The GRANDMAMA and the OH-MAMA . . .

The GRANDMAMA of all RECOLONIZATION PLANS,

The OH-MAMA!!! of all PUBLIC MEETINGS. . .

Imagine trying to force a referendum, by petition, on Peabody Coal’s Recolonization Plan for the Black Mesa Water Coalition of the Four Corners, a.k.a., the National Sacrifice Area. Peabody’s plan is 758 pages long. Actually, the Draft Environmental Impact Statement alone is 758 pages long.

The Office of Surface Mining put their stamp on this plan, but the Office of Mining Surfaces is just an obscure department within the Department of the Interior. If you check out their web page, you will find that the Office of Mining Surfaces has no purpose but I spoke to

How could the grassroots Diné Navajo people, many of whom don’t even have electricity be expected to pay the printing bill required to comply with all the obscure legal trivia of God and law and man and City Attorney Dennis Herrera? Or rather, Office of Surface Mining head and former Peabody and Arch Coal executive John Chorrey?

Didn’t our City Attorney insist that all signatories to that doc, so notoriously dangerous to decency and democracy, know how many City Attorneys could dance on
the head of a petition?

Excuse me if I remember that assault poorly, but I sorta kinda crumbled inbetween Dennis Herrera and the gang injunction, then fell flat on the floor when all three gas turbine peaker plants suddenly appeared out of nowhere. “PEAKERS!!! PLEASE HELP!!! PEAKERS!!!” I shriekeded, then hit “SEND” on the way to the floor. “Please help. I don’t even know what a peaker plant is.”

And, it’s true; pardon me, but I did not then know half of what I believe I know now, did not even realize that the two round-the-clock gas power plants in the middle of your ‘hood for all those years were supposed to be peakers kicking in for the hours of the City’s peak energy use and then switching off as use did. I’m told they never could have been peakers, no matter how much juice this city cranked up and turned off again. They were built to burn gas all day, every day, every week after week for years, that they never once even noticed demand rising and falling with use. Who was operating that closed plant all those years? Who’s operating the other Non-Peaker that someone told everyone was a peaker and who said that? Sound actionable? If so, anyboy got a dime or even one ounce of energy left?

Might as well mention the no-peaker peaker issue to Michael Boyd, who sent a note saying your lawyer got your peaker lawsuit filed and in line today. I’d add the no-peakers planted there in the name of peak use when whoever planted them there must have known that those couldn’t respond to pea if he thinks it’s actionable ’cause it should be.

Barbara George collaborated in that legal blockade and CPUC “intervention.” Not having been there done that, I belly flopped trying to do something similar for the Black Mesa Water Coalition of grassroots environmental groups and survivors, who may well be engaged in the Grandmama of All Battles. I didn’t know either of them the first tiem I called and had this naive illusioin that my CPUC would have to listen to me because I’m a citizen. But no; they briefly imagined that CPUC President Malcolm Peevey might listen to them, but all they got was a photo-op with Mr. Peevey, who happens to be a former V.P. of Southern California Edison, though he nodded and smiled and posed for the photo, muttering that their health didn’t look all that bad to him.

This Office of Mining Surfaces seems to have bushwhacked the grassroots into this Oh! Mama of Meetings last week, text below, and it seems that this event, the Oh-Mama-of. . . , really did happen. Oh! Mama, mama, mama.

But, it’s not over yet, even if the CPUC President did give all the carbon credits to Southern California Edison, market based incentives enouraging SCE to turn the plant off long after even this EPA had finally told them they had to turn it off or clean it up, and quite a few of the people of Big Mountain/Black Mesa had let SCE know how much they’d love to see them go and stay gone.

Indeed. I didn’t quite realize how criminal till I began to understand the wholly phony, totally faux energy crisis, that some thought justified the war, and 40 years of the coal-fired power plants in the National Sacrifice Area, and the BVHP RP, and what may be the Grandmama of all Recolonization I’ve beeon the way to the floor—”Anybody know anything about gas turbine peaker plants? i know nothing.”

You can read a few hundred, or more, pages of this proposal outlining the last stand of the Hopi and Diné Navajo people of the Four Corners, long known as the National Sacrifice Area, much as Bayview Hunter’s Point should be known as this city’s Municipal Sacrifice Area.

This city of ours just keeps doing its best to martyr the ‘hood out there, but, it seems to me, that everytime Dennis and Gavin and even their own Aunt Sophie, or even the Prop 90 Zombies, pass them that crown of thorns yet again, they pass it right back in the form of petitions, lawsuits, Marie Harrison, Ahimsa Porter-Sumchai, or Louis Farrakhan’s Hunter’s Point School. No matter how thick the radioactive asbestos gets, that crown of thorns keeps landing back on our City Hall’s steps, and I think the hood’s built a never-say-die reputation in the world out there beyond its own borders. The Lennar Corporation and LNR Properties are all over the Bay Area, east and west, but I don’t see anyone fighting back like Bayview-Hunter’s Point. no matter how heavy the pressure.
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Just click to see the Grandmama of sociopathic recolonization plans; this time for the Rural Removal of Indians:

Draft EIS. . . Or, try http://www.wrcc.osmre.gov/WR/BlackMesaDraftEIS.htm#draft. If you’re a licensed masochist, order 758 pages of bureaucratese.

That is, if and only if, you’re willing to spend one more minute of your life on this coal mining Concept Plan put forth by the award-winning Office of Mining Surfaces, LLC, a branch of the Department of the Interior, LLC, and a branch of Western Peabody Coal, LLC, for Big Mountain/Black Mesa’s coal, after all the people are out of the way.

This is the plan that says, in the elusive, deadening, thick-as a brick passive verbs that the Big Bureaus always use:
1) The mine will be reopened, 2) the plant will be reopened, 3) the slurry line between the plant and the mine will be reopened and rebuilt, 4) Peabody Coal will squander the C-aquifer water, having squandered most all of the N, 5) the Four Corners will become drier and deader than any land on earth yet, because 6) there will be no water left, and 6) the people will be force relocated to the yellow banks of the Rio Puerco, site of the worst nuclear accident in American history at 5:00 A.M. on July 16th, 1979. And then, 7) everything living will die, because there’ll be no water left. Not even to drink.

If anyone wants to make calls, write letters, and stand up like a citizen, or, like the Hunter’s Point parents, students and teachers at Louis Farrakhan’s Hunter’s Point School, about this mother of all recolonization plans, or maybe even go to the Four Corners to pitch in, here’s a whole page full of righteous ideas, http://www.stoppeabody.org/index.html.

Just to find some “Talking Points,” the kind that blow the whistle–WHOO!! WHOA WHOO!!–on this totally phoney salami energy crisis, I recommend Public Citizen’s critical mass energy expert, Tyson Slocum, on KPFA, last September 12th:
http://www.kpfa.org/archives/index.php?arch=16105; plays with a dial-up Net connection.

In case you haven’t listened yet, the main point is that we don’t need it.

We don’t need the power, though that’s the implicit justification of this mother of all recolonization plans. The people have to leave and the desert has to die, all so we can have a lot of power out here, in California. We’re the implied higher good that the Diné Navajo are supposed to leave home for, and let everything die for. Because there are more of us and we’re the fifth largest economy in the world, though these things are never quite said out loud. They’re implied, because Peabody Coal doesn’t feel comfortable saying that it’s because they wan to mine coal, slurry coal, burn coal, dry out the aquifers that desert storms have replenished and desert sand has filtered on the way down, every year, year after year.

Or that they want to force relocate the people and let all the life in the desert die of dehydration. Or that “water is life,” as the people there say, or that they come as death to all the life and the culture of the people which cultivates life and still tries to protect the land that they still believe to be sacred because, if they could protect it, it would sustain them. Peabody Coal doesn’t like to admit that they bring nothing but death to the desert and the people, so they hold us, busy California, and Arizona, ratepayers, aloft. Implicitly. We’re the implicit reason the people on Big Mountain/Black Mesa and Desert Rock have to die.

Tyson Slocum of Ralph Nader’s citizen advocacy outfit, Public Citizen, says that we’re wrongly implicated.

He says we don’t need it.

There’s an excess of electricity producing capacity. We didn’t need this anymore than we did when Enron created all the faux shortages to send electricity prices skyward.

And he’s not the only saying that there is no energy crisis or that Peabody wears no clothes. That’s phoney salami, faux crisis on sourdough. Hold the onions ’cause it already makin’ me wanta cry. I said that.

It’s kinda hard not to hold the onions for at least a minute, thinking that we all have to go through with all this just because Peabody Coal, Sithe Global, PG&E Utility, PG&E Corporation, and all the retail/wholesale/holding company energy hawkers can’t think of a way to make another buck and further concentrate wealth without killing all life in the desert and driving the people from the place where their ancestors survived. Or that San Francisco may never have needed the round-the-clock, so-called peaker plants that weren’t even built to turn on with peak use and off as use subsided.

Or that current rumor might be true, that there are powerful people in San Francisco who think our little people-packed peninsula should crank up our new used gas turbine peaker plants in Bayview Hunter’s Point and/or near our State University on 19th Avenue, even if we finally reach the promised land of community choice, energy aggregation, solar, wind, geothermal, sustainable, renewable, clean’n green power.

Rumor is that these people, whoever they are, want to use the peakers to make San Francisco a net energy producer, but that doesn’t sound as though even these peakers would be used as peakers; because, if we crank them up to generate revenue, then won’t they be on all the time? More revenue is always better than less no, so why would anyone interested in generating revenue with net energy exports ever turn them off, unless they cared about people?

Those were the peaker plants that our City Attorney won back for us by suing the PG&E Corporation, LLC when, he claimed in his lawsuit on our behalf, that our utility monopoly, the PG&E Utility, LLC had declared bankruptcy, after slipping half a billion or so to its PG&E parent, the PG&E Corporation.

Oh Dennis;Dennis, Dennis Herrera. Why couldn’t you just get us some cash? Better yet, why didn’t you get Bayview Hunter’s Point some cash, like for schools, breakfast, after-school sports and the like, or for gardens, trees, job training and retraining, or low-cost home and business loans? This neighborhood deserves reparations, not occupation, Dennis not gang injunctions, not scorn for their heroic democratic efforts in the face of formidable pressure. The pressure’s really intense, Dennis; that petition drive was heroic. Shame, shame, shame. If you really can’t feel it for anything else, then you must, at the very least, be ashamed of suing PG&E, the Corporation, LLC, for those used gas-burning peakers.

Because we don’t need the power.

San Francisco doesn’t need it any more than California rate payers need or want coal mines or coal-fired power plants or slurry lines between them. Or people pushed out of their homeland, so everything living can die there. Sure we could and should cut down on our power use, but we don’t need the grandmama of all people-removal plans on Big Mountain/Black Mesa or Desert Rock.

Excessive as our power use may now be, we don’t need it..

Most of us can’t call this surplus of existing power producing capacity ours, but our demand for more electricity isn’t demanding the ultimate sacrifice in the National Sacrifice Area. .Peabody Coal is demanding that, for its own reasons. The Mojave Generation Station doesn’t even have a majority buyer. Peabody may have to buy the old “dirty” coal plant and add scrubbers, despite its commitment to clean coal, as evidenced by the $19.y million George Bush handed to Peabody Coal to build the Mustang clean coal-fired power plant, also on the Navajo Reservation.

Southern California Edison now has a very nice $$$,$$$,$$$ sum coming in the form of carbon credits, as decreed by our California Public utility Commission, headed by former California Edison Vice President Malcolm Peevey. And it looks as though they can now sell their majority interest in that plant to whomever, most likely Peabody Coal, if Arizona requires that plant to buy carbon credits to resume operations. Time will tell, but, Arizona doesn’t yet have any landmark legislation that requires them to. So, the net result of California’s landmark is likely to be a doubling of the Mojave plant’s carbon emissions, when SCE sells that plant’s carbon credits to a company that needs them, and Peabody Coal reopens the plant. It took a few days, but I knew that I wasn’t going to like that landmark legislation.

It took a few days to realize that I wouldn’t and, I still might not have realized it, had i not picked up what seemed like the only voice raised against our landmark legislation—that of the Diné Navajo, who well knew that Arnold Schwarzenegger, just like George Bush, was committed to to clean green Peabody Coal.

Southern California Edison has lost its motivation to respond to California ratepayers demand for that plant’s power as soon as carbon credits seemed likely to slurry their way. so why do they keep building more dirty power? To manipulate it, drive utility rates artificially high, turning power plants off for what they call maintenance, evan as they create a faux energy crisis, stirring up fears of the lights going out, without warning, leaving us to face all these terrorists in the dark.

But we all know by now that it’s unsustainable and nonrenewable, which is to say that we could burn it all up and have none left.

Most of us need energy efficiency, before the municipal utility monopolies disembowel all of us with oh-my-god! power bills from municipal utility monopolies that contract with corporations to keep making more dirty, coal-fired, power, more gas peaker plants, and even nuclear (weapons infrastructure).

We may need to help them imagine that they might survive without going to all these extremes, might even find something they didn’t feel so @*#(&!!!’in’ vengeful doin’.

That’s my riff on Tyson Slocum’s argument, but don’t quote me. Listen. Tyson’s the energy expert at Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen advocacy and information outfit, so give Tyson a listen and create your own riff or two. It’s good to keep a few on hand, with all the coal-fired power plants planned for the Interior West. There’s even a rumor that someone’s hoping to use these peaker plants to turn our little people-packed peninsula into a net energy producer. (These are the peakers that Dennis Herrera won for Bayview Hunter’s Point in a lawsuit with the PG&E Corporation.)

We may still have to go to some hearings.

But, in case you thought last spring’s Redevelopment hearings in the Supes chambers, with the Bureau, were bad . . . well, you were right; they were bad. Who gave Marcia what’s-her-name the right to drone all afternoon and gave champions of the verbal arts like Marie Harrison, Ebony Colbert, Ahimsa Poter-Sumchai, Espanola Jackson, Willie Ratcliff, and all the rest of us two minutes?

I’m sure that was un-Constitutional, and I probably would have been ejected from chambers for snoring if these Shakespeares of the ‘hood hadn’t been there to punctuate the drone of the Bureau withoutbursts of real verbal genius and diversity—the holy grail. Like Ebony Colbert telling Marcia and the Supes that they could call a chicken a horse for as long as they wanted to, but, that a chicken would still be a chicken, no matter how long they went on, and on, and on about it bein[’ a horse.

Each of those drone fests did have at least a few splendid moments, but check out the Free Speech Radio at this gathering, which may have been the Mother of All Closed Meetings yet. Kathy Helms’s account here stirred me to raise the issues of Diné Navajo Freedom and Diné Navajo Democracy when I wrote to all the Arizona Bureaus. They all tell me that what is described here really did happen, on January 3rd, 2007, on the Navajo Reservation, though no one took pictures. http://www.blackmesawatercoalition.org/black_mesa_meet010307.html

~ by Ann Garrison on January 17, 2007.