New Mexico, for instance, finds itself ranked 7th in the country for the number of women killed by men. In 2007, 22 women were killed by men, over half of them either wives or girlfriends of their murderers. One anti-domestic violence Web site, divorcesupoort.com, reports that over a third of such murders of women nationally were at the hands of an “intimate partner.” Strikingly, only 4 percent of male murder victims were killed by an intimate female partner.

Misogyny, rape, domestic violence, racism, homophobia, hate crimes and hate speech are cultural sicknesses that plague our society and many others around the world. They are always with us like some terrible repeating infection. The stress of hard times tends to make them worse. There’s no absolute cure for them. Law and custom, though, can keep them at bay.

I was shocked to find that Minnesota Senator Al Franken’s recent effort to strengthen anti-rape laws, although successful, was opposed by 30 senators purporting to defend labor laws and protect business. The deep moral customs of respectful speech, decorum, politeness, general decency of behavior and a humane concern for the well-being of others have been overwhelmed in the last decades by savage talk radio, public political vileness and an explosion of hate speech that aid in creating an acceptance of verbal assault and potential physical violence that’s dangerous to us all.

Franken’s amendment to the 2010 Defense Appropriation bill would make it illegal for subcontractors to require female employees to sign a contract requiring them to forgo their right to due process in open court in cases of rape and sexual harassment, instead submitting to a process of private arbitration. The amendment passed 68-30 with bipartisan support.

Franken’s amendment does not preclude arbitration if the employee wants it, but restores a woman’s right to an impartial trial in a court of law.

The amendment arose in response to a 2005 gang rape of Jamie Leigh Jones by fellow employees working for a Halliburton subsidiary, KBR, in Baghdad. After the barbarity of the rape, she says, she was held without food or water for 24 hours in a shipping container, and threatened with the loss of her job if she talked publicly about what happened.

Acts like this have always been the darkest of brutal secrets in American life and in most of the cultures of the world. The misogyny began to gain ground again in this country with the so-called defeat of the latest version of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982. The ERA reads “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”

The KBR contract that Jamie Leigh Jones had to sign, which took away her constitutional rights to due process, would never have been possible if the ERA had been ratified.

The recent ongoing nadir in misogyny started symbolically, at least, in the early years of the Clinton Administration when Rush Limbaugh made an unthinkably wretched, hateful remark on his now defunct 1993 TV show about the President’s teenage daughter.

To quote the late Molly Ivins, “On his TV show…Limbaugh put up a picture of Socks, the White House cat, and asked ‘Did you know there’s a White House dog?’ Then he put up a picture of Chelsea Clinton, who was 13 years old at the time and as far as I know had never harmed anyone.” Five years later, John McCain went even deeper into the sewer at a Republican Senate fund raising function asking “Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno.”

Those early public breaks with decency and decorum played right into the woman-hating wing of American politics. It took a decade and a half for things to get so abysmal that an entire political party, the Democrats, would be slandered by being called Nazis and Maoists.

Rough and tumble speech in American politics is protected by the First Amendment. Even hate speech is, unless it is judged to have been the immediate cause of violence. And that’s as it should be. How else are we to know what people are really thinking and what atrocities of rage they are harboring?

Hate crimes are another matter. Most states and the federal government see the motivation of hate as an aggravating circumstance in an act of aggression which triggers a harsher sentence.

Rape is always a hate crime. And hate crimes arise from the predispositions of a person’s character in the context of his culture. American misogyny, flaunted even by a few national “leaders,” is at the root of the rape and most murders of women. The only way to lessen the power of misogyny is to begin to heal our cultural pathology about women.

So the minority mayor is something of a stealth mayor too. We really don’t know what we’eve gotten yet.

His minority status will make it hard for his ideas to get a hearing, when we hear them. Two Democrats won some 56 percent of the vote between them. Berry had 44 percent. This year only three candidates could get the 6,500 or so signatures necessary to get on the ballot, and raise the $19,000 in small contributions to qualify for public financing.

In the old days, signature requirements for mayor were very small, and the ballot tended to be full of candidates, including lovable crackpots. For years no one got 40 percent on the first ballot needed to win. A crowded field with a runoff between the top two vote getters guaranteed a majority mayor – even if the race was close, as it was in the first election in 1974 with 2000 votes separating winner Harry Kinney from city planner Herb Smith, or the election of 1993 when Martin Chavez beat former Governor Dave Cargo by 600 votes.

Mayor Berry is one down before he starts. He has the albatross of his party to contend with first. He and the Republican majority on the city Council can cram bad ideas down our throats, I suppose. But opposing coercion can be fierce in Albuquerque – witness the 25 year struggle over the Montaño Road bridge, with its encumbering baggage of ill-will and deep suspicion that Mayor Chavez could never lose after he finally rammed it through in his second term.

Many Democrats – long fed up the absolute intransigence of no-saying Republicans in Congress, their abusive and childish tactics, and their refusal to disavow their rabid radio hate jockeys who happily call Democrats Nazis and worse – won’t work with Republicans at all anymore. I don’t blame them.

Mayor Berry commendably did not descend to character assassination in this campaign. There was no out and out RNC slathering and snapping. Is it possible he’s a civilized Republican? Are there any left in Fox News wonderland and the Party of Limbaugh? Have local Republicans across the nation maintained their independence, unlike the Right Wing chorus of NO in the Congress?

Let’s for the moment say Berry is such a civilized gent.

The question then becomes is there enough serious thinking in the Republican arsenal of urban policies to allow him to remain loyal to the party and cope with the challenges that face him, and all the rest of us?

I’d have to say, I doubt it. If Berry is a booster, a sprawler, if he really thinks he can run City Hall “like a business,” if growth at any cost is his philosophy then we’re all in deep trouble.

This is a time for rethinking, not bulling ahead with old ideas that don’t fit the times.

Anyone who thinks the economy is on a sustained rebound doesn’t have much personal risk involved. Population growth, and geographical sprawling, won’t get us out of this mess – because they won’t happen, perhaps for years, and, by then, other painful realities will become very obvious.

Talking with many people around the city, it becomes clear that the housing industry is at a dead stop. No one is building. No one can. Credit is virtually a thing of the past. Consumer confidence is so far down, even now, that it’s barely half what it should be for retail to begin the slow job of repair. The Great Recession, as the AP calls it, has left residential contractors, and their myriad subcontractors and suppliers, jobless. Even big money, like oil and gas companies, have cut back on spending. Nothing’s moving but work on public buildings and government construction. And there’s not much of that. People I talk to say they have never experienced anything like it in their lifetimes. And they are not optimistic about it lifting anytime soon.

This is not a time to be planning for westward expansion, plotting a loop road to open up the Rio Puerco basin, not a time for Albuquerque to be buying into Sandoval County’s and Rio Rancho’s dreams of glory for a westside city on the hill.

Running the city like a business in the old sense of the cliche, and in this business climate, would mean running the city like a failed business – cutting jobs, scaling back services, tightening and tightening until nothing’s left, but refusing to change the failed products. Albuquerque mustn’t remain like the auto industry, flogging expensive, gas guzzling, extravagant plans to people who need the basics, and who might support genuine innovation – if it works for them.

This is a time to look at why the worn out old vision couldn’t sustain itself in hard times. Random, indiscriminate, mindless growth just won’t work when the economy has no margin for error.

But what will work? First off, the damages of the past have to be repaired. It’s folly to be planning for a resumption of the old status quo. It may come back for a year or two, and then strand us all again in even worse shape. Any investor knows now to keep heavy in cash, keep flexible, prepare for change, and be able to move fast when change comes. We can’t be building our municipal portfolio of plans and ideas hoping to resume what used to be. We have to prepare for a hard transition from the illusions of abundant water and fuel to a time of scarcity, conservation, holding on and making due until, and if, new technologies catch up with our predicament. Cities all over the world are starting to do this. The Berry Administration needs to too.

We need more innovation with mass transit, employing all kinds of buses already in the city. We need a clear, equitable approach to water conservation in the light of what seems to be a prolonged and potentially disastrous, global warming-caused drought in the West.

We need to recreate City Hall’s relationship with neighborhoods. Intelligent infill that doesn’t inflame opposition is the only way to get construction workers back to work.

The city needs to partner up with PNM on alternative energy, and do so aggressively. The Berry administration has to take the lead to press for adjudication of senior water rights in the Middle Rio Grande Valley and put an end to growth on the promise of water, rather than on the possession actual wet water.

Albuquerque needs to counterbalance the scavenging for agricultural water rights with a conservation plan that doesn’t attack farmers who are making a move to supply more of our basic food supply in an era of rising fuel prices and the inflation it causes in trucked in food.

The Berry Administration must focus on affordable housing, and the recognition of the world of financial hurt in which many of our residents suffer.

And Albuquerque needs to begin building the kind of trust it will take to have a new and productive relationship with Pueblo nations in our area, the holders of the most senior water rights in the state.

Please, let’s not run Albuquerque like a failed business and keep on doing the same old things until we’re utterly bankrupt.

Is it their basic humanity? Has the instinct for the humane care of others been expunged from certain legal and political philosophies? Has fear and prejudice seeped so deeply into our culture that being innocent until proven guilty is no longer the ultimate, golden rule principle of our legal system?

Capital punishment again emerged into public consciousness three weeks ago when executioners at the Ohio state prison in Lucasville failed in their grim task after two hours and 18 attempts at trying to find veins in the body of Romell Broom, 53, that they could use to inject him with lethal drugs. Broom even tried to help them. Some say he was driven half crazy by the attempt.

Broom was given a week’s reprieve, but his attorney filed suit in federal court claiming that to try to execute him again would violate his eighth amendment right against cruel and unusual punishment.

If Broom’s case gets to the Supreme Court, he’s not likely to find a sympathetic ear as far as the majority is concerned. And in a nation in which torture is no longer the mark of a totalitarian devil, I’d say the notion of cruel and unusual punishment is on the verge of being culturally erased in our country.

Broom also has legal precedent against him. In 1946, Louisiana failed in an attempt to execute a convicted killer by electrocution. The Supreme Court a year later said it was constitutional to try again. Executioners were successful the second time.

Apparently there’s no question about Broom’s guilt. He raped and murdered a young girl 25 years ago. It’s taken his case so long to move through the system that, in effect, he’s served a life sentence. Now he’s endured a botched execution, and will probably be put to death in the future.

The core argument against the death penalty is based on the belief that the state, as a representative of the people, should not act in ways that are similar to those who commit heinous crimes. The state, itself, should not be a murderer. State officials should not be required to act in ways that are normally committed by sadists, the insane, or people in the heat of rage. There’s just no way to compartmentalize killing.

And that has particular force with the chance that the state could kill an innocent person caught in a web of erroneous, but fatal, circumstances – as may have happened to Cameron Todd Willingham in 2004.

Willingham was executed in Texas in 2004, accused of committing arson in his own home and killing his three young children. A preponderance of new evidence, including an emphatic declaration by one of the nation’s most respected arson scientists and investigators that the fire was accidental, couldn’t sway Texas authorities.

In 1993, Leonel Herrera was executed in Texas for killing two police officers. He’d been on death row since 1981. Nine years before his execution, Herrera’s brother Raul was murdered. The brother’s attorney signed an affidavit saying that Raul told him he had killed the officers. Another man who had been in jail with Raul signed a similar affidavit. Two more people did the same, one claiming to be an eye witness. Leonel Herrera petitioned for a new trial based on this strong new evidence. He was eventually denied and took the case to the Supreme Court.

In 1993, an absurdity of illogic and deep injustice condemned Herrera to death. Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote for the majority that federal capital trials “must rule only on procedural claims, not on errors of fact.” Rehnquist continued, saying that “actual innocence is not itself a constitutional claim.” And that once a person has been convicted in court, “the presumption of innocence disappears.”

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Harry Blackmun, a Nixon appointee and conservative justice, wrote “the execution of a person who can show that he is innocent comes perilously close to simple murder.”

Were race or poverty factors in Willingham’s and Herrera’s executions? That remains a haunting question at the core of the capital punishment debate.

If Herrera had gone to the Supreme Court this year he would have met with the spirit of Rehnquist still dishing out his absurdist, pedantic logic. Rehnquist, who died in 2005, would probably have voted with the 5-4 majority of the court that maintained suing for DNA testing was not a right guaranteed to a person convicted of a capital crime. Chief Justice John Roberts, Rehnquist’s replacement, held that ”A criminal defendant proved guilty in a fair trial does not have the same liberty interests as a free man.”

In the case of Troy Davis, on death row in Georgia, nine prosecution witnesses recanted their testimonies. This was sufficient for a 7-2 majority on the Supreme Court this year to require a federal court in Georgia to reconsider Davis’s innocence. In dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia echoed Rehnquist writing that the Supreme Court “has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince” a lower court “that he is ‘actually’ innocent.”

How can one have a fair trial if the evidence is false, if witnesses lie, if prosecutors and judges allowed that to happen? Isn’t the basic truth of the testimony the deciding factor in whether or not a trial was fair?

If a president of the Unites States can be impeached for perjury, or lying under oath, is it logical to assert that the innocence of a person convicted of a capital crime on the strength of perjured evidence, or evidence that is otherwise false, isn’t protected by the Constitution, the chief instrument of justice in the United States?

When political philosopher John Rawls said that if slavery isn’t an injustice, nothing is an injustice, he constructed a logic that applies to Herrera, Williamham, Davis, and a dozens of others. If executing an innocent person when there is enough new evidence to conduct a fresh trial isn’t an injustice, nothing is an injustice.

I think it’s time for the federal government to follow the lead of New Mexico, Alaska, Hawaii, Iowa, Kansas, Maine Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wisconsin in abolishing the death penalty.

The whole legitimacy of our government rests on the credibility of its claim to guarding and dispensing equal justice under law. If the Constitution doesn’t protect an innocent person from the injustice of execution based on false accusation and false information, what does it protect us from? And who can feel safe?

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But it’s really a disaster. This is a time of worldwide transition that has startling local ramifications that no candidate is addressing. Residents in neighboring Phoenix, Tucson, Las Vegas, Denver, Los Angeles, and San Diego are having dialogues about the future. Albuquerque is still living in the past.

Candidates are talking about crime, education, jobs, budgets, helping small business, and the inner workings of City Hall as if these were normal times.

But this is city government. Not state government. Not the federal government. Talking about stopping crime and helping small business, and ramping up jobs, and even education are like city candidates talking about “whipping inflation” in the Eisenhower era. Just how much of this can one reasonably hope to accomplish on the city level? How do you help small business in a city? Lower the $35 occupation tax? Come up with city jobs in a bare bones financial environment?

For a city government to help put people back to work in a flat line recession requires powerful innovation, a new view of urban possibilities, an intricate, well-conceived vision and strategy for retrofitting what’s dysfunctional now and will soon be a huge burden on everyone – sprawl and its various wastes. Putting people back to work—in a town that thrives on the building trades when few buildings are getting built—requires a whole revisioning of the city. If you’re trying to jump start an economy in a drought caused by global warming in an age of peak oil and skyrocketing future energy costs, you deal with those issues on an urban level, you struggle to build an economic strategy around them, not ignore them.

We need to think in public about what used to be unthinkable possibilities, like not having enough water to sustain current populations, much less grow to a million people. We need public discussion about the relationship between the city and the countryside, urban water users and rural water users and agriculture. We need to get serious. Not mumble platitudes and give off jolly smirks.

And solving Albuquerque’s crime problem is not a doable goal for any mayor. Keeping it in check is, perhaps. But successful law enforcement requires the money and the talent to ensure a high quality, above-board, moral police force working every hour of every day. Few cities have that kind of money or that kind of leadership. It took a genius in Los Angeles to pull that off – Chief William J. Bratton, who also ran the NYPD for a while. Albuquerque isn’t that kind of town with those kinds of resources.

The 2009 mayoral election lets us know that nobody is really steering the boat. And it puts us at peril. It echoes the 1981 election between former booster Mayor Harry Kinney and a radio talk show joker named Gordon Sanders, who actually defeated one of Albuquerque’s best mayors, David Rusk, in the primaries. This is almost as bad as the 1985 election which pitted used car dealer Ken Shultz against Jim Baca. It was a race between two Democrats. Few could believe that Baca, who won major concessions from the liquor industry as State Liquor Director and was a recently successful State Land Commissioner, lost to Schultz by 2000 votes. As hard as he tried, Baca couldn’t raise the level of discourse. His opponent and leading news outlets mouthed booster blather and put voters to sleep. In this election, we don’t have anyone anywhere near as far seeing as Jim Baca.

The October 6 mayoral election will result, I’m pretty sure, in a ho-hum run off. No one will get the 40 percent of the vote needed to win. But who wins and loses won’t matter very much as far as the city’s future is concerned. Their campaigns are as relevant to the environmental and economic realities of the moment as phony non-partisan elections are relevant to the party warfare of post-Bush, Obama America.

If the runoff pits Democratic Mayor Martin Chavez against Republican Richard Berry, Mayor Chavez will win. It could be close, but if the Republican party brings in national PR attack dogs to smear the mayor, Chavez will walk away with it. In Democratic Albuquerque, a Republican candidate has his own party’s national reputation to fear. Should the party of Limbaugh and Beck get crazed with its normal nastiness, city voters, as always, will go with who they consider the most reasonable candidate in the runoff.

If, by some miracle, Richard Romero and Richard Berry end up in the runoff, Berry’s nice guy demeanor, empty campaign rhetoric and rightwing voters, might squeak by to win. But no one, surely, can take seriously a candidate who talks about running City Hall like a business. That’s an age old rubric that goes nowhere. City Hall is a government. It serves; it doesn’t profit. If profits are involved, they almost have to be criminal profits that do the public no good. There’s no other way around it.

Romero’s bipartisanship when he was in the state senate does not make him as strong a Democratic candidate as Chavez, even though the mayor is a throwback to the mindset of arch boomer, Republican Mayor Harry Kinney. With partisanship screaming from every pore of every politician, a hands-across-the-aisle kind of guy doesn’t cut it in the eyes of many. Who wants to make deals with present day mad dog Republicans? On the other hand, Romero might be able to spin Berry into a party corner, and attract a winning following of young Obama voters.

Whereas a Chavez and Berry runoff would be about hollow issues, a Chavez and Romero runoff could turn into a legitimate fight over a workable vision for the future, should Romero refine his campaign and concentrate on issues that matter.

While the Albuquerque Journal, which endorsed Chavez, is losing readership, and has already lost ground with young people who want to read things that make them think, The Weekly Alibi is gaining ground, is wired into the Internet world of fast information, and has endorsed Romero.

I find myself rolling my eyes at writing yet another city election column. I’ve been doing this since 1974. It’s hard to imagine how such a wonderful place as Albuquerque could have been afflicted with such basically nondescript leadership.

I put our success as a city to the hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of volunteers and professionals who have toiled year after year to preserve open space, to keep our symphony going, to keep alive our public television and public radio stations, to support and build our magnificent museums, our zoo, our botanical gardens, our libraries, our bosque, our homeless shelters, our food and clothing banks, our halfway houses, our emergency rooms, and our schools, university, and community collage.

These behind-the-scenes people have made us a great city. Now we need a visionary politician brave and smart enough to help us think about how we’re going to cope with the realities of the future hard times ahead. Maybe we’ll see one emerge four years from now. I hope it’s not too late.

Some people at that rally were openly using the “N-word” in a association with the President of the United States as if it were somehow acceptable and not despicable. Expressions of Antisemitism were heard at that rally too.

Those aren’t just a few crazy people. Politics in America has become so hateful and intellectually violent that bigoted people have been given permission to scream the vilest words of racial derision as if all of America were the 1950s Jim Crow South.

A white legislator from a southern state actually insulted the President during a speech to Congress, calling him a liar. If President Obama weren’t African American, do you think that would ever have happened? I do not. If President Obama were as white as Ronald Reagan, do you think the far-right would have dared claim that he was planning to fill the heads of school children with socialist propaganda instead–of giving them an uplifting pep talk about hard work and study on the opening day of school?

If “reverse racism” is used to attack “affirmative action” and counter charges of racial and ethnic hatred, then surely you can’t have reverse racism if racism itself doesn’t exist.

Racism has been a brutal reality in our country since the beginning. But racism is not only a matter of terrorist violence, flagrant intimidation and grotesque hate speech. It has its covert and all pervasive aspects as well.

Even in the relatively prosperous 1980s and 1990s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, for instance, routinely discriminated against Hispanics, African Americans, and women when it came extending credit and financial advice to small farmers and ranchers through the Farm Service Agency. No one ever hears about that, but it had a devastating financial impact on the family farm, and on hardworking Americans who suffered economic injustices because of their ethnicity and gender.

In the class-action suit Guadalupe L. Garcia v. Tom Vilsack, claimants contend that the USDA violated the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. According to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the USDA had “a long, sordid and well-documented history of discrimination against minorities in connection with farm credit and benefits programs.” Garcia claimants hold that in the 1980s the “USDA secretly dismantled its apparatus for civil rights enforcement. As a result, for approximately 15 years, minority farmers who complained of discrimination” in lending practices, “found their complaints relegated to a bureaucratic black hole.”

The discrimination was so blatant that African American farmers in a nearly identical suit to Garcia v. Vilsack known as Pigford v. Glickman won a settlement from the government to the tune of almost $2.5 billion. But no such settlement has yet been reached for Hispanic farmers and ranchers.

Politicians from New Mexico and Colorado, including New Mexico Congressmen Ben Ray Lujan and Martin Heinrich, and Senator Tom Udall and his cousin Mark Udall from Colorado, have joined many others in signing a letter urging President Obama to settle the Garcia suit expeditiously.

In Garcia’s class action, more than 82,000 Hispanic farmers could be affected, more than 90 percent of them owning small family farms. This includes the 8,073 Hispanic farmers in our state, most of whom form the backbone of local agriculture in northern New Mexico.

Guadalupe Garcia, himself, was repeatedly denied operating loans, despite a positive cash flow and good collateral. Farms are small businesses. Without the operating capital to hold him over through the farming cycle, Garcia was forced to give up his farm in 1999.

One can hear the rumblings already about “affirmative action lending,” and “reverse racism.” But some groups did get financial aid and credit from the USDA. If it wasn’t African American, Hispanic, or women farmers, who was it?

Covert racial bias as represented in both Pigford and Garcia give us a clue as to what lies beneath all manner of governmental, financial, and corporate bureaucracies–a hard-to-detect red lining depriving certain people of needed capital and services, and rewarding others for the color of their skin. It’s a painful irony, indeed, to realize that, while financial institutions were inducing all kinds of Americans to take out large, unpayable loans on housing to create the illusion of home ownership and Reaganesque prosperity, hard working small farmers were denied loans because of their race. That’s sickening.

Covert racism takes many forms. If we looked hard, I imagine we’d find hundreds if not thousands of cases in which civil rights and equal opportunity legislation was ignored or violated.

Some say racism is all in the eye of the beholder. But when people use racial jokes, racial taunts, and the winks and smirks of rudeness and disrespect, when people resort to the most rancid rhetoric imaginable, it becomes clear that racism is still our national sin, despite all the good work that’s been done to deprive it of energy and kill it off.

Some may not see it this way, but racism in New Mexico is still working its sordid and terrible way through our lives. In the not too distant past, the state’s two most prominent Hispanic legislators, both Democrats, one the Speaker of the House and the other the President Pro Tem of the Senate were subjected to endless harassment, racial jokes and slurs, and savage accusations by their political opponents. After a decade of such treatment, they were effectively driven from office.

The Republican U.S. Attorney here in the mid 1980′s spent four years harassing Democratic Governor Toney Anaya, trying to get something on him, to no avail.

Mention bilingual education in bilingual New Mexico and you’ll often hear people say that monolingual persons who only speak English are somehow better educated than multilingual people who speak both Spanish and English.

Racism simmers along doing its covert damage for years. Small human rights and equal opportunity victories are recorded, but can really do nothing get at the core infection.

And then suddenly bigotry rises up out of the slime and makes itself embarrassingly and detestably apparent again. We are in such a time. The hardest thing for people of good will to bear – people on both the left and the right, of all parties, and of all races, ethnicities, and genders – is their awareness of the deep rooted realities of prejudice and discrimination, their knowledge of the terrible harm it does, and their impotence to do anything to end it in America.

Only free individual human beings, or advocates for the rights of individuals, can have authentic credibility. When we don’t think for ourselves, however, we become political dummies for the ventriloquism of ideologues and the propaganda of their secretive rich sponsors.

Organizations of all kinds who assert their right to “free speech,” equating persuasion with money and the mind tricks of the advertising that money can buy, have no credibility.

Who in his right mind believes political advertising? All anyone has to do is consider the source.

The differences between free speech and propaganda will be an unspoken part of a heated debate before the Supreme Court this week when it begins hearing arguments on a case called Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. At issue will be the supposed first amendment rights of corporate and other legal entities to spend all the money they want opposing or supporting political candidates with direct political advertising.

Commercial propaganda techniques put to the service of political view points clutter up the market place of ideas. And yet both the business community and constitutional watchdogs like the ACLU support the basic idea that spending money freely is analogous to speaking freely.

The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, calls campaign finance regulation “thought control.” But that, of course, puts big money not only in the category of speech, but of thought. And that’s incredible and dismissible. Groups don’t think, or speak. They mouth what they are told to, or what they, as a whole, have agreed upon. And there is always a question as to how an agreement was reached and by whom, and who believes in it or merely acquiesces to it.

The Supreme Court could overturn numerous laws evolved over decades that keep corporations and unions from directly funding political ads. At issue is a film called “Hillary: The Movie,” a blatant piece of political propaganda directed against the presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton, and produced by Citizens United, a right wing political group. Who funds Citizens United is hard to find out. Is it a front group for some mighty big money, for corporate money, for pro-fascists, for some church? It’s all left up to the imagination. They are a 501-c3, however, and are tax exempt. But if you don’t know where the money is coming from no one should take the propaganda seriously. And propaganda, itself, should never be taken at face value.

In June, when the Supreme Court first heard arguments in the Hillary case, it decided to expand the inquiry and to use the case as a platform from which to explore the whole concept of campaign advertising restrictions, rather than base judgment on the case brought before it. This is flagrant “judicial activism,” a term used normally against liberal justices. But this strange and irregular broadening of the case is a conservative notion, as far as the court is concerned.

Lumping group speak with individual speech as its protected by the First Amendment is intellectually specious.

Only individuals have the ability to think for themselves, to weigh arguments and evidence, and to even change their minds. Only individuals have the capacity for true independence, to go against their own specific interests, let’s say, for the good all. Only individuals can make such sacrifices. Corporations don’t. Labor Unions don’t. Political parties, public and private lobbyists, and experts for hire do not. Their independence must always be questioned. They invariably allow ends to justify means, and often employ any means, short of murder, to make their point. More troubling, while wealthy persons might avail themselves of the expertise of a public relations company to do their thinking for them, most of them do not. And even the wealthy often think and speak impromptu. Group speak is almost invariably PR speak. And that lacks, almost invariably, any credibility whatsoever.

That’s why free speech is the inalienable right of human beings, not “juristic persons,” a concept unknown to the First Amendment of Constitution. Speech and thought are individual human attributes. Legal entities can only “speak” across a spectrum of propaganda. Truth is not in their purview. They have no character, no conscience, no soul. All they have is a lot of money, which buys them the chance at a lot of power.

If the Supreme Court overturns the McCain-Feingold restrictions on unlimited political advertising by corporations, unions, and other group speakers, there would an array of interesting implications, some of which include:

–The unintended consequences of group speakers who go against the those who brought them to the dance. Corporations, in particular, are loyal to no political party. They could turn on Republicans and conservatives as fast as they’ve turned against liberals while covertly supporting Democratic corporate Clintonistas, or as fast as they’ve turned against blather mouth Glen Beck.

–If group speakers are required to identify themselves in their advertising (as in “this piece of biased balderdash is brought to you by Slick Oil), then voters can make their own assessment of credibility. If groups speakers are allow to hide their identity and create infomercials that purport to be the truth, then confusion and misinformation will utterly corrupt elections in America. Many of us already suspect our election system is rigged.

–If restrictions on group speakers funding political ads is lifted then local businesses, local groups, local unions, local associations of all kinds could also fund ad campaigns for or against specific candidates. An advertising campaign is much more potent than a mere endorsement. But endorsements keep voters away from candidates as much as they draw them in. And a vicious ad campaign can backfire.

–If the Supreme Court abandons all campaign finance restrictions without requiring that sponsors take credit for the ads, then the often savage recklessness that anonymity breeds among those who comment on the Internet will descend upon local, as well as national, politics, and infect it with the brutal drivel that people spew when they are not held accountable for what they say.

Only individuals and groups who identify themselves have a chance at being credible. That’s why the murky anonymity of the backers of Citizens United casts a pall on the validity on the Hillary suit itself. Why did the Supreme Court choose this particular case to reexamine campaign advertising restrictions in general? Has the court’s conservative majority been corrupted by invisible corporate forces?

Look around southwest and mountain west America. Everywhere you’ll find major cities from Los Angeles to Denver, and Las Vegas to Phoenix worried sick about their water supply – as well they should be.

If the Colorado river continues to dry up and western drought becomes a perpetual hazard as current predictions have it, Las Vegas, Nevada will be facing a Katrina-like catastrophe, only this time it won’t be about flooding, but about running dry. Some 90 percent of Las Vegas’s water comes from the diminishing Colorado River.
Phoenix, Tucson, Denver and Los Angeles are in different boats, but their ponds are shrinking too.

And New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming — the “upper basin” states in the Colorado Compact of 1922 — have “junior” water rights to California, Arizona, and Nevada, the states that comprise the “lower basin.” And that means in a crisis, upper basin states won’t get their water until lower basin states have their’s.

But when push comes to shove in really tough times, California gets its water first, trumping all other states.

Western water planners are painfully aware of what happened to Atlanta, Georgia during the 100-year drought that hit the region in late 2006 and 2008. Atlanta was caught off guard and unprepared when the drought, with the speed of a blitz, almost emptied Lake Lanier, Atlanta’s only water supply.

Atlanta got some of the rain and snow it needed, but its drought still hasn’t entirely lifted. It doesn’t look like ours will lift for a long, long time, if ever, with global warming.

What this means is that if the Colorado River, which supplies New Mexico with about 110,000 acre feet of water a year, and has been counted on to give Albuquerque about 70 percent of its drinking water, continues to dwindle, New Mexico might not get any of it, owing to its junior water rights status as a “upper basin” state.

While New Mexico state government has raised the alarm about drought and climate change, and the governor has created numerous committees of experts to survey the situation, water problems in the West don’t have a high priority in New Mexico’s popular consciousness. It’s so far out of the picture that water has hardly been mentioned in Albuquerque’s mayoral campaign, save for candidate Richard Romero questioning of the reliability of the city’s water supply.

Mayor Martin Chavez is to be commended for starting to use gray water on some city parks and sports fields. It would have been even better, of course, if this practice had begun decades ago.
But the mayor’s many assertions that Albuquerque doesn’t have to worry about water are not credible, given what any curious person can learn about the water crisis in the West.

The complications of water law, the sounds of lawyers in California, Arizona and Colorado strapping on their armor and sharpening their swords, ought to make every New Mexican jumpy and nervous.

We just don’t have the money to hold them off.

And New Mexico really doesn’t like the whole idea of senior water rights to begin with. In its own bailiwick, New Mexico legislators and water officials have basically refused to adjudicate water rights in the entire Middle Rio Grande Basin.

But our head-in-the-sand approach won’t work. Issues of priority are making a major mess of water rights across the West.

California, for instance, was given senior water rights in the Colorado Compact over the six other states that use the river. But in California itself, the Metropolitan Water District (MET), which supplies 60 percent of the water to 19 million people in the Los Angeles area, made its claims on the Colorado after the Colorado Compact divided up the water. As the Salt Lake Tribune put it, “That means the most populous part of California is last in line among its peers when water runs low.”

It’s already had to deal with that in 2003 when California had to curtail, somewhat, its Colorado usage. Los Angeles customers were the ones that took the hit.

But the MET isn’t alone. Most, if not all, municipalities in the West have junior rights, including Albuquerque and Rio Rancho. Some fear, when times get really tough, that cities will seek changes in the New Mexico Constitution which establishes the priority use water system, making beneficial use the criterion for senior rights, rather than rights based historical precedent,

Arizona’s drought, and the Colorado River’s dessication, is already squeezing Phoenix and Tucson, with their shallow and depleting aquifers. The Colorado supplies more than half the annual water used by both cities. The state is facing a potential shortage from the river in only two years.

Denver and the whole state of Colorado are in for hard times indeed. Because of their junior status in the upper basin, should shortages dictate all water going to California first, Colorado might be prevented from using its own water generated in its own mountains.

Denver, itself, is almost entirely dependent on the Colorado and its tributaries for water. Three quarters of the water in Colorado comes from rivers originating in the West Slope of the Rockies, but about three quarters of the people live on the East Slope in Denver and environs. Denver is fed its water through 17 trans-basin diversions moving river water from west to east.

New Mexico’s statewide drought plan issued a major report three years ago. The state’s Drought Task Force was created by former Republican Gov. Gary Johnson in 1996. In 2006, the unpredictability of weather conditions in a time of global warming came home to New Mexico. The first six months of the year were the driest in 112 years, while the last six months were the wettest in 112 years. Despite such fluctuations, the state is still drier than ever, and our increase in population “has dramatically increased the state’s vulnerability to drought,” according to the New Mexico Drought Plan update of 2006.

Who’s to say how prepared New Mexico might be for ten or twenty more years of drought and a loss of Colorado River water?

I am sure the state’s professional water community and the hundreds of volunteer water planning activists are struggling with such questions on a daily basis.

But severe or chronic, water shortages in our state are sure to mirror the troubles our neighbors are having. Let’s hope Albuquerque doesn’t get caught, one day, with a water crisis of the magnitude that faced Atlanta two years ago, and that is sure to confront arid southwestern Nevada and Las Vegas in our lifetime.

Would anyone who values their life stay in such a meeting?

Gun carrying in any public setting is a provocation. I wouldn’t be surprised to see left-leaning gun owners and members of the NRA loading up and countering right leaning gun slingers.

I wouldn’t be surprised. But I am dismayed. Carrying guns in public meetings is an act of intellectual terrorism which could, in a split second, result in political murder.

Of course, we have a constitutional right to own and bear arms, but we also have an ethical and social obligation to be civil, respectful, decent and considerate of others. If that’s not true, then we can just toss the Golden Rule out the window.

Of course, we also have a constitutional right to speak our minds without fear of physical harm. In legal parlance, gun carrying in open public meetings where public policies are being debated, could well be considered as having a “chilling effect” on free speech. And that’s illegal and unconstitutional and just plain rude.

People who carry guns into public meetings do it to scare other people, to intimidate them, to make them watch what they say. They’re no better than any other bullies.

If you consider yourself an American, and believe in the Constitution, you have to come to terms with the Second Amendment, just as you must give the deepest respect to all of the Bill of Rights, including the right to express yourself freely.

Some people think carrying guns is “speech,” an expression of a political opinion. I do not. Some businesses, trade associations, and lobbyists think having huge amounts of money is a form of “speech” which allows them to drown others out. I do not.

But I don’t believe the Second Amendment has a second rate status in the Bill of Rights — its ambiguous and confusing wording not withstanding.

The Second Amendment reads: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

Some originists who judge the Constitution in its 18th Century context dismiss the Second Amendment because states no longer have militias composed of private citizens. Others counter that the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, forbidding military personnel to enforce civil law, authorizes counties to deputize citizens to help keep the peace. Of course, that would amount to creating a militia that is deputized by a formal governmental authority. It’s a long argument.

When it come to the ACLU and the NRA honoring the Second Amendment, at least the NRA tries to protect what they consider to be everyone’s constitutional right to bear arms. The ACLU, on the other hand, has traditionally chickened out on the issue.

If a liberal carries a loaded gun into a political meeting as a gesture in opposition to conservative gun slingers, the ACLU won’t have his back. Nor will it defend the conservative’s position. But the NRA will be behind them both, for better or ill.

On its Web site, the ACLU disagrees with the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in D.C. v. Heller striking down the District of Columbia’s handgun ban. Even though the court held “for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms, whether or not associated with a state militia,” the ACLU states, “in our view, neither the possession of guns nor the regulation of guns raises a civil liberties issue.” Justice Scalia confirmed in that decision, however, that regulation of firearm ownership was not unconstitutional.

The ACLU argues that the Second Amendment protects a “collective right rather than an individual right,” basing this view on the 1939 Supreme Court case of United States v. Miller which prevented the interstate transport of sawed off shotguns, arguing such weapons were not necessary armaments for militias.

I’ve never understood the logic of collective v. individual rights. How can a collective have a right if the individuals who composed it do not have the same right? It’s a logically indefensible argument.

Still, carrying guns to public meetings to make a point is roughly like carrying a club, grunting and pounding it on the table, after swinging it in the air over people’s heads.

There’s a big difference in my book between owning guns and waving them around in public, between protecting yourself, your loved ones and your property, and using a gun as a megaphone to make a hostile, angry, and dangerous point.

In a nation that’s seen the gun related assassinations of four presidents — Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy — and the attempted assassinations of no less than 13 presidents, from Andrew Jackson to Ronald Reagan, carrying guns in public places, without a badge, is not an implied threat; it’s an open threat of violence.

And it does have a chilling effect on freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment.

Gun carrying in public, used as a form of intimidation, does not serve the legitimate interests of those who consider the right to bear arms, as an individual or as a group, a fundamental constitutional right granted to all Americans in principle, subject to local and national regulation.

The Second Amendment is too important for such potentially lethal antics. The basic contemporary argument for the Second Amendment is individual protection against crime and protection against tyrannical takeovers. Whether one thinks the latter is a paranoid delusion or not, the basic radical message of the Declaration of Independence makes some kind of personal preparedness necessary in the defense of the Constitution.

You might be able to beat swords into plowshares, but holding the gestapo off with a big knife is not recommended. I say that even though I don’t own a gun, and prefer a baseball bat for household defense.

But I would never think to carry my bat into a town hall or any other political gathering.

Without a public option, health care reform would indeed drop dead, and its passing would be a bloody murder that demoralizes nearly two thirds of the nation’s voters, many of whom want a full “single payer” plan in the first place, like England, France and Canada.

But the screeching Republicans, who lost the big election, have somehow got the Democrats by the unmentionables again, and are squeezing them into submission.

But why?

When Bush finagled his first victory, the Republicans told Democrats “get over it.” When Bush finagled the second victory, the Republicans told the Democrats, “get over it.”

Bush “won” by squeakers. Obama won by a much bigger margin. Isn’t it obvious that it’s time for the Democrats to get over Bush, get over bipartisanism, get over playing footsie with people who despise them and despise everything they believe in, time to get the Republican boot off their necks, and give their own loyal voters what they want, not what the Republicans want?

How can you deal with a party whose radio surrogate leader calls Democrats “Nazis”? Democrats should be ashamed of themselves for letting them get away with it.

Now, I may be wishing myself into a corner, but it is possible that a public option being on the ropes is something of an illusion, a floater designed to get everyone whipped up at last about the only reason to vote for health care reform at all — having some way around the stranglehold of the health insurance industry in which corporate bureaucrats and office flunkies bar the door to the doctor’s office and routinely decide who lives and dies in America?

It’s possible, I suppose, that President Obama is “punking” the GOP, not his base.

I can’t imagine any Democrat voting against a public option — if they ever want to be re-elected by the party’s base.

There’s plenty of progressives and liberals and other fine Americans who believe in equity and justice and fairness to all waiting in the wings to run for office. The base will turn to them hard and fast.

Like it’s always been with the GOP, the base is the heart of it all for the Democratic majority right now. I can’t imagine a single Obama voter who doesn’t want a public option, and who doesn’t scorn the Repubs for shrieking and yelling fire in the crowded market place of ideas – torturing the most vulnerable and misinformed people with “death panels” and other utterly tacky and tasteless histrionics and fear mongering. But, then again, selling fear has been the Republicans stock in trade for decades.

Get over them, Democrats. You won.

Health care reform is, in many ways, about remaking the Democratic party, about moving it away from merely reacting to Republican threats and smears and oh so boring accusations of “socialism” and other absurdities. It’s about giving the Democrats spirit and guts and a sense of pride in doing good for millions and millions of Americans. It’s not about Democrats kowtowing again to the rumor mongers and foaming haters on the political right.

Maybe the president really does know the inside game in Washington. Maybe not. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is saying louder than ever that a public option is essential. So his Dr. Howard Dean, who as former national Democratic chairman knows the party base better than most. Senators Rockefeller and Feingold look at a public option as “a must.”

I can’t imagine either U.S. Sens. Jeff Bingaman or Tom Udall  – both Democrats — ever running successfully in New Mexico again if their base thinks they chickened out. Even the president’s eloquence won’t let him back off from this unscathed.

The outcry for a public alternative to bait and switch private health insurance isn’t funded by “public option” corporations and their corporate lobbyist, like the anti-option shreechers are. There ain’t no such animal as a public interested corporation. Public options are devoid of profits.

Screaming bloody murder to stop health insurance companies from ruining people’s lives is one thing, screaming bloody murder for the right to plunder and wreck ill people’s lives for the sake of making a buck is quite another.

I’m proud of New Mexico Congressmen Ben Ray Lujan and Martin Heinrich for being unflinching about a public option. As Heinrich said in a recent op-ed, “any truly effective insurance reform must include a public option,”

A public option is a life raft in an ocean of snapping sharks. If a person could choose the rescue of Medicare and its security, even with its taxes, over private health insurance and its price gouging – why on earth wouldn’t they do it?

Medicare does not up its co-pays by 30 or 40 percent every six months. It does not say which test you can have and which you can not. And when you get sick, Medicare, or a public option, won’t kick you out.

Is the Democratic party spineless? Or is it starting to remake itself as the dominant party of the future. We’ll know well before the end of the year.

I got to wondering about what her life would be like if it weren’t for Americans of conscience and compassion, golden rule Americans and the politicians they elect, politicians who voted for the Americans with Disabilities Act, for Social Security, for the Supplemental Social Security Income (SSI) program for people with disabilities, for Medicaid and Medicare, and other social programs.

Would she be able to live at all without such help? Would she have been just put on the junk pile and left to suffer and die?

I know the skinflints, tightwads and government haters would have treated her like a statistic, and jingoized about welfare cheats, and just scratched her off and let her fend for herself. Out of sight, out of mind.

A while back, an old friend of mine who had a terrible motorcycle accident when a car hit him, would never have been able to keep body and soul together with his brain injuries without SSI. But it took him a year of hardship and economic panic to get it after he applied, and the regulations were so stringent he could not save a cent for fear of losing everything and was effectively under fiscal house arrest, so tight were his circumstances.

He’d have been thrown on the junk heap too.

Another friend, a poet and scholar of great gifts and a wide network of admirers, but no formal credentials, was reduced to living on the streets by a series of job losses, thefts and job related illnesses. When he turned 65, he had to get the help of friends to fill out the Social Security and SSI forms. He didn’t have a car or a computer or the money for a cab, and couldn’t walk very well. Once he got the funds, though, he managed to find a little place, and lived his last years in relative security. Without public help, he’d have died a decade earlier.

Compassionate, moral American voters and politicians saved his life.

The skinflints and cheapskates with their big salaries and big cars, and fancy lobbiests with their ideological automatons in Congress wouldn’t have heard a whimper over their callous defense of “principles” and abstractions about the less government the better.

And it’s the same today as always. Now we have some 50 million Americans without health insurance. If they are not eligible for Medicare, they might as well be playing Russian roulette with their incomes, savings, health and their family’s well being. If they hold down two jobs, begin to tire, lose their appetite, have stress related high blood pressure and become less efficient at work, they get sacked. If they happen to be a month away from Medicare or three decades away, they’re subject to dying prematurely, or becoming disabled, or even homeless, having their health care rationed by lack of wealth.

But the misers and people who think government is the work of the devil, don’t care about them. Nor do they care about the households that pay more for health insurance than for their mortgages, only to find themselves dropped from their plans or denied coverage when they really need it.

This isn’t a matter of political philosophy. This isn’t “macroeconomics,” and “the wisdom of the market,” or a Jeffersonian mistrust of government. This is life and death in a world in which waiting too long for the doctor because you can’t afford to see her, nor pay for the prescriptions, being rationed out of the health care system for being poor, can sicken you, disable you, and kill you as dead as any 18-wheeler smashing into your car.

That’s 50 million people at risk.

And the same “me” people and political purists are at it again as they’ve always been, stonewalling health care reform, trying to make it seem like a commie plot from the days of McCarthy witch hunts, or calling Democrats Nazis.

It seems odd that there actually is a political party in America historically aligned against compassionate government. But most of the opposition to welfare, food stamps, SSI, comes from the Republican Party and wayward Democrats, the same folks who vehemently opposed the creation of Social Security in 1935. The overwhelming majority of Republicans in the Senate fought a losing battle in 1939 to keep dependents and survivors from getting Social Security. What did they think was going to happen to them when the so called “breadwinner” died?

In 1950 and 1956, the majority of Republicans opposed the creation of disability insurance and even defeated it once. In 1965, most of the Republicans in the House and Senate voted to kill Medicare, and in doing so, indirectly, and unsuccessfully, voted to kill off older people like me and the aging members of my family, all in the name of the “principle” that the less government the better.

In 1982, Present Reagan and Senate Republicans came up with the idea to save money by cutting $40 billion in Social Security payments over three years, threatening to impoverish countless American elders and thereby burdening their families with huge financial troubles.

In 1981, not only did President Reagan start taxing Social Security, his administrated began hounding people on SSI, looking for cheaters, carrying out over a half a million IRS-like investigations, traumatizing people who were already so stressed out by life’s vicissitudes they could barely function. More than 100,000 people were purged from SSI. No one knows now how many cheats they actually found. I’m sure the overwhelming majority of the disenfranchised were caught on technicalities like health insurance companies use today to drop customers from their roles. One wonders how many of that 100,000 died suffering in poverty.

But most of the people with money, however it came to them, felt full of rectitude, hounding poor people and bringing them to ground.

Now, once again, the rectitude factor is roaring and sneering. Republicans tisk tisk at Professor Gates balking at being arrested in his own home because he’s an African American, accusing him of behaving badly, while rectitudinal Republican leadership and their Blue Dog Democratic allies say not a word of condemnation of violent and loutish behavior by their own goon squads disrupting public meetings, shouting down proponents of health care reform, and showing complete disrespect toward our elected representatives.

Here we are in the middle of August. We know the old Republican dumb show is trying once again to let the financially unlucky die on the vine of their low to nonexistent wages. But what else do we know for sure?

Health insurance companies spend millions to defeat a reform measure that hardly anyone understands. Pharmaceutical companies back President Obama’s plan, that few understand, as long as health insurance becomes mandatory and no one is regulating drug prices. Mandatory health insurance looks good for insurance and drug companies, but to pull it off, those 50 million uninsured people, who’ve been financially rationed out of health care, have to have a public option that treats them fairly, or most of them will be health insurance outlaws, subject to fines, higher taxes and penalties. Or at least that’s the way it seems at the moment.

We’ve had Social Security for nearly 75 years, through the greatest period of prosperity in our history. Without Social Security, the middle class would not exist, consumer culture would be drained of the expendable incomes it depends on, and millions and millions of elderly, widowed, under-aged, and disabled Americans would have been suffering horribly, reduced to the broken lives of poverty, most of them from no fault of their own.

And here we are again. Republican stonewallers, perhaps in the minority at the moment, simply do not care about the lives and well-being of people less fortunate than themselves. They lack moral imagination. They lack heart. And I pray they lose again this time.