What’s in a picture
The photo that appears at the beginning of this piece was taken in the rubble left after the April 24th 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza, an eight-story building in Savar, Bangladesh where a number of sweatshops housed clothing workers in abysmally unsafe working conditions. The day before that tragedy, the building had briefly been evacuated when cracks were noticed in its walls. But people were forced back to work; the unceasing fever of profit had to be maintained.
Industrial disasters are all too common in a world greedy for profit...
Heather Wilson: Caught in the revolving door
It’s been about a month since the news broke that federal inspectors had sanctioned Sandia and Los Alamos National Labs for their no-bid, no-deliverables contracts with former Congresswoman Heather Wilson. The Santa Fe Reporter has done an admirable job reporting on the story even providing a link to the Department of Energy’s Inspector General’s Report. USA Today, the Washington Post and the independent watchdog group, POGO (Project on Government Oversight) have run national stories. But aside from one front page Albuquerque Journal story on June 12, we have not seen much from the local media here in her former congressional district. There’s been no follow up, no commentary or investigation of a scandal that raises questions about the ethics of former representatives (yes, even those considered saints) profiting from their prior public service...
Border surge misses real security threat in Transborder West
New U.S. initiatives associated with immigration reform proposals aim to seal the U.S.-Mexico border with more hulking fences, high-tech surveillance, sensors, and drones -- all to “secure the border” against a dramatically diminishing flow (lowest in four decades) of south-north immigrants, and costing at least $30 billion in additional border security funding.
Generally unnoticed in this border security buildup is the rapid onset of a new transborder security threat. Not immigrants, not terrorists, not drugs, not spillover violence. Rather frightening changes in the deserts, in the mountain flora, in the surface water flows, in the falling levels of reservoirs, and in the disappearing aquifers and underground water basins...
Mexico’s rich flourish
A Great Recession? Not for Mexico’s rich. In fact, the number of people in the Mexican Republic defined as wealthy by the corporate research outfit WealthInsight grew by almost a third between late 2007 and late 2012, a time when high unemployment and hard times had most people scrambling to make ends meet.
According to WealthInsight, the total number of Mexican residents who held wealth valued at than one million dollars (minus their principal home) reached 145,000 at the end of last year. Of this group, 2,450 people were classified as multi-millionaires...
Steve Pearce tells us what to do!
Pilgrim, if you want to contact New Mexico Rep. Steve Pearce from a zip code in northern New Mexico, forget it. Steve does not want to hear from you and he will block your e-mail from ever getting through on his pristine web site. You probably voted for someone else anyway. Steve does, however, have some brilliant fatherly, patronish-type advice for you, especially if you work for the federal government.
“Get yourselves efficient,” the coherent and persuasive Pearce intones. Steve is encouraging people here in good old drypocket NM to “lead by example"...
The path to economic salvation
Remember about three weeks ago when the Tea Party and other conservative groupies started screaming about how the IRS was picking on Sasquatch and his friends who were trying to educate the public about Ayn Rand’s secret recipe for fruitcake salad?
They were being singled out, they screamed, picked on and persecuted by Big Brother, who was actually off at a million dollar motivational conference in Hilo.
Well, hold onto your hats, the IRS, it turns out, when it was not partying, was also picking on progressive and liberal groups too...
DOMA, Prop 8, and the Voting Rights Act
If anyone tells you again that voting in a presidential election is a meaningless exercise, remind them of June 2013 when the Supreme Court became once again, as it has off and on throughout its history, the most powerful branch of government, for good or ill.
Lobbyists and their employers spent $488,296 to entertain, influence legislators in 2013
Here's some information I collected from the New Mexico Secretary of State's Office for NM Common Cause. It's a small piece of the work I'm doing, along with interns Jarrett Hines-Kay and Jonas Armstrong, for a forthcoming Common Cause report on lobbyists.
New Mexico lobbyists and their employers spent $488,296.74 to influence, entertain and feed New Mexico legislators, according to reports filed since January with the Secretary of State’s Office. The amount does not include campaign contributions, which are banned during the session.
The largest spenders among the lobbyists were...
Why progressives should welcome independents into Democratic primaries
First of all, can we acknowledge that there is significant disillusionment amongst the voting public with the partisanship and lack of compromise that has Congress virtually paralyzed at the moment? In a similar way, can we admit that the gerrymandering of congressional districts to the point where less than 10% of these same districts are considered "competitive" is largely to blame for the systemic edge that House Republicans will enjoy for the next decade? There is absolutely no incentive for these Republican incumbents to listen to the middle, concerned as they are about their unforgiving right-wing base...
Student exposes austerity’s shaky foundations
A major upheaval took place recently in the world of economic theory. Yet while a sacred cow took a mortal hit, its legacy of social impoverishment and unrest continues unabated.
Why does something presumably as dense and dry as economic theory matter? Because for longer than most of us realize, elected officials have relied on the dominant, though not necessarily correct, school of thought to provide a rationale for the policies they put in place. In the congressional debate over health care, for instance, it was the fundamental argument for a "uniquely American approach" (code for the profit motive) that carried the day and left the U.S. as virtually the only developed nation without universal health care for its citizens (and New Mexicans near the bottom in terms of health care outcomes)...