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.
The leisure class, to which many Americans belong, is composed of what might be called the unaccountable, non-working wealthy. By that I don’t mean the leisured don’t have to go to work, but the kind of work they do is more akin to recreation and gaming, especially in the financial sector, than it is to labor. Most of its products are what Veblen called “non-productive.”
The human family, it seems, is made up of givers and takers, of people who believe in the innate goodness of their fellows, and those who rattle the cages of their pessimism at the world; of people who spread cheer and well-being and people who infect the rest of us with fear, anger and suspicion. The human family has in it people who make the rest of us feel proud to be alive, and people who makes us cringe.
Most urban consumers of news in New Mexico probably don’t know about the intensity and wide spread Native American opposition to uranium mining and the dread that is felt across Indian Country of another so-called uranium boom. And it’s clear that despite desalinization being in the news a lot these days, the controversy surrounding it is not a hot topic either.
We need a growing body of citizen experts to motivate and guide elected leaders in directions that serve the good of all, much like we had in the heyday of the environmental movement in the 1970s. A good example is something called the New Mexico Water Dialogue.
In the October 2009 Albuquerque mayoral election, I really don’t think a centrist Democrat or an ankle biting attack dog Republican can make it through to the run off. It seems to me that the candidate of either party who represents what I’d call a return to party basics has the overwhelming chance to win.
Folks in California thought Prop 8 would fail, until a final surge on election day proved them wrong. No one, I suppose, should ever again underestimate the insidious power of negative advertising directed at minorities or any other scapegoated group.
In Albuquerque and New Mexico, national troubles usually take a year or so to arrive. But the downturn in the economy is here, right now, full blown and on time for the holidays.
The rift is symbolized in the term “un-American,” and its variant “real American.” It’s gone so far in Albuquerque that one right-wing political pundit called the 45,000 person Obama rally at the University of New Mexico Saturday a “cult” and “un-American.”
As we hold our noses this election season, wading through the stinking offal of robocalls, vile attack ads, and disgusting charges of un-Americanism, it’s sobering for us in New Mexico to realize that according to the AP our state has more working poor and more children living in low-income working families than any state in the union.
“Nationally, more than one in four working families – 42 million adults and children – were low income in 2006,” the Associated Press reports citing a U.S. Census Bureau report.
Megabillion bailouts won’t help them. Tax loop holes won’t help them either. It doesn’t matter to them that the FDIC has upped it’s coverage to $250,000 per depositor. That much money is only a fantasy to them.
Perhaps the most brutal reality of all, though, is that nearly 40 percent of New Mexico’s jobs pay below the federal poverty level for a family of four.
How can the well-off and rich talk blithely of meritocracy when honest work can’t make workers an honest living? High paid corporate leaders explain to us they need the incentive of a big salary and perks to do their work. But where are the incentives for the working poor?
There aren’t any. And some people care about that and some people don’t.
That’s really the dividing line in our society.
Francoise Sagan, the French novelist, put it clearly: “In the case of any given injustice, the man or woman of the right will say it’s inevitable. The man or woman of the left will say it’s intolerable.”
The rich see the working poor, if they look at them at all, as a sort of a slave class doing the nasty work that needs to be done. The working poor’s condition is inevitable according to conservative economic philosophy, be it that of Bush-McCain-Palin, or Clintonesque globalism.
Big money does not care about little money. It wages savage war against the only social pressures that little money has: a decent minimum wage and unions. It’s done that so successfully since the era of Regeanomics that some people are not only convinced that raising the minimum wage to $6.55 this year and $7.25 next year will hurt businesses but that it will actually amount to something they like to call “income redistribution.”
And you know what that means. Charges of socialism and communism. If you advocate for the real workers of America, you’re called an unpatriotic pinko.
At $7.25 an hour for 40 hours a week, a worker would earn $290. That’s slightly more than $15,000 a year. How big an incentive is that?
No wonder the working poor work harder than anyone. An 80 hour work week at minimum wage, might give you enough money to make payments on your bills, but how long can anyone sustain that kind of work load? And how can they possibly save? We’re forcing many people to work in almost Medieval conditions.
When mortgage bankers and tricky investors make huge bucks off high risk financial practices in the “ownership society,” who really suffers when they fail? The investors? The bankers?
No. In New Mexico, it’s a large part of the nearly 60,000 person work force in the construction industry that feels the bite the worst. If you have an overstocked inventory in houses, and no new houses being built, the $700 a week a construction worker might earn evaporates. What do the carpenters, tilers, drywallers, roofers, plumbers, electricians do?
Likely as not they’ll become a part of the working poor who have to resort to those minimum waged jobs no one but a hermit can live on.
And if you happen to be someone who’s retired from working 60 to 80 hours a week and trying to live on the fruits of your labors, harvesting pitiful social security checks that are actually taxed, and if the federal bailouts happen to bump up inflation two or three percent or more, the fruits of your labors wither on the vine. And low interest rates on your savings feeds your desperation.
And if you’re older and get sick and inflation and taxes are eating up your substance, tough. You’ve had no union to protect you, no champion in Congress to effectively look out for your interests because few are interested in micro economics, which is the level most of us live on.
Power brokers equate virtue with money not with hard work.
A living wage, good health care, a decent return on savings, and bringing jobs back home is not income redistribution.
People who say it is are willing to consign millions of Americans to the economic dumper. They are not patriots, they are political swindlers.
When campaign rallies become sounding boards for the vile and heinous utterances of a mob mentality, even then free speech has to be honored.
The current crisis, I think, is the beginning of a profound economic and social shift, a shift in fundamentals, a tectonic shift of our own making, one that we might have avoided or at least prepared for, but tragically did not.
Unlike so many hard-bitten, devious players in modern political life, with Joan Rosner and Vince Griego — who died recently — what you saw was what you got. And what you saw was civil, practical, and tirelessly optimistic. They were, to the present vicious world of cannibal politics, angels of decency.
Associate Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s contorted, oddball thinking about politics and the rule of law is a good reminder why the stakes in 2008 presidential election are so high.
Eight years ago, Scalia was part of the 5-4…
When all is said and done, Obama and Biden, McCain and Palin, are the servants of the parties and ideas they represent.
Personalities in this election matter less than party platforms.
The Republican and Democratic conventions, the profusions…
Both John McCain and Darren White are trying their darnedest to sound like Democrats. They’re scampering away from the black hole of the Bush legacy as fast as their PR Machines can carry them.
But the selection of presumptive…
Along with the rest of the nation Monday, I watched Sen. Edward Kennedy and Michele Obama inspire the Democratic National Convention with their optimism, good will, energy, and tenacity.
And at the same time, I’ve been thinking about something…
When the Colorado River Compact was negotiated by representatives of seven western states at Bishop’s Lodge, near Santa Fe, in 1922, everyone signed the compact except the Arizona delegation. Arizona refrained from ratifying the agreement for 22 years, finally signing…
Buried in the massive, 1,158 page reauthorization bill for the federal Higher Education Act are two most curious views of education and its relationship to the truth. Both views have long been championed by conservative legislators and ideological lobbyists.
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Politics is as much about ideas as it is about power. Why go to all the trouble to get power if you don’t have ideas you want to make real? Even if those ideas are gross and venal, and utter…
Not too long ago, I saw a billboard near a hospital in Albuquerque that epitomized the artificial nature of the declining American economy. It read, in part, “Heart burn, or a heart attack?” and implied that you’d better get to…
