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November 16, 2020 Urgent need for community resilience planning and organizing; local government meetings Permalink for this letter. Please forward as desired. Prior letters to this list. Dear New Mexico activist leaders -- "Everybody knows" we are now in for a hard time. What is less clear to most people is how much of a hard time, or how hard in what ways, or for how long this will last. Well, all our opinion and political leaders are minimizing what's ahead, and what's already begun. "Normal" is gone and it's been gone for a long time. There is enormous denial about the gravity of our collective situation, and the ones who are most insulated from events -- many of whom are among the most ignorant -- are by far the most influential. As we know, the deepening crisis in the U.S. has not been resolved by the recent election -- far from it. For reasons largely independent of who occupies the Oval Office or which party controls the Senate, covid cases will continue to rise exponentially, just as they are all over the West (but not in Asia; for details see here). Without significant behavioral changes the death toll will rise to World War II levels in this country, as we warned 9 months ago (see IHME: 371,000-587,000 by 3/1/2021). Our economic crisis will continue to deepen, and not just because of covid. Further government relief will certainly help buoy recipients but will not fix our systemic decline. Environmental crises will continue to deepen, including the ongoing rapid collapse of a livable climate, including in our state. We are very pleased that the Governor has called for a special legislative session as soon as possible. While some form of federal covid relief is possible before the lame duck Congress adjourns in December, without concerted action by state and local governments, New Mexico will be even more badly hurt by this first wave of converging crises than it is today, and its economic and social recovery will be slower and more partial than is necessary. Really bold investments -- unprecedented investments -- are needed for our society and environment if we want to grow relevant careers, skills, and spirit in this state. A lot of economic activity, a lot of livelihoods, are being trimmed away. New livelihoods appropriate to the situation are needed, with wartime urgency. Meanwhile compromises reached during the first Clinton administration, and others since, have made this state an ever-growing hub of nuclear weapons activity, with nuclear waste never far behind. Besides nuclear weapons -- obsolete for this role since the early 1960s -- other global control technologies appear headed our way (article, explanatory video). Descartes Labs, a LANL spinoff that is the darling of many liberals in Santa Fe, is much the same, thrilled to be getting a $2.2 million contract to improve target acquisition for the military. (As they say, "the first step in closing a kill chain is finding something to kill.") With the ink on its new contract barely dry, Descartes is currently seeking an emergency $750,000 interest-free loan from the state, via the City of Santa Fe. It has already been given some $1,097,000 in state grants and $100,000 in City funds, and will get a $260,000 bonus grant if growth meets expectations. As you have often heard from us, LANL itself is poised to grow beyond all prior limits as it becomes a plutonium warhead core ("pit") production site. Each LANL pit will cost $40-60 million (slide 29). By way of comparison, the smaller number is what Los Alamos County will spend on K-12 instruction this year. Such are our priorities. They are why this state is poor. We need to talk about community resilience. We need our local governments to show themselves and do something -- in the open, for a change. Up in Los Alamos, our Stepford-like "company county," pit production is forcing awkward choices on the community -- growing pains as it were, with no good place to grow. While many support expansion at any cost, not everyone does. It would be very helpful if the Los Alamos County Council heard from the rest of northern New Mexico: we don't want your ugly, selfish growth, or your weapons of mass destruction, or your increased pollution, and we don't like the way LANL puts its thumb on national policy whenever possible -- and believe me, they are masters at this, with plenty of help from our congressional delegation -- to create a new Cold War to justify its own growth. A few stalwart souls have been showing up at local virtual meetings to carry this vital message. Please join them! The other communities in New Mexico need to impress upon the largely (but not completely) docile people of Los Alamos that if they want to keep their relations with the rest of New Mexico sweet, they cannot passively stand by while the lab's cancerous growth puts its stamp, or its boot, on the social and economic development of New Mexico. As it happens, there is an opportunity to do just that, tomorrow.
And there is also this one, another opportunity to speak for a green new deal, not an ever-browner dead end.
To review, here are possible themes and talking points:
Please 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. |
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