When audiences hum happily out of The Crosby Theatre after, say, a jolly evening with Albert Herring, or when they linger cheerily outside St. Francis Auditorium after, say, a rousing reading of Mendelssohn’s Octet, their immediate concerns probably aren’t dollars and cents.

Even by New Mexico standards, this year looks to be a memorable one for political corruption. However the current, specific cases end, such stories will repeat themselves, Groundhog Day-style, until there is an “accountability revolution” at every level of government in New Mexico.

New Mexico now has offices in Munich, London and Paris! Sort of. According to an Aug. 25 press release issued by the New Mexico Tourism Department, European management and consulting company Mangum Hills Balfour will “consolidate the Department’s activities under one agency and act as the office for New Mexico in Europe.”

Don’t miss the gravy train: Proposals are due Sept. 16 for projects that jibe with the city of Santa Fe’s Economic Development Plan.

In the three months since SFR took note of former Thornburg Mortgage Board Member Eliot Cutler’s independent run for the governorship of Maine, his affiliation with that bankrupt Santa Fe corporation has become a campaign issue there.

SFR asked Larry Waldman, senior research scientist with the Bureau of Business and Economic Research at the University of New Mexico, to analyze the gubernatorial candidates’ economic proposals.

As SFR went to press, the business newswires buzzed with word that French drug company Sanofi-Aventis was offering $18.4 billion to buy one of Santa Fe’s largest employers, Genzyme Corporation.

“I heard it on the radio—131,000 jobs lost,” Richard, a tall, blue-eyed man, tells SFR. He’s been unemployed for seven months—the first time in his life he hasn’t had a job.

Under that law, the City of Santa Fe deducts 10 percent from a local company’s bid price to make it more competitive. But out-of-state contractors have been setting up temporary offices and receiving the local preference.

Jason Flores-Williams has had a wide-ranging career—as novelist, Hustler columnist, agitator and death-penalty defense lawyer. Last month, Flores-Williams returned to his hometown—he played football for St. Michael’s High School in ninth grade—to be a lawyer.