WINNERS
San Diego's tourism economy
Over the March 29-30 weekend, 11 Santa Fe officials-including Mayor David Coss, City Councilor Chris Calvert, County Commissioner Jack Sullivan and Police Chief Eric Johnson-flew to San Diego for a three-day junket to visit the USS Santa Fe, a nuclear-powered Los Angeles-class submarine that carries at least 12 Tomahawk cruise missiles. The officials' expenses were paid out of public travel budgets ($5,700 for the city; the county report is still pending but is estimated to be less than $1,000).
Germany's tech economy
When the US Department of Defense awarded a $28.5 million contract for handheld radiation sniffers to Thermo Eberline, a company ostensibly based in Santa Fe, US Sen. Pete Dominici's, R-NM, press office was quick to issue a statement taking credit as a member of the Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. The Santa Fe New Mexican then pointed out that not only was Thermo Eberline's presence in Santa Fe minimal (its parent company is based in Massachusetts), but the work would be completed exclusively in Germany. In February, the DOD upped Thermo Eberline's contract by $21.4 million. This time, St. Pete was conspicuously silent.
Insomniac veterans with telephones.
As the Iraq war passed its fifth year and US military casualties topped 4,000, pro-veteran activists in Albuquerque launched a statewide "GI Rights Hotline" to help soldiers deal with issues ranging from conscientious objection to health benefits. The hotline (505-404-6427) is manned from 6 pm to 6 am, seven days a week because, according to spokeswoman Maria Santelli, veterans are more likely to be in crisis in the dead of night. New Mexico joins the 11-state network of hotlines, which fielded 40,000 calls in 2007.
LOSERS
Juarez' tourism economy
Mexico has launched its own "troop surge," but not in Iraq, Afghanistan or anywhere else in the Middle East. Instead, the nation to the south has dispatched 2,500 soldiers to Juarez and other locations along the Texas-New-Mexico-Arizona border to combat the drug cartels. Not that Juarez had much of a tourism industry to begin with, but shopkeepers are complaining to the El Paso press that the surge, along with the US Department of State's travel alert, has cut their revenues by more than 50 percent.
Santa Fe social services
Since 2003, Santa Fe residents have seen $64.4 million of their taxes spent on the Iraq war, according to the National Priorities Project, a nonprofit federal-spending research organization. By its calculations (available at costofwar.com), the money could've been used to fund: health care for 17,194 people, scholarships for 15,215 university students, 1,250 elementary school teachers or 1,627 public safety officers.
New Mexico's anti-war voters
As presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama continue their long-distance race for the Democratic nomination, the Republican presumptive nominee John McCain is getting a head start on his general election campaign, starting with television ads running exclusively in New Mexico. A steadfast supporter of the war (infamously calling for a 100-year presence and claiming he'd rather lose an election than a war), McCain hopes his biographical ads will lend credibility to his position. His gambit may work: CBS polls show that national public opposition to the war has decreased from 70 percent to 65 percent since September 2007.
