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Rural Midwesterners Stand Up to Power Monopoly
By Carl Sack
As American capitalism continues to expand and exhaust itself, it
sacrifices the living conditions of ever more sectors of the working
class and the remaining integrity of the environment. Corporate
profits can be the only goal, and nothing else is sacred. But when
the destructive force of capitalism collides with the lives of
ordinary people, it can galvanize even the least political into
solidarity and decisive action.
This has occurred in seemingly the least likely of places: rural
Minnesota and Wisconsin. The issue is the Arrowhead-Weston power
line, a proposed 350,000-volt transimission line intended to be
built between Gillam, Manitoba and Wasau, Wisconsin. The line would
cut diagonally across northern Minnesota, through Duluth and across
northern Wisconsin. In its path are forests, lakes, wetlands, farms
and communities, all of which it would greatly harm. The Line has
been characterized by environmentalists in the two states as the
most environmentally destructive project ever undertaken in either
of them.
When such high-voltage power lines cross an area, they radiate a
great deal of ambient energy--enough to cause an 80-decibel
crackling sound. This static spreads into the ground, and flows into
the bodies of anything not insulated from the ground, including
animals, trees and people. This electromagnetic radiation has been
shown to retard tree growth, decrease wildlife populations, decrease
livestock productivity, and cause or aggrevate a myriad of diseases
in people living nearby, including Alzheimers, leukemia and other
cancers. It also makes farmers unable to work their land for fear of
being electrocuted by the machines they use or having combustible
materials explode.
Because of these effects, the high-voltage line would make adjacent
property values practically worthless and wreck the livlihoods of
hundreds of the region's residents. But despite the bourgeois powers
behind the Arrowhead-Weston Line having tried numerous ways of
keeping the rural landowners isolated and acquiescent (including
bribery, propaganda and misinformation), the people decided to band
together and fight back. In 1999, Wisconsin landowners and concerned
citizens formed the group Save Our Unique Lands (SOUL). The group
has united workers, farmers, students and small business owners in
solidarity to fight the power line.
The group has been holding highly-attended community meetings and
rallies and lobbying government officials against the Line. They
have had little effect on the politicians (most of whom have ties to
the energy industry), but have built up a tremendous base of
grassroots support. On February 29, SOUL held a protest which drew
about 75 people to a rural property in Midway Township, just south
of Duluth, MN. Despite overwhelming public opposition to the Line,
the power company has already begun to build footings for its new
towers there.
"When we started out five years ago, we were very naieve," said SOUL
organizer Mark Liebaert at the February 29 protest. "We thought, if
we just work through the legal process, the project would be exposed
as unnecessary and it would come to an end." But the reality has
turned out much different, and has been a very radicalizing process
for the members of SOUL. Locals were soon educated in the ways of
the American bourgeoise, as they learned that the building of the
Line had little to do with increasing Wisconsin's power supply, and
everything to do with capitalism. A SOUL pamphlet declares, "Dealing
with us was merely an unavoidable bump in the road to greater
corporate profits. We began to see that the sweatshop workers of
Southeast Asia and the farmers of northern Wisconsin were perhaps
not so very different after all."
While regional power companies, led by their monopolistic puppet
corporation the American Transmission Company, claim that the line
is needed to increase the reliability of Wisconsin's power supply,
SOUL activists see it as something much different. "The line is
[being built] so that the captains of industry down in Milwaukee and
Chicago can get the cheap power they covet to run their factories,"
said SOUL activist George Crocker. In fact, the Line will make
possible "wheeling," or increased free trade of energy. Wheeling
involves producing energy where it is cheapest to do so and
transporting it to the cities, where it is sold to the highest
bidder. This practice is a consequence of utility deregulation, and
far from making energy more reliable, was a factor in the power
disasters in California and New York. But there are billions of
dollars to be made by the power companies from it.
"[The Line] is so corporations can make a profit by flooding the
Indians of Manitoba and wrecking the climate," said Crocker. The
Arrowhead-Weston project is directly linked to proposals for new
lignite coal-fired power plants in North Dakota and existing
hydroelectric plants on the Churchill-Nelson river system in
Manitoba. Lignite coal is very dirty to burn; its emissions are a
major factor in acid rain and global climate change. In Manitoba,
three million acres of land have been flooded by Manitoba Hydro,
which would be directly linked to the Line. This flooding has
displaced the Pimicikamak Cree Nation and destroyed the habitat that
provided their traditional means of subsistence, creating extreme
poverty among these native peoples. SOUL objects to the connection
to Manitoba Hydro on the basis of solidarity with these oppressed
people.
Despite the incredible organization and enlightened principles that
SOUL has managed to acheive, they still have a long way to go in
their fight. They are aware that they need to confront the bourgeois
powers behind the Line to stop them in their tracks. Liebaert said
that in the past five years SOUL has held dozens of public forums,
to which they invited the Public Service Commission, which
ultimately decides whether or not to grant permits for the project,
to listen in. "But we didn't even get a hearing from the Public
Service Commission until we shut down [one of their] meeting[s]," he
said. In the meantime, $10 million of public funding has been given
to the power companies this year to run TV ads promoting the Line.
According to SOUL activists, the entire process has been marked by
questionably legal dealings between power companies and public
bodies, including local township boards. The power companies own
massive sections of the upper midwest economy, including much of the
small-time local media, and exert tremendous influence in
government. Far from giving up, however, SOUL is ready to face the
power companies in court should they trespass where they do not yet
have landowners' permission, or try to use Eminent Domain to force
that permission. But even so, SOUL activists now realize that they
cannot rely on corrupt bourgeois government to come to their aid,
and seem willing to escalate their fight to whatever it takes to
match the tactics of the power companies. They feel confident that
as long as they maintain solidarity, they will win out over
corporate greed.
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