New Mexico Mercury

Insight New Mexico - Bennett Hammer

V.B. Price speaks with longtime civil rights activist, former National ACLU Board Director and founder of the Bennett A. Hammer LGBT Archives Project.

What’s happened to ABQ?  Part 2: Think tank city

Albuquerque’s economy has fallen into a big hole.  It’s lost sight of itself. It’s floundering in the dark. The l950s don’t work anymore. The city needs new perspectives to help it find its way. Wouldn’t it be useful if this year’s mayoral race gave voters an arena in which to ponder and assess new economic models and plans, ones designed to rescue us from these doldrums?

Low-Tech and High-Tech Braceros

Is the IT industry being allowed to import a low-paid labor force amidst ample STEM graduates?

What’s happened to Albuquerque? Part 1: Growth uninhibited by water supply

Should Albuquerque be allowed to grow in size and population without tying its growth directly to its projected water supply over the next 50 to 100 years?

Should any big city in New Mexico permit sprawl development on the basis of “dedications,” which means, in the world of water, mere promises to find water after the developments have been built and populated?

Kush and Cornelius

I just can’t understand why people get so worked up over a couple of harmless little old jokes. Of course I’m referring to those good old peckerwood exemplars of uproarious hilarity Steve Kush, now suspended director of Bernalillo County Republicans and Bob Cornelius, former GOP county director.

During Tuesday night’s Bernalillo Country commission meeting as Working America’s director Chelsey Evans was about to testify in favor of raising the minimum wage, Kush was busy tap, tap, tapping away at his Facebook account about Chelsey’s nice boots. Kush had already twittered that a previous Working America representative was a “radical bitch.”

We need a national conversation

The Boston marathon bombing shocked us to our core. With neither the degree of coordination, immense loss of human life and treasure, or national and international impact of 9/11, it held our attention in ways even tragic recent school massacres have not.

If our national response to previous acts of terrorism on our homeland is any indication, what we will not get is a conversation, the conversation we so desperately need, about what prompted this and previous terrorist attacks. A few private discussions may try to frame the real questions, but these will not gain currency in the general consciousness. Extreme patriotism will trump thoughtful insight in every public forum...

Struggles on New Mexico’s Other Borders

At an honoring of his life and work, longtime Native American activist, writer and scholar John Redhouse reflects on the roots of his resistance and adds perspective to Native struggles.

Love dem hogs

Why do we always think someone from somewhere else, some magic someone with money and jobs has the solution for our economic problems?

Perhaps if we can just concoct the right inducements and incentives, even though we’re in a 50,000-year drought cycle, and even though we’re one of the poorest and least educated states in the union, if only we can throw the right tax incentives and benizens at such folk, they will just roll over and begin to smile on us, dispense their largesse, and New Mexico will be a blessed and golden land.

Avoiding priority calls for the right and wrong reasons

Carlsbad Irrigation District (CIB) has issued a priority call on the Pecos River against the Pecos Valley Artesian Conservancy District (PVACD) and we’re going to witness a legal process that won’t be as messy as if city wells were being threatened but will provide plenty of action.

A perilous world comes knocking — again

Bombs at the Boston Marathon, poison letters mailed from Mississippi to President Obama and a U.S. senator, an explosion in a fertilizer plant destroying much of a town in Texas, two wounded by bullets as 80,000 gathered at an annual marijuana festival in the center of Denver: What are we to make of all this happening in a single week?

Against this background of mayhem, the U.S. Senate at the same time killed off all gun reform. What are we to make of that?

It seems to me there are several lessons to be learned from the terrible tragedies and momentous moments of recent days...