May 3, 2013

Bulletin #169: Quash the Obama nuclear surge
Excerpt:

The Royal City of the Holy Faith of Saint Francis of Assisi

That’s the name, but as we all know the reality is increasingly different.  I said “slouching toward Santa Fe,” not “Los Alamos,” for a reason.  Santa Fe is now increasingly “inside the fence.” 

Until 2006 the University of California (UC), and since then Los Alamos National Security (LANS), and at all times DOE and NNSA, have assiduously sought to quell protest, undermine environmental regulation, and prevent bad publicity for LANL.  They have become quite successful at community and public relations, in addition to the lobbying, campaign contributions, “lending” staff to “help” members of Congress, and the hundred other tricks of the influence trade that LANS’ free access to tens of millions of taxpayer dollars makes possible. 

(This money is “free” because it is quite plentiful and entirely unregulated.  How can this be?  For starters every LANL program, project and salary is taxed internally to pay for categories of overhead which include, or for some programs just are, lobbying and propaganda.  In addition, corporate profit – “fee” – is freely available to the trustees and their managers, as are the resources of the LANS parent companies, an effectively bottomless pool.  Employees’ and managers’ own funds can be used, e.g. as campaign contributions.  In addition, many LANS jobs are themselves primarily lobbying or propaganda, and LANS can grant leave to “assist” governments.  In addition, DOE, especially the “green”-sounding office of the Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management, has many ways to grant money to its friends or hire contractors for services rendered.  Very lucrative jobs can be offered, for example to former congressional staff and federal or state regulators.  For large political donors and wealthy politicians, corporate investment opportunities and hedge fund(s) are available.  In all these ways and more, the privatized LANS led by Bechtel – the scope, scale, and influence of which boggle the mind – has in practical terms unlimited funds available to bend government policy.)

Bechtel-led LANS and its sponsor DOE use these funds and their many local “front groups” to buy friends and to buy silence.   In many ways Santa Fe is within the LANS security perimeter.  Indeed LANS and its Sandia partner Lockheed-Martin have built a political fence around the New Mexico congressional delegation, and the result is what you see: poverty and despair. 

DOE pays large but fickle sums to the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED), which regulates LANL and sets discharge and cleanup requirements.  DOE provides a large annual payoff each of four surrounding Indian tribes (the “Accord” tribes), a practice which began when then-DOE Undersecretary Charles Curtis made an emergency trip to New Mexico to keep the Pueblos from joining the successful Study Group–led lawsuit to delay the DARHT project. 

LANS paid the New Mexico Community Foundation (NMCF) handsomely to run its (useless, in our view) RACER environmental database.  DOE, through NMCF, recently paid over a million dollars to local and national “antinuclear” groups to drum up participation in its various “comment” processes that provide a benign outlet for concerned citizens and watchdogs.  The LANL Foundation reaches into local communities and school districts with what school administrators have told us are intrusive grant priorities.  The direct political campaign contributions are huge – the largest, for example, in the career of former Senator Jeff Bingaman.  There’s a “Citizens Advisory Board,” funded and tightly controlled by DOE. 

Then there’s the fiscally-giant Los Alamos County itself, its coffers stuffed with gross receipts taxes from LANS.  Reliable sources tell us that LA County, which as I recall has something like 850 employees for a county of roughly 18,000 people, was going to make so much money from taxes on CMRR-NF construction they would have something like $100 million left over in the bank –a sort of local “sovereign wealth fund.” 

LA County is a member of the Energy Communities Alliance (ECA), a national lobbying group.  LANL subcontractors have their own lobbying and outreach organization.  The local union, because of its Democratic Party role, is powerful.  A lead organizer of “Occupy Santa Fe” told us that he struck a deal with a union representative to make sure statements made at last year’s “Occupy”-themed Hiroshima Day protest would not undercut jobs at LANL.  The union threatened a counter-demonstration without that commitment.  They got it. 

On and on it goes.  Listing and quantifying the many ways in which LANL, both in its UC and in its LANS incarnations, has successfully bought local and national influence would make an interesting (and a long) book, almost as long as the ever-growing list of scandals and rip-offs it must keep hiding. 

In 2010 there was a new turn of the screw, probably related in one way or another to the immediate but endangered (by us) construction of the $6 billion CMRR-NF, which was going to change the political landscape of the region.  Late that year, a “Joint Powers Agreement” was negotiated between the counties of Los Alamos, Santa Fe, Rio Arriba, and Taos, and the cities of Santa Fe, Espanola, and the Town of Taos to create a “Regional Coalition of LANL Communities” (RCLC) the goals of which are to promote "environmental remediation, regional economic development and site employment, and adequate funding for LANL" (emphasis added)– and especially, as one of the sadder-but-wiser authors of the Agreement later observed, “promoting CMRR-NF.” 

RCLC derives its legitimacy from its non-Los-Alamos local government members.  These governments lobby for Bechtel-led LANS using local government funds. Sweet.  Los Alamos County ponies up more than 90% of the budget, although some of this may be DOE grants.  There was a $100,000 DOE grant to RCLC (through NMED!) in 2012. 

Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo joined RCLC in 2012, the first tribe to do so.  We note that Ohkay Owingeh was the recipient of a $65 million janitorial contract with LANS in 2008, so they have a lot of skin in the game.  Working through the Eight Northern Pueblos, Ohkay Owingeh and RCLC staff are recruiting other Pueblos to join. 

RCLC is a member of ECA, and there are other such regional front organizations in other ECA locales.  Thus there are wheels within wheels, across the country, with money, contracts, and grants flowing in a complicated and highly politicized manner to the faithful, and campaign contributions, votes, loyalty, and silence running the other way.   ECA is also a vehicle for the promotion of nuclear technologies in general, such as the small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) Bechtel wants to sell around the world, after developing them at LANL and elsewhere with DOE funds. 

The Chair of the RCLC is Santa Fe Mayor David Coss, a long-time friend and co-worker of many of us.  He, with all his RCLC colleagues, need to be told in no uncertain terms by many of you that this role is unacceptable for public servants.  A line must be drawn. 

Previous bulletins have chronicled the extensive support of the New Mexico delegation for nuclear weapons, plutonium pit production, and their budgets.  There is no point in listing a lot of examples; their support is simply unwavering – and coercive to junior members of the delegation.  Here’s a letter dated February 7 basically asking President Obama to appoint an NNSA Administrator who will amply fund the New Mexico labs. 

Bechtel and its partner Lockheed-Martin and their collective spokespaper the Albuquerque Journal will find ways to heavily punish any effective dissent in New Mexico politicians.  The New Mexican used to be an active newspaper but now seems to be hiding.  The political punishment from our side – i.e. the side that wants to be rid of weapons of mass destruction – needs to be greater. 

The first big thing many Santa Feans still need to realize is that Bechtel’s LANL subsidiary cannot be reformed or repurposed, any more than a battleship could become a bicycle.  Bechtel is not your friend or patron.  It’s here for its own reasons.  

The second big thing we all need to realize is that the complex of political power centered in the nuclear weapons laboratories – that’s what they are and will always be – is utterly antithetical to justice and the environment.  

“Environmental cleanup” is fine as far as it goes (most so-called “cleanup” isn’t cleanup at all), but efforts to get money for this “cleanup” are entirely perverted by the corrupt system of influence described above.  When a citizen in Santa Fe says, “I want LANL cleaned up,” that sentiment is now transformed, through the above corrupt institutions, into a simple message of “more money for LANL,” period, as anybody who spends much time in Washington can tell you. 

Supporting LANL (and Sandia) as institutions means not supporting renewable energy, climate protection, social justice, and economic development in this state. 

If you don’t believe me, try this simple experiment.  Ask your congressman or senator what his or her plan for sustainable economic development is for New Mexico.  We are and have remained at or near the bottom of every national social and economic indicator.  So what’s the plan?  You will hear two things.  One is silence.  The other will revolve around the labs.  It’s been the same absurd and self-interested story for decades. 

New Mexicans deserve much better, but nothing will change until support for politicians is made contingent on a real platform with a chance of benefiting New Mexicans – which the labs (that make so many millionaires from a tiny slice of the state’s employment) do not. 

We therefore are asking you to firmly withdraw support in all forms from politicians of any party who support weapons of mass destruction and plans to build more factories for them.  If a politician is sure of your support, it really doesn’t matter what you ask him to do, including “clean up” LANL.  The nuclear weapons mission, which he will also then support, will generate plenty of new nuclear waste to “clean up,” along with more risk, more nuclear transportation, and more political corruption.   

Such priorities sicken the state and the world.  Politicians who pander to them must go. 

Santa Fe could have a much brighter future.  If these plans go forward it most assuredly will not. 

Please join us. 

Greg Mello, for the Los Alamos Study Group