I just returned from a meeting in Martha's Vineyard, MA. The weather was beautiful, the meetings productive, and listening to questions about the Albuquerque Police Department kept me busy. It seems our Duke City is on the map.
No one asked about our economy, or weather, on general well being. They just wanted to know about the shootings and whether articles in the eastern press were accurate. People back there are paying attention and maybe that is why the malaise in job creation exists here. Some of the folks from Colorado who get New Mexico news stations said the broadcasts make Albuquerque look like ISIS has a branch here. Except for the occasional lost dog story spewing forth from our toothy reporters on the local news, every story is about the crime blotter from law enforcement agencies.
No wonder we are just a way point for Santa Fe. As they say, you can't buy this kind of publicity. And the Mayor and Governor still have no plan other than sophomoric remarks about people who disagree with them.
No one asked about our economy, or weather, on general well being. They just wanted to know about the shootings and whether articles in the eastern press were accurate. People back there are paying attention and maybe that is why the malaise in job creation exists here. Some of the folks from Colorado who get New Mexico news stations said the broadcasts make Albuquerque look like ISIS has a branch here. Except for the occasional lost dog story spewing forth from our toothy reporters on the local news, every story is about the crime blotter from law enforcement agencies.
No wonder we are just a way point for Santa Fe. As they say, you can't buy this kind of publicity. And the Mayor and Governor still have no plan other than sophomoric remarks about people who disagree with them.
1 comment:
If the perception people have of New Mexico is directly related to crime, what about crime? Crime is a function of poverty, which is related to jobs, which aren't coming here because of the crime.
There's no way out this cycle following the prescriptions allowable in the current political climate. Further lowering taxes on corporations, the prescription of New Mexico Democrats and Republicans both, will result in schools even more starved of revenue, an even less educated workforce, therefore more poverty and more crime.
If you give tax breaks to rich people they don't run out and hire a bunch of people and have them make a bunch of things in the hopes they can sell them. That's not even how business works. Demand causes businesses to hire people. Having orders causes businesses to hire people. Consumers with money in their pockets is what creates demand, nothing else. All the free money we've given to rich people in the form of tax breaks, as is being demonstrated to everyone but those who like to keep their heads well up their rear ends, is sitting on corporations' balance sheets and in the portfolio accounts of rich stockholders.
If we are to get out of the cycle we must admit that our politicians are wrong, both parties, and that we've been wrong. Policies that redistribute that tremendous pile of wealth, that we've been redistributing upward since Reagan and that the rich are just sitting on, are the only thing that will work. Our labor creates that wealth, after all.
Democratic Party diversions like the minimum wage increase will do nothing. Hillary's tinkering little suggestions will do nothing. Bernie Sanders is no answer. He's voted for every war we're in and says not one thing about reducing our bloated imperial military. His function is to keep the party base in play. The solution doesn't exist within the current political system, people. We have to change that first. Only by that can we do something about New Mexico and its neighbors constantly trying to underbid each other by giving businesses and their wealthy owners more and more of our money, and in the process consigning our youth to a future that holds nothing for them.
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