans, established (does that word ring a bell with anyone) a website, titled DobbsforGovernor.com Good folks, America’s Voice and I am sure that Mr Dobbs appreciates it. Check out the site, it’s too cool.
Here is the press release announcing this new endeavor:
Washington, DC – According to press reports the extreme, anti-immigration CNN commentator Lou Dobbs is contemplating a run for Governor of New Jersey next year. America’s Voice has launched a new website to tell the truth about Dobbs and pundits like him, who think they can stir-up waves of anti-immigrant hysteria and ride them all the way to the statehouse, the White House, or the Governor’s mansion.
The site features our take on what a Lou Dobbs campaign platform would look like, inspired by the unrealistic and polarizing views of real Congressional candidates. Visitors are invited to submit their ideas (in English Only) for the Dobbs campaign slogan contest. The winner will receive a free t-shirt featuring his or her slogan, and activists around the country will have the opportunity to purchase the shirt online.
Frank Sharry, Executive Director of America’s Voice had this to say:
“America’s Voice is happy to take this opportunity to reveal the truth about anti-immigrant, mass-deportation candidates who have stood in the way of real immigration solutions for years.
“Lou Dobbs is not a real candidate, he’s a caricature of what is wrong with the current immigration debate. He offers no real solutions to our broken immigration system, and simply uses his program to spread proven lies, stir up racial tensions and fear, and provide a platform to known hate groups.
“Though the quality of CNN’s programming would improve if Dobbs were elected, the citizens of New Jersey deserve a governor that deals in facts and real solutions. Let’s hope Dobbs remains as far away from the Governor’s mansion as he does from good journalism.
“There is no doubt in my mind that Lou Dobbs would lose a race to become Governor of one of America’s most diverse states. He would simply join the long list of desperate politicians who ran on anti-immigrant hysteria and lost.”
To view the site, please visit www.DobbsForGovernor.com
America’s Voice is the newly-founded communications and rapid-response arm of a reinvigorated campaign to advance immigration reform. Its goal is to build the public support and political power necessary to enact broad immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship for the estimated 12 million immigrants working and living in the U.S. without legal status.
I love the campaign slogan also, which is the title to this post!
By Héctor Tobar, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
February 7, 2008
MEXICO CITY — President Felipe Calderon said Wednesday that a shifting political climate in the U.S. could improve the chances that a new administration in Washington will help bring a comprehensive reform law that would legalize the status of Mexican immigrants.
In a wide-ranging conversation with The Times, Calderon, scheduled to visit California next week, also addressed the decline of the government-owned oil fields and the war against drug traffickers that has claimed thousands of lives.
“My hope is that whoever the next president is, and whoever is in the new [U.S.] Congress, will have a broader and more comprehensive view” of the immigration problem, Calderon said. Speaking at the presidential residence Los Pinos on the morning after the Super Tuesday presidential primaries in the U.S., Calderon said he took heart from the results, though he did not mention specific candidates.
“It seems to me that the most radical and anti-immigrant candidates have been left behind and have been put in their place by their own electorate,” Calderon said.
He arrives in Sacramento on Feb. 13 on the final leg of a five-day U.S. trip that will also take him to Chicago, Boston and New York to visit local officials and representatives of Mexican immigrant communities.
In Sacramento, he is scheduled to meet with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Latino legislators. In Los Angeles the following day, he is to meet Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and migrant groups’ representatives assembled by the nine Mexican consulates in California.
He will tell fellow Mexican citizens “that we are actively working to defend their human rights,” Calderon said. “No matter their immigration status, they are human beings with dignity and rights that should be respected. We are working, with the full effort of the government, to bring a halt to the campaigns that harass migrants.”
Calderon said one goal of his trip, which will include a talk Monday at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, was to build public support for an immigration reform law that would allow millions of Mexicans to work in the U.S.
He said Americans would recognize “sooner or later” that the health of the U.S. economy is linked to integration with its neighbor and “the increased flow of goods, services, investment” between the two countries “and also greater freedom in labor markets.”
Such liberal economic orthodoxy also informs Calderon’s beliefs about the policies that can best create jobs in Mexico and slow the annual flight of thousands of his countrymen northward.
Despite criticisms from farmers that the North American Free Trade Agreement is ruining Mexican agriculture and spurring migration to the U.S., Calderon said he remained a firm believer in the power of free markets to improve the lot of Mexico’s rural poor.
“The truth is that exports from the Mexican countryside have increased fourfold since NAFTA” was implemented, Calderon said.
Still, the federal government will continue to provide $20 billion in annual farm subsidies. And to ameliorate the effect of the U.S. economic slowdown on the Mexican economy, Calderon is proposing a massive series of public works projects and other measures.
On Wednesday, Calderon announced the creation of a $25-billion fund to build highways, bridges and other infrastructure projects so that “we don’t have to depend on the external motor of the U.S. economy” to keep Mexico growing.
Calderon also warned that the Mexican people faced difficult decisions related to the declining production of the country’s oil fields, the government’s main source of foreign revenue.
With reserves in its aging offshore Cantarell field diminishing, the state-owned oil company Pemex needs funds to pay for exploration in the deeper waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
The money, Calderon said, could come only from two sources: reducing government spending for public services or looking to the example of China, Norway and Brazil, where the state-owned oil companies benefit from private investment.
Private investment in Pemex has been a political poison pill in Mexico, where the publicly owned natural resource is considered by many a pillar of national sovereignty.
“This is a problem we should resolve now so as not to place future generations in danger,” Calderon said. “I’ve always worked from the assumption that Pemex will not be privatized. But I am sure there will be a more understanding environment to objectively evaluate what’s best for Pemex.”
Whereas declining oil revenue is a long-term challenge, the most immediate threat Calderon faces is organized crime. Violence linked to drug trafficking has claimed more than 2,000 lives since Calderon took office in December 2006.
Despite progress, including the arrest of more than 20,000 organized-crime suspects and huge hauls of illicit drugs and cash, much work remains to be done, Calderon said.
Drug traffickers are a dominant presence in several border cities and many rural towns.
“Victory will be achieved when the authorities have complete control over their own territory . . . when the authorities have total command over and complete faith in the police forces,” he said.
U.S. legislators are debating a $550-million proposal by the Bush administration to assist Mexico and Central America in the battle against traffickers.
“This is a battle in which Mexico obviously needs the help of the United States to win,” Calderon said.
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