March 19, 2021

Once more into the breach: contact the Santa Fe City Council and Taos County Commission urging RCLC withdrawal NOW

Permalink for this letter (tomorrow). Please forward as desired. Prior letters to this list.
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Dear friends --

We hope you are doing well in every way.

Thank you for responding to our last request for letters and calls, if you did. Now, again:

1. Please contact the Santa Fe City Council and Mayor, urging the City to leave the Regional Coalition of LANL Communities (RCLC). If you already did so after our previous letter, please do so again now! Please also contact the Taos County Commissioners urging the same thing.

Lots of background and publicity -- nearly all negative -- about the RCLC can be found here.

We have consistently called for the dissolution of this group since its first meeting and refused to take part in the charade of its meetings. It's inherently corrupt, existing only to suborn and undermine the independence of local government. Hundreds of citizen hours have been spent trying to "reform" the RCLC -- trying to get it to focus more on "cleanup," for example. That could never have worked because the basic purpose of the RCLC is to foster corruption.

Local governments and tribes which are part of the RCLC automatically register their political, i.e. moral, support for whatever the Department of Energy (DOE) and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) want. With DOE and the (company town) Los Alamos County supplying nearly all the money, no other entity has any genuine say in the matter. And if the purpose is "jobs," well that's just the same as lobbying for more money for whatever NNSA and LANL want. Cleanup is always a political afterthought. NNSA runs LANL. The RCLC has never had an ounce of traction on cleanup budgets anyway. The senators do that.

The main purpose of the RCLC is not at all to lobby for "jobs," as if it could ever add any value in that anyway -- but rather to bind the identity of local governments and tribes to LANL's identity. It is an entirely feudal and colonial entity. It makes sure northern New Mexico is "all in" as a nuclear weapons colony.

More simply and to the point at this moment in history, the purpose of the RCLC is to make sure there is no official opposition to plutonium warhead core ("pit") production, which NNSA, LANL, DoD, and our congressional delegation all know is controversial.

Both these local governments -- the City of Santa Fe and the County of Taos -- are about to decide whether to renew their memberships in the RCLC, which involves a token payment of dues and signing a new Joint Powers Agreement (JPA).

There are a lot of specific problems we could mention but we don't want to kill the RCLC on technicalities. We want to kill the RCLC because we don't want local governments and tribes to be subordinated to a nuclear weapons agency, and we want that factory stopped.

In Santa Fe, the City's Quality of Life Committee discussed this matter at length this past Wednesday, March 17 (all packet materials, video; quick summary: Santa Fe’s benefit from LANL coalition questioned, Santa Fe New Mexican, Mar 17, 2021).

The Committee treated the RCLC like the "hot potato" it is, kicking the question of membership to the main Governing Body for a decision without making either a positive or a negative recommendation.

Councilwoman Renee Villarreal really stood out for the quality and tenacity of her questioning and her opposition to the RCLC. She deserves a lot of credit and thanks. Two councilors abstained, which was interesting.

The next meeting of the Santa Fe Governing Body is on 3/31/21. the agenda is not yet available.

This means we have time for a major outpouring of anti-RCLC activism, so let's do it! We need to get Santa Fe out of this coalition, which will go a long way to killing it. Taos County -- same!

If everybody on this list wrote the decisionmakers in these two local government bodies, that would be the coup de grace for the pathetic RCLC.

LANL very much needs the support of Santa Fe in particular in order to make pits. Pits are necessary for new warheads. New warheads are necessary (but very far from sufficient) for the U.S. to remain a global empire. The RCLC exists, basically, to help prevent democracy, human values, and justice from gaining ground in northern New Mexico, or abroad.

Ending RCLC is not the goal of this organization in this matter. Ending preparations for pit production at LANL, and ending support for nuclear weapons while gaining support for a green social agenda on an emergency basis -- that's more like it. These are revolutionary goals. Anything less will not be enough for our grandchildren to survive. The RCLC is just a millstone around local government necks and a soporific drug on their minds and hearts. We mustn't get too distracted by it but at the same time it is highly problematic and we can end it right here and now.

We need to dispatch it with maximum prejudice, like a golf ball is dispatched from the tee. We aren't trying to nudge it off. We need to show that we are aroused and are demanding a future, something which "jobs" at LANL undercut for everybody involved.

2. This list

It was almost 3.5 months between the last two letters to this 500-person list (though you did get several other updates sent to our main mailing list). It has been a mere 17 days since the last letter, LOL. Expect the next one within a few days.

We expect to be sending either a "Bulletin" to the 1,400-person main list (less often, with more national and international content), or a "Letter" to this more New-Mexico-oriented list quite often now.

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Thank you for your attention, solidarity, and help,

Greg and Trish (who has been working on the web site a few feet away) for the Study Group