Ernie Atencio

Our local town council recently passed a resolution to make Taos the first officially-designated “Fair Trade Town” in the West. It’s also only the fifth in the nation, according to Fair Trade Towns U.S.A.

What does “fair trade” mean for a rural northern New Mexico town?

According to Wikipedia, fair trade is a “market-based approach to alleviating global poverty and promoting sustainability” that “advocates payment of a fair price as well as social and environmental standards . . . in particular on exports from developing countries to developed countries.” With some of the persistently highest rates of poverty and childhood hunger in the nation, New Mexico is right in there with many of those developing countries. And the northern counties are among the poorest.

The council’s resolution calls for public education and promotion of fair trade principles, encouraging local commerce in fair trade products and procuring and using “Fair Trade Certified products such as coffee and tea, which would normally be purchased for council meetings, office supplies, etc. when such products are available and competitively priced.”

It’s hard to imagine how buying fair trade coffee and tea and copy paper for town meetings (when competitively priced) will make much of a dent in global poverty. And what about buying local? Those third-world Taos-area farmers don’t grow coffee or tea, but they do grow organic wheat and wonderful produce and grassfed bison and beef.

Well, it’s a start in the right direction.

Felice Pace

Few in the West are unaware that the federal crackdown on immigration has had an impact on western industries. The March 3rd edition of HCN, for example, included this comment on the situation from Bill Crooke’s essay for Writers on the Range:“There are upsides to the employment crunch (in Cody, Wyo.): It’s harder to get fired, and the increasingly desperate business community has to keep raising wages and incentives.”

Crooke may have been thinking more about the energy boom, but the loss of immigrant labor is affecting wages and employment not just in Wyoming but throughout the West. Even Silicon Valley is feeling the pinch. But the largest impacts are on low wage service industries and agriculture. From California to Colorado and Arizona to Idaho growers are wondering who will pick the fruit, prune the vines and hoe the weeds while motel owners wonder who will clean the rooms and restaurateurs are in search of cooks and dish washers. .

Another western industry which has “suffered” as a result of the immigration crackdown is the ski industry.

(Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Richard McCullough, of Cheyenne, doesn’t have a college degree. He’s 53 years old, divorced, and his three children live in another state.

Despite his personal difficulties, he shows admirable character as “probably the state’s only full-time outreach worker for the homeless.”

A few excerpts from Jared Miler’s fine story in the Casper Star-Tribune:

McCullough starts his day at 7 a.m. and drives upwards of 60 miles to visit the bridges, tunnels and creek bottoms where the city’s homeless sometimes spend their nights.

He gathers leads on where to find the “hidden” homeless packed into cheap motel rooms and crashed out in area homes.

… He uses street lingo and a little self-taught Spanish to communicate with the transients and regulars who live around Cheyenne.

The trunk of his car is packed with toothbrushes, sleeping bags and food for those in need.

The work can be dangerous: McCullough has been threatened twice by drunken homeless men. But most of the time his clients greet him with a smile and a handshake.

(Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Lisa Girion at the LA Times continues to pry up the lid on the stinking mess of health insurance. The latest:

One of the state’s largest health insurers set goals and paid bonuses based in part on how many individual policyholders were dropped and how much money was saved.

… Health Net Inc. avoided paying $35.5 million in medical expenses by rescinding about 1,600 policies between 2000 and 2006. During that period, it paid its senior analyst in charge of cancellations more than $20,000 in bonuses based in part on her meeting or exceeding annual targets for revoking policies …

The revelation … comes amid a storm of controversy over the industry-wide but long-hidden practice of rescinding coverage after expensive medical treatments have been authorized.

… These “rescissions” … typically leave sick patients with crushing medical bills and no way to obtain needed treatment.

(Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

The headline, played dramatically on the cover of the current Business Week, packs a punch:

The Poverty Business: Inside U.S. companies’ audacious drive to extract more profits from the nation’s working poor

The story, by Brian Grow and Keith Epstein, begins:

Roxanne Tsosie decided in late 2005 to pull her life together. She was 28 years old and still lived in her mother’s two-room apartment in a poor neighborhood in southeast Albuquerque known as the War Zone. … She landed a job as a home-health-care aide for the elderly and infirm. It paid $15,000 a year and required that she have a car … A friend told her about a used-car place called J.D. Byrider Systems Inc.

The bright orange car lot stands out amid a jumble of payday lenders, pawn shops, and rent-to-own electronics stores … Signs in Spanish along the street promise “Financiamos a Todos” — Financing for All. On the same day she walked into Byrider, Tsosie drove off, jubilant, in a 1999 Saturn subcompact she bought entirely on credit. “I was starting to think I could actually get things I wanted,” she says.

The writers go on to show, Roxanne Tsosie became a victim of predatory business practices that are tolerated by most business leaders, politicians and journalists:

(Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Most people who get sentenced to jail in this country endure harsh conditions. But some — those who can afford it — can now pay their jailers a fee to be housed in better conditions.

Jennifer Steinhauer of The New York Times has the story, reporting:

For offenders whose crimes are usually relatively minor … and whose bank accounts remain lofty, a dozen or so city jails across (California) offer pay-to-stay upgrades. Theirs are a clean, quiet, if not exactly recherché alternative to the standard county jails …

Many of the self-pay jails operate like secret velvet-roped nightclubs of the corrections world. You have to be in the know to even apply for entry, and even if the court approves your sentence there, jail administrators can operate like bouncers, rejecting anyone they wish.

(Read on …)

Jonathan Thompson

Editor in Chief

Political P.R. stunts can be really annoying. But Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski’s is pulling one off that might actually be useful. For a week, he and his wife are living on a grocery budget of $3 per day, the same as two people get on average from food stamps. Though he was chauffered to the grocery store in a state-owned car and accompanied through the aisles by bodyguards, he’s sticking to his pledge to eat for just $42 per week in order to draw attention to poverty in his state. He’s also probably learning a lot about how many of his constituents live. All the time. The Portland Oregonian wrote about the Guv’s shopping trip here.

Emma Brown wrote a poignant article about a homeless family in Oregon for High Country News in January. Read it here.