In this special broadcast from just outside Los Alamos National Laboratory, we look at the radioactive legacy of New Mexico. The atomic bombs used in World War II were designed and developed here, and the state still plays a key role in maintaining the nation’s massive nuclear arsenal. We’re joined by two guests: Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, and Chuck Montaño, a former investigator and auditor at Los Alamos who turned whistleblower after calling attention to wasteful spending and fraud at the nation’s foremost nuclear weapons lab.

Transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: We’re in our 100-city tour here in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Yes, we are broadcasting from Los Alamos, the birthplace of the atomic bomb. We’re here at the historic Fuller Lodge, built in 1928 as a boarding school for boys. Gore Vidal was one of the better-known students here. The school was taken over by the U.S. government in 1943 to house the scientists for the Manhattan Project, the secret military program based here that produced the first U.S. nuclear weapon. The work was led by the physicist J. Robert ...

Scientists report in the journal Nature Climate Change that the drought-stress currently being experienced by forests in the Southwestern U.S. “is more severe than any event since the late 1500s megadrought” that “probably led to deaths of a large proportion of trees living at the time.”

They warn that climate projections indicate that “the mean forest drought-stress by the 2050s will exceed that of the most severe droughts in the past 1,000 years.”

In Temperature as a Potent Driver of Regional Forest Drought Stress and Tree Mortality (by A. Park Williams et al., Nature Climate Change, 30 September 2012), the authors say that the current severe drought event in the Southwest — which extends from 2000 to the present – is the fifth strongest since 1000 AD. They define the Southwest as including Arizona, New Mexico and the southern portions of Utah and Colorado. They attribute the current event both to natural variability and to rising atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases from human activity; and they associate it with “regional-scale declines in canopy greenness and tree survival, due in part to large bark-beetle outbreaks and increasingly large wildfires.”

A combination of declining precipitation during the cool season and rising temperatures during the warm season is likely by mid-century to be accompanied by increased forest decline. “If forest drought stress exceeds late 1500 levels, we expect that a lot of trees are going to be dying,” says the article’s lead research, A. Park Williams (Los Alamos National Laboratory), in a press release on Monday from the U.S. Geological Survey.

“Consistent with many other recent ...

Dark money groups flooded Albuquerque’s airwaves in August, aiming to sway a hotly contested U.S. Senate race by making more than half the political ad buys on top TV stations.

That fact, gleaned through a review of TV station political ad records now available in our Free the Files news application, highlights the role that unlimited anonymous money is playing in this year’s election.

Our analysis of a month of ad orders in the Senate race between Republican Heather Wilson and Democrat Rep. Martin Heinrich is possible because of a new Federal Communications Commission rule requiring major-market affiliates of ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC to upload political ad files to a government website.

In statements to ProPublica, the campaigns of Heinrich and Wilson blamed each other for relying on dark money.

Wilson campaign spokesman Chris Sanchez accused “environmental extremists” of pouring money “into New Mexico to falsely attack Heather Wilson because they know her opponent, Congressman Heinrich, supports their radical agenda.”

Heinrich campaign spokeswoman Whitney Potter accused “corporate special interest groups” of spending millions in secret money to support Wilson “because they know she will support their misplaced priorities that put the wealthy special interests ahead of middle-class families in New Mexico.”

The Senate race has attracted national attention because, with incumbent Democratic Sen. Jeff Bingaman retiring, it is a rare open seat. The race was considered tight earlier this year. After a summer of heavy spending by outside groups on both sides, Heinrich is now the favorite.

In August, while Wilson’s campaign contracted to spend about $512,000 on ads in Albuquerque, four prominent conservative groups booked almost $658,000 of ads attacking Heinrich, station records show.

That means about 56 percent ...

The state of Vermont— Mecca of hemp-wearing, Subaru-driving, Co-op-loving, Frisbee revolutionaries—is paradoxically gaining attention for its leading role in supporting the private, for-profit corrections industry.  

WWBJD? (What would Ben & Jerry do?)

Behind only New Mexico, Hawaii, and Montana, the state of Vermont now houses the largest proportion of its inmates—28 percent—in prisons owned and operated by for-profit corrections firms. Vermont, in fact, recently renewed its two-year, $24.9 million contract with Nashville-based Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation’s largest private prison owner and operator. According to the terms of the agreement, CCA will house nearly 600 of Vermont’s youngest and healthiest inmates in Kentucky and Arizona-based facilities from July 2011 to July 2013. 

Since 1998, Vermont’s Department of Corrections (DOC) has justified its partnership with CCA by appeals to efficiency. But are CCA-operated facilities really more cost-effective than state-run prisons?

The answer may surprise you.

Despite Vermont’s steady-to-declining crime-rate, incarceration in the Green Mountain state has increased by 270 percent since 1990. And the state’s DOC budget has grown by almost 400 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars over the same period.  Burgeoning expenditures and inmate populations alike are attributable to changes in state and federal sentencing guidelines. According to the Vermont DOC, “both the length of sentence and the number of persons sentenced have increased” since the early 1990s by virtue of the expansion of state DWI laws (1991), ...

On Tuesday, a Senate Judiciary subcommittee held a hearing called “Taking Back Our Democracy,” examining special interests’ increasing grip on American politics and policy, especially focusing on the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision. Two panels of witnesses, including both current lawmakers and activists, testified to a friendly panel of Democratic senators (no Republicans appeared to have shown up) that our democracy is under siege.

That sentiment was no surprise to anyone in the room (over 400 people showed up for the hearing, packing the room and causing spillover to another room). Again and again, testimonies confirmed that while money has played an enormous role in politics for decades, the past few years have marked a dramatic change:

• Sen. Bernie Sanders (I- Vt.) said that at least 23 extremely rich families have contributed at least $250,000 each in the 2012 campaigns. “My guess is that number is really much greater because many of these contributions are made in secret. In other words, not content to own our economy, the 1 percent want to own our government as well,” Sanders said.
• Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) cited Citizens United  and the DC Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision on SpeechNow v. FEC as the two cases most directly responsible for the rise of super PACs. “But our campaign finance system was hardly a model of democracy before these opinions,” he said. “We have been on this dangerous path for a long time. The Citizens United and Speech Now decisions may have picked up the pace, but the court laid the groundwork many years ago.”
• Gov. Buddy Roemer, former Republican presidential contender, lamented the “institutionalized corruption” gripping Congress, blaming it for the lack of trust Americans have in their ...

The story of the Sawmill neighborhood, one of the oldest Latino neighborhoods in Albuquerque, is a familiar one. Sawmill was, for a long time, among the city’s most affordable places to live. But it is also within walking distance of the downtown business district and adjacent to the historic Old Town area, a major New Mexico tourist attraction. In the early 1990s, a wave of property investment swept through Sawmill, which included development of a huge retail plaza, luxury condominiums, and a hotel convention complex. Businesses appeared on residential blocks once lined with affordable, single-family houses. This economic activity caused real estate values throughout the Sawmill neighborhood to spiral upward, pushing land and housing costs beyond the reach of families who had lived there for decades.

Here’s where the story takes a different direction. Members of the Sawmill Advisory Council (SAC), a group of neighborhood residents formed 10 years earlier to stop pollution from a nearby particle board factory, decided they needed to do more than ...

“If you don’t like it here, move!” This phrase has been used by pundits, politicians, and overzealous religious leaders in the United States for as long as I can remember. It used to be reserved for people who “hate America” but lately it’s taking an ominous turn that prods disenfranchised citizens to become refugees from their own home states. I’ve been seeing it more and more in online comments as the nationwide battle over women’s reproductive rights, gay marriage, race equality, and religious freedom blazes its way through the primary season and into the general election. The popular sentiment appears to be turning toward an America made up of a disjointed patchwork of equality laws. An America where if you don’t “fit in” it’s your own fault. An America where “States’ Rights” reign supreme.

Ron Paul has built much of his grassroots mystique around this notion and it sounds good to people on both sides of the political spectrum that feel their local values shouldn’t be dictated by someone in Washington. It sounds great to everyone but those outside of the local majority. If your faith, color, or sexuality doesn’t match up with regional ideals, that simple notion of “States’ Rights” is a life sentence of oppression, poverty, and abuse. States’ rights is more than a combination of words, it’s a tool used by racists and zealots to, like petulant children, throw fits against the will of the American majority in favor of local traditions.

Perhaps the most famous stand off in States’ Rights was the fallout from Brown vs. The Board of Education. In May of 1957 the Supreme Court declared racially segregated schools to be unconstitutional. In September of that same year nine black students attempted to enter their new High School for the first time. They were met by the Arkansas National ...

On Wednesday, a group of members of Congress, local and state lawmakers, and activist groups met in a Capitol Visitor Center hearing room to do something unusual for its loftiness: they announced and signed a “declaration for democracy,” pledging their support to an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to overturn the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which allowed unlimited spending by corporations and unions on elections.

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), himself the author of such an amendment, was one of the first lawmakers to speak:

The U.S. Constitution has served us very well, but when the Supreme Court says, for purposes of the First Amendment, that corporations are people, that writing checks from the company’s bank account is constitutionally-protected speech and that attempts by the federal government and states to impose reasonable restrictions on campaign ads are unconstitutional, our democracy is in grave danger. There comes a time when an issue is so important that the only way to address it is by constitutional amendment.

Sanders was joined by Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Tom Udall (D-NM), as well as Democratic Reps. John Conyers (Mich.), Donna Edwards (Md.), Keith Ellison (Minn.), Rush Holt (N.J.), John Sarbanes (Md.), Betty Sutton (Ohio), Sheila Jackson Lee (Texas), Ted Deutch (Fla.), Hank Johnson (Ga.), Peter Welch (Vt.), and David Cicilline (R.I.). Many have introduced constitutional amendments of their own; all signed on to the declaration and expressed their support for the movement.

Each member echoed Sanders, especially focusing on the momentum building across the country for such an amendment. Hawaii, New Mexico, and this week, Vermont, have all passed resolutions in their state ...

LGBT equality activists in New Mexico protested a local pastor on Sunday for opposing Gov. Susana Martinez’s (R) appointment of Doug Howe, a gay man, to the Public Regulation Commission. Pastor Steve Smothermon of One Legacy Church told NMPolitics.net, a local political blog, last month that Martinez “looked me in the eye personally and said she’s socially conservative… she wouldn’t espouse the homosexual agenda.” He said Howe’s appointment “goes against that”:

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We’ve all heard it: “Dress for the job you want, not the one you have.” I often wonder if the same logic applies to electoral politics. Though conflating “the political” with “the sartorial” isn’t at all my intention, I cannot help but believe that we vote for the lives we want, not the ones we have. Politics, broadly understood, helps to bridge the chasm between the immediate and the aspirational, to negotiate the oscillation of our material needs and our magical desires. To this end, I think there is sufficient evidence to argue that politics is what we do when metaphysics fails, what we do when transhistorical categories of supposed universality become unlaced.

So what exactly constitutes the ground for our political calculus? And what happens when voting for our future aspirations negates our current needs?

Traditional scholars in the field of political science often suggest that our unobstructed self interest (premised on rational choice theory) tends to produce policy preferences and electoral outcomes largely reflective of our material interests. Regrettably, however, according to a 2007 report published by the Tax Foundation entitled “Federal Spending Received Per Dollar Paid by State,” U.S. states that rely most heavily on federal subsidies for public programs routinely elect politicians who are determined to excoriate such funding sources. The articulation of policy preferences and, indeed, the creation and maintenance of a deeply democratic society are co-premised on free and equal access to reliable information, but even a cursory exegesis of the Tax Foundation data compels one to conclude that the particular states most dependent on aid from the federal government are the very same states whose residents voted overwhelmingly for John McCain in 2008. How could this be?

According to the data, only 10 ...

Consider it a taste of the future: the fire, smoke, drought, dust, and heat that have made life unpleasant, if not dangerous, from Louisiana to Los Angeles. New records tell the tale: biggest wildfire ever recorded in Arizona (538,049 acres), biggest fire ever in New Mexico (156,600 acres), all-time worst fire year in Texas history (3,697,000 acres).

The fires were a function of drought.  As of summer’s end, 2011 was the driest year in 117 years of record keeping for New Mexico, Texas, and Louisiana, and the second driest for Oklahoma. Those fires also resulted from record heat.  It was the hottest summer ever recorded for New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, as well as the hottest August ever for those states, plus Arizona and Colorado.

Virtually every city in the region experienced unprecedented temperatures, with Phoenix, as usual, leading the march toward unlivability. This past summer, the so-called Valley of the Sun set a new record of 33 days when the mercury reached a shoe-melting 110º F or higher. (The previous record of 32 days was set in 2007.)

And here’s the bad news in a nutshell: if you live in the Southwest or just about anywhere in the American West, you or your children and grandchildren could soon enough be facing the Age of Thirst, which may also prove to be the greatest water crisis in the history of civilization.  No kidding.

If that gets you down, here’s ...