Letters to the Editor
Great power over indebted nations
Editor:
Doug May, in a recent letter to the editor, said that the most important issue facing our nation right now is the national debt. I agree, because too many people believe in that debt. In fact, Congress just passed a law that will make ordinary Americans pay the debt.
Since Reagan, Republican governments have increased the national debt. Obama, too, because he continued the bailout and the wars and tried to support the ordinary people.
Since the 1930s, our nation and others (we were the most powerful member of the World Bank) have been lending money internationally. As with the subprime mortgages, these were loans known to be at great risk of not being repaid. (There was no international enforcement agency). However, lending money is highly profitable: When the person or nation defaults, you just make them another loan.
When people and nations are in your debt, you have great power over them. Our international loans allow us to require “structural adjustments” — austerity measures — of other nations under the pretense of making them “save money” so they can repay their loans. This impoverishment of the country in question makes it so they can’t develop, and are forced to export their most precious national resources.
The austerity measures take the form of higher taxes, privatization of national resources, lowered social services.
Does that sound familiar? Those are precisely the measures that Republicans tout ad infinitum. (Republicans claim they don’t want to raise taxes, but — since no one’s trying to raise taxes on anyone but the rich — those no-tax pledges are only to protect “big money”).
Those international loans will never be repaid. The subprime mortgage loans will never be repaid. (Big business got paid taxpayer money, instead).
The U.S. debt will never be repaid, and that’s OK. It’s win-win for the big money that’s behind the Republicans: The worse government performs, the more the citizens can be persuaded to help tear it apart further — that Republican equation of “smaller government” — the less protection we have against them and the more easily we can be exploited.
The more austerity is imposed on us, the more education and health care and elder care are defunded, the less productive and smart we become, the more likely we are to need more loans — and to be subject to all the various kinds of blackmail: Selling our water, oil and mineral resources dirt cheap to industries that use cheap labor. (And we’ll be part of that cheap labor force).
It’s been a fruitful century of very expensive propaganda sometimes known as public relations. Fox News and Citizen’s United are just the latest in technical improvements on brainwashing by business and military-industrial government that started in the 1920s.
I talked with a Republican just before the congressional deal that raised the debt ceiling, who angrily said, “Why are they letting Obama raise the debt ceiling?” The Republicans got their huge spending cuts because Democrats also believe the hype that the debt is real (even though their guy Clinton took a huge debt and balanced it in only a few years by raising taxes on the wealthy)— and this person wanted more austerity.
If you believe the national debt is the democratically-acquired debt of the people of America — except insofar as they allowed themselves to be brainwashed into buying too many things and into allowing their government to buy too many things — like excessive military offensive capability — then you have learned the lesson well.
Rather than 9/11, remember 10/1! (2008, the day of the Bailout).
The enemy is not some Muslim.
Jan Deininger, Socorro
Co-op board is a circus
Editor:
On Monday, July 18, Socorro Electric Cooperative’s board of trustees held another of their illegal meetings. I guess their lawyer just doesn’t know how to advise them to follow the court’s ruling.
Judge Mitchell told all of us in the courtroom that the board was to follow the Open Meetings Act. He also told them that everything that was passed after April 17, 2010, was null and void. In order to follow the bylaws, the board was to inform the members of meetings in billing statements. They are also to advertise in the local newspapers, and, since some of our members are not in Socorro County, they need to advertise in the Valencia County News-Bulletin and the Mountain Mail.
Well, as you know none of this has been done, and they trustees just keep sailing along thumbing their noses at the courts and the members. And as far as keeping the minutes, well, that isn’t happening. How long can they claim ignorance, and how long can they just keep bankrupting the SEC? It has become a three-ring circus.
You know when the board chose to sue the members they shot themselves in the foot. And now, instead of trying to fix it they are choosing to again try and hide everything. What is in those books and at what expense will these so-called board members go to hide it?
The jig is up. It isn’t their club anymore. They should go home.
Last but not least, we need to do redistricting with a reputable firm so that it will be legal and fair. Then we can move forward.
Hope to see you at next year’s annual meeting.
Charlene West, Lemitar