Romero Institute

The lakota people's law project continued to advocate for the rights and sovereignty of the lakota sioux people. Our five respected lakota leaders set priorities and worked collaboratively with our California team. Our dominant project in 2022 was a major campaign to turn out the native vote in rapid city, south dakota, where we produced an "oceti vote" event that helped register community members for the national election. That event brought a basketball tournament, live music, and handgames (a traditional lakota practice) to rapid city. On voting rights, we also successfully served as plaintiff in a lawsuit brought against south dakota by legal allies to ensure compliance with the national voter registration act ("motor voter" law). The settlement reached in this suit will ensure that native folks in south dakota can register to vote when visiting agencies like the department of motor vehicles, as mandated by federal law. Another major commitment was our work on behalf of the standing rock sioux tribe, for whom we provided technical support in relation to its ongoing effort to resist the dakota access pipeline. We managed the tribe's communication flow, including their e-blasts, video production, fundraising, website development, and press releases. At standing rock we also operated our kinship care home, where 3-5 children were housed throughout the year, and we made strides in developing our "nodapl" archive which, when eventually launched in collaboration with sitting bull college and loyola university chicago, will provide an enormous amount of free media about pipeline fights including dakota access to educators, journalists, lawyers, and others across the world. Additionally, in an historic battle, our attorneys and communications staff pushed hard to support the indian child welfare act (icwa) at the supreme court, where icwa was under attack from activist lawyers in Texas. Our attorneys prepared an amicus brief submitted to the court in collaboration with the chair of our board of advisors, former u.s. Senator james abourezk, the main author of icwa. In an historic decision, the supreme court's ruling preserved the protection of indian parents and children provided in the icwa law. Lastly, we worked at cheyenne river nation in south dakota to incubate a child welfare department for the tribe.

The rico project began the legal research to produce a criminal complaint against the six major oil and gas corporations in California. Both the federal congress and the California state legislature have criminalized the joining together of a group of individuals in a criminal conspiracy to commit two or more of any of a list of 32 specific crimes. These specific crimes include: murder; murder-for-hire; kidnapping; bribery; witness intimidation; witness tampering; embezzlement; wire fraud; arson; extortion; robbery; theft; obstruction of justice; money laundering; terrorism and several other serious felony crimes. The research reveals that each of these corporations' officers and management officials, during this past 47 year period, has been responsible for committing, directing, and/or expressly authorizing the commission of two or more of these specific state and federal predicate criminal acts of the federal criminal racketeering act of 1970. The Romero legal team has been preparing a federal and a state complaint under the federal criminal racketeering act, intending to present it to the legal bodies who can assemble a grand jury to investigate the crimes. On november 10, 2022, in a parallel development, California attorney general rob bonta filed a lawsuit against the big oil and gas companies charging them with many of the crimes outlined in our research. We are grateful for any public officials who will apply the rule of law to this industry.the special media project is a research and investigative project that is preparing to produce a publicly available archive, a podcast series, a documentary series, and a cable series about the legal, investigative, and organizing activities of the christic Institute and the Romero Institute. The research covers 50 years of public interest work and reveals important historical information that is relevant today regarding systemic injustice in corporate and government corruption, human and civil rights violations, criminal activity, constitutional violations, drug smuggling, and illegal war making. The Romero Institute archival project seeks to correct the historical record and lay out the facts in several media formats. The goal is to share true facts that beg for new laws and policies needed to create a sustainable, green, and thriving future for the u.s. and the world.

Let's green California developed plans and policies for California achieving close to zero carbon emissions in 10 years. We have a moral obligation to end the climate crisis and all citizens must be able to participate, so we partnered with the dolores huerta foundation, and with vulnerable communities and working families throughout California to build bottom-up solutions to the climate crisis, putting equity, jobs and workers, and frontline communities first. As the fifth largest economy in the world and a historic environmental leader, California is uniquely positioned to create a model of equitable climate action that can be replicated worldwide. The team conducted extensive research and authored a policy framework to electrify California, create good-paying green jobs, and get the golden state back on track to achieving its 2030 climate goals. Our framework became the basis of senate bill 1230 that was introduced by senator limon and passed in 2022. This legislation makes it easier for millions of low and moderate- income californians to purchase evs. We secured 100+ organizational endorsements, eight senate co-authors, and governor newsom's signature. We continued our work to build the cca and workforce and ej standards alliance of 32 labor, climate and environmental justice organizations that is working to strengthen labor standards at regional clean energy agencies, and has earned wins in san mateo, san francisco, and the central coast. In addition, our work in the monterey catholic diocese has continued to organize successful electrify California events in parishes, again reaching 1000s of low to moderate-income citizens about the health and climate values of electrifying kitchens and cars, and the financial incentives available to make it affordable. Our work to make green solutions more available to 80% of californians who are low to moderate-income citizens will continue into 2023, because we know that solving the climate crisis will require all citizens participating.

The new paradigm Institute project was launched in 2022 when lui elizandro, a pentagon whistleblower who had been the director of the multi-decade pentagon covert program that was investigating ufos and uaps (unidentified aerial phenomena) asked our general counsel, dan sheehan, to represent him in challenging legal issues of importance to the public. He was the first high level insider to release information about the many military videos tracking these vehicles in the air, and he stated that they are not ours, not the russians, and not the chinese". He was the first to publicly state that "it appears that the vehicles are of highly intelligent, non-human origin". His statements were covered by the new york times, 60 minutes, and later reviewed by the house of representatives and the u.s. senate which are now demanding transparency of 80 years of covert documents and videos.