Today much of the online content of The Union has gone behind a paywall, even yesterday’s news and op-eds (although I notice that the publisher’s editorial from yesterday is still available online in full for free).

Because I’ve stopped reading The Union regularly anyway, I’ll be one of those who will pass on this new opportunity to pay for online content.

I’ll still buy a hardcopy from time-to-time when we go out to breakfast, another ritual we enjoy less often these days as the budget gets tighter (maybe The Union should have a special discount for seniors in these hard times?).

By the way, most of the local restaurants where we have breakfast — like South Pine and TJs — have a couple of copies of The Union lying about for diners to peruse while they eat.

The free market is a wonderful thing to behold.

Press Release
Thursday, December 15, 2011
By the Foreclosure Group of Occupy Wall Street Nevada County

Occupy Responds to Local Eviction

On the night of Wednesday, Dec 14th at 10pm, members of Occupy Nevada County’s Foreclosure Work Group responded to a distress call from homeowner Stephen Merryweather who was facing imminent eviction at 6am the next morning.

Well before the sun came up on Thursday, with snow falling lightly, the Occupy group arrived to meet the owner of the Nevada City property. The occupiers, not knowing entirely what to expect – not even that there was a renting family involved– arrived to meet the people they had come to comfort and assist, and hear their stories.

The renters, a woman and her four children ranging in age from four months to 17years of age, had received the eviction notice only the day before and had no time to prepare. Not having a car of their own, a friend brought a truck to carry their belongings. The baby was sick, the teenager was preparing for finals week, and the mother was overwhelmed, having been packing through the night. She did not know her rights as a tenant caught up in the foreclosure process, and the family waited outside, only moments from becoming homeless, during Winter in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas.

Having arrived through the rear of the property, the locksmith had already changed one lock before negotiations had begun. Two of the occupiers spoke with the sheriff and the Fannie Mae representative, from California Pacific Brokers, to ask for more time. With the circumstances as they were, the sheriff and the Fannie Mae representative were faced with the prospect of doing the job they had been sent to do – putting a family out of home, in the snow, with only ten days to go before Christmas.

The negotiations did not take long, and moments later, the Fannie Mae representative gave the news to the mother that the eviction would be postponed through the new year. The family and the homeowner were relieved to have a few more weeks to prepare, and grateful to all who were willing to step outside of the dehumanizing foreclosure process, and act out of compassion.

The Occupy Nevada County Foreclosure Working Group would appreciate further information about legal rights and community resources available to people facing foreclosure, and resulting eviction and homelessness. Please contact foreclosure@earth-justice.org or get involved at http://ga.occupywallstreetnc.org.

Foreclosure Group of Occupy Wall Street Nevada County

Four of the five members of the Grass Valley City Council, in its meeting of November 8th, voted unanimously to approve the proposed contracts with ASCENT Environmental (for the revised Idaho-Maryland Mine EIR) and with Emgold (the reimbursement agreement). Dan Miller was absent.

Before the vote, Mayor Jan Arbuckle allowed public comments, within the following guidelines:

“I’m going to allow public comments on this, but before I do I want us to be clear that what we’re talking about is not the merits of the Idaho-Maryland Mine, whether it should happen or it shouldn’t. This is strictly to award the contract for the revised EIR. So, we’re not going to make a decision on whether the mine should go forward or should not go forward. It’s just to grant the contract for the revised EIR.”

Several of the nearly one dozen speakers specifically addressed contract issues, calling on the city to include some time constraints in the new contract with IMM, and to avoid the sort of unlimited, open-ended agreements that have allowed Emgold to drag-out the process with no action over the last several years.

Other speakers called for a new economic viability study to be provided in the contract for the revised EIR. And still others suggested refraining from entering into the ASCENT contract for the revised DEIR “until Emgold has bonded the money for the completion of the work up-front.”

Notice that these are all business considerations regarding the contracts, not environmental issues regarding the re-opening of the mine itself.

Why, then, did the council members — when all the public comments were complete — vote immediately to approve the contracts, with no discussion of the relevant business concerns raised by these speakers?

There is no way to know what thoughts were in the council members’ minds as they listened to the public comments, although they did appear to be awake.

Had they misunderstood what they were hearing as criticisms of the mine project itself, rather than — as was the case — criticisms of the structure of the proposed contracts with IMM and ASCENT?  Or, also possible, had they simply made up their minds in advance?

One of the speakers in favor of the project, Libertarian Gary Bryant, dismissed all the critics as environmentalists who, he said, he was “sure are doing God’s work, but … ”

David Watkinson, President of Emgold, who — as usual —  contrived to have the last word, also mis-stated these issues of the flawed contracts as environmental issues. He said, “the questions that most of the people brought up tonight will be addressed in the CEQA process.” That is clearly not true, since several speakers called for time-limited contracts.

Here are the videos of most of the dozen or so speakers in the order they occurred.

Note: David Watkinson was the only speaker of the night whom Mayor Arbuckle inexplicably allowed to exceed the 3-minute time limit during the public remarks. He spoke for nearly 6 minutes publicly before being invited by the council to sit down and answer some more questions. I’ve combined both of his opportunities to speak into one nearly 9-minute video below.

“I applaud the fact that the city is requiring initial deposits totaling $440,000, but given the past history of IMM, it may be many months or years before the deposit is made. So I am here tonight to ask the city to not create another open-ended contract with IMM. This is not fair to the consultants, and it is not fair to the community.

In summary, what I am asking is a simple common sense approach: put an expiration date in. Require that the contract should specify that the initial deposits are to be made within 30 days, or the contract is canceled. If they are not prepared to make the deposit now, after over 3 years since the project was submitted, then they have no business being here.”

“I wanted to bring the Council’s attention to a recent press release that is on the Emgold web site and to request that no contracts be approved at this time and that Emgold be given a deadline as to when they must fund the DEIR or withdraw their application.”

“As soon as the city signs the contract with Ascent for preparation of the revised draft EIR, Emgold intends to immediately ask for an indefinite deferral before the contract work actually begins – because they do not have the money to pay for it.

“Emgold also specifically spells out the possibility of terminating the application if they cannot get enough money to pay for Ascent’s work.”

“Since the tile factory is such an integral part of the project, I ask that an independent study be made of the economic aspects of the tile factory that I have outlined here. And that this study be prepared as part of the RDEIR so that it can be reviewed and commented upon by the community.”

“I called CAL-OSHA and asked, ‘Do you allow mining operations to have their employees work 12 hours, because it seems dangerous to me?’ And he said, ‘Whoa … yeah, they can come in with that proposal, but accidents start happening after 8 hours, and that’s when we step in.’”

“Please protect the people who elected you with a full disclosure statement. As you hire Ascent make sure they know the IMM has already asked for another 60 or 90 day extension and that this is their method of operation … Whenever you are doing business with someone who is deeply in debt, it makes sense to get the money up front and have a drop dead deadline.”

“I’m totally baffled … From a plain business aspect of this thing, it seems very strange to me why you are even considering this business prospect this evening, under the condition that the only person you are dealing with … is a semi-broke in-debt pennystock company from Canada and no one else is even knocking on the door that I’m aware of to try to start this mine … “

Excerpt:

“The questions that most of the people brought up tonight will be addressed in the CEQA process.”

I plan to go to the Occupy Wall Street encampment on October 21^st, after my post-surgery check up with my cardiologist.  I now have a pacemaker, so I’ll see if it sets off the metal detector at airport security.  I’ll try to remember to place my borrowed cell phone to my right ear instead of my left so that its electromagnetic field doesn’t interfere with the pacemaker.  I won’t be able to walk very fast or march very far.  I don’t yet know where I’ll sleep, shower, store my computer, or type up reports to send home.

I’m not going because I need to find something to do.  My life is full.  I write and speak and have meaningful work.  I’m surrounded by friends and family, including my beautiful grandchildren.  I love my garden.  Still, I plan to go.  I see Occupy Wall Street as a light in the darkness of this time.

I feel called to go to the economic center of what Walter Wink called “the domination system,” the interlocking network of ideological, political, military, and economic institutions, a system that seeks to control the world and play God in peoples’ lives.  I am going to stand in solidarity with those who are oppressed by the current corporate-dominated Empire, and to hear stories and sing songs of hope.  I plan to join my voice with those who shout out that the Emperor has no clothes, that money is not ultimate, that the invisible hand of the Market is not the hand of God.  I intend to make visible my refusal to bow to this idol, this usurper, and to join with people of conscience and witness to my faith that “another world is possible.”

I have been advocating, and sometimes agitating, for peace, justice, and the environment for over thirty years.  For the past twelve years my work has focused on economic justice and the effects of growing corporate power on our culture, government, and global institutions.  I have worked to educate people on these issues and to move people to action, including direct action.  I have been a community organizer, led nonviolence trainings, and been arrested for civil disobedience many times.

My book, Shaking the Gates of Hell:  Faith-Led Resistance to Corporate Globalization (Fortress, 2007), is an attempt to educate people about the global economy and motivate people of faith and conscience to join the struggle for a peaceful, just, and sustainable world.  This is the most important and urgent issue of our time, for if we continue to allow corporations to set the agenda and the Market to rule, we face a living hell of social, economic, and environmental ruin.  The alternative is a global awakening of “we the people” to what is at stake, to our responsibilities as moral agents, and to the power we have when we join with others to work for a more compassionate world.  This includes a commitment to participatory democracy and refusal to comply with corporate rule.

The good news is that this awakening is happening now!  Around the world, people are joining together in local communities, forming coalitions with others working on various issues, networking beyond regional boundaries, forming a global network, a “movement of movements,” a people’s globalization, a “globalization from below.”

The festivals of resistance taking place on Wall Street and other occupation sites have become visible on the world stage and have captured the imagination of those of us who have been yearning for social transformation.  The whole world is watching to see what will happen next.  These spontaneous outpourings springing up around the around the world are the most hopeful signs I’ve seen in a long, long time.

There are many ways to support this movement.  I hope you will consider joining a local action.  (Meet today, Wednesday, at 4:30 at the Walgreens parking lot for a support rally.)  To keep updated locally, go to www.occupywallstreetnc.org..  You can find out more about Occupy Wall Street and support the demonstrators in New York with money, supplies, or an “occu-pie” pizza by going to http://occupywallst.org.

For me, this is a matter of faith.  I seek to follow Jesus, who lived simply, healed, taught, preached good news to the poor, and lived and died in solidarity with those who were oppressed  When he overturned the tables of the money changers in the temple, challenging the ruling class and the economic system at its core, the authorities began plotting his death.  They killed him because he and the egalitarian movement he founded posed a direct threat to the domination system of his day.  But that was not the end of the story.  His Spirit lives and flows through every compassionate, courageous, and truthful act of love and personal sacrifice in the struggle for a better world.

Sharon Delgado is an ordained United Methodist minister, founding director of

“Reed considers himself a moderate, and prides himself on mediating disputes. He will be talking about the issues, including jobs, the country’s economic situation, and our military involvements.

“Currently, Reed runs a law practice based in Fall River Mills, managing 10 employees. He holds a Master of Science in Taxation and a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from UC Berkeley. He has volunteered his services for many nonprofit organizations.

“Reed gets around the huge congressional district in his Cessna 172 plane, having held his private pilot’s license for 15 years. The Reed family runs an informal animal rescue facility at their ranch.

“The state redistricting commission recently approved new political boundaries that shifted Siskiyou, Tehama, Butte, and Shasta Counties from the 2nd Congressional District into the 1st Congressional District, which extends to the Nevada and Oregon borders.

“In the 2010 election, Reed lost the congressional race by just 7 percentage points despite being vastly outspent, and this in a national race in which Republicans across the country took dozens of seats from House Democrats. Reed considers his chances in 2012 to be much better in the 1st Congressional District.”

Richard Tuttle

A day or so ago I received this email from our friend, Dave Comstock, publisher of Comstock Bonanza Press, concerning a “book launch” on October 15th in the Nevada City Council Chamber … of judge Richard E. Tuttle’s book, “Nevada City and Beyond:  An Unscripted Life:”

Here’s the announcement Dave sent along with the email:

Update at 7:45AM on 9/15/11: See comment #5 below (link) for why this so-called “poll” question is bogus, and why the results cannot be trusted, no matter which side they appear to favor.

The Union is conducting a poll among Facebook users concerning attitudes about re-opening the Idaho-Maryland Mine.

This is the single — and conspicuously leading — poll question:

“With gold and unemployment at near-record highs, would you support reopening the Idaho-Maryland mine?”

Since The Union doesn’t mind asking leading questions, maybe it should consider asking it this way:

“With gold and unemployment at near-record highs, and the guarantee that you will be massively infested with fleas if you say no, would you support reopening the Idaho-Maryland mine?

To participate in the poll, click on either of the two links above.

“Nevada City, Calif., has got a fever — and the only cure is more bike corrals.

“Bike corrals are like supersized bike racks in a parking spot, usually on-street, which replace one or two car parking spaces with anywhere from four to 20 bike parking staples. They’re growing in popularity around the country (I wrote about them in a Bikenomics column a few months ago), but even I was surprised that bike advocates here had read about it and gotten excited.

“So at 8 a.m., with coffee and local strawberries in hand, we went for a walk around tiny, touristy downtown Nevada City with a delegation of transportation advocates, the city manager, and a traffic engineer from the next town over.

“We started out in the public parking lot outside the APPLE Center, a nonprofit sustainability resource center. “I’d like to have a bike corral here,” said the center’s director, Mali Dyck, indicating the parking spot near the door. It’s a little embarrassing, she says with a laugh, to have a sustainability resource center with no bike parking.”

Read full article in Grist:

Elly Blue is a bicycle activist living in Portland, Oregon. She has been the managing editor of BikePortland.org, the lead coordinator of the Towards Carfree Cities conference in Portland in 2008, and has been an active bike funnist since 2005. She publishes a feminist bicycle zine called Taking the Lane.

It was about 75 miles from Grass Valley as the wind blows (Glenn County) that I spotted a Halliburton trailer alongside of what appeared to be a natural gas extraction rig. Having seen the movie “Gasland” (available at Grass Valley’s Video Library), a documentary about the horrendous damage being caused by the natural gas industry (a result of then vice president Dick Cheney’s successful lobbying of Congress on behalf of Halliburton in 2005) I was immediately curious to see what operations look like.

Spotting a derrick in the distance, I drove out on a gravel levee to get a closer look and parked near a tanker marked with symbols indicating severe skin and respiratory danger (one inadvertent whiff from 40 feet away was enough to convince me).

My job as a County Supervisor involves being on committees that support biomass utilization – and one of its biggest hurdles is being competitive with natural gas, one of the problems that plagues the Loyalton biomass energy plant. I have since come to the opinion that if the true cost of natural gas extraction via hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”), with its extensive utilization of toxic chemicals, nearly unregulated release of toxic substances (including heavy metals and radon) and permanent damage to aquifers across the nation were factored in, biomass would have a real chance on the free market.

The last six years of deregulated natural gas extraction –with its examples of flammable tap water, animals losing fur and release of toxics into water supplies – have not gone unnoticed by some California legislators. A bill, AB591, is currently working through Sacramento that would require disclosure of fracking chemicals, an important first step that will help level the playing field. Given that central California’s Monterey Shale Formation, encompassing 13 counties, is alleged to be the largest and richest shale gas “play” in the nation (and a large northern California ‘play’ “is very promising”, according to bill sponsors), the timing is critical.

As to biomass utilization, the hurdles involve the aforementioned unfair environmentally subsidized competition, the challenges of costly and environmentally responsible transportation to processing facilities, the usual siting challenges of a new industry, and obtaining reliable and consistent “product”, start-up capitalization and supportive regulation.

The plus side is the opportunity for the creation of a vast number of new local, regional and national jobs (many of which do not require a high degree of training), utilization of a benign, readily renewable local resource, national security enhancement due to less reliance on foreign energy, and a nearly “carbon neutral” energy supply. It is important to note that there are environmentally and economically successful examples of biomass energy production in California.

There are compelling cases to be made for both “hard” (extractive) energy and “soft” (renewable) energy but unless and until science gives us a new, safe and reliable form of energy not yet seen on the planet, common sense dictates that we proceed conservatively with what we know and have.

Gary Greenberg, writing on new environmental books in a recent issue of Harper’s magazine, cites environmentalist Bill McKibben: “We know, definitively, that the old planet ‘worked.’ That is, it produced and sustained modern civilization. We don’t know that about the new one.” “(T)he big problem is that we’ve always been promised (by “every politician who ever lived”) that “‘our best days are ahead of us.’”

Greenberg goes on to cite a 1991 quote from Larry Summers: “there isn’t a risk of apocalypse due to global warming or anything else. The idea that we should put limits on growth because of some natural limit is a profound error.”

McKibben offers a different view: “We’ve spent two hundred years hooked on growth” and it has “kept us perpetually adolescent…we’ve forgotten that between adolescence and senescence lies maturity, with it’s acceptance of mortality and cultivation of limits. We’ve been so busy growing, we haven’t bothered to grow up.”

Greenberg offers McKibben’s practical Vermont native perspective: “We will set and meet new, modest goals – to “”keep the lights on, the larder full, and spirits reasonably high” – with projects that are “myriad and quiet, not a grand few visible to the whole world.”

Regardless of where one stands in the debate, it is clear that humanity, with its multiple capabilities to permanently alter the globe and dramatically redefine “civilization” for the first time in human history, has to have unequivocal answers to the question: what does the maturity to responsibly manage and sustain ourselves look like?

Photo by Shirley Benedick

Grass Valley District 3 Supervisor Terry Lamphier’s views are not intended to represent the views of the Nevada County Board of Supervisors or staff. He lives in Grass Valley.

“Who doesn’t support the sustainability movement?” you might ask.

Well, in Jeff Ackerman’s account, mostly the federal government:

Last week I went to see a documentary called “Farmageddon,” which convinced me that our government has declared war on this sustainability movement. The last thing Uncle Sam wants today is a society able to think and act for itself. He’d rather have us clamped firmly on his teat and as far away from a goat or cow’s udder as he can keep us.

If we start drinking milk straight from a goat or cow — like our ancestors did before us — what would happen to the food industry, or the federal Food and Drug Agency that controls it?

… Most of the small farmers grow food and milk cows and goats to feed their families, friends and neighbors. This country was once a nation of farmers, and that’s the way we operated. The upside to this down economy is this sustainability movement, which is encouraging us to return to the days when we fed ourselves, our families and our neighbors with food and milk we grew and raised with our own two hands.

It’s nice to see an editorial in The Union in support of sustainability.

I’m curious to know, though, whether this now means that Jeff Ackerman has joined the growing number of Nevada County residents who oppose the ginormous local non-sustainable project being considered by the City of Grass Valley, the re-opening of the Idaho-Maryland Mine for speculative exploration, a project that he has previously supported? Hardrock mining for gold, a non-renewable resource, is the epitome of non-sustainability.

But back to Farmageddon. I need to understand this better: Is the government at war with organic farming, at war with sustainability, or just at war with raw milk?

Maybe I’ll start by watching Farmageddon, which I’ve not yet seen.