March 26, 2020

Permalink for this letter (give us a few minutes). PLEASE FORWARD! Other Letters
Home page; Press Releases; Bulletins;
To subscribe to our Activist Leaders listserve (formerly "Friends") send a blank email here. To unsubscribe send a blank email here.  
To subscribe to our Main listserve (less content, less frequent) send a blank email here. To unsubscribe send a blank email here.
Our blog (makeover in progress): Remember your Humanity. Twitter: @TrishABQ.
Contribute. Volunteer. Contact us (Greg, Trish, and Michelle in our main office, Lydia Clark in our Santa Fe office)

A wakeup call for new priorities; Call for Sanity, not Nuclear Production; Santa Fe Midtown -- calls and letters needed ASAP

Suggested actions:

1. Call for Sanity: help us recruit businesses, organizations, and religious communities.
2. As discussed below, write or call Santa Fe city councilors, if you live there, and recruit others to do so.
3. Write letters to editors; they are effective.
4. Please help us recruit other activist leaders; they can subscribe to this list by sending a blank email here.

Dear New Mexico activist leaders –

1. Our country desperately needs new, humane priorities. Now is the time to push for them.

The COVID-19 (CV) pandemic has created difficulties, distractions, and dangers for all of us.

There are also opportunities. Jean Nichols of Penasco rightly reminds us we can and should treat COVID-19 as a wakeup call.

This pandemic is re-making our world, more than any of us can fully grasp.

Watching part of last night's Santa Fe City Council on-line, we had the distinct impression that City leaders are in denial about the gravity of the present crisis. After the pandemic -- and when will that be? -- will the economic and social life of the state and City return to some approximation of "business as usual?"

In a word, no.

CV cases and deaths in the US are still rising exponentially, doubling every 2-3 days (see the straight line on a logarithmic scale). Total US cases have surpassed all other countries. Cases and deaths worldwide are rising exponentially, with horrific spread into crowded refugee camps and slums yet to come. There are likely to be life-threatening economic consequences to come for much of the world. We pray that the toll of death and destruction is as low as possible, but it is difficult to escape the conclusion that at a minimum, millions of individual people -- real people with families and communities and aspirations and brave hearts -- will die.

How many will die in our own country, state, and city depends on the actions we collectively take. In this regard, we felt we had to write the Governor about what we thought would be a normative framework for COVID-19 epidemiological response: test widely, trace thoroughly, isolate cases and clusters, and aim at preventing every case, not "flattening the curve." You will see a very good explanation of that policy in Tomas Pueyo's article here. If you follow the link provided to an interactive epidemic model you can experiment with different policies.

The medical aspects of CV are just the beginning of the changes at hand. The US financial and economic system is being deeply challenged, as it is in almost every country at this point. Predictions of the depth and duration of the present US economic decline vary. We think our economy was very sick to begin with, and much of the value being destroyed was notional in the first place. It is not coming back.

As is obvious to all, the current collapse of demand for oil is crushing shale producers, which on average made no net money anyway. Cash was certainly extracted (entering the New Mexico economy, sure enough) but on balance it was mostly borrowed by the upstream producers. Prices are now too long, and will be low too long, to drill and complete hundreds of new wells that will lose money. Shale production will peak and decline. Worldwide, existing fields deplete about 6% per year. US shale oil was tipping the balance toward net growth. Even before CV, world production of crude oil peaked in late 2018. That peak is now going to be permanent.

Why is this important? Because even though we can "print" notional money, it take actual energy to produce real goods and services. A fairly constant fraction of the energy needed has to be in the form of oil. There are no immediate substitutes. Transportation, mining, farming all depend on oil. Batteries won't cut it even if we had them. The energy density is too low.

The upshot is the prosperity, which we might crudely define as goods and services per capita, is going to decline, even if a CV cure is found tomorrow.

Basically CV has pricked the balloon of our false prosperity. It has kicked us off the knife-edge we were on.

Will carefree travelers roam the world, thronging into crowded venues in Santa Fe like they used to do? It is fairly doubtful. When the dust settles -- and we have no idea when that will be or whether the people formerly known by our names will be in that dust -- will tourism still be a bonanza for New Mexico? What about movies?

The point is, we are entering a brave new world -- at least, it had better be brave -- the values, narratives, and operating terms of which are being negotiated right now, with or without us.

As Bansky put it in a classic graffiti, "Sorry -- the lifestyle you ordered is currently out of stock."

Will we have more disaster capitalism, or less? More military-industrial-intelligence domination, or less?

Joe Lauria:

“Nobody in their wildest dreams would have thought we would need tens of thousands of ventilators,” Trump said.  But the Pentagon’s wildest dreams of 11 aircraft carriers, 65 attack submarines, 65 destroyers, 104 B-1 bombers, 744 B-52 bombers, 8,848 M1 Abrams tanks, 6,724 Bradley Fighting Vehicles and 1018 F-16 fighter jets have for years come true.

The U.S. can afford to build the greatest arsenal ever known to fight two major wars at once while scrambling to produce hospital gowns, surgical masks and hand sanitizer.  All of America’s mighty “defenses” could not defend the nation against the humblest of things put upon the earth.

The United States prepared for the wrong war.

A trillion dollars a year is spent on the military and nuclear weapons when America has no real armed enemies. Instead the U.S. is an enemy to nations that seek to impede its dominance by protecting their own sovereign interests.

There would be virtually no public support for this spending if the American people understood the U.S. as an offensive force. So the targets of its dominance must be portrayed at every turn as the menace. When Russia, for instance, defends its interests in Ukraine or on its borders against NATO troop deployments, the aggressive U.S. role is cloaked by government and the media, while the Russian response is branded a threat. (emphasis added)

Nuclear weapons are a key enabler of US offensive forces and wars worldwide. They provide the ultimate threat that "deters" defense against our expeditionary forces. If "deterring" attack on the US itself by some "evil empire" were actually the objective, the US would have a small nuclear "monad" like the UK and France.

There are a lot of people in New Mexico, some of whom call themselves liberals or "progressives," who think Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is engaged in some kind of "nuclear deterrence" mission that keeps "America" safe. Earth to propaganda victims: wake up.

LANL has a new tag line: "Delivering science and technology to protect our nation and promote world stability." Wow. Orwell wrote 1984 as a warning, not an instruction manual.

Many liberals think the "jobs" that come from the world's most monstrous military machine are somehow "good" for New Mexico, despite 75 years of social and economic data otherwise. They see the hand of the labs -- the whip hand -- with a few dollars in it, but they don't see the other hand in our back pockets, looting the money that should have gone to community needs.

They think maybe "tech transfer" will produce "jobs" for Santa Feans at the Midtown Campus, even though that has never really happened to any significant extent before. As if the cost to our souls would be worth it in the first place.

2. The Call for Sanity, not Nuclear Production

This Call is not a petition. It is a league of solidarity among business and civic leaders, which you (we hope) will help us bring to powerful life. Please help us recruit endorsers!

This Call is not for individuals. We encourage individuals to recruit businesses and organizations to join this Call.

After endorsing this Call, we hope businesses and organizations will make their voices heard by calling or writing elected officials and in other ways.

We want everyone -- individuals, businesses, organizations, churches -- to write letters to editors (LTEs) and guest editorials.

Nearly all our elected officials either support expanded nuclear weapons or are passive. They support federal priorities that fatten the nuclear-military-industrial-intelligence complex. They won’t change until politically forced to do so.

We will post a list of endorsers when we have the first 100. Please help us reach this first target! These businesses and organizations are a good place to start.

3. Midtown: we need calls and letters to the Santa Fe City Council! Please!

Midtown is roaring forward despite the accelerating pandemic, associated financial and economic instability -- and the shift to virtual "public" meetings where public comments are taken (from the few who find out it is possible) but the City Council can't hear them because of technical problems.

From the New Mexican, 3/23/20:

The city also is making plans for when the public health crisis ends. Webber said planning for the redevelopment of the midtown campus is ongoing; he has asked his directors of economic development, public works, and parks and recreation to get brick-and-mortar projects ready for construction.

“I wouldn’t be surprised to see a package come out of the Congress and signed by the president that is comparable to FDR’s first 100 days,” he said, referring to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s response to the Great Depression. “If we’re prepared with a lot of projects that can immediately be implemented, I think there will be a huge amount of money and energy and positive optimism to put America and put Santa Fe back to work.” (emphasis added)

Setting aside the ridiculous comparison between what has just come from Congress and the New Deal, what we see in the case of Midtown is pure disaster capitalism. The City is not the developer here. The City's aim is to sell this property to a master developer or possible multiple developers, who will develop the property on a for-profit basis. It is these developers who would profit from the "package" Webber refers to, greased by the "huge amount of money and energy and positive optimism" (which has got to be better than negative optimism, right?).

The City's opacity on this huge, central development -- especially after promising a far more open process -- is really disturbing. Why is this being rammed through right now, in the middle of the worst pandemic since polio or the 1918 flu, at a time when the City Council cannot even properly meet and no real public meetings are even possible? And why is the City not ruling out selling or leasing all or part of this land to a nuclear weapons agency, after all the resolutions the City has passed condemning that mission?

Lydia Clark, LASG Outreach Director, spoke last night at the virtual City Council meeting, asking the City to consider using the Midtown Campus --

to create a centralized location for temporary services. It is spacious enough to create the necessary social distancing between people while conducting these services, and it has numerous buildings which can accommodate these needs now. This is the highest and best use of this property on a temporary basis to serve the community of Santa Fe during this crisis.

This means tabling and postponing any further development of Santa Fe Midtown Campus project until this crisis is over. Pursuing this development at this time is a careless use of time, energy, and funds by the City given the current economic instability of our city, state, country and the world. Please remember you work for us, not the developers. Use this property for the City of Santa Fe now.

Joni Arends of Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety (CCNS) also spoke, making the notable point that much more transparency in this process was recently promised but not delivered:

We are requesting more transparency in the Midtown decision-making process. We cite from the November 16, 2019 Santa Fe New Mexican article, which reads:

"Starting in early January, Hernandez will have a series of public study sessions with the mayor and City Council discussing how candidates score under various criteria such as experience, financial approach, composition of the team, the development program, respecting adjacent neighbors and how their ideas fit into the city's theme for the property: "Live, work, learn, play."

Further in the same article:

"The evaluation and study session period may or may not lead to an exclusivity agreement with a master developer that is designed to lead toward a disposition and development agreement, possibly by the end of 2020, detailing terms of sale of the campus and phasing of the project, likely over several, even many years, Hernandez said."

We reference the January 14, 2020 Santa Fe New Mexican article, which reads:

"A new component of public input will come into play in February, March and April as the city seeks more specifics from the community of what is wanted at the midtown campus. Hernandez said city funding has been set aside to invite local organizations to engage the community in novel ways to get specific input that will be used as the city negotiations with the chosen developer."

Such public input events have not taken place, which is understandable given the current pandemic. Nevertheless, we have seen no notices in newspapers or in the Midtown Monday updates about such opportunities - nor any type of notice about postponement about such input events.

Instead of the promised public process that was to begin in January -- long before choosing a developer -- some of us got an email from the City saying

...the Governing Body will host a special hearing on April 13, 2020 to provide an opportunity for the public to meet the master developer that the Evaluation Committee is recommending for approval to enter into an Exclusive Negotiation Agreement with the City.

In other words, the public is invited to a virtual reception to meet the master developer that has already been chosen. The City Council will have no comparative vote -- only up or down. The public will have no say at all in who develops this property. As for LANL at Midtown, all possibilities are still open.

Our proposed resolutions (no LANL at Midtown, support for a Site Wide Environmental Impact Statement [SWEIS]) have not been introduced by any councilor.

Greg, for the Study Group