New Mexico Mercury

Insight New Mexico: Cisco McSorley

V.B. Price talks with New Mexico Senator Cisco McSorley about the ABQ Journal's biased coverage, the governor's race, rewriting New Mexico's criminal code and more. 

When the Tail Wags the Dog

Going where even New Mexico angels would fear to tread, Bernalillo County will place two potentially controversial measures on the November ballot, one raising taxes and the other opening the door to replacing elected county officials with appointed ones.

Provincial Matters, 6-30-2014

V.B. Price's weekly collection of appreciations and observations.

El Machete: Preventative Medicine

Preventative Medicine

Humphrey’s World: Susana Can’t Say

Susana Can't Say

Tongues of Fire on the Border

With the defeat of Eric Cantor, immigration reform may be dead for the near future. Nonetheless, there are heroes out there who won’t be deterred by Congressional dysfunction. One of them is Reverend John Fife who was recently in Santa Fe.

Back in the early 1980s when wars were raging in Central America, refugees fled to the United States from death squads in their home countries, particularly Guatemala and El Salvador. The first church to respond to this crisis was Fife’s church, the Southside Presbyterian church in Tucson, Arizona. On March 24, 1982 he started the Sanctuary movement and initiated an “underground railroad “system to move refugees to other parts of the country and to Canada where they would be safe...

Immigrants or Refugees?

In the media barrage over the “flood” of Central American children arriving along the United States’ southern border, the refuge-seekers have been typically labeled as “illegal immigrants” by many media outlets.  

But Central American migrant advocates have a diametrically opposed take on the crisis, contending that the children on the U.S. border should be considered not as immigrants but refugees meriting international treatment standards, which does not generally include detaining children, according to Human Rights Watch...

Insight New Mexico - Alan Webber post primary

V.B. Price talks with Alan Webber about his recent gubernatorial campaign, economic growth potential in New Mexico, Susana Martinez' abysmal record of job losses and more. 

Marx, Freud and Mitt Romney: What Globalization Means

Taxation Without Representation!      

That was the clarion call the American colonists employed to rouse their fellows against the British in 1776. The American Colonies were important for the nascent capitalist economy in England, because they represented not only a growing market for their goods (tea was only one of many products exported to America), but also a new source of natural resources to bring back to the homeland and turn into goods to be sold back to the colonists. The British had already monopolized tea imports from China and were reaping fortunes selling it, not only in their own country but to the American colonists as well.

My point is that capitalism has always been in search of new, expanding markets...

El Grito de Roosevelt Park

Slightly more than three months after the police shooting of homeless camper James Boyd catapulted Albuquerque into the international spotlight, activists returned to the streets to advance their movement against police brutality.