D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
January 2010
Editor's Note
Page: 2Could such a truly straight-talking politician get elected? Not a chance.
The awful truth is that, whether it's Harry Reid or Mitch McConnell, we mostly get the leaders we deserve. People propose term limits as one way to throw the rascals out, but that's just a gimmick to substitute for electoral willpower. You want to throw the rascals out? Vote for somebody else — maybe even somebody with the courage to tell you what you don't want to hear.
"The standard answer is that we need better leaders," Friedman writes. "The real answer is that we need better citizens. We need citizens who will convey to their leaders that they are ready to sacrifice, even pay, yes, higher taxes, and will not punish politicians who ask them to do the hard things."
As the storm clouds gather here at the first light of 2010, perhaps another Shakespeare quote says it best about the "brave new world" we face:
"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves."
Second District or Financial District?
Harry Teague sides with Wall Street over Main Street
on financial reform.
If this keeps up, we may have to give Rep. Harry Teague his own column. Perhaps we could call it, "So You Think You Elected a Democrat." Last month we berated Teague for breaking his own campaign promise and voting against health-care reform. While we ordinarily prefer to spread our editorializing around, Teague's latest vote on a major issue — against the financial-regulation bill designed to prevent the excesses that helped lead to the Wall Street collapse — was so egregiously wrong-headed that we must repeat.
Once again departing from the other two New Mexico Democrats in the House, Teague voted to strip the bill of a Consumer Financial Protection Agency that would serve as a watchdog on Wall Street abuses. After that attempt failed, Teague was one of only 22 Democrats to join all the House Republicans in voting against the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009, which would also:
- Give shareholders an advisory vote on executive pay.
- Use $3 billion of TARP funds to reduce the risk of foreclosure among
the unemployed.
- Create a whistleblower bounty program for those who uncover securities fraud.
(That summary of the legislation, by the way, comes from the Wall Street Journal, not exactly an anti-business mouthpiece.)
Apparently, Harry Teague was too busy buying his Congressional seat last fall to pay attention as the US financial system nearly propelled itself into a black hole. Liberated by an orgy of deregulation and happily forgetting the lessons of the last great economic collapse, speculative investment firms and lenders went on a binge from which we're now all suffering the hangover.
But Teague doesn't see that as a problem in need of fixing, we guess. Hey, after all, he's not unemployed.
One wonders exactly whom Teague thinks he's representing. Just three days before the House vote on financial reform, Republican leaders met with more than 100 financial-industry lobbyists to coordinate strategy. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, members of the House who voted against the measure raised 50% to 70% more from commercial banks, credit and finance companies, on average, than those who supported it. Teague collected a total of $226,809 from the financial sector, significantly more than Rep. Martin Heinrich ($176,019) or Rep. Ben Lujan ($170,883), the New Mexico congressmen who voted for the bill.
Much as he did on the health-care bill, Teague blamed his "nay" vote on perceived imperfections in the measure: "As written, the bill created a new government agency run by one administrator that will have the power to regulate trillions of dollars of financial products and transactions. I think it makes more sense to create a powerful council of regulators called the Consumer Financial Protection Council to promote consumer protection for customers of financial institutions."
That "council of regulators" was proposed by Republicans and opposed by all but 33 Democrats. According to the White House occupied by a president of Teague's own party, the watered-down watchdog would allow "big banks, mortgage companies and credit card companies to continue to get away with the practices that helped cause the financial crisis."
Evidently that's OK with Harry Teague. It may not be OK with New Mexico voters in the Second District who thought they were making a change from Rep. Steve Pearce.
Photographing Palomas
A new series pictures the border town as it was.
For Desert Exposure readers, the new year brings a new series of articles, "Going to Palomas," which in this issue. Author and photographer Victoria Tester will be familiar to readers from her previous "Voice of a Ranchwoman" series (which is still collected on our Web site at www.desertexposure.com/ranchwoman). In this new, heavily pictorial series, she presents a personal view of Palomas, the Mexican border town that’s been so sadly in the news for drug-related violence. The violence, however, is not Tester’s subject here: An award-winning poet and playwright, the author of Miracles of Sainted Earth (University of New Mexico Press), Tester shares her memories and photos from regular visits to Palomas that began more than a decade ago. You might think of it as a vision of the Palomas that was--and that, optimistically, might be once again someday.
In the meantime, another regular contributor, Marjorie Lilly, continues to chronicle the current state of affairs in Palomas and other border towns in her Borderlines column. Like Tester’s new series, it’s must-reading.
David A. Fryxell is editor of Desert Exposure.