The New Free Trade Fever
20 years after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect, little interest has been shown until now by the governments of the signatory countries for reopening the trade pact. But a similar agreement between Mexico and the European Union, signed in 1997 and enacted in 2000, is under review and could be expanded.
Three working groups from the European Commission are expected to be in Mexico February 11-13 for discussions that could lead to changes in the current agreement, especially as they pertain to the energy, agricultural, financial services and telecommunications sectors...
Trickle-down PR in the Journal
You have to give it the corporate elite in this country for their crafty effectiveness in convincing a large percentage of the working poor and the debt-ridden middle class to parrot economic talking points that work in direct opposition to their best interest. A marketing coup made possible with the support of much of the mainstream media establishment at the national and local level.
Winthrop Quigley gives us the latest supporting example this week in an Albuquerque Journal column, “Minimum wage hike won’t fix income inequality”...
Answering response to ‘Reforms in Mexico’
On January 24, I submitted an article entitled “Reforms in Mexico” and writer Margaret Randall filed a very articulate response, finding my ideas “extremely troubling.” She raised three issues to which I would like to respond.
1. My characterization of two-time presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador as “loony” when, in fact, she believes that he is a “genuine revolutionary reformer” and “widely believed to have won the election in his first bid for the presidency.” I agree with part of her criticism. Using the word “loony” was wrong because he’s a very intelligent individual. The word “hypocritical” would have been more accurate...
Explosive art: something new under the sun
Ever since Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel invented dynamite 150 years ago, people have been trying to make lemonade out of his lemons. The most famous example is Nobel himself, who created the Nobel Prizes, rewarding peacemaking and sundry civilized achievements in literature and science, to atone for the murderous violence he unleashed on the world.
The effort to find useful, even pleasant employment for explosives continues today in New Mexico, home of the biggest explosive of them all, the atomic bomb.
A new book published by the University of New Mexico Press, Detonography: The Explosive Art of Evelyn Rosenberg, parses and celebrates this current effort...
Farming in the New Age of Drought
“Record rainfall in September brought most us nearly up to ‘normal’ annual precipitation levels, greened up the rangeland, but the rain came so hard and fast that much of it ran off,” reads part of the introduction to the upcoming New Mexico Organic Farming Conference.
“Acequias were damaged and fields were buried in sediment. And we’re still desperately short of water in the rivers and dams. Without good snowpack this winter, we face exceptional irrigation shortages in 2014.”
The above words set the tone for the 2014 conference, which is scheduled for the weekend of February 14-15 at the Marriott Pyramid North hotel in Albuquerque...
Weekly Poem: Taken by Storm
Up near the northern border of North Dakota
the third day of an arctic blizzard, a social worker
loads her hatchback with jackets and coats
and drives the frontage road beside a frozen river.
She comes to a man wrapped in a hospital blanket
seated on cardboard on top of a bed of snow.
He doesn’t want the jacket she offers.
“Then I can take you to shelter,” she says...
Rebranding Enchantment
Some months ago, I was lucky enough to attend a reading by Scott Momaday. He spoke like a man in the middle of a great love affair with the New Mexican landscape. The land was tied to his life; together their narrative extended thousands of years into the past. After the reading, I longed for a walk in the mortally beautiful mountains.
I live in the Scott Momaday New Mexico. The Rudolfo Anaya New Mexico. The Georgia O’Keeffe New Mexico. The Fred Harvey Company New Mexico. I do not live in newly rebranded “New Mexico True” setting that our tourism department has begun selling...
Susana’s Other Grading System
Good morning Case 3520. We are here to discuss your uh differently abled son.
Can you stand a pleasant little surprise this morning? Good, because the Administration wishes to discuss some wonderful news with you, Case 3520, news that will doubtless change your life forever! I can see the excitement behind the tears in your narrow, beady eyes. Good...
“Nebraska:” The Changed Face of the Land
The movie “Nebraska” is described as a character-driven road movie. It strikes me as that and something more, a meditation on the decline of the part of America alternatively dismissed as “flyover country” or valorized as “the heartland.” In 50 years, the film may be a favorite of college professors, to be screened alongside Orson Welles’ adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons. Both films explore the transformation of America as fueled by the gasoline-powered engine...
Why do people smile?
Do people smile because they are happy or because they are too dumb to know they should be frowning? That, it seems to me, is the basic issue posed by the article on Denver by James Burbank. Maybe I am just a happy fool, but I opt for the former.
I have always liked Denver, and I still do. I have visited the city often since the 1960s when my brother was doing his training there in psychology. I edited a newspaper there, got married there and lived in a charismatic little tree house above a museum...