09 December 21
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Nowhere is the atomic disease more potentially lethal than at California’s ancient, aging, embrittled reactors at Diablo Canyon.
Throughout the US there are now 93 big licensed commercial reactors. Except for one, they are all more than 30 years old. Many are more than 40.
Worldwide there are more than 400.
After more than 60 years of uneven operation, the US nuke industry still can’t get private insurance. Any American reactor could be blowing up as you read this, taking down your health, your family, your home.
Since there’s no private insurer (your homeowner’s policy explicitly excludes liability from any reactor disaster) you’ll have no recourse beyond a very limited federal taxpayer fund…if that.
Over the decades the industry has touted one “Nuclear Renaissance” after another. Each time, with a few pliant “environmentalists” in tow, they declare atomic energy’s time has really really come.
At least such two such “green advocates” have turned out to be big-time climate deniers.
But never mind.
Atomic reactors burn at 571 degrees Fahrenheit. They trash every ecosphere they encounter. Billions of marine creatures die daily from their heat, chemical and radioactive emissions. Thousands of birds crash into their cooling towers. Countless humans die from the radiation they constantly pour into our air and water.
When reactors open, the nearby downwind human infant death rates rise. When they close, those rates drop.
The human death toll at Three Mile Island was significant (I went there in 1980 and interviewed stricken families; it was the worst week of my life). The death toll from Chernobyl exceeds a million. Fukushima emitted more than 100x the radioactive cesium than did the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
All of them racked up gargantuan economic and opportunity costs that can never be repaid.
With no solution to the nuclear waste problem, Fukushima is poised to dump millions of gallons of heavily irradiated liquids into the Pacific Ocean. At Pilgrim, south of Boston, the industry wants to dump huge quantities of radioactive water from the long-shut Pilgrim reactor into Cape Cod Bay.
In South Carolina, two reactors at V.C. Summer shut without opening, wasting $10 billion that could have solarized much of the state. At Vogtle, Georgia, a twin reactor project has just crossed the $30 billion mark, and can’t open at least until 2022---if ever.
Endless happy talk about small reactors, thorium reactors, fusion reactors, breeder reactors and whatever else Bill Gates perpetrates studiously ignore the fact that even their most wide-eyed projections show they can’t compete now with renewables, and never will.
Solar, wind, battery and efficiency technologies have so far outstripped initial projections in terms of cost, safety and availability that no nuclear technology---on line now or at some point in the mythological future---can ever hope to compete.
But somehow the mandates of the “free market” disappear as corporate cash buys the gerrymandered legislatures needed to scam public money to keep these dinosaurs alive.
And that’s where the real danger comes in. Future reactors are wasteful but perfectly harmless as long as they’re not built.
It’s the ones now terminally hot that hang like over our heads like swords on strings.
The 93 operating US nukes are falling apart. They’re allegedly kept safe by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. But anyone familiar with the industry knows the NRC really stands for Nobody Really Cares. Some of its staff is competent and caring. But the five Commissioners are historically corrupt, Soviet-style puppets who mostly take their marching orders straight from the industry they’re supposed to regulate.
That means our aging nukes --- every one of them without private accident insurance --- are each incredibly dangerous.
It’s one thing to debate the broad issue of nuke power --- the waste, the surety of more melt-downs, the emissions, the costs, the health disasters.
But it’s quite another to realistically deal with each of these reactors on a case-by-case basis. In fact, every US nuke is its own terrifying likely-to-blow reality.
Take Ohio’s Davis-Besse, near Toledo. Its astonishing history of neglect, decay, near-misses and on-going corruption boggle the mind. To gorge on a proposed billion-dollar public bailout, its owners slipped a $61 million bribe to Larry Householder, then the Speaker of the Ohio House.
Householder is gone, but the slipshod, corner-cutting Chernobyl-style non-maintenance at Davis-Besse goes on.
Alabama’s Browns Ferry was set on fire with a candle. Arizona’s Palo Verde daily turns millions of gallons of precious water into steam. Nebraska’s Fort Calhoun and Cooper have both been flooded. Sea- and lake-side reactors will soon be under water. Many could be swamped by dam breaks.
The code red list goes on. But none exceed Diablo Canyon, near San Luis Obispo. And it’s the two reactors there that the Biden Administration now insanely wants to save.
More Americans have been arrested at Diablo than at any other nuke. Badly built just 45 miles from the San Andreas fault, and just 180 miles from Los Angeles, the seaside reactors could easily lose their cooling systems to a Fukushima-style quake/tsunami.
More than 30 years old, their radioactive clouds would reach the ten million people in LA County within five hours. Evacuation is inconceivable, the death toll unfathomable.
Most critically, Diablo’s ancient Unit One is severely embrittled. As a nuke’s interior metals are subjected over the decades to intense heat, pressure and radiation, their resilience disappears. As they become brittle they grow vulnerable to the kind of intense shock that could come when emergency cooling water is poured into a melting reactor.
Should that happen in the middle of a melt-down, the nuke’s interior metals would shatter. The resulting steam explosion would blow the structure apart, throwing apocalyptic clouds of radioactive gases, metals and structural concrete into the sea and atmosphere.
Yet Diablo is operated by Pacific Gas … Electric, which has been twice convicted of criminal manslaughter (involving up to a hundred human deaths) and which has burned down much of northern California. To say PG…E has zero credibility as a reactor operator is to vastly understate the case.
A series of intense negotiations has led to a plan to shut Diablo Unit One in 2024, followed by Unit Two in 2025. A broad coalition of communities, unions, environmental, regulatory, citizens and other groups deemed that California would emerge safer, more prosperous and more ecologically sound once those reactors were shut.
But now Team Biden wants to trash all that. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and the usual industry stooges are attacking the shut-down deal and fighting to keep Diablo open.
A petition calling for an independent Diablo embrittlement inspection has been signed by more than two thousand Californians, including Hollywood A-Listers Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Martin Sheen, Eric Roberts, Jodi Evans, Mimi Kennedy, Graham Nash and many more. Governor Gavin Newsom has ignored the request, as has Biden’s Department of Energy.
The idea that Diablo’s operations could be prolonged without an independent investigation is beyond insane. The one thing the site has to offer of long-term value is its transmission switching station, which could easily handle major megawatts of juice coming in from the offshore wind turbines that should be built to power California’s future.
The idea that Diablo’s operations could be prolonged without an independent investigation is beyond insane. The allegedly “green” administration is pushing the envelope on the incredibly dangerous, wasteful, uninsured and ecologically catastrophic engine of mass death.
Can we stop them before Diablo or some other errant nuke blows up and terminally irradiates millions of innocent downwinders along with our planetary eco-systems?
The answer must come VERY soon.
Harvey Wasserman co-convenes the weekly Election Protection 2024 ZOOM. His People's Spiral of US History is at www.solartopia.org.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), seen Nov. 30, 2021, on Capitol Hill, has raised concerns for months about the Build Back Better Act and has signaled he remains skeptical about federal initiatives that send checks directly to Americans. (photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
ALSO SEE: Dems Weigh Forcing Manchin's Hand on Biden's
Build Back Better Bill
Party lawmakers fear a disruption to one of their signature aid programs as they continue to haggle with Manchin over their roughly $2 trillion package
The aid is the result of an expanded, retooled child tax credit, which Democrats approved this past spring as part of their sprawling coronavirus relief package. Lawmakers grew the size of the benefit, ensured lower-income Americans could claim it fully on their taxes and allowed parents for the first time to collect the money in the form of monthly checks.
Democrats hope to extend each of those elements as part of their latest, roughly $2 trillion economic initiative known as the Build Back Better Act, which more broadly aims to overhaul the country’s health care, education, climate and tax laws. They say they intend to finalize their work in the Senate before Christmas, eventually sending the bill to Biden’s desk after the House adopted the measure in November.
But their ambitious timeline increasingly faces the prospect of sustained delays. For months, Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) has raised concerns about the size and scope of the tax-and-spending proposal. This week, he even appeared to take aim at programs including the child tax credit, signaling he remains skeptical about federal initiatives that send checks directly to Americans.
With much about the measure unresolved, the wrangling raises the prospect for disruptions in a program Democrats have come to call the Biden Child Tax Credit — a reflection of their belief that the monthly checks are a defining element of the president’s legacy and the party’s political philosophy. The payments are still slated to arrive, as scheduled, on Dec. 15. Without a legislative change, though, that is set to be the last payment, and the program come January will revert to its older, smaller state.
“Our country would not accept vulnerable senior citizens missing out on a Social Security payment,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the leader of the tax-focused Finance Committee. “Similarly it is not acceptable for vulnerable children and families to miss out on a child tax credit payment.”
For years, federal law allowed parents to deduct up to $2,000 from their annual taxes for each child under age 17, though the exact amount they ultimately received would depend on a filer’s income and the amount of taxes they owed. For many lower-income families, the system generally provided an injection of cash every tax-filing season in the spring.
But Democrats expanded the program as part of the American Rescue Plan, which Biden signed into law in March. The revisions belonged to a broader set of spending measures that the White House pursued in a bid to give families a financial boost, particularly as they recovered from the coronavirus pandemic.
Under the stimulus law, lawmakers bumped up the size of the tax credits, allowing parents to deduct up to $3,600 for each child under age 6 and $3,000 for others ages 6 through 17. They also made it refundable, meaning that many low-income Americans — who might not have had enough income and tax burden to benefit from the full credit — could still receive the entire amount in the form of a refund.
And lawmakers put in place a novel system allowing families to take advantage of the aid well before they might normally file their returns. Beginning in mid-July, parents could receive monthly payments up to $300 for each eligible child, with deposits made directly into their bank accounts from the Internal Revenue Service.
In signing the bill into law, Biden in March asserted the expanded, retooled child tax credit could cut child poverty by as much as half. Over a series of studies, the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated this year that the initiatives could benefit more than 65 million children, particularly helping families who make less than $35,000 annually to cover the costs of food, clothing, housing and education. Democrats widely view the program as a runaway success, motivating many lawmakers to try to make it permanent.
“We’ve seen such success in five months, lifting millions out of poverty,” said Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro (D-Conn.), chairwoman of the House Appropriations Committee. “It cannot be undone.”
Yet Democrats at the time still opted against making the changes to the child tax credit permanent, because doing so would have greatly expanded the price tag of their $1.9 trillion relief law. Instead they set their sights on extending it as part of their subsequent efforts to enact Biden’s broader agenda — a process that since then has proved more difficult than some in the party once anticipated.
In the House, Democrats last month adopted their version of the Build Back Better Act, including a $190 billion effort that extends the expanded child tax credit and its monthly payments for just another year. The short-term extension amounted to a major concession to Manchin, whose opposition to the original plan would have doomed the entire package in the Senate.
Manchin at various points over the past year has questioned the wisdom of the child tax payments, called for their exclusion from the bill and raised the prospect that he would support the Build Back Better Act only if it includes work requirements for parents. Democrats largely balked at his ideas, but Manchin’s general apprehension about the price tag of the broader bill — initially set at $3.5 trillion — left his party little choice but to scale back what would have been one of its most expensive components.
In recent days, however, Manchin once again has sounded dour notes about the package — refusing repeatedly to endorse the Build Back Better Act even after Democrats whittled down its size and scope. Appearing onstage Tuesday at an event hosted by the Wall Street Journal, he questioned the “social” spending in the bill and raised concerns about its effects on inflation. He also took issue with the fact that Democrats limited the duration of some of their initiatives, including the child tax credit, in an attempt to save money — even though many in his party eventually hope to make the programs permanent.
“If we keep sending checks,” he said, “it’s going to be hard to stop the checks.”
Manchin did not respond to a request for comment. On Wednesday, he told reporters he could not offer a final judgment on the bill because he had not yet seen the final text.
Even without Manchin’s explicit support, Senate Democrats have started the process of shepherding the bill through the chamber, where they plan to rely on the intricate process known as reconciliation to sidestep a Republican filibuster. Other Democrats, meanwhile, increasingly have tried to pressure Manchin from the sidelines, making a loud, public case for swift Senate action to stave off any interruption in the tax payments.
The chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, described the program at a news conference Wednesday as “a lifeline for so many different American families.” At a time when consumer prices are rising, a major issue for Manchin, Jeffries said the continued aid would ease “some inflationary pressures to pay for child-care expenses, or educational expenses, or food or housing expenses.”
Across the Capitol, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) this week said he brought up the issue during a private party lunch. He said he called on his caucus to act swiftly to pass the bill and protect the payments — a comment, he said, that was met with “applause.”
“It doesn’t mean we have to pass a bill on December 16,” Kaine said, referring to the day after child tax credit recipients are set to see their final allotment. “But we’ve got to pass it sufficiently in advance of January 15, to make sure that families continue to get this child tax credit.”
In recent days, IRS officials have communicated to Capitol Hill that they probably need clarity by Dec. 28 on the future of the program. Otherwise, the tax agency is unlikely to be able to make payments on time for Jan. 15 in the event Congress finalizes the law before the end of the year, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the conversations.
Wyden, as the leader of the Senate’s top tax committee, said the trouble stems from the significant logistical requirements that come with administering the aid program at a time when the IRS is also preparing for the new tax-filing season.
“We’re focused on getting the entire caucus behind this,” said Wyden, who spoke with Biden directly on Tuesday to discuss the fuller spending package. “We are working as a caucus to get this done.”
Yet a slew of Democrats already have set their sights on next year, looking beyond the debate over Biden’s signature spending package as they argue for making the child tax credit changes permanent. That work will begin “as soon as we get this done,” said Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.), the leader of the moderate-leaning New Democrat Coalition in the House.
“We’ve seen the impact the child tax credit has had on families,” DelBene said. “We need to keep that going.”
Brooklyn Center Officer Anthony Luckey testifies on the opening day of the trial for ex-cop Kimberly Potter. (photo: AP)
The testimony came on the opening day of Potter's trial. The former Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, police officer is facing charges of first- and second-degree manslaughter for killing Wright, a Black man, after saying she mistakenly grabbed her gun instead of a Taser during a traffic stop. She was terminated from the force following the shooting.
In April 2021, officers pulled Wright over and during the traffic stop discovered he had an outstanding arrest warrant for a weapons charge. According to body camera footage of the stop, while trying to detain him, Wright breaks free and gets into his car. The word "Taser" is repeated before Wright is shot.
Officer Luckey testified that he was the one who decided to pull over Wright. During cross-examination, he testified that he had an "intuition" to pull him over because of "the behavior of the vehicle," including that it had its right-blinker on while in a left turning lane, and the fact he was driving in a "high crime area" that is "known for a lot of shootings."
In response to a question from Matthew Frank, the assistant Minnesota attorney general who also led the prosecution of ex-police officer Derek Chauvin, Luckey affirmed that Wright never reached for a weapon, never struck him, and that neither Wright nor the woman in the passenger seat made any threatening moves.
That admission came after the defense sought to portray Potter's decision to reach for a weapon as a justifiable attempt to protect her fellow cops' safety and prevent Wright from potentially injuring them in an attempt to flee the scene in his vehicle.
The trial resumes Thursday.
Reality Winner, poses for a portrait in the field behind her mother's home where she is serving a home confinement sentencing by the federal courts in Kingsville, Texas. (photo: Christopher Lee/The Intercept)
“I knew it was secret, but I also knew that I had pledged service to the American people,” Winner said.
Winner’s case is unique, and because of how tribal our politics have become, she’s a person without a political home. Despite the sacrifices she made, she largely gets ignored as a result.
Of course, from a Trumpworld perspective, which fully rejected any claims of Russian interference, what she leaked was too inconvenient to discuss. The left, for its part, was heavily critical of the Democratic focus on the Trump-Russia scandal, arguing that it was an effort by establishment Democrats to escape necessary responsibility, so did not rally to her cause. Among resistance liberals, Winner had a hard time gaining traction. At the time of her arrest, mainline Democrats were closely allied with the public faces of the intelligence world who were avidly fueling Trump-Russia theories, but by leaking, Winner had betrayed the intelligence community, and the deep-state talking heads had no interest in taking up her cause on CNN or MSNBC.
The document she leaked didn’t contain evidence of collusion between then-presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russia. It said that Russia had penetrated our election system but not that it had done anything to manipulate the voter rolls or the votes. The leak exposed flaws in the system while showing that Russia was keeping its options for meddling open — just as they’ve done in other countries, and just as we’ve done in almost every country on the planet.
The Intercept published the document in question along with a story about its significance on June 5, 2017. The Press Freedom Defense Fund, which is part of First Look Institute, The Intercept’s parent company, supported Winner’s legal defense.
At the time of her arrest, Winner, an Air Force veteran, was serving as a contractor for the NSA. While Winner is now out of prison, she’s still on supervised release for the next three years, with onerous conditions. In the interview, she talks about her motivation for the leak and the psychological impact of the government’s assault on her. As she explains, she felt like she was seeing double, watching Trump publicly claim that Russia had behaved entirely innocently throughout the 2016 election while knowing that his own intelligence service had concluded differently.
“I knew it was secret, but I also knew that I had pledged service to the American people, and at that point in time, it felt like they were being led astray,” she said.
Even the federal commission in charge of election security had no idea what had happened. “What prosecutors called ‘grave damage’ was a bombshell of truth to the federal Election Assistance Commission, which helps secure the vote,” Scott Pelley reported on “60 Minutes,” adding that election officials took significant actions in response to Winner’s revelations. Two sources told CBS that Winner’s leak helped make the 2018 election more secure, confirming previous Intercept reporting.
At trial, Winner wasn’t able to talk about the document or why she leaked it, but in her interview, she pushed back against the idea that she had ever done anything to put the country at risk. Quite the opposite, she said: “I thought this was the truth but also did not betray our sources and methods, did not cause damage, did not put lives on the line. It only filled in a question mark that was tearing our county in half in May 2017. … I meant no harm.”
One way that the government managed to deny her bail was by suggesting that her language abilities — abilities she had been trained in by the military — meant that she might defect to the Taliban. That charge, that she was some kind of traitor, shook her to her core and haunted her throughout her time in confinement.
In prison, Winner went to a dark place. Her mother had moved from Texas to Georgia so that she could see her regularly. “There would just be times when it almost wasn’t worth it to see the end of this,” she said. “I started to plan my suicide, and I would do practice runs. The only thing that was stopping me was my mom because she was still in Augusta. My dad had gone back to Texas to go to work, and I just refused to let her hear that news by herself, so I would get on the phone and try to talk around it and say, ‘Hey, there’s no reason to stick around, visitation’s not worth it, just go back to Texas, just go.’”
But her mother refused to go. She learned of the depth of her daughter’s despair the same time that “60 Minutes” did. “There were some very dark days, but they would be followed by a better day,” her mother told Pelley. “I just knew when I was in Georgia I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t leave her.”
Pro-choice supporters attend a nationwide Women's March in Los Angeles on 2 October, held after Texas rolled out a near-total ban on abortions. (photo: Ringo Chiu/Reuters)
Advocates and providers have asked the state to offer funding to those from other states seeking an abortion if access is banned
The California Future of Abortion Council, made up of more than 40 abortion providers and advocacy groups, and lawmakers on Wednesday released a list of 45 recommendations for California to consider if the high court overturns the 48-year-old decision that forbids states from outlawing abortion.
The recommendations, crafted with help from some of the state’s most important policymakers, include possibly paying for travel, lodging and procedures for people from other states. With an estimated $31bn surplus next year, the state has money in its coffers to fund abortion services for patients from other states.
“We’ll be a sanctuary,” said Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, adding he’s aware patients will likely travel to the state from elsewhere to seek abortions. “We are looking at ways to support that inevitability and looking at ways to expand our protections.”
Abortion access in the US is under threat as the supreme court weighs a law from Mississippi that bans abortion after 15 weeks gestation and ultimately seeks to overturn Roe v Wade. More than two dozen states are poised to ban abortion if the supreme court gives them the OK next year.
The state has already seen the effect of abortion bans in other states. In 2020, Planned Parenthood, which comprises about half of California’s abortion clinics, said it served 7,000 people from other states. California affiliates of Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, also reported a slight increase in patients from Texas when a law in that state outlawing the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy went into effect.
A huge influx of people from other states “will definitely destabilize the abortion provider network”, said Fabiola Carrion, the interim director for reproductive and sexual health at the national Health Law Program. Out-of-state abortions would also likely be later term procedures, Carrion said, which are more complicated and expensive.
California abortion providers want lawmakers to make it easier for people to get to the state for reproductive care. They recommend funding – including public spending – to support patients seeking abortion for travel expenses such as gas, lodging, transportation and childcare. The plan released Wednesday also asks lawmakers to reimburse abortion providers for services to those who can’t afford to pay – including those who travel to California from other states whose income is low enough that they would qualify for state-funded abortions under Medicaid if they lived there.
But the number of people who would come to California for abortions if the supreme court overturns Roe v Wade is not clear. The state does not collect or report abortion statistics. The Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights, said 132,680 abortions were performed in California in 2017, or about 15% of all abortions nationally. That figure includes people from out of state as well as teenagers, who are not required to have their parents’ permission for an abortion in California.
The plan also asks lawmakers to help clinics increase their workforce to prepare for more patients by giving scholarships to medical students who pledge to offer abortion services in rural areas, help them pay off student loans and assist with their monthly liability insurance premiums.
“We’re looking at how to build capacity and build workforce,” said Jodi Hicks, the CEO of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California. “It will take a partnership and investment with the state.”
Abortion opponents in California are also preparing for a potential surge of patients from other states seeking the procedure. But they hope to convince them not to do it.
Jonathan Keller, the president and CEO of the California Family Council, said California has about 160 pregnancy resource centers whose aim is to convince women not to get abortions. About half of those centers are medical clinics, while the rest are faith-based counseling centers, Keller said.
Many of the centers are located near abortion clinics in an attempt to entice people to seek their counseling before opting to end pregnancies. Keller said many are already planning on increasing their staffing if California gets an increase of patients.
“Even if we are not facing any immediate legislative opportunities or legislative victories, it’s a reminder that the work of changing hearts and minds and also providing real support and resources to women facing unplanned pregnancies – that work will always continue,” Keller said.
Maintenance crews prepare a Lockheed Martin F-35A jet for a training flight in Hill Air Force Base, Utah. (photo: George Frey/Getty)
The revolving door between the Pentagon and the military industry never stops spinning. The latest to walk through it: Bill LaPlante, who's moving from the arms industry to a top government position — buying arms from the arms industry.
LaPlante is being poached directly from the military industry that is praising him, which he entered after serving in an acquisitions role under the Obama administration, where he was known for shepherding through major (and controversial) programs, such as the acquisition of the F‑35 fighter jet.
By moving from government to industry, then back to government (should the Senate confirm him), all while the weapons industry cheers, LaPlante has spun through a well-trodden revolving door — a career trajectory that is entirely routine, but nonetheless scandalous.
In a November 30 White House statement, President Biden praised LaPlante as a “seasoned national security leader with nearly four decades of experience in acquisition, technology, sustainment and the defense industrial base.” The president is nominating LaPlante for the role of Under Secretary for Acquisition and Sustainment at the Department of Defense, which has been vacant since Ellen Lord stepped down from the position in January.
LaPlante is currently the president and chief executive officer of Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, a contractor for the US military, where he has served since 2020. As recently as November 2, the company announced that it “has been selected by the U.S. Air Force as one of 55 contractors on a digital engineering contract that aims to increase the service’s ability to work on digital designs of its future platforms.” The price tag is massive, potentially amounting to $46 billion over eleven years, according to the company.
This is just one of numerous contracts with the U.S. military held by Charles Stark Draper Laboratory. The most recent one was announced just thirteen days before Biden announced the nomination of LaPlante.
Before Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, LaPlante served as senior vice president and general manager of the Center for National Security at the MITRE Corporation, which also contracts with the US military.
But perhaps most telling is LaPlante’s role as Obama’s assistant secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics from 2014 to 2017. During his tenure, LaPlante prioritized three weapons programs: Northrop Grumman’s B‑21 Long Range Strike-Bomber, Lockheed Martin’s F‑35 fighter jets, and Boeing’s KC-46 tankers, which are used to refuel B‑52 bombers and other aerial attack vessels (though they have a troubled history).
The NDIA, which represents all of the manufacturers of the previously mentioned weapons systems, released a statement gushing about Biden’s nomination of LaPlante, and urging his quick confirmation. Punaro, board chairman of the NDIA, said on November 30. “LaPlante has a wealth of experience in government service and the responsibilities of this position. We urge his speedy confirmation.”
The relationship between LaPlante and Punaro is not new. In 2014, Punaro introduced LaPlante, then serving on the Obama administration, at an Atlantic Council event that was cosponsored by NDIA. He praised LaPlante’s “strong leadership,” calling him “a doer, not a ditherer.” Punaro emphasized, “He’s a true believer in the two-way street with industry.”
At the 2014 event, LaPlante identified the B‑21, F‑35 and KC-46 programs as the priorities of his tenure, saying they are “critical to the future of the Air Force literally for decades to come.” He emphasized his partnerships and frequent communication with CEOs of weapons companies, addressing by name those gathered in the room.
Upon nominating him, Biden praised LaPlante’s role in advancing these weapons programs, singling out the fact that he “forged a path forward” on the B‑21 bomber. The development, production, and operation of this program is expected to cost $200 billion over the course of thirty years. (The program is still in the engineering stage.)
The US acquisition of F‑35s, meanwhile, has been the subject of fierce protests over the fighter jets’ environmental harms, human toll, and astronomical costs. In 2019, a spokesperson for Operation Inherent Resolve, the name of the US military campaign against ISIS, boasted that F‑35s and F‑15s had been used to drop eighty thousand pounds of bombs on Iraq’s Qanus Island, located in the Salah ad Din province.
Punaro isn’t the only weapons industry representative happy about LaPlante’s nomination. Herbert “Hawk” Carlisle, head of the NDIA, told Defense News, “Bill would be an outstanding [acquisition and sustainment] leader. He has a great background and understanding of the industry, which also has a high and deep respect for him.”
LaPlante is in good company. In July, the president announced the nomination of Andrew Hunter, also an Obama administration Department of Defense alum, for the role of assistant Air Force secretary for acquisition, technology, and logistics. Hunter is a senior fellow for the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank that receives funding from weapons companies, including Lockheed Martin and Boeing. (Weapons companies often fund think tanks that advance industry policy objectives, through a more academic and seemingly “above the fray” approach.) Biden has also nominated Gabe Camarillo, senior vice president of the Army business unit for Science Applications International Corp., a weapons manufacturer, for the role of undersecretary of the Army.
NDIA is urging the swift confirmation of these nominees as well.
Direct military industry ties go all the way up the Biden administration’s cabinet: the secretary of defense, General Lloyd J. Austin III, served on the board of directors for Raytheon. What makes LaPlante’s connections so noteworthy is just how unremarkable his nomination is — any controversy about his industry ties has been entirely absent from public discourse.
It’s dubious that there is such a thing as a “good” buyer of weapons for the US military, arguably the most violent institution on Earth. But the fact that the next prospective one is drowning in military industry largesse, reveals a great deal about what keeps this institution growing — and who benefits.
As Alex Y. Ding, codirector of organizing at Dissenters, a youth anti-militarism organization, puts it, “Executives representing U.S. military contractors, including Draper Laboratories’ LaPlante, are often tapped to be in high level positions in the Pentagon, or in government departments that oversee security and defense. And our elected officials empower them by writing blank checks, and agreeing to let them operate with little to no accountability to us.”
Workers put the finishing touches on a prototype of a spaceship called Starship before SpaceX CEO Elon Musk arrives to update the progress on the project Sept. 27, 2019, at the Boca Chica spaceport launch facility. (photo: Jonathan Newton/Getty)
Explosions, noise and beach closings have disrupted the peace and harmed wildlife in Boca Chica, Texas, residents and environmentalists say.
“My dad couldn’t afford to take us to the movies,” Johnson said. “That was our entertainment.”
Thirty years ago, Johnson made sure to pass that dream on to her children by buying a three-bedroom brick ranch for her to retire there. Then she bought a second ranch house nearby to rent out to support her in retirement. For years, she spent her winters in Boca Chica, mainly driving from Michigan to escape the cold and welcome the ocean air that brought relief to her asthma.
“It was so peaceful, and at night it was so dark you could see a billion stars,” she said. “You are surrounded by nothing but nature. The beach was pristine and there were tons of different species of birds.”
But the idyll was disrupted when SpaceX, the aerospace company, came to town in 2014 to build a commercial spaceport. The company’s presence, while welcomed by local politicians lured by the promise of taxable income and employment opportunities, has become a nightmare for many residents and wildlife conservationists attempting to protect the sensitive habitat surrounding the development.
Since SpaceX started construction in late 2015 and testing rockets in 2019, explosions have showered debris across previously unspoiled tidal flats and blown out residents’ windows, including Johnson’s. Rare species of birds like the piping plover and mammals have dwindled, and intense periods of construction and testing have closed off public access to the beach for more days than were authorized by the Federal Aviation Administration, which has federal oversight of the development. The company has also installed bright floodlights to illuminate the road and construction site.
“You can’t see the stars anymore,” Johnson said.
Now, the FAA is reviewing SpaceX’s plans to significantly expand the spaceport to allow for launches of the largest rocket known to man, an expansion that has alarmed many residents, environmentalists and wildlife conservationists.
SpaceX declined to respond to a detailed list of questions and allegations that it is lowballing homeowners and harming the environment, stating that the company did not have anyone available.
“As you can imagine, it’s an incredibly demanding time for the team,” according to an unsigned email from SpaceX’s communications team.
Neither Elon Musk, who founded the company and is its chief executive, nor his chief of staff responded to a request for comment.
When SpaceX pitched its spaceport, dubbed Starbase, to residents and environmentalists in 2012, the company described a modest facility with a “small, eco-friendly footprint” that would launch a maximum of one rocket per month, according to a SpaceX presentation delivered at the time, seen by NBC News.
Over time, however, the project has mushroomed to accommodate the development of a new type of launch vehicle, Starship, which at 21 stories tall and with 29 rocket engines will be the largest space vehicle and rocket system known to man. Early this year, Musk announced his desire to turn Starbase and Boca Chica Village into a city with a private spaceport to the moon, Mars and beyond. The accompanying expansion plan, whose environmental impact, outlined in a 150-page draft assessment, is currently being reviewed by the Federal Aviation Authority. It includes the construction of a 250-megawatt power plant -- capable of generating enough power for 100,000 homes -- desalination plant, and liquid natural gas plant. If approved, the expanded Starbase would pave the way for humans to travel to and potentially live on Mars, but would make Boca Chica Village uninhabitable for humans and many animals due to the tenfold increase in the testing of rocket components and launches, and the associated risk of “anomalies” -- a space industry euphemism for explosions.
“We are interested in space exploration like many other people and are not trying to be obstructionist,” said Mike Parr, president of the American Bird Conservancy, which has been monitoring the decline of bird species around the spaceport. “But the scope of the project has changed and it feels like a bait and switch.”
SpaceX has bought out many of the villagers, offering them money for their homes that the company said in letters to the owners were three times an independently appraised valuation. But some villagers have said these offers are too low to buy an equivalent property away from the blast zone. Some residents felt pressure to accept SpaceX’s offer, which came with the looming threat of eminent domain. Residents like Celia Johnson and Maria Pointer, whose home now forms part of the SpaceX property, said that threat was communicated verbally by a real estate intermediary representing SpaceX. Eminent domain allows the government -- in this case the county through the Cameron County Spaceport Development Corp. -- to seize their property.
Cameron County did not respond to a request for comment.
Johnson, whose silvery-gray schnauzer Flash accompanies her everywhere, held out. The offer for her home was $150,000. She said that was insultingly low, based on valuations of inferior properties without ocean views. She would need about three times that much to buy a similar oceanfront property nearby. She had dreamed of leaving the two Boca Chica homes to her sons.
“That dream was destroyed by Elon Musk,” she said, noting that since SpaceX arrived, Cameron County changed its rules around how it handled residents’ utilities. Before, they could stop water deliveries and shut off electricity if they were away during the summer months. Now, however, residents must either pay to maintain utilities even if they are not there -- which Johnson said costs about $150 per month -- or risk being permanently disconnected, as happened with her rental home. Without access to water, owners lose their occupation license, which allows the county to condemn the property.
“I worked double jobs and whatever was required so that one day I would have a good retirement,” she said. “Then here comes SpaceX and they take my income away.”
Some of SpaceX’s displaced neighbors are more sanguine. Pointer, a retired navigation officer in the Alaska Marine Highway System, said that she and her husband, Ray, decided to make “lemonade out of lemons” after the SpaceX development subsumed their Boca Chica home.
“When they first came to town I kind of welcomed it. I like technology. We loved the Apollo program, the moonwalks and felt like it was going to help Brownsville. We didn’t feel like they were going to impede on us except maybe a bit of noise,” she said. “They never mentioned they’d work 24/7 around the clock and have lights so bright you couldn’t sleep without plywood boards on your windows.”
The disturbance took a toll on the Pointers, who were both suffering from serious health issues. Ray had cancer and Maria was dealing with paralysis on one side of her body due to a latent spinal deformity. Neither could sleep because of the noise and the lights. “We were walking zombies half the time,” she said.
Maria started documenting the construction of the spaceport and launch vehicles outside her bedroom window, in the early days with her Samsung smartphone camera and in the last few years with a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera, posting photos and videos to social media.
“If I’m going to be an independent lens, I’m going to show you what I see,” she said. “If there are birds dying and they are dropping down to the side of me from overpressures, I get to film it. I don’t get to fix it.”
In 2019, after Musk gave a presentation to residents about his vision for Starship, Pointer said she and her husband “knew we were toast.”
Pointer said she didn’t like the way SpaceX tried to buy residents out through what she called a “ruthless” third-party real estate firm called JLL.
“They used very intimidating language on some of these poor folks,” she said, noting that properties in Boca Chica Village should have been appraised based on how much it would cost to buy an equivalent beach-bay home somewhere like South Padre Island. “SpaceX hired the right people because they got some of those old folks so scared that they gave it away for far less than it was worth.”
JLL did not respond to a request for comment.
The Pointers held out, having initially been told their property was worth just $70,000 and being offered $210,000.
Pointer said they eventually sold for “substantially more.” Their Boca Chica home is now part of SpaceX’s production shipyard and has been converted into an office dedicated to hazardous environmental safety.
But Pointer blames state and county officials, not Musk or SpaceX.
“You don’t blame a corporation for what governments propose and what greedy commissioners and boards allow,” she said, adding that she’s excited about the prospect of space travel and the technology that enables it.
“There’s no way you can stand in the way of progress you want to see to bring us to an interplanetary world,” she said. “I hope I get to live long enough to see us back on the moon and on Mars. The idea brings tears to my eyes.”
When SpaceX was first shopping around for locations for its private commercial spaceport in 2011, it negotiated tax breaks and other sweeteners with local and state officials in Florida, Georgia, Puerto Rico and Texas.
By 2014, Texas won the company’s business and associated promise of jobs and economic development. State and local officials offered Musk’s company about $20 million in financial incentives, including a 10-year county property tax abatement, legal protection from noise complaints and laws altered to close the public beach at Boca Chica during launches, as reported by The Dallas Morning News in 2014.
While the project has brought construction jobs to the Brownsville area, one of the poorest urban areas in the United States, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, many community activists question whether it’s bringing sustainable economic development.
“How many of these jobs are long term? Most of the folks are doing contracting work,” said Michelle Serrano, a Brownsville resident and activist. “Is this going to have a sustainable economic impact for our community, or is it more trickle-down economics?”
In a document outlining SpaceX’s environmental and community impacts on the region, submitted to the FAA this year as part of the licensing process, the company states that the proposed development would employ up to 450 full-time workers, many of whom would move to the area from elsewhere, depending on when the expansion is approved. More than a quarter of those in Cameron County, where the spaceport is, live below the poverty threshold, which is more than twice the national average, according to Census Bureau data.
The document suggests that the main benefit to the community will come from trickle-down effects from SpaceX workers spending part of their earnings on housing, goods and services in the area. Transient SpaceX workers would also spend money on hotels, food and rental vehicles.
“While the population under the poverty threshold may not directly benefit through employment and income, it may indirectly benefit as regional economic health is improved through the proposed increase in employment for commercial space exploration activity,” it states.
“Even if it does result in some local hires, it doesn’t undo the destruction in the community,” said Bekah Hinojosa, another community activist, pointing to the regular closures of the “poor people’s beach” and the displacement of those living in Boca Chica Village.
Hinojosa pointed to comments made by Musk in 2018, during a news conference after the launch of SpaceX’s reusable Falcon Heavy vehicle. The billionaire was asked by a reporter how soon flights would be going to the moon or Mars. Musk said that test flights would need to take place first, most likely in Boca Chica, “because we’ve got a load of land with nobody around and so if it blows up, it’s cool,” he said.
The comments grated on some of Boca Chica’s residents, who have dealt with shattered windows and debris strewn across the beach and wildlife refuges after these explosions.
Hinojosa went further, characterizing Musk’s position as “environmental racism.” Musk has an estimated personal wealth of about $310 billion and is the world’s richest man, according to Bloomberg.
“We’re a poor community and a people of color community,” she said, “But he’s trying to erase us and claim that we’re not there.”
Musk’s comments also irked conservationists tasked with protecting the wildlife in the surrounding area, one of America’s most biologically diverse coastal wetlands.
“Musk is a very smart man. But he either was ignorant of the ecology out there or he felt his project was so much more important that it really didn’t matter what he did to the area,” said local environmentalist Jim Chapman.
Chapman said he is alarmed to see rocket tests and launches taking place in such a “fragile and biologically important area,” adding that while tidal flats “are not very exciting to look at to the casual observer,” there’s a “whole web of life out there,” from algae to tiny crustaceans, that a food chain of birds and animals rely upon.
“This is a very important area for migratory birds as it’s a huge stopover area,” said Jared Margolis, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, who submitted comments to the FAA questioning the legality of the SpaceX expansion. “Even a power plant would be concerning. But here you have giant rockets powered by methane that tend to explode, causing debris and noise impact, and we want to make sure the impacts are mitigated.”
While the SpaceX launch site is relatively small, covering about 75 acres, it’s sandwiched between delicate, protected tidal flats, wetlands and a much-loved public beach. Not only does the area provide a habitat for migratory birds, including endangered species such as piping plovers and red knots, it’s also one of the only places where the Kemp’s ridley sea turtle, the most critically endangered sea turtle in the world, comes ashore to nest.
Amid the constant construction noise, truck traffic, enormous floodlights over the site and debris from explosions, some species have already dwindled at an alarming rate, said David Newstead, director of the Coastal Bird Program for the Coastal Bend Bays … Estuaries Program, a nonprofit group that works to protect the area's bays and estuaries.
Newstead conducted a study of the local population of piping plovers, sparrow-sized shorebirds that nest and feed in coastal sand and are protected under the Endangered Species Act. He found that the population halved from 2018 to 2021, correlating closely with the intensity of SpaceX operations in the area.
In addition to the piping plover, the FAA has identified at least nine other endangered species that would be adversely affected by the SpaceX expansion, including the red knot shorebird, northern aplomado falcon, Gulf Coast jaguarundi (a rare wildcat), ocelot and five types of sea turtle.
There are also plenty of unknown impacts to small mammals, reptiles and the marine worms the shorebirds forage from the sediment because of the reverberations through the land from launches and construction activity, Newstead added.
When one of the Starship prototypes exploded above the launchpad in March, it threw rocket debris five miles away, to the jetties at the southern tip of South Padre Island, as documented by local news media at the time. That prototype had just three Raptor engines. The Starship that SpaceX hopes to get approval to launch from Boca Chica will have at least 29 of them.
“Nobody has ever put a wildlife preserve in this type of habitat through this type of experiment,” he said.
Reagan Faught, the regional director of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, whose land is adjacent to the SpaceX development, said that his agency has worked closely with SpaceX to improve scheduling and communication around the closing of the state highway and access to the public beach. In September, the agency signed a memorandum of agreement with SpaceX committing to develop protocols to respond to events such as rocket “anomalies," including outlining efforts to retrieve debris and restore the sensitive public lands.
“We want a good neighborly relation with them, and they want to do the same with us so we can work together with sensible and reasonable approaches to solving these issues,” Faught said, although he noted that the respective missions of the organizations “may not always align.”
Several environmental groups who submitted public comments to the FAA in response to SpaceX’s expansion plans argue that the agency would be violating several laws if it fails to require a more thorough analysis of the company’s environmental impacts in Boca Chica, through a rigorous environmental impact statement, and a clearer plan for mitigating those impacts. Those laws include the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which requires that federal agencies prepare an environmental impact statement for all “major federal actions significantly affecting the quality of the human environment,” and the Endangered Species Act.
The FAA has until the end of December to review the public comments and determine whether to approve SpaceX to issue a “Finding of No Significant Impact” (FONSI) or a Notice of Intent to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement. A FONSI would allow the launch licensing process to proceed, meaning SpaceX could start testing its giant rockets in early 2022, as long as a review by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, also due by the end of December, shows that the project won’t put any endangered species in jeopardy of extinction. But if a full environmental impact statement is needed, launches from Boca Chica could be delayed for years.
If the FAA does issue a FONSI, environmental groups could sue the agency. But SpaceX would still be able to proceed with the expansion unless an injunction were obtained.
In a public comment written to the FAA on behalf of the Center for Biological Diversity, Jared Margolis described the FAA’s decision not to prepare an environmental impact statement for the SpaceX expansion as “arbitrary, capricious and in clear violation of NEPA.” He added that it “calls into question whether the agency truly understands the scope of what SpaceX plans to do at the Boca Chica site, and the incredible environmental harm that is likely to occur, and indeed has already occurred.”
Another public comment, submitted by a group of 11 environmental nonprofits including the Sierra Club, Defenders of Wildlife and the Surfrider Foundation, and obtained by NBC News includes a letter sent from the Fish and Wildlife Service, obtained through an earlier public records request by Margolis, that calls on the FAA to carry out another environmental impact statement.
“Due to operations by SpaceX, the Fish and Wildlife Service’s ability to maintain the biological integrity, diversity and environmental health of refuge resources ... has been significantly diminished at the Boca Chica tract,” the letter states.
FAA spokesperson Steven Kulm said the agency was “committed to complying with the requirements” of NEPA and that the environmental review is “one aspect of this process.”
He noted that the FAA had previously warned SpaceX that launch towers and structures that it is building cannot skirt the FAA’s environmental review.
Laury Marshall, a spokeswoman for U.S. Fish and Wildlife, said that the agency continues to work with the FAA and SpaceX to “identify ways to further minimize possible effects to listed species from spaceport operations” by “restricting or changing lighting, noise and activity timing.”
Residents like Celia Johnson are resigned to their fate that sooner or later they will have to move to make way for Elon Musk’s interplanetary ambitions. They can refuse to take SpaceX’s buyouts and drag out the eminent domain process, something legal experts like Clay Beard, an attorney at the Texas law firm Dawson … Sodd, who is familiar with the project but not representing any residents, said might yield them more compensation but won’t prevent the condemnation of their properties.
Eventually, however, they’ll have no choice but to leave.
“The only thing I hope for is that Elon will come around and make us a decent offer for the house,” Johnson said. “I don’t need anything bigger, I don’t expect to be a millionaire. I just want to buy another house like the one I have now near the beach.”
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