Local Politics Emulates National Policies

(Ed. Note. We have two events coming up. Friday at 5pm we will gather at a yet to be determined location for the Rachel Maddow forum. Then November 14th at Taos Mesa Brewery for the CBS Twitter debate. Mark your calendars! Follow us on Facebook via the links below. Visit the Bernie Sanders page and dial in your zip code to RSVP to the upcoming events! Thanks to Kate, Abe, Margarita, and Renee for starting their own exciting Sandernistas group in Taos! Please forward this to your interested friends. David Cortez)

“The Sound of Music.”

Rated R

Fewer Americans each year have the ear or eye to detect reality, due to the “virtual” American culture, now being transformed by the debates described by the masters of “double speak” as “political” and “presidential.” Just because you don’t see “it” on the Cable or Broadcast news doesn’t mean a version of empirical (experiential) reality doesn’t exist.

Reagan celebrated “morning in America” even as he moved the debate to the right, and Clinton unleashed the hoards of banksters by signing off and deleting the depression-era regulations of “Glass Steagall.” Osama Bin Laden delivered the final coup de grace by burning down the Twin Towers. First Bush over-reacted then Obama intensified the Wars of Empire as well as steady profits for weapons manufacturers and inventors of new forms of surveillance.

“Don’t worry, Be Happy “: The White House itself is the new “assassination hub.” And righteous right-wingers find solace in Donald Trump’s slogan to “Make America Great Again” while listening to the somnolent tones of Dr. Carson’s “Sound of Music.”

Below, Chris Hedges comments about Sheldon Wolin who “named” the way America today is governed through “Inverted Totalitarianism.” The new “Totalitarianism has been confirmed by the Supreme Court’s miracle of “transubstantiation” by turning the Corporation into a “person.” Move over Jesus!

Hedges says, “Wolin throughout his scholarship charted the devolution of American democracy and in his last book, “Democracy Incorporated,” details our peculiar form of corporate totalitarianism. “One cannot point to any national institution[s] that can accurately be described as democratic,” he writes in that book, “surely not in the highly managed, money-saturated elections, the lobby-infested Congress, the imperial presidency, the class-biased judicial and penal system, or, least of all, the media.”

“Inverted totalitarianism is different from classical forms of totalitarianism. It does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader but in the faceless anonymity of the corporate state. Our inverted totalitarianism pays outward fealty to the facade of electoral politics, the Constitution, civil liberties, freedom of the press, the independence of the judiciary, and the iconography, traditions and language of American patriotism, but it has effectively seized all of the mechanisms of power to render the citizen impotent.”

You’ve got to Pay to Play!

(State) According to Greg Mello’s Las Alamos Study Group publication and news letter, Albuquerque’s “Stop the War Machine” group is preparing to protest: “The U.S. Air Force Global Strike Command is conducting a special weeklong war exercise at Kirtland AFB from Mon., Nov. 2 to Fri., Nov 6. Operation Global Thunder Vigilant Shield* is code for a first-strike nuclear attack against Russia and/or China arising out of a regional conflict with U.S. military forces. U.S. military strategy now includes denying Russia and China use of their space satellites – so this next war will be a war in space too. Including Kirtland AFB in this exercise is a leap in global war planning. The base is a pivotal link between the military’s nuclear weapons capability and space war operations… Our military leaders have gone mad again, thinking the planet can survive a global nuclear and space war both. Stop the next war now.” (Soon military gunships will be practicing touch downs at the cross-wind runway in Taos. The pesky Chinese et al are coming.)

(Town of Taos) The Socio-Economicos engineering, managed by the Taos Cabal, continues in the historic district of Taos. By expanding the hours and days of events like the Farmer’s Market, Halloween spectacles, Christmas Holidays, and Fiesta on the historic Plaza, our four fathers and one mother, along with the Machiavellian manager are using the “family values” photo op as the “motor” for “events” to drive out traditional tourist shops.

The current shops (for the most part) count on the infrastructure and historic patterns to deliver vehicular-based shoppers interested in the cultural curiosities. By squeezing the hours and reducing the flow of street and sidewalk shoppers, the shops that sell traditional art and culture, whether ersatz or authentic, will be forced out, according to the Manager’s “Memo to Barrone.”

As the restaurants and B&Bs or decaying motels fill up with tourists and retail sales decline, the gentrifiers need to dream up another source for GRT, the taxes that drive the muni budget: hence, high-end shops for high-end shoppers. The motive behind Mr. Machiavelli’s paradigm shift seems clear: in with the new demographic, out with the old “purple hairs” and “local” resistors. (You know what the occupiers did in 1847 to the rebels!)

Everyone has high praise for the Cutler Paving outfit. When did the roads ever look so good around town? Eh? And why didn’t Cutler fall into favor sooner at the Town’s hoary Public Works Department? At least we know why Bellis and Barrone fired and/or didn’t hire replacements in various muni departments. Instead of filling department vacancies, they are filling potholes and cracks in the roadways for the visitors and new progenitors of the tourist trade. One mystery answered.

The Barrone, Bellis, and Hahn cabal, as brilliant as it is culturally diabolical, has not escaped the notice of La Cantu and the concerned but retiring El Peralta. But the swing vote is controlled by the Energizer Bunny’s Double-Agent El Gonzales, the future of the valley. For said Councilor is on the Coop’s payroll. See below.

(Kit Carson Electric Coop) When have so many members been so exploited by so few? We member-owners merely serve those we elect, who also serve the Energizer Bunny, Mr. Luis Reyes. By borrowing some $100 millions, the Trustees and the Energizer Bunny have forced debt down the throats of the member meter minders and they are forcing rates up, up, up in order to “save the Coop.”

Though more tourists (and year round Christmas lights) and solvent second-homer occupiers might save the Coop from itself, the Trustees and their CEO have turned against the members who brought them to the dance. Now the County and Town want to pass an E911 “Public Safety” tax to subsidize the Coop, a Coop which used the phony “Command Center” to corrupt and subsequently cost members and taxpayers millions of dollars in loans, moving expenses, and unnecessary new infrastructure.

The profligates at KCEC have sold their birthright, their primos and vecinos “down the river.” Propane losses, Internet losses, Command Center losses, and Fiber-optic promises added up to “contracts for cuates” and “jobs for hitos and hitas” but negatives, long rows of zeroes, on the bottom line. Yet, the Trustees, except for one man, the “man from Cerro” stand proudly “sin verguenza” before you and ask you and a “compliant” PRC for a rate increase. The “Traveling Trustees” believe they, too, should enjoy transcontinental air travel from sea to shining sea. When these Trustees, as children, watched “And Now Miguel” they identified with the sheep, not the shepherd or the sheep dog. Times have changed. (See Hardy’s “Far From the Madding Crowd,” a tale of a sheep dog gone mad.)

And the Coop furnishes the “Founder” of the “Bank” on the Paseo with a steady source of loans and mortgages, income opportunities and repossessed properties. For Luis’s bro Angel (What a Name!) Reyes is President of the bank just as the former Romero factotum of forty years, Mr. Bobby Ortega is President of the Board of Trustees (despite his interference with “The Lineman of the County.”) The Cruz Alta Energizer is well-known and likeable as a “Mega-Kilowatt,” who does his duty to please the Trustees and his Banker buddies but mostly, I think, just to prove he could turn a tiny northern New Mexico REA-era Coop into a multi-million (100 million) dollar debtor and progressive example of egotistical brinksmanship.

Other Players

Small fry, like Mr. Painter, the El Prado “White-Out Artist” (along with TVAA’s Palemon and Taos Pueblo’s Gilbert and Nelson) have cornered the local water market for future growth. Charmin’ Joey, “The Man Who Sells Gravel and Asphalt, the Food of the Gods” laughs all the way to the bank as the dreamers of “highway corridor districts” and “builders of airports for billionaires” backed up by the Homeland Security Military Industrial Complex enjoy their own peculiar brand of “wishful thinking” (Blankenhorn, Bellis, Barrone, Fambro) and send up their prayers like smoke signals to the “Club for Growth.”

“Our Fathers” and a few “Mothers” all depend on Biblical lessons learned: the mutual cash flow passed back and forth as they rob Paul to pay, especially, Peter, while ferreting out the last dime from government grants and depleted departments, selling repossessed property and used vehicles, collecting pennies on light bills, and more dough, always more dough, to pay for potholes, bar ditches, and travel vouchers.

Our County tax bills go up even as our property values remain the same or decline. Go figure.

Now the County and Town would commodify “public safety,” and tax you to pay the E911 electric bill even as the Town antes up more dough to the Coop for Barrone’s mesmerizing Christmas tree lights 365 days a year, 24/7. How long before we pay more for the water we drink and, like our senior citizens, start asking: “how much is my oxygen bill this month?”