The meek shall inherit the Earth. But not its mineral rights.” — J. Paul Getty 

I’m really quite fed up with Barack Obama and his Socialist agenda. The final straw came this week when his administration help broker a deal with the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. Yesterday, the latter body in a 3-2 vote passed a measure that will give a European company broad powers here in our Santa Clarita that could, in the future, have devastating effects.

I’ve oft said in the past that it’s next to impossible to fight the giant so misnamed as Progress. We so often confuse construction with that hungry god. The true measuring stick of Progress ought to be: “Are we better off than before?”

For years our attention units have been diverted a valley away to the gigantic Cemex Corporation project. The Mexican-based company was hell bent on creating a powdery atmosphere of grit and pollution in upper Canyon Country. I’ve felt it odd that we demand so many new homes, businesses, roads, and, in general, the concreting of the valley. Yet, at the same time, we don’t want any concrete.

Odd.

But, while all that was going on, near the very site of the second-largest disaster in our state’s history, we’re going to threaten the safety of possible tens of thousands of people, if not more.

Even unbeknownst to The West Ranch Beacon, a Swedish-based multinational company has quietly done their homework. They’ve acquired the proper permits and I won’t say that bribes have caressed the palms of bureaucrats and elected officials — from the Oval Office to possibly even in the halls of our own city and county government.

But 13 miles up San Francisquito Canyon brews an ecological nightmare.

I had never heard of the Slooflirpa Corporation but after a little exploration on the Internet, it is a multibillion-dollar construction, shipping and holding giant with development projects ongoing on four continents and one still semi-rural canyon. With the Los Angeles Metropolitan Water District and the Forest Service, they have passed all the early tests to construct a monumental cement plant, a dam and several giant residue holding ponds that combined, will hold more water and residue than the capacity of Castaic Lake. The project, at a little less than 25,000 acres, will completely dwarf even the wildest expansionism dreams of Cemex.

Certainly engineering is not my realm of expertise. But it seems to be such folly to construct six rather sizable holding ponds, each approximately two-thirds the size of the Bouquet Reservoir, especially in an area where three major earthquake fault lines meet. In a worst-case scenario, we could have the possibility of a disaster 100 times worse than the bursting of the St. Francis Dam in 1928 — built in the very same location starting in the year 2012.

I did finally reach officials from the European conglomerate late yesterday afternoon.

The Swedish company’s flaks were the typical polite but aloof public relations operation with slick one-liners and assurances that there is nothing for us silly Santa Claritans to worry about.

As one PR vice president ingratiatingly noted: “After all. You Americans tend to love your creature comforts while pretending to embrace the environment.”

The man had a point.

“And please. You know have to know what S-L-O-O-F-L-I-R-P-A is spelt backwards,” he added. 

John Boston is the reigning best humor writer in America, as voted by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.