By Juleyka Lantigua

As you may know, taxpayers are about to own 60% of General Motors. So here’s our chance to get exactly what we want in our favorite mode of transportation. Personally, I am looking forward to annual meetings in which I can discuss my wish list at length with fellow stockholders.

A driver for over fifteen years, I have accumulated a list of improvements that I believe will make all our driving experiences more pleasurable. Feel free to add your own thoughts, fellow shareholder.

1.    How about 100 miles per gallon. We’ve been to the Moon and sent rovers Mars, but still can’t figure this one out?
2.    Standard built-in navigation systems for all models. Why should the rich be the only ones who don’t get lost anymore?
3.    Volume and tuning buttons standard on all steering wheels. The number of accidents avoided will stagger you.
4.    Remote control key for every car. There’s no reason a 2-cent battery in a plastic case should be turned into a luxury item.
5.    Different sounds for different warnings. Door open = three bells. Key in ignition = 4 pings. Headlights still on = 2 knocks. Those are just suggestions, but you get the point.
6.    Power-controlled seats on the driver and passenger seats; sometimes the driver is the passenger, and that’s an unpleasant surprise.
7.    Value retention, for real.
8.    Built-in technology that melds our techie lifestyles (iPods, cell phones, etc.)
9.    Roadside assistance service modeled after On-Star, connecting the car directly to the manufacturer and sharing performance data automatically, to keep you safe and the car running smoothly.
10.    Lastly: car designed so sleekly they make you want to get in and go fast.

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Juleyka Lantigua is a writer whose work has appeared in books, magazines and newspapers around the world.

By Juleyka Lantigua
The more I hear, read, and witness the reaction of many (mostly conservative) white people to the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, the worse I feel for white people in general.

You know the feeling. That nagging sense of collective embarrassment (C.E.) some of us brown/black folks feel whenever “one of us” does something so outrageously unimaginable that we shrug our shoulders and brace for impact.

Examples:
    A Latino mayor of huge city admitting to cheating on his wife.
    A certain Black civil rights icon threatening to castrate a presidential candidate.
    A Black star athlete shooting himself in a club after strapping his gun to his sweatpants.
    A first Latino governor who can’t get confirmed for Cabinet because he’s so corrupt.

I don’t know for sure if white people ever get a serious outbreak of C.E., but I bet plenty of them are feeling a little rash-y right about now. The likes of Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Bill O'Reilly and their ilk have spent the last week chomping at Judge Sotomayor, and trying to best each other for bottom-feeder status.

Among their most ignorant claims:
    She’s an immigrant fluent in “illegal speak.”
    She’s a racist who thinks she’s better than a white man.
    Her menstrual cycles will impact court rulings.
    She does not know the real America.

I’m not accusing all white people of sharing these incendiary views, not by far. But what I am aware of is that the rest of us non-whites are watching and listening carefully, because deep down in places we don’t talk about, we live with the fear that to some extent many more white folks see us in such radically warped ways as to render some of these statements .0000000001% true in their worldviews.

And that’s why I feel bad for white people right now. I feel bad for them because an almost measurable degree of doubt has been introduced to their relationships with the rest of us, because they have all become somewhat suspect in our eyes—just a tiny bit—because the most vociferous and dangerously ignorant among them have unleashed the type of venom that clouds the air for years.

I hope I’m wrong about this, and that this is merely a fleeting manifestation of some deep-set paranoia the immigrant, Bronx-bred, educated Latina in me harbors in a forgotten crevice in her mind.

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Juleyka Lantigua is a writer whose work has appeared in books, magazines and newspapers around the world.

By Juleyka Lantigua

Since AmeriCorps was founded by President Clinton in 1993, 540,000 members have served with thousands of nonprofit organizations, public agencies and faith-based organizations nationwide. Among many other things, members tutor and mentor youth, build affordable housing, clean parks and streams, and recruit, train and manage community volunteers, and coordinate after-school programs.

In exchange, volunteers receive a very modest monetary award they can use towards college or qualified student loans. During their term of service, volunteers are also provided training, student loan deferment, health care, and in about half the cases, a modest annual living allowance.

The bill that President Obama just signed contains a few important changes: it increases volunteers to 250,000 from 75,000 annually, and bumps the education allowance to match the amount given by a Pell education grant ($5,350). The areas of service will also be expanded to include education, veterans’ affairs, health care, and renewable energy.

More needs to be done, though.

According to AmeriCorps, 46 percent of members embark on careers in education, social work, public safety, government and military service. A way to modernize the volunteer organization is to create strong mentorship opportunities for volunteers to interact with high-level managers, executives and elected officials who can help them envision and shape careers in those fields.

But to fully mature AmeriCorps we need to create tangible career tracks that lead to lasting professions in service, civic entrepreneurship, and elected office. President Obama is a perfect example of how community-level experience can form a solid foundation for a life in service and leadership.

We should provide the same opportunity to others.

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Juleyka Lantigua is a writer whose work has appeared in books, magazines and newspapers around the world.

By Juleyka Lantigua
Recently I was online filling out an application for a foreign affairs fellowship sponsored by a top government entity. After the usual who/what/where/when questionnaire, I was taken to a page with four essay-style questions.

In the interest of full disclosure, you should know that I have not written essay-like answers to anything, beyond winding personal emails from my closest friends, since I applied for graduate school ten years ago. But being a professional writer, I was unfazed by the prospect of some thought-provoking and intellect-tickling inquiry.

That is, until I came upon a question that, to summarize, went something like this: What conditions in the U.S. and Mexico have caused the immigration problem between the two countries, and how would you fix it.

REALLY? You’re asking lil’ old me? Gosh, I’m flattered. Here goes nothing….

“This is a large and complex issue that will require many large and small actions on the part of both governments over a long period of time. But some of the larger and immediate contributing factors that must be addressed include:
--the lack of viable employment for poor people in Mexico; the lapses in compulsory education—standard, higher and vocational—that leave millions without the proper training to pursue meaningful and lasting work in Mexico;
--the poorly regulated underground economy in the U.S., which makes it possible for millions of workers to be absorbed into exploitive work in the service and farming industries;
--and the unwillingness of the U.S. to establish a real and organized guest-worker program which allows seasonal workers to anchor their lives in Mexico while working in the U.S.

My first recommendation would be for both countries to establish a comprehensive guest-worker program, which encourages Mexicans to live, invest and thrive in their home country while earning a living in the U.S.

I would recommend that the Mexican government do more to create opportunities for training in forward-looking industrial sectors like alternative fuels, technology and health fields.

I do not believe that there is only one answer to this issue, but that a joint multi-prong approach is the best place to start.”

Ufff! That was a long breath. I hope that helps. Let me know if you have any other massive-scale issues you’d like me to tackle in 300 words or less.

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Juleyka Lantigua is a writer whose work has appeared in books, magazines and newspapers around the country.

Note: All pop-up content embedded into articles are selected by our site editors and not individual contributors. They are purely for informational and contextual purposes and do not constitute an endorsement by individual contributors to the Republica Update.

By Juleyka Lantigua
An environmental spark has been ignited in the South Bronx, a place usually associated with crime, poverty and all types of social ills. The point source for the flame is a statuesque and brilliant Black woman named Majora Carter, who is gaining national and international acclaim for her work in a forgotten corner of the world's most celebrated city.Majora Carter, 41, grew up watching buildings burn because of what she calls "the financial disinvestment" in her Hunts Point neighborhood in The Bronx. After graduating from Wesleyan, she returned home and became involved with local youth and arts groups, which led to community development and public arts projects.

She soon learned that New York City and New York State were planning to build a large waste facility on the area's waterfront to process 40 percent of the City's garbage. She started to make connections between the actions of the city and state governments and the ailing state of her community. "They were absolutely complicit in bringing on not just the economic disinvestment but also what it brought in: the environmental degradation of our community. They put it on poor communities of color, thinking they're not going complain too much."

Sustainable South Bronx (SSBX.org), the organization she helmed for seven years, started with the idea of building a South Bronx Greenway to include bicycle and pedestrian paths, open spaces, and waterfront access. When the restoration process began, the contractors would bring people in the work, even though the community had a 25 percent unemployment rate. So Carter started asking why they were not training locals to do the work.

Soon they were training people to work on reclaiming and rehabilitating the waterfront, wetland restoration, cleaning up contaminated land, and green-roof installation. "We effectively coupled poverty alleviation with environmental remediation so that we could work to make sure that people felt that they had the capacity to change the world and change their own lives at the same time," she explains proudly.

A tenet of the work SSBX does is the idea that environmental rights are civil rights. "It is the core of everything we do. Environmental justice means [certain] communities shouldn't have to have lots of environmental burdens and not enjoy environmental benefits," Carter says. She is unequivocal on this point. "Race and class are the ultimate indicators of where you're going to find the good stuff—like parks and trees—and where you're going to find the bad stuff—like waste facilities and power plants. And of course [there are] health effects associated with it."

In 2005, Carter was honored with a MacArthur "genius award" Fellowship in recognition of her work as "a relentless and charismatic urban strategist" as the foundation described her. But Carter, who has served on the Clinton Global Initiative Poverty Alleviation Panel, has always been very clear that the advocacy she practices is not about receiving charity.

"For us, it's about resource generation; it's about recognizing that there are assets here to produce even more resources. And that people are your ultimate resource…We're not expecting people to do this out of the kindness of their hearts…There will be many opportunities for people to participate in this," Carter says.

After years of focusing on improving the environment in her own backyard, Carter re-aligned the work of SSBX to parallel the growing economic needs of the area as well as the expanding demands of the burgeoning green economy. The aim is to develop an eco-industrial sector, a collection of businesses that use recycled materials as raw materials and has the potential to generate hundreds of local jobs. "I want to help make the South Bronx the center for green manufacturing in New York City," she asserts.

The Bronx is just the beginning. Carter is now transitioning out of her role as the head of SSBX to start her own organization, the Majora Carter Group. "My job will be to go around the country, and internationally, to help support other municipalities, business leaders, universities and community members so they can work together to unlock their green-collar potential." So far, she has received interest from Baltimore, Kansas City, Missouri, Miami, Milwaukee, and Detroit.

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Juleyka Lantigua is a writer whose work has appeared in books, magazines and newspapers around the country.

Note: All pop-up content embedded into articles are selected by our site editors and not individual contributors. They are purely for informational and contextual purposes and do not constitute an endorsement by individual contributors to the Republica Update.

By Juleyka Lantigua

“Give us your ideas, and we’ll give them to the president.”

That deceptively simple invitation lured me into the multi-layered change.gov website a few weeks ago—during a sleepless night, mind you. In case you don’t know, change.gov was set up by the Obama-Biden transition team as the preferred communication tool between the powers that be and the rest of us. There are many useful and many not-so-useful things on the site. (I’ll let you invest/waste your own time figuring out which is which.)

As I was saying, one recent winter night insomnia was tap dancing on my eyelids, so I logged on to see what people were saying. The set up was that you could vote for or against each post in order to move it up or down in the ranking, resulting in the best ideas getting the most votes and floating to the top, while the really bad ones sank to the bottom.

Allow me to summarize the more popular entries from the night I logged on:

--Withdrawing our troops from Iraq
--Free universal healthcare for everyone
--Ending our dependence on foreign oil
--Increasing our sources of sustainable energy

And so on. You get the picture; these are all BIG ideas that definitely need to be tackled, but that will take a loooooong time. So, in the interest of practicality, I decided to add some of my own ideas to the mix, just to see which would float and which would sink.

--Requiring that all public college/university graduates speak one foreign language fluently (starting with Spanish, Arabic, Chinese and Russian) in order to graduate
--Granting permanent resident status to any undocumented immigrant (w/o a criminal record) who has been in the country for 5+ years (and their kids and spouses)
--Forgiving 50% of all subsidized student loans for people who graduated in the last 10 years, so they can pump that money back into the economy
--Adding a community service requirement in order to graduate public high schools
--Establishing a guaranteed 2% interest rate for all first-time homebuyers with good credit who can put 10-20% down
--Cutting the payroll tax in half, so employers and employees get a cash infusion immediately
--Removing all vending machines from public schools

Needless to say, soon after I thrust my ideas into the public arena (much like a gladiator facing a packed Roman coliseum) I started to fret as people began to weigh in and rank them. Soon, I started to get very, very sleepy……

Juleyka Lantigua is a writer whose work has appeared in books, magazines and newspapers around the country.

By Juleyka Lantigua

As thousands of jobs are lost every day in this economic crisis, it’s time for the government and corporate America to start transforming traditional manufacturing jobs into green-collar jobs.

Simply put, a green-collar job contributes to the use and conservation of natural and existing resources and to reducing our reliance on fossil fuels like coal and oil, usually without a significant impact on the environment.

The most easily identifiable green jobs include manufacturing, installing and maintaining photovoltaic units (solar panels), harnessing the power of wind with windmills, and recycling and repurposing industrial materials. But there are many more jobs that fit this emerging labor category. Green roof installation and maintenance and HVAC retrofitting enable commercial and residential buildings to reduce their energy consumption while generating some of their own power.

The green-collar sector is a huge growth industry. Worldwide, businesses invested $117.2 billion in alternative energy in 2007, according New Energy Finance, a U.K. research company. Over 3,400 U.S. companies are in the solar energy business, including manufacturers, installers, distributors, developers and suppliers.

Art plays a pivotal role in creating cultural momentum. The MANIFEST HOPE: DC Gallery celebrates that role and shines a spotlight on artists who use their voices to amplify and motivate the grassroots movement that carried President-Elect Barack Obama to victory.
MANIFEST HOPE: DC gathers together a diverse array of the nation’s most talented visual artists under one roof to mark this monumental achievement in our nation’s history and encourages artists and activists to maintain the momentum to bring about true change in the United States.

Along with its partners, MoveOn.org Political Action, the Service Employees International Union and Obey Giant, MANIFEST HOPE: DC, will issue an inspiring visual call-to-action, encouraging a redirection of public energy toward true reform in three key areas: Health Care Reform, Workers' Rights and The Green Economy .

CONTEST | MANIFEST HOPE: DC invites you to show your art in Washington, D.C. during the Presidential Inauguration Celebration alongside some of the most celebrated artists today. [ SUBMIT YOUR ARTWORK HERE ]

The MANIFEST HOPE: DC Gallery will be open to the public in Washington, DC for the days preceding the Presidential Inauguration, Saturday, January 17th, 2009 through Monday, January 19th, 2009 between the hours of 10:00 AM - 6:00 PM. 3333 M Street NW, Washington DC 20007.

For more info visit: www.manifesthope.com

[ Source: Obey Giant ]

George W. is a good sport after an Iraqi reporter hurls not one, but two shoes at the outgoing President during a press conference. Props to Dubya for the excellent ducking skills. Check it out!

By Juleyka Lantigua

Chicago is the birthplace of the mythical Hollywood “untouchables,” corrupt and villainous men who existed beyond the reach of the law, who made vast fortunes and devastated countless lives. That was all supposed to be just a movie plot, but it seems that political life imitates art in Chicago.

The wind-swept city holds the embarrassing honor of ranking as one of the most politically corrupt in the country. Mayors, governors, state politicians and their peons, have walked a straight line into a prison cell following their time in office.

So it’s fitting, almost cinematic, that Chicago has assumed a starring role in what promises to be a sweeping national drama centered on the corrupt practices of a megalomaniacal governor and scores of dangerously ambitious politicians. The domino effect that promises to follow will leave a cadre of dishonored public servants and an irrevocably tainted public trust.

But the lesson here is not that absolute power corrupts absolutely, but rather that widespread apathy and complacency are the handy accomplice to the corruption. Many people in Chicago did no seem surprised, even moved, by the unfolding 76-page complaint against a governor who believed himself a political untouchable. Instead, anyone with a microphone in front of them, reminded the rest of us that Chicago has always been rotten to the core. They even taught us the  clever names they use, like “pay-for-play” and “pinstripe partisanship.”

And therein lies the problem.

It is antithetical to a democracy to have a population—be it a town, city, state or country—that accepts widespread corruption as a way of life. It is deplorable that, instead of striving for real change, elected officials simply figure out how to work the system to reap maximum benefits. But it is even more egregious that the citizenry stand by and watch it all happen, almost nodding with ascent because they knew it was eventually going to happen.

Now the soon-to-be-former governor has been transformed into a different type of political untouchable: the kind whose toxic stench radiates for miles out, razing careers, corroding the pubic trust, and poisoning everything he touches.

When he stands before a judge, the entire city and state will stand in spirit behind him as co-defendants in his narcissistic and vile chapter of political theater.

"Juleyka Lantigua is a journalist and editor whose work appears in national newspapers and magazines. For more info visit: www.juleykalantigua.com."