New Mexico Mercury

Housebreaking fossil fuels

While Heather Wilson was losing her Senate bid to Martin Heinrich last year, her campaign team must have been drunk on PR from the Fossil Fuel lobby. The rhetoric tipped them off the bar stool.

She accused then Rep. Heinrich of being supported by not only “radical environmental groups,” but also by “the radical environmental industry” with their “extremist agenda.”

I wonder what a “radical environmental industry” might be. Does it sell camping gear and sleeping bags or manufacture trail mix? Does it produce energy without polluting ground water and without using taxpayer dollars to clean up its excreta? Does it actually believe in free enterprise without a governmental crutch?

Did the ‘Iron Lady’ help kill capitalism?

The recent news of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's death affords an opportunity to open the issue of who will be remembered as significant players in the death of capitalism. Mrs. Thatcher's image as a beacon for freedom may seem secure among mainstream media for the moment but to objective observers it is looking increasingly likely that in the long term the blind passion for "free markets" she shared with the global plutocratic class she abetted will be understood as the beginning of the final chapter for the most productive economic arrangement in history...

A systems approach to understanding water in New Mexico

Because everything is connected to everything else, water crises have a cascading affect all along a water system, even one as huge as that of the Southwest and Mountain West United States.

Life, or death, goes on: More than public will needed for gun control

Although a variety of opinion polls show 90% of Americans favor at least some measure of gun control, and although President Obama has made sincere pleas for changes to our retrograde laws, change proved impossible. When the US Senate voted on expanding background checks for gun sales—the only amendment left standing among the many introduced—neither Democrats nor Republicans were able to provide the 60 votes necessary to avoid a filibuster. US democracy doesn’t mean the will of the people. It means the vast majority of our elected officials consider their jobs first and public opinion a distant second...

New Mexico’s Economic Drought

The economy in New Mexico has about as much life as a drooping mat of browning prickly pears. It’s true. Finding a job here is a struggle, and our armies of unemployed, underemployed and discouraged workers should know we’re not hallucinating. Maybe we will find some validation in this.

The Coming Water Wars in Mexico

Once forbidden as a transgression of God’s natural laws, irrigated agriculture backed by increasingly deep wells and the most advanced farming machinery has become the norm. Mennonite farmers are meeting—and taking advantage of—the challenges of climate change and intensifying drought cycles by embracing the most unsustainable practices of capital-intensive, resource-depleting agribusiness...

Obama’s political framing of immigration reform lacks depth

President Obama’s understanding of immigration and border policy is fundamentally political. For Obama, immigration reform makes good sense politically.  As such, the president’s vision of immigration reform is framed by political platitudes and slogans – such as the stress on combatting transnational crime, deporting and excluding “criminal aliens,” and fortifying border security.

Taking a stand on the Rio Grande

In the final days before the expected destruction of the Asarco stacks in El Paso, critics have not ceased their demands for a halt to the demolition on environmental and public health grounds.

College ballin’

UNM students got a crash course in American economics and priorities on Tuesday when regents approved a 13.2 percent increase in tuition for students taking under 15 credit hours.  The hike included a nearly $1 million increased student subsidy to athletics.  That equals $165 per student and $4 million total.  In the past two years at UNM, student fees for athletics have doubled.  If UNM is going to strong arm the student body into doling out welfare for a system where $2 million a year isn’t enough money to retain a coach, students should be demanding added security for their college athlete peers...

Fairness in America’s poorest state

When you think about the governor signing into law tax breaks for incoming corporations and vetoing a dollar hike in the minimum wage, and add to that the more than 13 % tuition hike passed by the UNM Regents yesterday, you get the feeling that reality has slipped a cog in our poor state, the poorest per capita in the nation according to Census Bureau data released in January...