Evading Wildfires

    I’d planned to write very few columns on the national scene this year, but it’s hard to take our eyes off the political wildfire destroy familiar landmarks of democracy, even to catch up with the fates of health, public safety, and other bills I wanted to back during our state legislature.
    What, I wondered, did progressive provincial legislatures accomplish in 1932-33, while Hitler gained power?
    Turns out that Prussia’s progressive parliament expanded workers’ rights and social welfare programs, and improved public education and police professionalism.   However, in right-winger Franz von Papen took over, appointing himself Reich Commissioner.  That probably wasn’t legal; but German courts, like the U.S. Supreme Court that recently declared our President could not be criminally liable for crimes carried out while in office, let it slide.  This greatly helped Hitler consolidate power when he became Chancellor in 1933.
    Fortunately, a right-wing coup in New Mexico seems unlikely. But it’s not impossible.
    I’ve wondered, too, whether state legislators are having as hard a time as I am controlling their eyes.  I hope and trust they’re finding ways.  Because what they’re doing will matter a great deal to us, particularly the most vulnerable among us, assuming the blaze doesn’t destroy us.
    We absolutely should let all New Mexicans vote on whether or not to pay our legislators, as every other state does.  That means poor and middle-class folks can run, and maybe stay somewhat honest, while now you have to be rich or retired, or a trial lawyer.  Glad that passed a committee.
    We absolutely should provide oversight of acquisitions, mergers, and other transactions involving changes of control or assets of hospitals and other health care entities.  It’s too common now for private-equity to buy a hospital and bleed serious healthcare out of existence – or bankrupt the place by dealing at odd rates with entities indirectly owned by the hospital’s indirect owners.  We also need to protect whistle blowers - the employees so appalled by bad conduct that they’ll speak truths to government agencies or elderly column-writers.   We should bolster recruitment initiatives to stem the shortage of health-care workers here.  (We must better balance the interests of doctors and patients who’ve suffered malpractice – or between greedy hospitals and greedy malpractice lawyers.  “Tort reform” shouldn’t mean save hospital profits and screw poor folks; but I’ve seen disgusting abuse of the law by plaintiffs’ malpractice lawyers.  
    Also more delicate than most citizens would acknowledge are some of the public safety initiatives.  Some candidates always shout “Crime!” to justify jailing everyone and trampling Constitutional rights, but crime right now is a far more serious problem than many of us progressives care to admit.  But solutions must balance a host of interests and considerations more delicately than we usually manage.
    We must pay and protect our peace officers better – and also set up mechanisms to make them more professional – and safeguard citizens from some police officers.
    We need universal child care funding and early childhood development.  Historically, the chance to learn the skills and language success required  was primarily a privilege of the rich.  Universal public education has made great strides.  We’re incredibly literate.  But the kind of emotional/psychological well-being head start some of us got from loving, literate, thoughtful parents who were not hampered by poverty, should be there for all the kids we can create it for.
    Kudos to all the folks working on this stuff sincerely in the public interest.
                – 30 – 

 

[The above column appeared Sunday, 9 February, in the Las Cruces Sun-News and should be posted soon on the newspaper’s website, as well as on the KRWG website under Local Viewpoints. A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/). ]

[Particularly fascinating to me right now is that so many folks who voted to elect Mr. Trump and whose interests will not be served by the Trump-Musk effort to shape our government into one that does less for regular folks and better serves corporations, do not yet see the danger in abandoning democratic safeguards to let Musk run free. That’s scary. I think a critical mass of such folks won’t see what they’re losing until far too late, when it bites them personally but most of their potential allies for change are jailed, dead, or fled. Or merely intimidated. As Musk uses unusual financial knowledge to interfere with folks lives, Patel uses an FBI stripped of apolitical investigators to start nuisance investigations of enemies, and folks who committed violent felonies for Trump and were pardoned by Trump commit new violent felonies for Trump, many will indeed fall silent.]

[For now, we U.S. citizens are living in two very different realities.]

A True Danger!

The 47th President’s Administration is starting about as foreseen, but with some differences.

We knew that in 2016 he was an inexperienced narcissist who figured everything would change when he bellowed at it. It didn’t. Shockingly, the rightwing sycophants he’d installed in important cabinet positions (AG, Defense Secretary, even his military chiefs of staff) found that vestiges of ethics, patriotism, or good sense, meant there was some dung they just couldn’t eat.

We knew that this time he was resolved to appoint people no hint of backbone. He has. I thought he’d appoint some experienced but bombastic defense secretary. He appointed a joke, except that it’s mostly Putin, Xi, and the mullahs in Iran who are laughing at it. Behind their sleeves.

The speed and comprehensiveness of the viciousness are surprising. Mr. Trump, having thought he could command this vast beast, the civil service or “Deep State,” now knew (or had minions who knew) that they needed someone loyal to him in every cell of the beast. He also has a cadre of folks, including the creators of the 2025 blueprint, who understood this and were prepared to kiss his posterior hard enough and often enough to gain his trust to do as they liked. He himself cares little for policy, except that he hates anyone who’s opposed or belittled him, and any favoring of women, folks of color, poor folks, or queer folks at the expense of Anglo frat boys and billionaires’ profits – or bore the scent of Mr. Biden of Mr. Obama.

They’ve rapidly released felons who violently attacked Capitol cops, canceled security details, excised Tuskegee Airmen from Air Force training syllabi, illegally fired all inspectors-general, encouraged [intimidated?} civil servants to take buyouts (to limit the government’s ability to tax or regulate corporations) but imposing the abortive” pause in paying moneys already committed.

It seems that the reaction of even Republican officeholders in states and cities caused that U-Turn, which so embarrassed the Trumpies that they denied it was a retreat at all. But don’t celebrate. The game plan is to distract with unconventional formations and pre-snap motion so’s defenders can’t cover everyone. Throw out so many appalling absurdities that more thoughtful and patriotic forces can’t fight em all.

Everyone wonders how and when many Trump voters will realize that he’s working against their interests? He represents the well-heeled corporations that are gouging and poisoning people. Government officials trying to protect us from them is somewhat inconvenient to their profit maximization. He promises lower grocery prices; but neither depriving farms of their largely immigrant work-forces nor imposing tariffs will reduce the price of eggs, nor will ignoring bird flu. He is their champion, but his various actions to weaken their access to medical care won’t make ‘em feel a whole lot better, nor will the polio Mr. Kennedy might subject their kids to. Trump yammers about job creation, but he’s trying to undo the jobs Biden and Congress quietly created through the Inflation Reduction Act. (He needs to cover the Biden smell.)

Will they see the connection? Or will he convince them that Joe Biden’s ghost is tinkering with the machinery, or Kamala has a sly finger on the scale? Will Musk’s Twitter continue bombarding them with enough pro-Trump propaganda to keep them quiet? Will eliminating all the watchdogs suggest he has plans to break laws – or just that he’s pruning the Deep State?

Beats me!

                                                      – 30 --

 

[The above column appeared today, Sunday, 2 February, in the Las Cruces Sun-News and on its website, as well as on the KRWG website under Local Viewpoints. A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/). ]

[ What’t going on is dangerous in an unprecedented way. And part of the plan is what my column points out, the great variety of the bad acts – as predicted by Steve Bannon years ago, when he spoke of flooding the zone.

The moment I sent in the column, Trumpian absurdities flooded in. Krish Patel, the proposed FBI head, scrambled to explain why saying he’d destroy the FBIwas not a problem; and our proposed new Fauci, Mr. Kennedy danced such weird gyrations around his dangerously goofy vax ideology that even the Louisiana Republican U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy, a physician himself, confessed he was “struggling with your nomination.”

Since, top FBI officials are gone, and Musk operatives have full access to the federal system of payments, which was normally well-guarded information even within the government. They could cut off funding to a social program they disliked – or stop sending Fauci’s pension checks.

Meanwhile a tragic crash between a small airplane and a military helicopter killed scores of people near D.C. That’s a tragedy. Mr. Trump immediately insulted women and ethnic minortiies by blaming DEI! Under reporters’ questioning, he said sometimes brains could be a factor in air controllers’ work, implying disadvantaged folks’ brains were inferior, and complained about a slogan he said Biden had put up at the FAA, until another reporter said the slogan had been there all through Trump’s first Presidency.

Trump’s absolute lack of grace in trying to make a political point even before the bodies were recovered was no surprise. Nor was his lurching into a random lie, then trying to support it with remarks that were as stupid as they were racist.

Meanwhile, facts emerged that I suspect were irrelevant but had a lot fatter chance of being relevant than Mr. Trump’s babbling. Trump’s pal Elon Musk had essentially fired the head of the FAA; Trump had then dissolved the Airline Safety Council; and the combination of Trump’s “pause” in payments and “Fork in the Road” letter inviting federal employees to resign rattled folks, causing great chaos.

Here’s a possibly relevant fact that those facts probably didn’t cause: on the night of the crash, a staffing shortage had the air traffic controller doing the job of two controllers. I’m not blaming Trump for the crash. But I promise that if it had happened a week or two into Biden’s Presidency, Trump would have blamed Biden. And creating chaos and fear among federal employees, as Trump is doing, can’t be helpful.

Mr. Trump’s Presidency is something few of us deserve for our sins.

As Republican (or former Republican?) David Brooks wrote, “This was the week in which the Chinese made incredible gains in artificial intelligence and the Americans made incredible gains in human stupidity. I’m sorry, but I look at the Trump administration’s behavior over the last week and the only word that accurately describes it is: stupid.”

Meanwhile, top FBI personnel were reportedly told to resign or get fired. They left. Now Mr. Trump can ensure there’s no top expertise, independence or conscience to protect us from whatever January 6 sympathizer Kash Patel wants to do. Musk and friends also demanded sensitive information about methods of payment to retirees getting social security. No legitimate reason fot them to get that, and those officials resigned, too. What that says to folks who might want to speak up, is, realize that we can make up any kind of case we want and put you through legal hell and, if you depend on social security, you might need a lawyer to get the government to keep paying you. None of that sounds real subtle.]

A public school is an a public accommodation which must treat us all equally.

Likely you’d have figured that that that statement was so obviously true that I’m an idiot for writing it.

But, in a sense, it only became true in New Mexico today (January 23), when the New Mexico Supreme Court unanimously decided the point, tossing out an erroneous 1981 decision that UNM was not a “public accommodation,” as that term is used in the New Mexico Human Rights Act.

The new case arose from a Halloween event in which their Advanced Placement English teacher allegedly cut three inches off one Native American girl’s braid and called another “a bloody Indian.” Albuquerque Public Schools argued, as lawyers will, that APS was not a public accommodation. The trial court bought that, and dismissed the case; but the Court of Appeal overruled that, and the Supreme Court agrees. (Lawyers will note that the Court of Appeals “distinguished” the 1981 UNM case, but the Supreme Court explicitly overruled it.)

I note the decision not merely for its irony, but for the distinction between our courts’,, and our state government’s, willingness to consider candidly our sorry history in such matters; and to be glad we do not live in Florida or Texas, and have some protection against the possible abuses at the hands of our federal government.

Said the court, “ The NMHRA’s protections against numerous forms of discrimination must be read against the backdrop of this state’s unfortunate history of race-based discrimination, including that history transpiring within our public schools.” Noting that our New Mexico Constitution provides for education for all children, and that, “Children of Spanish descent in the state of New Mexico shall never be denied the right and privilege of admission and attendance in the public schools . . . but shall forever enjoy perfect equality with other children in all public schools and educational institutions of the state.” For a lot of the 20^th Century, that simply was not true for Native American kids.

In judicial language, despite such constitutional protections, “New Mexico schools have been used to further efforts of assimilation and cultural erasure among Native American and Hispanic children” and that historians have written that our schools sought to force “assimilation through education ‘that intentionally sought to destroy their cultural ways of life.’”

Political point: can you imagine the governor or attorney-general of Florida or Texas writing that? Rather, we’re seeing directives that such things not even be spoken of in those states’ public schools.

Personal point: I’ve talked with a Navajo long-distance runner whose father taught himself long-distance running as a kid, racing home after escaping from the schools to which our state sent him to learn not to be Navajo any more. I also recall my friend Fred Johnson, a Dineh student here in 1970, whose required ten-minute film to pass Buddy Wanzer's filmmaking course was a very moving study of his daughter, juxtaposing the loud chaos of a morning here, and on a local schoolbus, with the quieter strains of a morning at home.

Justice Briana Zamora’s concurrence correctly notes that while Brown v Board of Education held in 1954 that the segregation of public schools based on race was unconstitutional, it was 41 years later, in 1995, that a federal court explicitly held that that applied to children on the Navajo Nation.

Another reason I’m glad I’m in New Mexico.

                                – 30 --

[ oops - thought i'd published this y/d, sunday, but apparently i didn't quite do that.]

[The above column appeared Sunday, 26 January, on the Las Cruces Sun-News website, as well as on the KRWG website under Local Viewpoints. A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/). ]

No News Is Good News If the Alternative Is Armed Insurrection

This week’s news included our first human bird-flu death and no violent effort to overthrow the government.

Outgoing VP Kamala Harris quietly presided over certification of Donald Trump’s election to the U.S. Presidency. That’s always a yawner. But, four years ago, a losing Presidential candidate orchestrated a plot to stay in office through fraud and chicanery, aided by a violent protest that killed five police officers and threatened the lives of congessfolk trying to do their constitutional job, including that losing candidate’s vice-president. Imagine trying to explain that to Dwight David Eisenhower! Then explaining that the guy was elected again.

He’ll reportedly pardon folks convicted of crimes in the failed coup effort. You elect a somewhat demented narcissist, then even violence against our country is acceptable if committed with admiration for the narcissist. An event almost unimaginable in U.S. history occurred, on national TV. The shifting sands of memory have already covered it.

This year, no violence. No threat of violence.

I can’t tell if the first human death from bird flu will someday loom large in memory, or be a trivia answer. (I’d bet on the latter, but for months I’ve washed my hands after filling bird-feeders.)

In 2016, the new president economized by abandoning the small office in charge of monitoring the world for possible pandemics, such as ebola and swine flu, and responding quickly. In 2019-20, that president denied that COVID-19 was any big deal. Perhaps coincidentally, the U.S., 4.24% of the world’s population, suffered by May 2020 28.6% of the global deaths from the pandemic, 103,700 out of 362,705. Maybe reporting anomalies contributed; and maybe some of the initial sanitizing recommendations proved excessive. But Mr. Trump was pooh-poohing masks, and advising folks to try weird remedies, and now wants to appoint an anti-vax nutcase to oversee such matters. Trump’s term ended in January, 2021. By April 2024, the death figures were just over seven million worldwide and 1,219,487 [a reasonable 5.7%] here.

The Salk vaccine stemmed the polio epidemic of seventy years ago. Polio has vanished. Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s lawyer has brought lawsuits seeking to undo approval, and even do a new placebo test – not vaccinating some kids, to see what happens. Sorry, but given 70 years’ scientific history, that just sounds dangerously goofy. Kennedy also helped undermine Samoan confidence in the measles vaccine, helping Samoa suffer a deadly measles outbreak.

In 2020, Kennedy said that much of the pandemic “feels very planned to me,” adding that “if you create these mechanisms for control, they become weapons of obedience for authoritarian regimes.” Jay Bhattacharya, Trump’s choice to heat the National Institute of Health, said in April 2020 that the pandemic would be less deadly than flu. FDA appointee Marty Makary said in February 2021 that COVID would be “mostly gone by April.” Their ideologies dominated their “scientific” pronouncements. Not ideal behavior by the folks who’ll decide how we handle the next big health problem. Or biological warfare against us.

Meanwhile Mr. Trump, like an Alzheimer's patient, grabs at everything he sees. His threat to snatch the Panama Canal and Greenland, for our security, undermines alliances. Refusing to rule out violence tells Xi and Putin that if they feel they need Taiwan or Ukraine, that’s cool. Even Trump’s own former National Security Advisor says that’s dumber than a fencepost.

Very few of my future Sunday columns will mention the White House. It’s too easy a target.

                                         – 30 –

 

[The above column appeared Sunday, 12 January, in the Las Cruces Sun-News and on the newspaper's website, as well as on the KRWG website under Local Viewpoints. A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/). ]

[In 2025, very few of my Sunday columns will discuss Mr. Trump. We have plenty of urgent issues locally worth discussing; and Washington is both too easy a target to be much fun [see above column] and a little fruitless, because folks mostly believe what they believe and ain’t listening.

However, a Facebook exchange today set me thinking on what’s maybe an odd course: Along with keeping an eye on Mr. Trump, and resisting excesses if and as we can, we should be grateful we are not him. Most of us, clearly including Joe Biden, grew up in families that taught us some basic stuff about loving and being loved, living our lives but considering others’ needs too, and basic decency. Mr. Trump was taught that it was a dog-eat-dog world, and one’s task was to make as much money as you could off anyone else you met, and you got laughed at if you didn’t. All his annoying traits, some trivial, such as cheating at golf and comically exaggerating crowd sizes, and humiliating anyone who disagrees with him, are indeed annoying; but each speaks eloquently of his need to do that sort of shit, and I can think of few people I know who would choose to be in Donald’s wounded mind if they could avoid it. It must be hell!

So, while maintaining compassion for all those he hurts and insults, save some for him. ]

New Mexico Supreme Court Confirms Localities Can't Outlaw Abortions

No big surprise here, but on 9January, as I watched all that wonderful snow float earthward, the New Mexico Supreme Court unanimously rendered a decision that’s important but also as obvious as the snow falling in the direction Newton would anticipate: that the vicious efforts by Hobbs, Clovis, Lea County, and Roosevelt County to outlaw abortions was illegal and ineffective. Despite a laundry list of goofy sounding rightwing “friends of the court,” the justices said that the ordinance, as it was intended to, conflicts with state law, and that the state statute controls. The court did not consider or decide the deeper question of the ordinance’s constitutionality, because there’s a basic procedure rule that if you don’t have to decide a constitutional question, because some other issue is sufficient to decide the case, you don’t look at or opine on the constitutional question.

The case was formally known as State ex rel. Torrez v Board of County Commissioners for Lea County, et al., Docket # S-1-SC-39742 (1/9/2025)

The ordinances, in the court’s words, “create blanket prohibitions on the mailing or receipt of any abortion-related instrumentality.” Those prohibitions, the court concluded, “plainly conflict with provisions of the Reproductive and Gender-Affirming Health Care Freedom Act (the Health Care Freedom Act or the Act), NMSA 1978, §§ 24-34-1 to -5 (2023)” and several other statutes.

Therefore the effort failed.

The court reviewed the history, starting with the 2022 US. Supreme Court decision in Hobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215, 360-61 (2022), overturning Roe v. Wade, 410 US. 113 (1973), and declaring the authority to regulate abortions a state issue. Today’s opinion noted the accuracy of the Hobbs dissenting justices’ prediction that Hobbs would encourage just such in-state battles as this one.

In response to Hobbs, New Mexico’s Legislature revisited the decades-old state criminal statute banning abortions unless deemed necessary to protect a woman from death or “serious and permanent bodily injury. In 2021 the Legislature repealed the old ban and its criminal penalties, removing legal bars to abortion in New Mexico. Further legislative and executive actions broadened access. Most notably, the the Health Care Freedom Act, stating New Mexico’s modern desire to protect women's’ rights to access reproductive health care in New Mexico, went into effect in June 2023.  It prohibits any public body, entity, or individual from interfering with access to reproductive or gender-affirming health care and imposes penalties for violations of the Act’s provisions. The two county commissions and the two city councils had willfully violated that law.

Thus, today's decision should come as no surprise.

However, it confirms the importance (disputed at the time) of formally rescinding the old law and enacting a fresh one, bringing a more modern and compassionate approach to the issue. 

                                         --  30 --