Harvesting Humboldt’s quality of life?
My Word by George Clark
Our Founding Fathers might have protested “another clever tyranny,” after corporations received the constitutional rights that the Founders intended for living citizens, (Santa Clara vs. Southern Pacific, U.S. Supreme Court, 1886).
Predictably, corporate “freedom of speech” became a political bullhorn unleashing the greatest massed force the world has ever known, turning American’s quaint notion of private enterprise into a tyranny by immortal kings that shape our communities to serve their whimsical interests. Moats of corporate legalese protect their identities, repelling common law, prisons, taxes and growing hoards of peasants demanding accountability. This ancient conspiracy was renamed “privatization” to soften its barbaric history of transferring vast public resources into few royal hands.
In Humboldt’s first historic harvest, rivers and fisheries were devastated, leaving native populations homeless and unemployed — in return for a lovely Carnegie library and Rockefeller Forest. Humboldt’s second historic harvest promises to extract our remaining quality of life, a harvest already experienced by countless American cities plagued by unbridled development, lower wages, job losses, unaffordable housing and epidemics of cancer and childhood asthma unheard of just decades ago.
Despite complaints about “over-regulation,” developers and financiers have been wildly successful in harvesting citizens’ home equity and quality of life through interest-only mortgages; in exploiting public subsidies to build on cheaply acquired wetlands, floodplains, sandbars and brownfields, unaccountable for human and environmental disasters that follow; in irresponsibly building subdivisions miles from downtown, oblivious to America’s inevitable fuel shortages, continuing job exportations and chronically inadequate infrastructures.
According to the National Association of Realtors, one quarter of new homes are purchased by investors, thus artificially inflating home prices, described by UCLA economist Christopher Thornberg as pyramid schemes costing home owners $150 billion during the 1980s market crash. According to the USDA, 96 million Americans live in unaffordable, inadequate or dilapidated” housing. Perfectly legal conspiracies, thinly veiled behind the myth of free enterprise, are diminishing citizen access to shelter, clean environments, health care, jobs, education, pensions and bankruptcy. And each time, America’s forgotten majority loses access to the “pursuit of happiness.”
Compounding these losses is a negligent educational system that manufactures “civic voids” by failing to teach (or model) the fundamental responsibility of voting, thus enabling profiteers to maintain their dominance upon every governmental level. Civic apathy and greed severely weaken America, while developers in other nations profit from government-mandated housing innovations that utilize alternative energy, transportation and conservation. Government’s purpose to improve the quality and security of life would include communities of 700-square-foot homes, requiring all downtown commercial developments to include affordable upper-level condominiums, creating critical sources of equity for millions of returning veterans, graduating students and working-class citizens.
Expecting to meet citizen needs by repeating America’s failed development legacy here in Humboldt County literally defines insanity.
It has been inspirational to witness a majority of voters saying “no” to corporate leviathans Wal-Mart, Calpine and Pacific Lumber. However, today’s “corporatocracy” enjoys unrelenting force and unparalleled anonymity, flooding communities with a well-funded newspaper called the Eureka Reporter, coinciding with the appearance of mysterious front-groups: One, called “HELP,” threatens lawsuits demanding 400 percent growth increases in our communities. Another, called “Eureka Coalition for Jobs,” spent 30 times Chris Kerrigan’s annual Eureka City Council salary to unseat him! Still another, called “R.A.P.I.T.,” warned, “those who think your quality of life is most important are elitist,” (North Coast Journal, Dec. 2, 2004). That’s a quality of life that's made Eureka “one of the top 100 places to live in the U.S.,” without Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Calpine or high growth rates, (T-S, Sept. 12, 2004)!
Ask our increasing number of refugees from Southern California about developers’ promises of “prosperity,” typically followed by employment, wage and benefit losses, then by crime, traffic and diminishing public services.
Yet, developers and their political shills would line our bay with cheap hotels and big boxes, undeterred by repeated voter opposition or public-use zoning restrictions.
Contact Catherine Kuhlman of the California Regional Water Quality Control Board to demand enforcement of cease and desist orders under section 13301 of the California Water Code to stop all developments within our numerous communities that are increasingly threatened by silted streams and wastewater violations.
Also, join Eureka’s Democracy Unlimited and the Healthy Humboldt Coalition and begin electing desperately needed candidates who will represent Eureka’s voting majority, instead of the petulant plutocrats determined to harvest our quality of life.
George Clark, a 30-year resident of Humboldt County, is a self-employed refugee from Southern California. He lives in Eureka.
The opinions expressed in this My Word piece do not necessarily reflect the editorial viewpoint of the Times-Standard.