A Letter From The People: Touring the Realm of the Dispossessed

Since we have a certain blogger with long-time ties to the Roundhouse wall leaners and power brokers waxing poetic today about well connected insiders, hordes of lobbyists with deep pockets and martini-fueled dealings in dark bars in Santa Fe, I thought I'd take a similar tack from The People's point of view.

You know, us -- the little people out here in the wilderness who are supposed to wait silently and submissively for the word to come down from on high on what will and will not be done in our name by the powerhouses of La Politica. We're the ones who won't get real reform related to health care, ethics or campaign finance because our "leaders" in the Legislature -- and especially in the "independent" Senate -- have come to depend on the ready money and perks from people who want to preserve the status quo and the profits for themselves. The public and the common good be damned.

Citizen Lobbyists
Our citizen lobbyists travel to the Roundhouse or interim committee meetings on their own dimes. Many take vacation days to do so. They car pool to save money. Their meals come from brown bags, not the Santa Fe hot spots designed for seeing and being seen. Those who can't afford the trip or can't get time off from work have to be content with phone calls to legislative secretaries and emails to legislators that usually get little or no response. Even if they succeed in getting their needs met in committee after committee with the help of the honest members of the legislature, their bills are often killed when or even just before they get to the Senate or House floor by the "leaders" dedicated to keeping power to themselves.

With no big chunks of cash or complimentary happy hours to offer, these citizen lobbyists too often get only a blind eye and a deaf ear when they voice their concerns. After all, they have no clout. They don't buy legislators drinks or invite them to buffets and cocktail parties or throw unlimited amounts of money into their "campaign funds" or hand them tickets to boxing matches or football games, or oooh and ahhh over them when they enter casinos or racetracks.

Citizen lobbyists have to scratch for information about what's going on with bills that will personally affect their daily lives, their health, their work, their children, their futures. And when they show up at committee hearings, they're often treated like unwelcome outsiders who take up precious time demanding to be heard when everyone who's anyone knows the deals have already gone down behind closed doors.

The Result
Because this is how the system presently works, we get things like bills proposing massive tax breaks for the coal-burning Desert Rock power plant, health reform bills that ignore the overwhelming support of the people for the Health Security Act and a summer's worth of testimony at hearings, pronouncements that public funding for elections is off the table, plots to kill the Domestic Partnership Act with last-minute, shady maneuvers and inflated, "privatized" contracts to conduct or "oversee" government functions. I could go on.

This bunch won't even allow floor proceedings to be shown online, despite $75,000 having been appropriated to do so. What don't they want us to see? Wouldn't it be fun to send a phalanx of citizens with video cameras to the Roundhouse corridors and swanky lounges of Santa Fe to track the comings and goings, the whispers and handshakes, that constitute way too much of what goes on in the Capitol? A regular YouTube bonanza.

I know our reps and senators are supposed to be doing the people's business, but as is often the case these days in state capitols and the halls of Congress alike, they mostly go about doing the business of the highest bidders, of those who wield power to get earmarks and loopholes, of those with profitable rackets to protect. These days, too many consider their real constituencies to be not the people who elect them, but the brokers, the insurance moguls, the financial market manipulators, the insider stock traders, the shady real estate developers, the for-profit prison operators, the pay-day loan sharks, the "defense" contract proliferators, the fake "homeland security" money suckers, the outrageously compensated CEOs and the high and mightily titled corporate investor class.

Somehow, not one bit of poetry, not one shred of romance or nostalgia comes to mind when I think about what's going on in Santa Fe right now. Can you blame me?

The Good Ones
Of course there are any number of genuinely honest, committed, hardworking legislators who work their bodies to the bone all year long to try and get a little something for the people, for the community, for the common good, for justice, for equality. Unfortunately, in a greed-filled and close-minded climate like the one that prevails these days, they're about as well respected by the "leaders" in our government as ordinary people are. They get the shaft and the run-around just like we do. And I'm pretty darn sure they're not feeling poetic and nostalgic about it either, as our critical needs go unmet while the elite among us count their chits.