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October 28, 2020 Upcoming local government meetings, background as to why these are important, report on our citizens hearing at the Capitol
Permalink for this letter. Please forward as desired. Prior letters to this list. Dear New Mexico activist leaders -- We are observing that many people, including political leaders and candidates, nonprofit leaders and followers, and reporters and editors, are now afraid to speak out against the largest Power-That-Is in New Mexico, namely the complex of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), their overseer the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), and the matrix of militarism and military institutions in which NNSA and its laboratories are embedded. The expansion of these laboratories is being welcomed with open arms in New Mexico. At the moment, the main glimmer of hope to forestall development of a new Rocky Flats nuclear production center ironically lies in Washington, where the enormous costs and risks of the LANL factory are apparent to at least some responsible parties. Power which operates by fear is, to the extent it does, coercive power. Thomas Merton and later James Douglass called it "The Unspeakable." Fear of the nuclear-military state was once confined to relatively narrow circles in this state but it has now spread to infect a controlling portion of New Mexico civic life and institutions. This fear is entirely antithetical to democracy. It does little good to point out that New Mexico is investing (again) on the wrong side of history, as the pending entry-into-force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) indicates, so long as individuals and more so organizations and opinion leaders do not actually stand up on the right side of history. If you peruse the Call for Sanity, Not Nuclear Production and look to see which organizations have not endorsed this call despite dozens of entreaties to do so via all conceivable means you will begin to get an idea of how effectively New Mexico's acquiescence to hosting the new Rocky Flats has been engineered. We see no countervailing force in New Mexico political life. New Mexico progressives, for example, are by-and-large just ordinary liberal Democrats first and foremost. In general, they have allowed what antiwar and anti-militaristic perspectives they might have had to be crushed beneath the general tide of electoralism. Democratic politicians take them for granted, and why shouldn't they? It is ironic that in hawkish South Carolina, the Democratic candidate for the 2nd congressional district, which includes the Savannah River Site (SRS), which like LANL is also slated to host a plutonium warhead core ("pit") factory, is now questioning pit production. That has certainly not happened here! If we turn our eyes to the broader question of New Mexico's "failure-to-thrive" and look into the future, we see that environmental, economic, and social decline are largely "baked-in" by the failure of most New Mexico political and nonprofit leaders -- including us, too much of the time -- to even offer any realistic vision otherwise. (To be fair to ourselves, we again and again sounded the warning, and offered the general direction we need to go, in dozens of public meetings, op eds, and policy missives and letters over the past two decades. The response has been crickets.) It is not that democracy was taken from us over our strenuous objections. It's more that we got confused about what it was, and we just let it go. We didn't resist. Getting a measure of democracy back will be hard, especially in a pandemic -- or at least it will be for now, when belief in a return to normal times and the efficacy of the current election system remain high. Most people who should understand, do not understand what they have lost and are losing. What, then, can be done? We aren't sure. We do see local government as essential elements, if not the upward-welling source, of resistance to further conquest, and of democratic reconstruction. We hope you will continue to write letters to editors and if you can, opinion pieces. These are very important, affecting news decisions as well as public and leadership opinions. We hope you will endorse the Call for Sanity, Not Nuclear Production and ask others to do so as well. We seldom ask for donations but this is now the season when it is important to do so. Please contribute! We hope that if you have a special connection with an elected official, that you will talk to them. For most people however, writing private missives to elected officials, especially to ones with large constituencies, is an exercise in futility. It may even be counterproductive, as it shows a degree of naivete that can safely be ignored. The alternative to a nonpublic "begging letter" is to publicly call out a politician -- members of our congressional delegation especially. Our congressional delegation knows no shame in their support of genocidal weapons of mass destruction, as well as their neglect of any meaningful response, or even discussion of how to respond, to our climate crisis. To prevent the continuation of such deadly behavior, the guilty need to be shamed in the court of public opinion. Senator Udall's committee in Congress has yet to speak on the subject of this year's funding for NNSA and pit production. People have begged him to do the right thing for years. Something far harsher is merited now. He has one last chance and it's evaporating quickly. We also want you to virtually attend local government meetings, and speak whenever possible --
To this end we have put together a public calendar of local government meetings. (If you are aware of ones we have omitted please write Lydia or Trish.) There is an important meeting TODAY in Santa Fe: SF City Council Governing Body Mtg There are other important meetings on November 10:
Background: two futures I want to set two contrasting New Mexico futures before you, to make visible what is largely hidden behind countless distractions and to simplify a complex situation. We will be speaking primarily of northern New Mexico but the scale and nature of the choice being made for El Norte affects all of New Mexico. Who is making the choice between these futures is another pertinent question. At present there is no democratic process involved, only administration. The fate of northern NM is being decided in Washington, DC by a few people whose primary concerns are not the people of this state. One future is being built around a massive program to make more nuclear weapons, requiring great national and local commitment and cultural identification. We here talk about it all the time. It's the future we don't want. The alternative is what we do want and must have, just to survive. It is a terrible mistake to imagine that any kind of livable future is assured. Even to survive we will be dramatically changing our attitudes and ways of life. So don't think radical change is impossible. It's begun. In gross outline -- your own ideas may differ in detail but the overall outline is probably similar -- we need to build household and community resilience, with an inclusive social contract and productive roles for everybody. We need food, water, housing, and energy security for everybody. We need emergency employment and training in much-needed fields to replace jobs we are losing and won't get back. We need deep adaptation to a rapidly-changing climate, and to lead in mitigating the climate disaster we are brewing. We need to be able to live with less energy, while building locally-owned and managed renewable energy. What's different now, vs. a year or a decade ago, is that the crisis is now upon us. These two futures are both built around government programs, in one way or another -- the one exclusively federal, the other involving a mix of local, state, and federal policies and programs, which in turn foster a large ecosystem of accessible, locally-owned private enterprise. The scale, cost, and profoundly different politics of these two futures make them mutually incompatible. We are not going to be able to preserve nuclear weapons and a global Empire, and also prevent global climate collapse. We have to choose. The decision between these two futures is usually considered a national matter. That perspective assumes New Mexico is a colony and that we and our political "leaders" will do what we are told with respect to most of all the important decisions about our future. When push comes to shove (as it does in Washington), New Mexico is a peripheral zone needed as a nuclear weapons and waste colony, a military testing and training area, and as a source of oil, gas and wind, and for very little else. Investing -- psychologically and politically -- in nuclear weapons, waste, and the military have made us among the poorest states. If we don't use our voice this choice will be made for us. It is being made now. Future #1 (the default): what we don't want, in simple terms As you know, the U.S. has embarked on a project to upgrade or replace all U.S. nuclear weapons, warheads, and the factories that build them. Leaving aside all the other problems this causes, the sheer cost of this program, including environmental cleanup, in fiscal year (FY) 2021 is $51.2 billion, greater than the total military expenditures of all but four countries (p. 8). This is a staggering sum, but it pales in comparison to the $2 trillion that is to be spent over the next 30 years on nuclear weapons and associated cleanup, assuming current programs continue. This is more than $15,000 per U.S. household (p. 9). Yet nuclear weapons comprise only roughly 5% (depending on how you count) of U.S. military spending overall, which now approaches $1 trillion annually, exclusive of interest payments on what has been borrowed. This exceeds the combined military spending of all other countries in the world except three (China, Russia, and India; p. 1). That's $7,240 per year per U.S. household. Military spending absorbs the majority of what Congress appropriates each year. (Frank Zappa: "Politics is the entertainment division of the military industrial complex.") One "small" but must-have item in the Global Hegemon's shopping list is an emergency supply of new plutonium warhead cores ("pits"). They are needed by the end of this decade for making a new kind of ICBM warhead with some advanced features (the "W87-1") to go on a new missile. To meet an artificial production deadline of 2030, a pit factory is needed right now, on such short notice that the only place available is an old, unsafe, smallish, R&D facility ("PF-4") at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) which must also continue other missions, which -- as you might have noticed -- is located in Greater Santa Fe. To install such a factory in and around this facility, it is necessary to harness skilled labor and housing across the entire region and beyond (see last year's animated regional site plan, recently obtained via the Freedom of Information Act [FOIA]), opening one or more new campuses, etc. Some 4,000 full-time workers (slide 29) will be required to run the inadequate LANL facilities around the clock, making the whole project insanely expensive. It is clear from LANL presentations that the northern NM labor market and contractor pool are inadequate for LANL's needs. The whole purpose of drawing some 700 contractor representatives from 35 states 14 months ago was to break away from northern New Mexico's businesses and labor limitations. Building, starting up, and running the LANL pit factory through 2030 will cost roughly $14 billion (B)(slides 23, 26, 27, 29). Each pit made will cost something like $50 million (slides 29-31), which for comparison is about what New Mexico pays annually for public school education for each 5,000 students. The life cycle cost of the entire ICBM program (called the "Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent," GBSD) will be in the range of one-quarter trillion dollars. Most Americans don't want ICBMs. Some former nuclear commanders say they make us less safe, not more. We think so too. This, in a nutshell, is the big economic and social development engine that has been selected for northern New Mexico by our congressional delegation and the Pentagon. The Governor and Legislature are passively -- actively, in some cases -- accepting this path also. There is no other vision on the table. Choosing this path will make any green, socially-responsible vision impossible to realize -- politically, culturally, educationally, environmentally. It is a path of no return. Future #2: what we do want, and need We are in the midst of a pandemic that has already caused more than 300,000 excess deaths in the U.S. and is well on the way to exceeding total U.S. deaths in World War II (419,400). Currently the pandemic is getting worse fast, including in New Mexico. K-12 education has been badly hurt by the pandemic, especially for lower-income and rural students, as have our colleges and universities. As the pandemic hit economies already weakened by obscene inequalities, financial predation, corruption, and inadequate price signals as a result of central bank interventions, a deep recession was triggered worldwide and in the U.S. This has lowered demand for oil and led, in New Mexico, to a precipitous decline in oil and gas revenues and a fiscal crisis. Unemployment and bankruptcies -- personal and business -- have skyrocketed everywhere, with no end in sight. Homelessness is rising in this state and elsewhere. Mental health is deteriorating and suicide risk -- especially in youth -- is rising. Many businesses will never re-open, and many of the newly-unemployed will never go back to the work they did before the pandemic. Tourism, a central pillar of the New Mexico economy, is being hit especially hard. New Mexico is already at or near the very bottom of all U.S. states in most important social and economic metrics, making our state the worst of all in child well-being. There is no guarantee that any of this will get better. Indeed, with an economy largely driven by consumption, further dominoes are certain to fall. The bottom might be quite far down. On top of this we face the ongoing collapse of a livable climate. In New Mexico, water supplies are declining, along with the health of our forests and grasslands and the animals that live in them. We thus face a combined environmental, economic, and social emergency that is unraveling the fabric of our society and of all nature. Survival of our civilization and indeed of most higher life forms is in question, even without considering the possibility of nuclear war -- the one thing we are preparing for! So what exactly is being done at the state and local levels, where democracy is comparatively strong, in response? The short answer is: very little. As Study Group Outreach Director Lydia Clark has emphasized, in New Mexico, governments are largely not even showing up. In the midst of the greatest crisis in the history of New Mexico, exceeding in overall severity even the 1918 flu if our environmental problems are included, do you see the state legislature in session? We don't. Or to take a local government example, in our tourism-dependent capitol city, currently reeling from the pandemic and associated fiscal crisis, there are exactly four (4) City Council meetings scheduled for the entire remainder of the year, counting today's. This, during one of the worst crises ever to befall the City. What can be done? A LOT. Collectively, we are not using our imaginations, or holding our leaders accountable. We have been captivated by neoliberal economic thought. We are colonized. We see dollar signs when we should be seeing precious human beings -- and animals, living ecosystems, and the tapestry of human effort in the landscape that has produced and maintained our unique inheritance. New Mexico holds more than $20 billion in its permanent funds and still has an excellent bond rating. We have sun and wind. We have our people. A great deal can be done. What would you do? Report on our citizens hearing at the Capitol: First, we had a decent turnout and some excellent testimony at our citizens hearing on 10/7/20 outside the Roundhouse on the issues involved in the proposed massive expansion of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and its new plutonium warhead core ("pit") production mission. As promised, we sent the testimony, in video form, to our congressional delegation, state officials, and cognizant federal officials at the Department of Energy (DOE) and its nuclear weapons subsidiary the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). You can see a 6 minute highlights version here. (Hat tip to Lydia Clark, our outreach director, who did the filming and editing.) We all know -- or at least I hope we all know -- that these various government parties will pay no attention to what was said except, in some cases, to gauge the strength of local opposition and in others, as input in their deliberations as to how they can frustrate that opposition. The point of the event was not to beg but rather to begin to organize ourselves to do at least part of what the federal government is not doing. There is no alternative. Stay safe, help each other, Greg, Trish, Lydia |
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