El Mitote…Rumor Walks Among Us!
While we wait for the reports on the low slow local economic turnaround, the Mumford and Sons concert caught everyone’s attention. Taosenos were flogging parking places for from $10 to $40 even as vendors sold cheap bottles of water for $5. We hope everyone got well at the downtown food and sales fair on Civic Plaza Drive. I scanned parking lots at conventional restaurants and grocery stores but business was ever so slow. We’re happy to hear the long suffering hotels might get a June boost in their occupancy rates, due to music fans from out of town.
Leaked documents to the international press yesterday confirmed the “rumors” of the last decade, concerning the administration’s acquisition of your personal and business data, which they store at Bluffdale, Utah. If the Obama administration isn’t targeting American citizens with killer drones or detaining foreign citizens without charges at GITMO, then they are listening, reading, and storing your private communications, courtesy NSA, FBI, IRS, ICE, and who know what other alphabet agencies under Homeland Security’s purview. The Obamanos have used the Espionage Act six times, more times than all other administrations combined, to warn off leakers, reporters, and other suspicious Americanos.
By expanding Broadband Internet access to each home in Taos, the Coop is proving to be an able ally of Obama’s electronic pickpockets. Similarly, the expansion of the Taos airport will aid surveillance by drones and Ospreys. Up here in El Norte, we talk too much about anachronistic notions of free speech and quaint civil liberties. Ask the KCEC Board of Trustees about electronic surveillance this Saturday at the annual meeting. Ask who stole the $210,000 in cash and checks. KCEC employees are saying it was an “inside job”—the money used for trustee elections and travel expenses. Quien sabe?
Despite spending millions in reserves, the decline in GRT, and subsequent lay-offs, the Town of Taos has rewarded one employee in the legal department, we hear, with a ten thousand dollar raise. And they say a highly placed public official owes the water department in arrears of more than $7,000. We’ve all read about taxpayer subsidies for the Mayor’s radio station, as well as the alleged nonprofit Mother’s Day venture. And the Mayor’s cuates on the council, Silva, Mr. Insider Contracts, and Abeyta, Mr. Realtor, continue to prosper, potentially or otherwise, like the Mayor’s friends at the KCEC Command Center and property owners at the airport. Hey times have changed since Bobby, Erlinda, Frank, and Meliton were considered the conscience of the community. Come back Bobby, come back.
As for poor folks in Taos: no more free books, no more free box, no more free speech downtown–unless protesters hire bigger bodyguards. Apparently law enforcement functions have been privatized and assigned to vigilante volunteers, the Tow Truckers and the insiders at the Coop, by the Taos Police Department.
As for correcting the town problems during upcoming elections, a group of activists has been searching high and wide for an honest man or woman to run for mayor. But the qualified shy away due to this the age of “excessively” corrupt politics. Democracy and constitutional government are under siege both nationally and locally. It’s time for us to take a hint from the Constant Gardener, shut down the computer, turn off the phone, say goodbye to all that and retire to water the vegetables instead of the weeds.