I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
Moral thinking never changes anything, true, but it’s hard to escape moral words. Like “corruption.” Corruption is, in fact, the focus of an upcoming local production of Sophocles’ “Oedipus” (in which I have a small role). And just the other day I heard Greg Fouratt, the interim U.S. Attorney for New Mexico, address the Albuquerque Press Women about public corruption.
That coincidence sent me to dictionaries, which agree that corruption is “dishonesty for personal gain” or “impairment of integrity, virtue or moral principle.” It’s “decay” or “rot,” too.
The dictionaries don’t limit corruption to governmental crime, but that’s the Establishment teaching. We all agree that public servants who steal from us should be exposed and punished. But folks atop the hierarchy want us to believe convicting an Aragon or Vigil solves the problem. Nobody else cheats. Certainly not those who condemn “corruption.”
If that were true there’d be no corrupt privatization. Consider how much Halliburton and Blackwater have stolen from us in Iraq. Consider the privatization of Medicare that enriched insurance companies and big PhRMA via a prescription drug benefit.
Remember when New Mexico privatized Medicaid?
Governor Gary Johnson invented Salud and a new, Republican-led company arose to bid for contracts. Soon thereafter, Johnson’s Human Services honcho fled the Land of Enchantment. There were probes but no indictments; corruption perhaps, sans crime.
Widening the lens further, what about good ol’ corporate corruption?
A year later, we’re still suffering from the Wall Street rot that sparked a deep global recession but most responsible actors are enjoying cushy retirements. And regulatory reform languishes.
Plain vanilla business corruption prospers, including advertising lies. The “honest” flavors in Marie Callender’s Italian dinners aren’t Grandma’s, but from ConAgra’s chemical plants. Given ConAgra’s political contributions, heavily favoring the GOP but hardly neglectful of Democrats, truth-in-advertising is no imminent threat.
Speaking of contributions, what’s more corrupt than our electoral system?
On the bright side, though, our free, fair press fights corruption.
Saturday, Sept. 12, the Albuquerque Journal ran an Associated Press story headlined “Health Care Overhaul Could Raise Premiums.” It was front page.
The headline was metaphysically accurate, like those road signs that warn, “Gusty winds may exist.” But the story was weak. The AP authors themselves wrote cautiously that if the President obtains universal coverage, “some analysts say individuals could wind up paying higher premiums.”
That turned out to be one business school professor’s view.
Taking a different tack was a McClatchy story in the Sept. 16 Journal. Headlined “Health Care Premiums Rising Faster Than Wages” and based on two organizational studies, it reported health care costs to individuals and employers rose in 2008 for the 10th consecutive year. Also, they’ve outpaced wages and general inflation.
That one didn’t run on the front page. It was farther back, on A7.
But let’s re-consider that entire Saturday, Sept. 12 Journal.
Besides the AP front-pager, there was a Santa Fe neurologist’s Op-Ed opposing Obama’s health reform ideas, three vaguely anti-reform cartoons and an AP account of how the deficit “worries” GOP leaders and private economists.
Plus, in the West Side edition, conservative columnists Mike and Genie Ryan were disappointed by President Obama’s health care speech.
(Congressional decorum bothered them, too; applause interrupted Obama too often. They didn’t mention Republican Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” – probably out in the kitchen for that.)
In sum, the Albuquerque Journal’s Sept. 12 newspaper advocated Republican Party views on health care reform and deficits via “news stories,” their placement, their headlines, opinion pieces and cartoons.
Corruption? Nah.
