OP-ED

When you get vaccinated, you’re not doing it just for yourself. You’re doing it for those close to you, for your friends and family, and for the community. If we want to see an end to this pandemic and get back to some sense of normalcy, we need to get vaccinated.

The three officers responsible for the murder of Breonna Taylor are not the first to walk free after killing an unarmed Black person, and unfortunately, especially if things continue as they are, they will not be the last. Things continuing as they are includes the decision to only charge one Louisville police officer for the destruction of property, which sends the message that Black lives do not matter to law enforcement agencies.

Successfully addressing poverty is going to require a different approach. With bipartisan support and by embedding fatherhood programming in the administration's child poverty strategy, Biden can score an early, easy, unifying victory and help take decisive action towards ending the scourge of child poverty.

Policymakers, larger technology industry stakeholders, and community leaders must come together to broaden access to the tools available to small business owners today. This should encompass greater familiarity with digital advertising platforms, online payment processing capability through services such as Square, and third-party delivery options that are becoming increasingly digitized like USPS, FedEx, or UPS.

When people are given a fair opportunity to participate in the workforce, our economy and society are stronger. That is why we're proud to serve as co-chairs of the Second Chance Business Coalition. Our goal is to encourage the nation's largest employers to give more people with criminal backgrounds a second chance at the dignity of a good job and a better life for themselves and their families.

The disenfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of D.C. residents is fundamentally un-American and there is no good reason to allow it to continue. There are bogus reasons to oppose statehood, and some Republicans in Congress have been trotting them out now that legislation to admit Washington, D.C. as a statehood bill is moving forward in Congress.

They demand that the spending be “paid for,” even though they had no problem passing a massive tax cut for the rich and corporations without concern for the deficit. But they reject Biden’s plan to pay for the spending by raising taxes on the rich and the corporations.

As we celebrate, we must ask ourselves if this was justice or accountability? Justice is a fair and moral process within a system of law in which every person receives his/ her/it’s due from the system. Accountability is the obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or to account for one's actions. Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd. He took away the one thing most precious to Mr. Floyd and his family, his life. Chauvin took him away from his family, friends and loved ones.

No matter what I’ve done over the last several days, I find that I am repeatedly drawn back to that image of the families of George Floyd and Daunte Wright in Minneapolis, united by their grief, their arms around each other’s shoulders.

With this verdict, the jury has made an unambiguous declaration that unwarranted use of force against Black people by police is a crime, and that Black Lives Matter."