Margaret Randall

In Albuquerque we’ve become accustomed to hearing about another police shooting in which an unarmed person is killed. In the past several years we’ve had two dozen of these, with 17 fatalities. This past week our city saw two civilian shootings, each of them resulting in high-speed chases and terrorizing neighborhoods for several hours. It feels as if we are trying to catch up with notoriously violent cities such as Chicago or Los Angeles…

We’ve all been privy to public service announcements and commercial advertisements urging us to spend money we don’t have in order to save an economy being squandered by our elected officials and the corporations that increasingly pull their puppet strings. During the 1960s and ‘70s we often said we wished the military had to hold a bake sale to fund its B-52s and that ordinary people might have access to government funding for projects as worthy as peace and education…

While going about our ordinary lives—though those cannot, at the moment, include accessing federal Internet sites, visiting a National Park, or being able to take advantage of a federally-funded health study—most of us seem oblivious to the fact that we are experiencing a coup…