Wednesday, September 26, 2012

History

My good friend Eric called from Hawaii to talk a little about Albuquerque's economy.  He says our economy was formed by General Leslie Groves and Scientist Robert Oppenheimer when they opted to center research on the building of the Atomic Bomb here in New Mexico.  More specifically Los Alamos. This decision was paramount in the historical arc of our state's federal based economy.  (We beat out Utah.)  All because Oppenheimer had spent time at a boy's camp near Los Alamos as a youth.

Of course Los Alamos Labs and Sandia Labs were the heirs to the A-Bomb effort.  And it is good they stuck around because New Mexico's leaders for the last few decades pretty much concentrated on one thing only.  Sprawl development was our economic development.  More and more homes meandering into the desert was our means of growing.  Building and buying houses.  That's pretty much it and when things melted down we suffered greatly, except for our federal employment which really softened the impact.  Still, we see the Albuquerque Journal and our local and state political leaders doing everything they can to sweeten the pot for real estate developers.  That is not what we need.  We need manufacturing and development jobs in the private sector.  It would be the third leg in standing our economy on a steady level.  And it would make no sense to gut the federal, state and local government payrolls or the whole thing topples again.

It was hilarious to see John McCain here yesterday for Heather Wilson warning that budget cuts would harm New Mexico.  Aren't budget cuts the GOP's answer to everything.  Talk about the height of double talk by right wing politicos!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Amen to that.

I wish that had elicited more comment. That, right there, is a fundamental issue for the state. I was tempted to add my own five cents worth of suggestions for how it could be accomplished, but I think it needs to be established first that that should be a fundamental goal of politicians and policy makers in this state. There are some structural things that prevent that from happening and you alluded to some of them.

Speaking of that recurring nightmare, I see where Heather told a group of local real estate vultures that on the day Jeff Bingamam announced he was retiring from the Senate "she was offered the best nonpolitical job of her career, vice president of non-nuclear defense programs at Sandia National Laboratories. She turned down the job to run for the Senate."

http://www.bizjournals.com/albuquerque/news/2012/09/24/wilson-wants-dodd-frank-exemption-for.html?page=all

Coincidence? That she was offered that job on that day?

Sometimes I wish I was still a reporter. There'd be some people right now who were having to deny on the record that that wasn't a coincidence.

To her credit Heather, whose says her family received government assistance after her dad died, thinks there should be a social safety net, so at least she has that on the record before she votes to destroy the social safety net.

Ok, then said...

Today on the front page the Daily Lobo reports that Heather Wilson was listed as one of the most corrupt members of Congress in 2007.

Unknown said...

Heather isn't corrupt in her eyes. Taking money from rich "producers" is what she does, so they can use gov't to make more money.
Little people don't have any money, which proves our inferiority, so she doesn't represent us. It's that simple.