April 12, 2021

RCLC delenda est; want to help stop the plutonium-fueled "innovation" in YOUR town? Write us.

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Dear friends --

We hope you are enjoying the lovely spring weather.

Do we need to remind ourselves that unless the military-industrial complex is dethroned from its commanding position in U.S. public life there will be no possibility of any genuinely progressive or truly environmental program being enacted, at any level?

This is nowhere more true than in New Mexico, where elected politicians increasingly identify with -- increasingly represent -- nuclear weapons and military-related institutions, public and private.

In the main, these institutions embody priorities exactly opposite to those we seek.

It may appear easier to just ignore and work around these institutions. And it can be. But all history and experience suggests that overall, the results of doing so will be stunted at best. Sooner or later, the proverbial "elephant in the room" has got to be faced. Because it is growing, and it wants to eat not just our lunch, but everything. It's a monster.

In New Mexico, our incredible public tolerance for poverty and inequality is enabled and advanced by genuflecting to our nuclear and military institutions and by the political loyalties and corruption that goes with that. New Mexico politicians live far too much in the nuclear dream, fantasizing that "innovation" and a "high tech" future will lift all boats. Just how that will happen is never explained. As they say, "hype springs eternal."

Nuclear weapons, as Carol Miller says, are our political heroin.

So as we all work on our various social and environmental agendas, in our important charities, and on the thousands of sustainability projects that make up the Gandhian "constructive program," we should not lose sight of the gigantic "taxation without representation" going on. We don't have a say in it (short video illustrating this study), but the fact is that the Empire sucks up resources to the tune of about $7,200/household-year (i.e. $934 billion/year divided by 130 million U.S. households). Whether you consider it tax or a debt makes no difference. Either way, it is a vast opportunity cost into which our whole future is continually sinking. Whatever else we do, we will not succeed until we throw off this yoke. And because we live here, in the heart of the beast, we have quite a lot more leverage than most people.

Which brings us to this update.

1. Drive a stake through its heart: "Regional Coalition of LANL Communities" (RCLC) update

RCLC delenda est.

As we wrote on 4/1/21, the City of Santa Fe rejected the "new and improved" RCLC legal basis, aka Joint Powers Agreement (JPA), throwing a something of a wrench into RCLC operations. The Santa Fe City Attorney believes this rejection is not enough to remove the City from the RCLC and that a separate motion would be required to effectuate that. Such a motion is not on the agenda of the City's Governing Body this week. We have not heard if or when it might be.

So the RCLC staggers on, for now. Our target is not just the pathetic RCLC, but rather nuclear weapons and LANL itself, both of which the RCLC inherently supports. Nuclear weapons are the raison d'etre and overwhelmingly dominant mission of LANL. If you respect LANL as an institution you respect nuclear weapons.* (*Please don't fall into the fallacy of thinking LANL does, or could do, a lot of "wonderful civilian science." If you think that way, feel free to bring it up at our next in-person meeting.)

As it happens, the RCLC will meet virtually this Friday, 4/16/21. The agenda and meeting coordinates are not yet posted on the RCLC's derelict website. That will happen tomorrow. Questions as to how the RCLC will function without endorsement of its new JPA by the City of Santa Fe or Jemez Pueblo (and without certainty regarding its core DOE funding) are sure to be on the agenda.

At every RCLC meeting there is an opportunity for public comment. Consider using this opportunity! And don't hold back! You don't have to know more about the RCLC than the simple points outlined here.

Even by New Mexico standards the RCLC is corrupt. This is probably the most important point that needs emphasis, along with its ineffectuality (Much of this RCLC background and talking point page is one long chronicle of corruption). The notion that the RCLC can change federal priorities -- get more pork, in other words, beyond that obtained by the untiring efforts of the New Mexico congressional delegation -- is laughable.

Apart from that risable goal, the RCLC has no actual raison d'etre. It is a vehicle for corruption, pure and simple.

The people who promote and lead the RCLC are thus promoting and leading corruption, along with promoting nuclear weapons.

Assisting young people to get jobs at LANL -- building a better LANL jobs "pipeline" -- is another RCLC claim to fame. Aside from being redundant in that role, this is not a good thing to do. It means, in nine out of ten cases, assisting young people to orient their careers -- the single biggest hunk of the time they have available on this earth -- toward weapons of mass destruction. It's just another form of the "poverty draft."

That giant sucking sound you hear around our universities and community colleges these days is the sound of talented, beautiful young people being sucked up by the nuclear weapons industry. These are now people who will NOT be helping you with your solar installation, cultivating tomorrow's spinach, or building and working in the new health clinic. This is nothing less than the "demonic, destructive suction tube” of military spending that Martin Luther King spoke of, a year to the day before his assassination.

LANL jobs are for the most part not good jobs -- not "decent" jobs anyway. We all know and love people who are trapped in such jobs, or in one of the "bullshit jobs" our capitalist system creates by the millions -- jobs with little or no redeeming social value. (We who are not in such jobs are the lucky ones, but that doesn't mean we are better people. We aren't.)

But let's not promote more such jobs as public policy, all the more so during what could be humanity's last stand against the environmental and social catastrophes created by our own collective greed and folly. It's an all-hands-on-deck moment. Nuclear weapons are not necessary. A rapid transition to a sustainable way of life is necessary, or by definition we won't live.

We understand the larger political purposes of the RCLC well enough. But why, many here are asking, do local politicians like Darien Fernandez in Taos or Henry Roybal in Santa Fe, or the other RCLC board members, actually want to be associated with this thing? And why is David Israelevitz such an "Energizer Bunny" in promoting the RCLC, visibly holding other board members' hands, answering questions here, there and everywhere? By one count Israelevitz has appeared four times before the Santa Fe Governing Body and its committees to promote the RCLC.

We leave speculation to readers but the broader point is robust: when a public body has no clear purpose other than suborning local governments and tribes by tying them to a corporate agenda, that body is corrupt to the core and should be abolished.

For other talking points see our 3/30/21 letter and more recently this April 7 Open Letter To Taos County Commission, Town Council On Membership Of Regional Coalition by Suzie Schwartz of Norteños for Peaceful and Sustainable Futures.

2.  NNSA, LANL, and well-connected profiteers have huge plans for Los Alamos, Santa Fe, and beyond

Unprecedented growth and the new plutonium pit production mission in particular have led LANL to lease additional facilities in Santa Fe to accommodate its rapidly-growing staff ("Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab to open offices in Santa Fe; Shift in identity, values feared for "Royal City of the Holy Faith of Saint Francis", Feb 10, 2021; "LANL leases second office complex in Santa Fe as nuclear weapons growth pushes admin staff off "The Hill"; 2,000 more staff needed for "24/7" plutonium "pit" production mission for only 20 pits/year," Mar 8, 2021.)

We can now say that NNSA plans for Santa Fe recently also included a national "innovation campus" that would serve "the operators of all our DOE/NNSA facilities" and transform "the entirety of St. Michael's Drive," requiring "additional housing, entertainment, business, and retail development." Regional schools and universities would be engaged as partners to strengthen a "pipeline initiative" to recruit and train additional nuclear weapons employees. This conceptual plan, obtained by the Study Group, and other competing plans for the City's Midtown campus, have never been made available either to the public or even to city councilors.

While this particular NNSA plan appears dead or at least dormant, private development may take its place ("Innovation Village aims to combine tech sector, housing in Santa Fe," Santa Fe New Mexican, March 29, 2021.) Developer John Rizzo envisions some 25,000 new "innovation"-created jobs in the region over a 10-year period. (For further background on developer John Rizzo's "innovation villages" and their dependence on NNSA, see for example this 12/12/19 letter and its links.)

Triad LLC, which runs LANL for NNSA, uses the same "innovation triangle" meme in its region-wide site plan, which we also obtained in redacted form (for an overview see LANL Future Campus video of Aug 27, 2019). From other information requests we know Mr. Rizzo has met privately with city, state, and federal officials as well as local corporate leaders, as he himself said to the New Mexican.

The previously-unforeseen growth in LANL staffing and costs for pit production was a key finding in our October 1, 2020 workshop presentation. Some $14 B in startup and early production costs can be expected over the FY19-FY30 period. To grasp the true magnitude of the growth NNSA envisions for LANL one must also include other new programs, such as the proposed W93 warhead for U.S. submarine-launched missiles.

In other words, transformative plans for increasing the role of nuclear weapons in northern New Mexico are right now being hatched in secret by the New Mexico congressional delegation, NNSA, Triad, and others. These plans are far more ambitious and transformative than most people imagine. We see only glimpses. Local governments are being kept in the dark, as are citizens. Our future is being decided by national security bureaucrats and syndicates of private interests, which are to be rubber-stamped by elected local officials at the appointed times.

When will any local government or tribe see and discuss LANL's site plan, which involves all of them? When will NNSA's plans for pit production at LANL -- the mission of the former Rocky Flats Plant -- become available? We know that NNSA says it will employ as many people in pit production as worked at Rocky Flats until that plant's last decade. This is not some just-right Goldilocks effort. It's an all-out campaign to make an old, small facility designed for R&D only function as a full-up nuclear factory. It is also the largest construction project in the history of the state -- in constant dollars, it rivals all three interstate highways put together.

With pit production using up most of LANL's allowed shipments to WIPP, how will LANL be able to ship its thousands of drums of legacy transuranic waste, now sitting in tents or buried under a few feet of sand adjacent to the San Ildefonso Pueblo and just upwind from White Rock? Nobody knows.

Centrally, where will the water come from? Let's be frank. Santa Fe and the Espanola Basin do not have enough water to support our present population and activities in the megadrought now beginning, let alone more growth.

How can LANL's nuclear weapons mission, especially at the bloated scale now imagined, be reconciled with our moral and legal obligations, or with a climate emergency that threatens our survival, or our obligations to the vulnerable, or even with our exploding deficit spending?

What is being proposed, once the PR gloss is scrubbed off even a little, is ruinous. It hurts us at every level -- economically, culturally, politically, spiritually.

So what can be done? A great deal can be done, both in Washington and here. Both are necessary.

Can you help us organize, in principle at least? That means, are you potentially interested in reaching out to your friends, and to others we suggest? Little can be done unless a few people step forward and say, "I can help, at least a little!"

Right now, we want to hear from you. That will give us some idea of what the next steps can fruitfully be.

Thank you so very much for your thoughtful engagement -- and looking forward your reply,

Greg and Trish, for the Study Group