Badlands Journal

Metropolitan Water District of Southern California's lawyers filed a legal brief last week that argues that the drastically crashing population of Delta Smelt cannot be used as an argument for curtailing water shipments from the Delta to LA. The Delta Smelt, they say, is not under the protection of the federal Endangered Species Act because it only lives in one state. (1)

Perhaps California's Endangered Species Act will protect the smelt. However, Metropolitan's brief brings up a far more important issue.

But, first, already slipping beyond the living memory of Californians is the Colorado River Agreement in the first Bush term. Bush appointed a Colorado attorney general, Gale Norton, secretary of the Department of Interior. Norton brought with her Colorado's top water attorney, Bennett Raley. Raley's assistant, Californian Jason Peltier, was executive director of the Association for California Water Agencies. The result of the negotiations on the Colorado was that the upstream states would keep more and Southern California would get less. Since then, Metropolitan has been buying water contracts wherever it could in Northern California and the last three years of pumping out of the Delta have been the heaviest in history and have contributed greatly to the "sudden" collapse of the federally endangered Delta Smelt populations.

This water war was inevitable, but Metropolitan's argument raises an interesting question. This species of smelt is limited to the Delta. The Delta is its home. It has no other. Its home is being destroyed by Southern California water agencies 400 miles away, which are providing water for a growing population of people, many of them who have moved from far away to Southern California.

Let us speak the unspeakable. The smelt cannot move. The people can move and, in many cases, have moved to Southern California, a desert region without enough local water supplies to support a tiny percentage of its present human poplation.

Why can't the people move away from Southern California to avoid extinguishing this species of fish and once again damaging the salmon populations, which cannot spawn in LA storm drains any more than Delta smelt can migrate to Beverly Hills swimming pools.

People can move. They have demonstrated their ability to do it, time and time again. Wildlife species have a harder time relocating.

"Where is it written?" ask the brilliant Metropolitan water attorneys. "Where is it written" that a species specific only to one state can be covered by the federal ESA?

To such a sophisticated and expensive rhetorical question, one might reply with another: Where is it written that Southern California has the right to seize Delta water, gravely endangering one or more species of fish, because it has insanely fomented growth in its arid region so far beyond the carrying capacity of its resources that the word "carrying capacity" uttered aloud in Metropolitan lawyers' tennis clubs might be cause for suspension or revocation of membership?

Other questions arise. Humanity, of course, asserts the right to dominate lesser species. It doesn't have to be written down. But it gets trickier when the south exerts its domination over the north in our state water wars, because the south has a larger population and therefore more political representation. Then there is a good question for academics with the resources for such studies: a team of University of California professors ought to try to come up with an approximate figure of how many millions of dollars are spent annually by developers, water agencies, local, state and federal government agencies (including UC) on propaganda, lobbying and lawyers to defeat environmental laws and regulations. A publicly financed institution like UC ought to be the ideal site for such a study in view of the amount of money public agencies like UC spend to fight environmental law and regulation.

Bill Hatch
-------------------------------
Note:

(1) http://www.sacbee.com/content/opinion/story/13895995p-14734826c.html

Editorial: LA's new water theory; Lawsuit: Feds can't protect Delta smelt
Sacramento Bee – 11/23/05

For years the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California has tried to assure a skittish north that it isn't looking to harm the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Sure, it wanted water for its 17 million customers, but in a safe, reliable way.

The Delta these days is in an environmental free fall, its fish species crashing to record low numbers. And as this is happening, Metropolitan and other water districts are advancing a legal theory in court that the federal Endangered Species Act does not apply. For Southern California to attack a key environmental law during the Delta's worst environmental crisis is hardball that harkens back to water tactics of yesteryear.

Why wouldn't federal law pertain to the Delta smelt, a listed species meriting protection?

The smelt, according to a legal brief filed by Metropolitan and all of the State Water Project contractors, "have no apparent role in interstate commerce." And the smelt don't swim between two states. Its habitat, the brief continues, "is located entirely within the state of California." Therefore in this lawsuit, Metropolitan and fellow water pumpers "intend to raise the issue of whether the Endangered Species Act can properly be applied to regulate and protect purely intrastate species."

The theory may ring some bells. It came up during the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee John Roberts.

He had once opined in a case that a "hapless toad" isn't protected by the federal Commerce Clause because the toad, "for reasons of its own, lives its entire life in California." Roberts is now chief justice of the Supreme Court. Whether this hapless toad, or the Delta's hapless smelt, are truly protected under the federal Endangered Species Act remains to be seen.

To protect the smelt and migrating salmon, state and federal agencies for years have curtailed pumping from the Delta during certain times. The same agencies are looking to pump more water at other times, resulting in a net increase in pumping. The Natural Resources Defense Council is suing the federal government over the new pumping strategy (NRDC v. Norton, Case No. C 05-00690 CW). Southern California makes its "hapless smelt" argument, among others, in this case.

Fortunately, California has a state Endangered Species Act. It protects the Delta smelt. But any law is subject to change, either through a decision by courts or legislators.

For Southern California to try to whittle away at Delta protections is an extraordinary action. But Metropolitan staff says its board was never consulted beforehand about advancing the new "hapless smelt" legal strategy. Wow. Who's in charge down there?

To find balanced, lasting solutions in the Delta, the state desperately needs Metropolitan to reduce its dependency on this estuary and to play a centrist role between the hard-line positions of agriculture and the environmental community.

The behavior of Metropolitan in this lawsuit, by seeking to undermine federal protections of the Delta, is radical, reprehensible and revealing. #

Could it be because the land near the Delta is so rich that despite what is happening on it, somehow not all people believe in the eternity of growth?

It is foolish to become upset about the changes out there in western San Joaquin County approaching the Altamont. One should never become upset about such changes. People too attached to the beauties of Nature suffer too much to live in California. They ought to go join the woman in the town in Nebraska who runs the bar, is the mayor, taxes herself, is the only resident since her husband passed away, and deer wander down her Main Street. Perhaps she would agree to rename the town “New California,” create bike trails, open an organic health-food store and galleries for the painters. The Californians could create in her town the utopia of all their memories of Ecotopia Lost.

Yes, I know the answer to Arne Naess’ question:

“How would mankind’s present role on this planet be evaluated in the light of philosophical world-views of the past?”

(I know it because I read the next sentence.)

“No matter which one of the great philosophies one considers to be valid, our current role would be evaluated negatively. It is in opposition to value priority as announced by these philosophies. This applies to Aristotelianism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and other great philosophies of the last two millennia.”

(Don’t forget to add a zendo on Main Street to New California, Neb.)

“In the great philosophies, greatness and bigness are differentiated. Greatness is sought, but it is not magnitude. The importance of technology is recognized, but cultural values get priority of consideration. The good life is not made dependent upon thoughtless consumption.” (1)

Perhaps it is something about the air the comes off that unfathomable Delta bottom land between Manteca and the Altamont, something about the incredible fecundity of it, that inspires such dreams of greatness (unenlightened by Aristotle, Buddha or Confucius, or Laotse, Boethius, Avicenna, Nicolas of Cusa, St. Thomas, Moses Maimonides, Spinoza, Bacon, Hume, Hegel, Dilthey, James, Dewey, Husserl or Heidegger for that matter), when you live on top of San Joaquin Delta bottom land. All you really need is a big Caterpillar and diesel enough to plant anything from alfalfa to a commuter subdivision.

Of course, the area has been known to flood at times. In fact, that’s what makes the land so fertile. But levees exist to stop flooding now. The main point is that almost anything grows there.

There was a town out there once, called Tracy. It was a long, gangling town that grew up beside the highway, only a few blocks deep on either side. It had a city hall, a high school, some cafes and small businesses, a newspaper, and an old hotel that served the best steak sandwich in the north valley. I suppose that town is still there somewhere, but I worked around that area several years ago and could never quite find it.
The disappearance of Tracy is nothing to get upset about. Remember, one shouldn’t get upset over these things. If one does, it is time to go to Nebraska. Actually, I worked within the city limits of the present-day Tracy and never even found the old highway through the old town.

The land is incredibly rich. It grows anything.

This weekend, our nation’s newspaper of record, Judith Miller’s publisher, the New York Times, lambasted a son of Tracy, Rep. Richard Pombo, chairman of the House Resources Committee, for a bill he’s pushing to sell off mining claims on public lands. (2) The Times editorialists describe this bill as “an evil trap to be sprung on the American public: Richard Pombo’s plan to put a few hundred million acres of publicly owned land up for sale in the American West.”

Setting aside that the New York Times’ sentiments about the American West are about as warm as they are for the Arab Middle East, what we seem to have here is part of a national campaign against Pombo, a simple ranch realtor who believes in his heart that western rural land exists to be sold, as many times as possible for a decent fee, and has never said otherwise. Because various environmental laws, regulations and agencies impede his quest, he hates them and seeks, in a straightforward manner, to destroy them.

While it is possible to join Aristotle, Buddha, Confucius and Naess in disagreeing with Pombo’s simple view of life in all its porcine sincerity, evil it ain’t, it seems to me. Evil is publishing cooked intelligence that causes the deaths of thousands of innocent people and more than 2,000 American soldiers plus the 15,000 wounded.

Pombo’s worldview is something else. I think it might come from the idea that the “real world” – rightwingers are very big on the “real world” – is only what one owns or has options on, and that concepts like “the planet” just don’t fly in Tracy the way they do in Manhattan. I mean that, not too long ago, back when Tracy was still a long, thin town on a highway, if a couple of longhairs went into one of those cafes for a cup of coffee and started talking “planet,” it could have gotten ugly for them. Because the world, in Tracy, was what you owned (and it still is for those who still own it). If you don’t own any land, in Pombo’s world, there may even be some doubt about your existence, let alone your right to vote. And that land around Tracy is so fertile, who would want anything more? In fact, everyone ought to go to Tracy and buy land … from Pombo. If people only realized this, there would be less disagreeable strife about natural resources in the nation.

For example, Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez (across the river from Tracy), the former chairman of a defunct House committee called Natural Resources, should quit sniping and buy pasture while he still can. Miller and Pombo should bury the hatchet over a nice real estate deed. Maybe the New York Times should get in the deal, too.

The land in Pombo’s district is fabulously fertile. It grows anything. Whole bedroom communities spring up there like Johnson grass. It’s amazing. Growth in that region is as inevitable as … well, you know, growth. There’s nothing more inevitable than growth. The alfalfa grows. The tomatoes grow. The subdivisions grow. Everything grows in the incredibly fertile congressional district of Pombo.

Well, maybe except for freeways. It’s not that they haven’t tried to pave everything from Manteca to the Altamont into one Great Road, but it’s a government deal and there are some rivers involved, so they haven’t quite gotten there yet. There are still some pastures and farmland and funky old bridges that distract from the view of the road. If you know where to look (people who have traveled through the area for 40 or 50 years do know) you can still see houseboats and a few other remnants of pre-Pombo primitive existence, which should have been paved over by government long ago. But most people don’t look and if they did, would be offended by the faintly gypsy air of such camps, floating or not, and might complain to a county supervisor about the viewscape they are forced to endure daily on their way to work in the Bay Area.

There is even an old brick silo that used to have a sign on it saying, “Horses for sale.” If it upsets you that you can’t see that sign anymore, you are a candidate for Nebraska. If you can’t maintain, control yourself and refrain from blogging or some such nonsense, go open an antique store on the prairie, and see how your life unfolds. Study the joys of quality of life instead of the standard of living. (3) This is the 11th Congressional District of California: we’re talking standard of living here, to be achieved through land deals, because our land grows anything (unlike the Nebraska prairie, which our developers wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot poll).

So, it gets a little crowded sometimes on the inadequate freeways around Tracy. Pombo wants to cut another one south of the Altamont through a Coast Range canyon straight to Silicon Valley. But that’s a government deal. Actually, some people call it “pork,” an unattractive term for government investment in your congressional district (things like UC Merced, etc.). And Pombo don’t like government. That’s why he’s in government: to stop government.

It doesn’t matter. In his district, the soil is so rich it grows anything but contradictions.

Traffic was thick on Thanksgiving. It just crawled, in both directions, from outside of Manteca all the way into and through Tracy, almost all the way to the Altamont. Growth, it’s beautiful. In the middle of Tracy, on a balcony in one of those subdivisions that loom over the road, a woman stood, a cell phone in one hand, while her other arm made a regular, semaphoric motion, up and down, perpendicular to the traffic. She must have been counting her blessing with each stroke, because there she was, in the Middle of Growth, rejoicing in her standard of living, even as we transients were cursing the quality of our lives. It’s all an optical illusion. From above the freeway, on the balcony of a condominium, it’s all standard of living. Down on the road, it’s all quality of life.

From the road, Ms. Semaphore seemed demented, actually, perhaps deranged by philosophical contemplation of the problems arising from the relationship of standard of living to quality of life. In short, an urban transplant to soil that grows absolutely anything. But again, that’s only the opinion of a driver.

On the other side of the freeway from this particular strand of highway jammed with crawling traffic in both directions, lies (for the time being) a clear expanse of farmland, mostly in alfalfa, that runs to the river, a fair distance away, its riparian corridor of oaks barely visible on that overcast day. We don’t eat alfalfa, of course, although its sprouts might be offered in the health store on Main Street of New California, Neb. Cows eat alfalfa, and California is the largest dairy state in the country and those dairies are concentrated in the San Joaquin Valley.

So, while the southern edge of the freeway in those parts is composed of a sound barrier over which peek the balconies of commuter villages, the view to the north preserves the agrarian heritage of the region.

As we crawled onward, I spent my time looking at alfalfa and the irrigation-canal laterals that water it. These are not timeless scenes because I am not a timeless being, nor were the two snowy egrets timeless, bent over, eyes to the wet earth, hunting in a field. However, they reminded me of a time when these roads were not jammed bumper-to-bumper, the fields surrounded the road, there were many more egrets and other birds in the area, and that part of the trip to the Bay Area, particularly in the cold of early winter, was a drive through the abundant natural life of western San Joaquin County.

Due to the abstraction of my own philosophical contemplation, I was not surprised when Don Quixote appeared on horseback, his horse standing on a little hump next to a lateral dividing an alfalfa field from pasture. Why not? I wondered. This Delta land grows anything. As I grew closer to the horseman, I began to suspect it really wasn’t Don Quixote – the man was a little too stocky—and the horse, a flashy pinto, was a bit too athletic for Rocinante, exactly. Yet …

Here was a horseman. He was wearing neither a Pombo drugstore/political cowboy hat nor a medieval barber’s basin, but a bent farm cap, just like an ordinary horseman. Perhaps the sorcerers were at work. Sancho? I thought. The pinto argued against Sancho, who rode a donkey. But, as the real Don Quixote teaches, you just can’t tell as long as there are sorcerers in the world. And they are everywhere.

The horseman wore a dark mustache, another Sancho-esque feature. But Sancho would never have ridden this horse, which kept tossing its head as its rider kept raising his right arm in a salute to the freeway. Perhaps the reason the horse tossed its head was because each time the rider raised his right arm in salute, a quirt looped over his wrist came into view.

In the two days since Thanksgiving, I have given more credence to the idea of a stocky Knight of the Sad Countenance than to the squire on the strength of the insane repetition of the salute. (This, of course, is the interpretation of a perfectly sane man driving to San Francisco on Thanksgiving in very heavy traffic, already an hour late for lunch with his 90-year-old mother.) Yet, finally, as I turn over the event once more in my mind, I am not sure if the man was insane or if he was perhaps mocking us. He may even have been trying to teach his horse something about freeways that every horse should know.

No, finally, I don’t know what that horseman was doing there, repeatedly raising his right hand in salute to the freeway, a quirt looped on his wrist. But he seemed to be looking at us as if he knew us. At least some of us felt that he might know us, which is why so many of us honked and waved.

I admit the vague thought entered my mind that perhaps it was Pombo himself, watching the vast herds pass through, counting cars like trail bosses of old counted cows in a canyon somewhere south of the railhead. Or perhaps it was a new, ambiguous, picaresque style of campaigning.

The traffic picked up speed after we had honked and waved at the horseman. Afraid I might be in for a crawl all the way to the Bay Bridge, I’d turned on the radio and had received a very detailed description of a traffic jam in Napa County. However, just as we got to normal speed, the announcer mentioned that a woman had called from Tracy to complain about some cowboy slowing traffic all the way through town. Probably a Democrat.

But, party affiliation aside, at last a grounded person had explained the situation. The horseman was just an obstruction of traffic, no more than a wreck with victims in stretchers on the side of the road. The proper response was to complain to the radio station. Perhaps the highway patrol would send somebody to arrest him and his horse for obstructing traffic. That would be the right thing to do. The traffic must go on, you see. Nothing must be allowed to impede it.

Bill Hatch
-------------------------

Notes:

(1) Ecology, community and lifestyle, Arne Naess (translated and edited by David Rothenberg), Cambridge, 1989, p.87

(2) Privatizing the American West...Editorial
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/26/opinion/26sat3.html?pagewanted=print
While lawmakers are in recess, it is worth reflecting on one particular part of the mess they have left behind. Mr. Pombo is head of the House Resources Committee and has long been determined to privatize as much of the West as he can lay his hands on. Last week, a budget bill scraped through the House... The bill has to clear a few more hurdles before becoming the law of the land... Americans have come to understand that America can't drill its way out of dependency on Middle Eastern oil, and that ravaging the Arctic is no substitute for sound energy policy. They also understand that Mr. Pombo's sleight of hand is little more than legislative robbery.

(3) Naess, p. 88

There is no doubt a lot of money and influence is on the line in the Hilmar Cheese situation, although the Modesto Bee keeps shrinking the amount. The original fine levied by the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board was $4 million. Yesterday it shrunk to $3 million after the Moutha Gold got into it.

To recapitulate briefly, Hilmar came up with a proposal in September to inject its offensive wastewater so deep in the ground it would presumably disappear from human consciousness.

At that hearing, which was public, Vance Kennedy, of Modesto, a retired PhD in hydrology, said and wrote to the Environmental Protection Agency some unflattering, authoritative things about the deep-injection plan. (1) (I have included them in full below.)

Then everything went dead in the water until this week, when the Sacramento Bee wrote a $3-million settlement proposal (instead of a $4-million fine) had been worked out without benefit of more public input, six new members had been appointed to the regional water board and it would decide the issue next Tuesday. But there was one catch: John Norton, from the state Water Resources Control Board, wrote the regional board urging them not to approve the deal.

Enter Mike Boccadoro, the Moutha Gold, senior vice president of the Dolphin Group, a public relations and lobbyist organization. The Moutha Gold gets hold of Mike Mooney at the Modesto Bee with another version of events. Already we’re in deep manure.

See, it was the Sacramento Bee that broke the story that Hilmar Cheese, founded by Chuck Ahlem and others, had routinely violated water quality regulations with impunity for years. The Sacramento Bee thought that was a bit much, probably because our Gov. Hun had appointed Ahlem undersecretary of the state Department of Food and Agriculture. Ahlem was selling himself as the biggest cheese maker in the world but environmental, environmental, environmental. But, by skewering a political hypocrite, the Sacramento Bee incidentally compelled top staff at the Central Valley regional board to act: it fined Hilmar Cheese $4 million – the largest fine for the largest cheesemaker. Symmetry.

But Modesto isn’t Sacramento. Modesto is headquarters for the Western United Dairymen and hometown of Mad Cow Annie Veneman, former secretary of the USDA and Bill Lyons, Jr. former secretary of the state Department of Food and Agriculture. And that’s just the living top agricultural officials Modesto has produced. That city is represented in Congress by Dennis Cardoza, Shrimp Slayer-Merced (Resources and Agriculture committees), in the state Senate by Jeff Denham, R-Salinas and chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, and in the state Assembly by Barbara Matthews, D-Tracy, chairman of the Assembly Agriculture Committee.

Reporter Mooney, the modbee’s political veteran, is all ears to the story the Moutha Gold has to sell.

"It (Norton's letter) is so fraught with reckless, inappropriate and inaccurate statements that I can't even begin to elaborate," said Michael Boccadoro, a spokesman for Hilmar Cheese and senior vice president with the Dolphin Group public relations firm. "It is not in any way the official position of the State Water Resources Control Board." (2)

Well, that’s a real mouthful but par for the course of the firm founded by Bill Roberts, who along with Stu Spencer packaged Ronald Reagan for the San Joaquin Valley in 1966 with a whispering campaign about Black welfare mothers driving 10 kids to the LA Welfare office in a gold Cadillac.

The Moutha’s first sentence is your basic character assassination of some witless government bureaucrat on behalf of the environmentally blameless, largest cheesemaker in the world. We’re walking in a myth here and we’ve forgotten Ahlem was ever undersecretary of anything. This is your basic, elemental shoot out between Agriculture and Government.

It’s the second sentence that kinda takes your breath away, when you consider the Moutha Gold has suddenly switched clients and is now representing the State Water Resources Control Board (presumably in the role of a better, truer bureaucrat).

Mooney (anybody who’s read his lyrical pieces on rivers knows the guy’s a closet clean water lover) craftily spends the rest of the article showing that the Moutha Gold and the world’s biggest cheesemaker’s attorney are misspeaking about state water board procedure.

But there is just enough “balance” in the article to possibly half-persuade the incurious reader that state resource bureaucrats are once harming our Holy Agriculture, which is a mortal sin in high, small, tight, rich circles hereabouts. So the Moutha Gold earned his fee for the story.

The Dolphin Group describes itself in the following way:

We are a full service public relations and public affairs consulting firm with a reputation for achieving results for our clients. Everything we do is designed to change the perceptions of an individual or group -- to get them to think differently -- and to ultimately persuade them to change their behavior. We are result-oriented and by the nature of our business, crisis-oriented as well. With offices in Los Angeles and Sacramento, and over two decades of experience, the Dolphin Group is prepared to accept any challenge. (3)

The word truth is absent and the public is an adjectival target of the euphemisms it modifies. In English, public relations means propaganda, and public affairs means lobbying. Yet it is an honest statement about itself. The LA Weekly described Dolphin much the same way, but with more detail in a piece written in the midst of a campaign for a phony living wage initiative in Santa Monica to defuse a proposed ordinance that really would have raised wages for local hotel workers:

The Dolphin Group had worked with Nielsen, Merksamer on the Dump Bird campaign, but that was just one of its greatest hits. It labored on Gerald Ford’s presidential and Ronald Reagan’s and Deukmejian’s gubernatorial campaigns. More notably, it was the Dolphins who produced the notorious Willie Horton ads, exploiting racial fears that helped sink the 1988 presidential bid of Michael Dukakis. Over the past few years, the Group coordinated the establishment of an employer-dominated farm-worker union to combat the United Farm Workers’ campaign to organize strawberry workers. (The Dolphin Group did not return the Weekly’s phone calls seeking comment on its campaigns.)

Most important, in 1994 the Group ran the unsuccessful campaign for Proposition 188 — an initiative, funded entirely by the nation’s five major tobacco companies, that sought to pre-empt state and local restrictions on smoking in public with far weaker language. The Dolphins marketed 188 to the public, however, as a strict anti-smoking ordinance.

Proposition 188 went down to defeat when the opposition campaign informed voters that it was funded by such anti-smoking activists as Philip Morris, and KK opponents hope that a similar fate awaits the hotels’ initiative. Their own mailings will surely make clear the hotels’ support for KK, but, as longtime Santa Monica activist Vivian Rothstein pointed out during an anti-KK precinct walk last Saturday, the campaign has a real challenge before it. “The hotels’ message,” she said, “is totally aimed at our base.” (4)

I’m not saying the Moutha Gold lies in his teeth every time he comes down here to the land of the Sacred Cow. Standing in Mooney’s shoes a few years ago, after a week of investigation I agreed that Dolphin was fighting a campaign based on truth against a pack of lies fomented by an Arizona milk magnate who was claiming that California’s regulations adding non-milk-solids back to skim milk didn’t make it any more nutritious. State Senator Debra Bowen, D-Redondo Beach, introduced legislation to gut the state’s milk standards. Despite a forensic UCLA nutritionist hired by the other side to testify the Arizonan was right, the Moutha Gold won that campaign. He had much empirical evidence in verifiable public documents to support his case. I read it all and I believe he was right, an opinion shared by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals when it upheld trial-court Judge Stanley Karlton's decision. (5)

During our short, intense time together, I noticed moments of discomfort, as if having been so often on the side of pure fable, the Moutha Gold knew well how vulnerable the truth often is.

On the theory that if the University of California can get away with it, Agriculture and the next owner’s of farmland, developers, are denying larger chunks of reality and taking a harder, more reactionary stance against environmental law and regulation. This is shown in Congress currently by the Pombo/Cardoza Gut-the-Endangered Species Act bill. It is bad politics, particularly if the nation is driven into a reform mood; but meanwhile it remains a good living for the Moutha Gold and Hilmar's lawyers.

Regardless of the superior nutritional value of California skim milk, the dairy industry is a major polluter. It pollutes groundwater with its tremendous quantities of wastewater. It pollutes the air with its dust, manure and diesel fumes. It pollutes our politics with huge campaign contributions. And it pollutes our minds with high priced propaganda/lobbying campaigns that deny dairies pollute anything.

Issues remain. The original $4-million fine was calculated according to some guidelines, presumably legal. Now, the special interest -- the largest cheesemaker in the world -- is trying to settle for $3 million. What's a million dollars to the state of California these days? It's a million dollars the public is owed for the grossest violations of water quality regulations in the history of those regulations in this region. Although that dirty water is a special interest solution to its waste disposal, it is a public problem and will remain one -- in the region the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board is supposed to protect. How much of that million dollars is going to pay Moutha Gold and the lawyers to reduce the fine by a million dollars? When you begin to dwell on these topics, the arrogance of the biggest-cheesemaker-in-the-world and its faith in corruption runs about as deep as the proposed injection wells.

Unlike the fables and threats the five or six new regional water board members, the law is real and here to protect the public health and safety, not special interests -- and it's their job to enforce it.

Bill Hatch

Notes:

(1) COMMENTS ON A PROPOSED HILMAR CHEESE COMPANY WELL
Sept. 9, 2005: Letter to Editor, Modesto Bee

These remarks are intended to supplement more technical comments made in a letter sent to The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in early August. If you have ever filled a balloon with water and squeezed it, you know that, when you push on one side, you cause the balloon to bulge out elsewhere. The same principle applies to water underground. When you inject water into a saturated aquifer underground, you force water already there to go elsewhere. That; “elsewhere” has to be upward. The water in the rocks above that aquifer is quite salty for perhaps 2,000 feet and, when that salty water moves upward, it will mix with good water and ruin it for human use.

It would be bad enough if that overlying salty water only moved upward next to the well, but it can go a mile or more in any direction before contaminating near-surface good water, The injected water itself won’t show up near the surface for a long time, but the salty water it pushes ahead of itself can show up in a fairly short time.

I am amazed that EPA technical people did not reject this injection well proposal immediately, given the situation I have described.

/ ORIGINAL SIGNED /

Vance C. Kennedy, Ph, D.
Retired Hydrologist.

5052 Tully Road
Modesto, Ca. 95356
August 6, 2005
-----------------

To: Eric Byous, U.S EPA, Region 9
From: Vance C. Kennedy

Subject: Proposed injection of wastes into a deep aquifer by the Hilmar Cheese Company

These comments relate to the above subject. I will first present a series of questions and follow with a discussion of what I believe are major problems with the proposal.

Question 1. A representative of the California Regional Quality Control Board said that the Board bad no official knowledge of the well proposal. Why not? Does the Board have no jurisdiction?. One would think that such a proposal would be of concern to them, given the points mentioned below.

Question 2. What is the expected chemistry of the injected water and that of the receiving water?

Question 3. What is the salinity of water at various depths fix several thousand fret around the proposed well? See comments below for reasons for this question.

Question 4. What are the relative densities of injected and receiving waters?

Question 5. Does anyone question the statement that water is incompressible? If not, then the discussion presented below should be pertinent.

As a generalization, in sedimentary rocks, the horizontal permeability to water flow us considerably greater than the vertical permeability. Thus, water injected under pressure will flow laterally until the resistance to flow laterally becomes a significant fraction of the resistance to vertical water flow. Then, some displaced water will move toward the surface, pushing deeper saline groundwater upward into shallow aquifers. That upward movement can be tortuous and delayed greatly in time. But, the displacement has to happen due to the incompressibility of water. Furthermore, it is not the chemistry of the injected water as much as the chemistry of the displaced water that is the problem initially. Even if one injected distilled water, the same displacement upward of saline water would occur. Legally, it might be a lifetime before the actual injected water neared the surface and could be identified as coming from Hilmar Cheese, The displaced saline water can be expected to contaminate near-surface aquifers much sooner.

If the injected water is less dense than the receiving water, it will tend to float upward and push saline water upward also, but very slowly. Thus, the regulators may well be gone long before that becomes an obvious problem. Not to worry?

When groundwater is contaminated, it is not a simple matter to clean it up by flushing with clean water. To understand why, picture through-going channels in the aquifer bounded by areas of essentially immobile water in tiny openings. The contaminant flows in the open channels readily but can only penetrate the tiny pores by diffusion, whose rate is concentration dependent. When clean water flushes out the open channels, the contaminants in the pores will diffuse slowly into the open channels until temporary equilibrium is reached or new flushing is done. The process can be repeated over and over, but, as the concentration of the contaminant decreases, the rate of diffusion slows also and “complete” cleaning will take forever. Adsorption processes slow cleaning as well.

In summary, the damage done by deep well injection to shallow aquifers may take years to show up, but, when it does, the damage can be far from the injection well and be impossible to tie to that well. Because the actual injected water is the pusher, that water may stay a long time in the deep injected aquifer before moving upward.

The Modesto Bee has expressed concern about the Hilmar well, so I am sending a copy of this letter to them. The subject is obviously a matter of some public interest. My background is that of a hydrologist that has been involved in studies of contaminant transport in natural water systems. A 5-minute presentation seems inadequate to cover the items discussed in this letter. If you wish to discuss these comments prior to the meeting. I can be reached at 209 545 3575.

Vance C. Kennedy, PhD.

(2) http://www.modbee.com/local/story/11517556p-12254646c.html

Hilmar Cheese decries plan critics
Plant: State regulators' letter may create conflict of interest

By MICHAEL G. MOONEY
BEE STAFF WRITER
Last Updated: November 24, 2005, 04:22:09 AM PST

Representatives of Hilmar Cheese Co. on Wednesday blasted state regulators who want the Central Valley Regional Water Control Board to reject a proposed $3 million settlement of the company's long-standing water pollution violations.
Earlier this week, the Office of Statewide Initiatives — a unit of the State Water Resources Control Board — issued a letter criticizing the settlement pact because it was hammered out behind closed doors and would let Hilmar Cheese indefinitely pollute groundwater surrounding its Merced County plant, about a half mile north of Hilmar on Lander Avenue.

"We recommend that the proposed settlement agreement be rejected," the letter states, "and that an order be issued containing a schedule designed to return the discharger to compliance."

The letter is signed by John Norton, chief of the Office of Statewide Initiatives. The Bee was unable to reach Norton for comment Wednesday.

Members of the regional water board are expected to vote Tuesday on whether to accept the settlement.

"It (Norton's letter) is so fraught with reckless, inappropriate and inaccurate statements that I can't even begin to elaborate," said Michael Boccadoro, a spokesman for Hilmar Cheese and senior vice president with the Dolphin Group public relations firm. "It is not in any way the official position of the State Water Resources Control Board."

Hilmar attorney Mark Fogelman, in a letter issued Wednesday afternoon, questions the propriety of OSI sending the letter to the regional water board and contends it creates a potential conflict of interest because the state water board likely will review and determine the "correctness" of the regional board's action on the proposed settlement.

"No subdivision or part of the state board should be commenting on the matter when it is pending before the regional board," Fogelman wrote, "and no such comments should be given any weight whatsoever in the deliberations of the regional board."

Hilmar Cheese contends the OSI should have submitted its comments to the state water board's executive director, Celeste Cantú.

"However, the OSI comments indicate that Executive Director Cantú never authorized the filing of the comments," Fogelman wrote.

The Bee was unable to reach Cantú for comment Wednesday.

But William L. Rukeyser, a state water board spokesman, said Norton and other OSI staffers did follow proper procedures by putting their concerns about the proposed settlement in writing.

Rukeyser said Norton took care in the letter to point out that there had been no consultations between his unit and the state water board.

Nor had there been any contact, he said, between Norton and any of the attorneys involved in negotiating the proposed settlement.

Rukeyser did say, however, that attorney Catherine George, who represented the regional board in the negotiations with Hilmar Cheese, was aware of the OSI's reports on the water pollution allegations. He insisted, however, that the proceeding had not been tainted.

Hilmar spokesman Boccadoro was not convinced.

"Clearly," he said, "this is an attempt to grossly misrepresent the facts, to confuse and influence inappropriately the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board."

(3) http://www.dolphingroup.org/

(4) http://www.laweekly.com/ink/00/47/powerlines-meyerson.php

(5) supreme.lp.findlaw.com/supreme_court/ decisions/lower_court/99-16981.pdf

The Central Valley regional Water Quality Control Board is set to approve a deal between regulators and Hilmar Cheese Co. on Nov. 29 that would “grant the world’s largest cheesemaker sweeping immunity for hundreds of water pollution violations – and for future offenses.” (1)

How did this happen? We can only guess.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed Hilmar Cheese founder, Chuck Ahlem, to the state Department of Food and Agriculture in January 2004, apparently under the apprehension Ahlem was an “environmental” dairyman. (2) When the Sacramento Bee broke the story this year that Hilmar Cheese – far from being an icon of environmentalism – had been cited by this same board numerous times for water quality violations and, somehow, nothing had been done about them. Exposed, Ahlem resigned from the CDFA and the water quality board fined the cheese company $4 million. Some in the Valley thought the fine made a good press release.

After a plan was announced two months ago that Hilmar would inject its wastewater thousands of feet down, to loud public disbelief and derision, the story quieted down and went behind closed doors. Meanwhile, it was discovered the board needed some new members and the governor appointed them. There were six vacancies on the nine-member board that needed immediate attention from the governor. Five are mentioned on the water board’s website:

His appointments are:

Linda Adams, 56, of Sacramento, has been appointed to the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board. She most recently served as chief of staff to the state controller from 2004 to 2005. Previously, Adams was a member of the California Performance Review, director of the Department of Water Resources, legislative secretary and chief deputy legislative secretary to the governor and principal consultant to the Senate Agriculture & Water Resources Committee. She is a member of the board of directors of the Sacramento Local Conservation Corps. Adams is a Democrat.

Paul Betancourt, 46, of Kerman, has been appointed to the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board. He has been managing partner of VF Farms since 1983, a family farming operation. Betancourt also writes a monthly column on agriculture and urban issues for the Fresno Business Journal. He is a member of the Kerman Unified School Board, Fresno County Farm Bureau, Valley Clean Air Now Board and San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District-Community Advisory Committee. Betancourt is a Republican.

Kate Hart, 34, of Granite Bay, has been appointed to the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board. She has served as associate attorney with Trainor Robertson since 2004. Previously, Hart served as associate attorney with Reed Smith and Woods and Daube. She is a member of Trout Unlimited and CalTrout. Hart is a Republican. On 11 November 2005, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced the following appointments:

Sopac Mulholland, 60, of Springville, has been appointed to the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board. She has served as the executive director of the Sequoia Riverlands Trust since 2002. Mulholland was previously interim executive director for the Economic Development Corporation of Tulare County from 1998 to 1999. She is also the owner and operator of River Valley Ranch, McCarthy Creek Ranch and Quail Run Ranch. Mulholland is a former member of the Occupational and Health Standards Board. Mulholland is a Republican.

Dan Odenweller, 60, of Stockton, has been appointed to the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board. He most recently served as a fishery biologist and manager in the Habitat Conservation Division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries from 2001 to 2004. Odenweller previously served with the California Department of Fish and Game from 1971 to 2001, retiring as a senior fishery biologist. He is a member of the American Fisheries Society, the Sierra Club and Delta Flyfishers. Odenweller is a Republican. These positions require Senate confirmation. The compensation is $100 per diem.

Hilmar can count of local support from elected officials. Rep. Dennis Cardoza, Shrimp Slayer-Merced is a member of the House Resources and Agriculture committees, and is co-author with Rep. RichPAC Pombo, Buffalo Slayer-Tracy of the Gut-the-ESA bill. State Sen. Jeff Denham, R-Salinas (or Merced – he can’t quite remember which) is chairman of the state Sen. Agriculture Committee. State Assemblywoman Barbara Matthews, D-Tracy, is chairwoman of the Assembly Agriculture Committee, a member of Assembly Water, Parks and Wildlife, and of the Assembly Select Committee on Water, Infrastructure and the Economy. Each is a beneficiary of dairy largesse through the various associations and PACs the industry generates as abundantly as it produces government commodities.

Monday, an official of the State Water Resources Control Board, which oversees the state’s regional water quality boards, wrote the Central Valley board urging it to reject this settlement.

"We are deeply concerned with the precedent of granting immunity from civil liability for all such past and future violations," said John Norton, chief of the state Office of Statewide Initiatives.

Three of the Republicans among the five new appointees to the Central Valley board for which we have public information would seem capable of voting for anything pro-agriculture, anti-environmental, particularly when it would help a prominent Republican dairyman, despite the decision stinking as highly as Hilmar on a bad day.

If this happens, it would remain to be seen what power the state board would have to remedy the injustice done to the people in and around Hilmar. If the executive branch, after a belated but real beginning to bring the cheese company to heel, returns to its corrupt habits under what must be considerable political pressure, a judicial approach should be sought if one is possible.

California is the nation’s top dairy state and the dairy industry is historically a powerful, rich lobby in Sacramento and Washington. Although industry pricing (including subsidies) remains an unfathomable mystery, even to most dairy producers, from time to time its lobbying enthusiasm gets exposed. The last time this happened was called the “milk-fund scandal.” It was revealed as a by-product of the Watergate investigation. (4)

Bill Hatch
-------------------------------------------

Notes:

(1) Don't let polluters off easy, state says...Chris Bowman
http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/v-print/story/13892086p-14731032c.html
Top state water-quality enforcers on Monday blasted a proposed settlement that would grant the world's largest cheesemaker sweeping immunity for hundreds of water pollution violations - and for future offenses. The officials said the proposed deal between Central Valley regulators and Hilmar Cheese Co. sets a bad precedent and offers scant justification for dropping all violations stemming from years of dumping putrid, poorly treated wastewater on open fields near its Merced County factory. In a letter Monday, the officials urged members of the state's Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board to reject the settlement, which is scheduled for the board's vote Nov. 29. "We are deeply concerned with the precedent of granting immunity from civil liability for all such past and future violations," said John Norton, chief of the state Office of Statewide Initiatives.

(2) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2005/01/17/jnelson.DTL

(3) http://www.waterboards.ca.gov/centralvalley/HomePageAttachments/new-board-members.pdf.

(4) http://www.watergate.info/tapes/71-03-23_milk-price-supports.shtml

These are troubled times. Lobbyists plead guilty and sing like canaries, investigations "widen," new Grand Juries are convened, there is talk about "high crimes and misdemeanors" at the top, the war has gone horribly wrong and keeps getting worse. Something has begun the end of which is not known. Neither blood nor money seem able to hide the lies anymore. The Badlands staff, stunned, confused, in the words of our local congressman, the Shrimp Slayer, "troubled," looked deep into our hearts ... and probably like many Americans, came up with some lines from a couple of movies. They didn’t make a whole lot of sense but they expressed attitudes that don’t make a lot of sense either, but which are “going around like that flu.”

Bill Hatch
------------------------------------

Wall Street (1987)
Stanley Weiser & Oliver Stone

The point is, ladies and gentlemen, is that greed—
for lack of a better word--is good. Greed is right.
Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and
captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.
Greed, in all of its forms--greed for life, for money,
for love, knowledge--has marked the upward surge of mankind.
And Greed--you mark my works--will not only save
[this company] but that other malfunctioning corporation
called the USA.
Thank you very much.
--Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas)
------------------------------------

Miller's Crossing (1990)
Joel and Ethan Coen

It's a wrong situation. It's gettin' so a
businessman can't expect no return from a fixed
fight. Now if you can't trust a fix, what can
you trust? For a good return you gotta go
bettin' on chance, and then you're back with
anarchy. Right back inna jungle. On account of
the breakdown of ethics. That's why ethics is
important. It's the grease makes us get along,
what separates us from the animals, beasts a
burden, beasts a prey. Ethics. . .
--Johnny Casper (Jon Polito)

The San Joaquin Valley is in the news this weekend. Two of the great treasuries of American intellect were on display: the University of California and the New York Times.

Kenneth Rosen, chairman of the UC Berkeley Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics, lectured 500 business people on the Valley real estate market this weekend. Rosen, a real public/private, win-win partnership kind of guy, "also heads a real estate market research firm and an investment trust with $81 million in assets." (1)

His idea is that:

"A significant number of homes — 20 to 40 percent of those sold (from Merced to Bakersfield) — are being purchased by investors," Rosen said. "We're worried too many people are buying houses for investment, not occupancy."

Local Merced realtors say 60 percent but who's really counting?

Rosen imagines a situation in which interest rates would rise, valley home prices would fall, and investors would "dump their investment homes."

Perish the thought! Is it possible that stupid, anti-social investments could yield their just rewards? But, not to worry, Rosen said, there is only a 35-percent chance of a serious recession and the US economy should stay strong (despite record deficits and imbalance of trade). It's just that a lot of people buying homes on interest-only adjustable-rate mortgages could lose them. But those people would be mostly Valley citizens actually trying live in their homes, not speculators, so who really cares?

Next, the 500 business people heard from Anthony Downs, a senior fellow at hte Brookings Institution and former chairman of the Real Estate Research Corp. Downs said high home prices were driving middle-class people out of California while many poor immigrants continue to pour in.

"The state is trading mostly middle-class residents who are leaving for many more poor immigrants from abroad," Downs said. "So California's net population and poverty are both rising."

Those middle-class people left a lot richer than they came, one figures, having sold their homes in this market.

But Downs is a anti-government man at heart and so begins a fable about how local land-use authorities "discourage new homebuilding and construction of affordable multifamily complexes."

Right! " ... since homeowners politically dominate almost all suburban governments, he said, too few developments are approved."

Downs is an anti-NIMBY man, too, a real critic for our time. And if the local land-use authority policies he fantasizes are allowed to continue:

"There will be a permanent shortage of housing in California."

It could be that the invisible hand of the market is also the blind invisible hand of the market. It sure can't see the resource destruction it is causing, in case it has the brains to think resource destruction cannot go on forever without increasingly serious political, economic and social consequences.

This seminar makes about as much sense as UC studies on Valley air pollution: it is simply make-work for academics.

The Los Angeles Times produced a feature on how Valley kids go away to college and don't come back. (2)

The nicely crafted, patented LA Times nut-graph says:

When the area's most educated residents leave, "it takes away from the culture and intellectual life of the valley," said Raney, 67.

It also hamstrings the economy, strains the social fabric and puts a damper on the quality of life here in California's agricultural heartland.

Lamentations from Fresno culture-vultures follow. It might be too simplistic to note that what we lack in urban, sophisticated "cultural life" we make up for in agri-cultural life, which -- if only uttered with the utmost hypocrisy by Valley leaders in the pockets of developers -- is still the top productive agricultural region in the nation.

The reason the Valley is attracting all this high-powered urban attention is that its agricultural economy has concentrated into fewer and fewer hands as the generations have gone by. Today, there are many farming parcels of a size very attractive to developers for subdivisions. Hence, LA and the Bay Area are frustrated because the Valley, still dominantly agricultural economy cannot support all the people developers want to build houses for. And there is all this speculative money just looking for a home, any home, anywhere, even if the speculator cannot get enough rent for it to cover the mortgage.

To reply to the LA Times piece about brain drain and the terrible "Third World" economy we have here, let us say: the problem in the Valley is the people WITH college degrees, not those without them because the people with degrees are so busy separating themselves from those without them, they do nothing but obfuscate and establish obfuscating organizations like the Great Valley Center, to study how to beautify Highway 99 rest stops and co-opt potential grassroots leaders with a little grant money, some wine and cheese, and a guaranteed career in community betrayal.

Throughout these articles and a spate of others in recent days like them, never the E-word is heard. There is no thought of balance between urban and rural, town and country, the developed and the open spaces. It might take an old Californian with an ear smashed to the ground to hear it, but our intellectual and media leaders are doing their usual number: ignoring and burying a problem that stands in the way of the quick development buck. California is so besotted on developer wealth it can no longer imagine anything more creative, intelligent and sane than building subdivisions (complete with low-income components) on flood plains. That is the extent of the remaining economic imagination -- pathetic and empty.

The Valley looks ripe. Its communities have been rendered deaf and dumb by political corruption and immigration. Its land is now arranged into neatly vendible parcels. Willing sellers and willing buyers seek each other’s company. The speculators are too dumb to know. So, let a win-win, public/private partnership, by all means, fleece them. By the way, forget the people in the Valley because, obviously, they are uneducated. Actually, don’t quite forget them, declare culture war on them for not supporting the arts in Fresno or for not buying all these houses or for not making more money. Above all things, get their land, such as they still have it.

All that stands in the way of creating a slurb from Bakersfield to Redding is a few environmental laws, regulations and resource agencies. UC Merced set the new standards for coping with these obstructions: build it anyway and dare the resource agencies to enforce the law with politicians climbing up their backs in track shoes.

Oh, and one other thing: an economy to support this slurb, because man cannot live by strip-mall alone. Even in Sacramento, very rich in strip-malls, there is that ever-expanding state government to keep pumping money into the smoggy slurb.

Bill Hatch
-----------------------

(1) 11-20-05
Modesto Bee
Investors like valley housing...J.N. Sbranti
http://www.modbee.com/business/story/11504268p-12241760c.html
Here's a new name for the San Joaquin Valley: "Affordable California." "A significant number of homes — 20 to 40 percent of those sold (from Merced to Bakersfield) — are being purchased by investors... if interest rates rise, the valley's house prices may decline and investors could dump their investment homes. Because of the housing crunch, Downs said there is a large-scale domestic migration out of California. "The state is trading mostly middle-class residents who are leaving for many more poor immigrants from abroad," Downs said. "So California's net population and poverty are both rising."

(2) http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-braindrain20nov20,0,7804653.story?page=2&coll=la-home-headlines

The first article, “The US Has Lost; Let’s Leave,” succinclty states the honest, common-sense case against the war. The second, a statement by Sojourner founder, Jim Wallis, expresses the national wrath about all that is being forgotten as this bloody spectacle in the Mideast blows apart. Wallis reminds us that that the war, like wingnut threats to start another one in Syria or Iran, distracts our attention from the deep moral problem of how these despicable little bullies manage the national budget.

Things are very bad this Thanksgiving. Military commanders are trying to get US troops out of Iraq and the administration is not permitting it because they see every dead American soldier as political cover. Meanwhile national debt and balance of trade are dangerously askew, the speculative housing boom, the source of an unhealthily large percentage of (temporary) employment, particularly in California, is also slowing as interest rates rise. The president has escaped to Asia this weekend to lecture China on its human rights, trade policies and deplorable religious immaturity.

"I look forward to frank discussions on Sunday with President Hu about our need to find solutions to our trade differences with China," Bush said in his weekly radio address on Saturday.

"Access to American markets has played an important role in China's economic development," he said.

Bush will also urge Hu to allow greater religious freedom in China, a message he will underscore by starting his day at Sunday services at the Gangwashi Church, one of five officially recognised Protestant churches in Beijing.

U.S. officials were not happy when a Chinese court recently sentenced a Protestant minister, his wife and her brother to prison terms of up to three years for illegally printing Bibles and other Christian publications.

"Of course, it's Sunday so the president will want to worship," said Mike Green, Asian affairs director at the White House National Security Council. "But it's also important that the world see and that the Chinese people see that expression of faith is a good thing for a healthy and mature society." (1)

The US trade deficit, particularly, has raised worries among economists, and it relates directly to decisions China makes about its currency valuation. (2)

The trade deficit remains a trouble spot for the U.S. economy as it widens to new record highs in 2005. Since this deficit has to be financed by borrowing abroad, the question arises as to how long foreign lenders, particularly China, Japan, the UK, Taiwan and Germany, will lend to the U.S. at comparatively low interest rates. A widening trade deficit could ultimately put increasing pressures on U.S. interest rates, thus potentially contributing to an economic slowdown.

Bill Hatch
-------------------------------------

The US Has Lost; Let's Leave
Murtha and the L Word
By DAVE LINDORFF
Counterpunch.com – Nov. 18, 2005

Rep. John Murtha, the decorated Vietnam and Korean War Marine vet and conservative Pennsylvania Democrat who stunned Bush administration and Republican congressional warhawks and Democratic go-alongs like Sens. Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Joe Biden alike with his call for an immediate U.S. pullout from Iraq, left unsaid one important word in his dramatic turnaround announcement: defeat.

But that's the real message of his change of heart from Iraq War backer and booster to peacenik.

The war begun by President Bush with such bravado and so little braino, which was designed to convert him from a dismal president to a crisp and awe-inspiring commander-in-chief, has been lost.

The nearly 2100 Americans who have died so far to help the president get re-elected, to make him look like a leader, and to provide cover for his criminal executive power grab, have died for nothing.

An unorganized bunch of insurgents armed with nothing but raw guts, aging Soviet-era rifles, and home-made explosives, have routed the most powerful military machine the world has ever known.

There will be efforts to cover up this astonishing defeat, just as there were efforts made by the Nixon and Ford administrations to hide the fact that the U.S. was defeated in Indochina, too, but the truth is clear.

American military might can destroy a country. It can kill hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. It can sow terror through the use of indiscriminate use of such WMDs as DU explosives, phosphorus bombs, helicopter and fixed-wing gunships and computerized drones and missiles. But it cannot defeat a concerted popular resistance.

The American military, according to some generals, is once again, as it was during the Vietnam War, falling apart. Recruitment is collapsing, both for the regular Army and Marines, and for the reserves and the National Guard. Parts and even ammunition are in short supply. Morale is at an all time low and sinking.

Who in Iraq would want to die for Bush and Cheney at this point? And yet they keep on dying.

Murtha has it right. It's long past time to call the whole disastrous thing off. The Bush-Cheney mantra of "stay the course" is the desperate cry of two mad men caught in a trap of their own making--two men who are perfectly willing to send thousands more American soldiers to their deaths, and to slaughter tens of thousands more innocent Iraqis, in order to cling to power and to defer a final reckoning for their crimes.
They cannot be permitted to do this.

The war is lost. Iraq has been destroyed and will have to be helped for a long time to allow its people to recover somehow from the devastation caused by decades of brutal dictatorship, American-led sanctions and America's war of aggression and criminal occupation. The broken military will have to be returned home and made into something appropriate for a world that settles disputes diplomatically, not by unilateral acts of violence and terror. Finally, the veterans of this war will need help recovering from the horrors they were forced to participate in and from the physical and psychic wounds they have endured.

Meanwhile, the political leaders who brought all this about must be called to account. Either they apologize, as growing numbers of Democrats (and some Republicans) have begun to do, like Murtha and vice-presidential candidate John Edwards have done, or they must be ousted. Half steps like Kerry's admission that his pro-war vote and his pro-war campaign were mistakes, after which he then trashed Murtha on Hardball, won't do. As for the criminal authors of this war-Bush, Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and others--they should be impeached or indicted as appropriate.)

The first step will be admitting that the US has been defeated in Iraq. Murtha is right that the troops did what was asked of them, but their sacrifices were for naught. The war is lost.

Then we can begin the blame game in earnest.
-------
Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His new book of CounterPunch columns titled "This Can't be Happening!" to be published this fall by Common Courage Press. Information about both books and other work by Lindorff can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net.
--------------------------------------------------------

As Nation Prepares for Thanksgiving, Jim Wallis and 45 Religious Leaders to Hold Faith Summit on Poverty Nov. 21

11/18/2005 5:29:00 PM

To: Assignment Desk, Daybook Editor

Contact: Jack Pannell of Sojourners, 202-745-4614 or 202-285-1899 (cell)

News Advisory:

What: Roundtable with the Media (Jim Wallis and several religious leaders will discuss the tragic meaning of House Budget vote during the season of Thanksgiving).

When: Monday, Nov. 21, 12 noon until 1 p.m.

Where: Jury's Hotel, 1500 New Hampshire Ave., Washington, D.C.

Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners and Convener of Call to Renewal, made the following the statement today on the narrow passage of the House Budget Reconciliation Bill.

STATEMENT BY JIM WALLIS:

"The prophet Isaiah said: 'Woe to you legislators of infamous laws ... who refuse justice to the unfortunate, who cheat the poor among my people of their rights, who make widows their prey and rob the orphan.' Today, I repeat those words. When our legislators put ideology over principle, it is time to sound the trumpets of justice and tell the truth.

"It is a moral disgrace to take food from the mouths of hungry children to increase the luxuries of those feasting at a table overflowing with plenty. This is not what America is about, not what the season of Thanksgiving is about, not what loving our neighbor is about, and not what family values are about. There is no moral path our legislators can take to defend a reckless, mean-spirited budget reconciliation bill that diminishes our compassion, as Jesus said, 'for the least of these.' It is morally unconscionable to hide behind arguments for fiscal responsibility and government efficiency. It is dishonest to stake proud claims to deficit reduction when tax cuts for the wealthy that increase the deficit are the next order of business. It is one more example of an absence of morality in our current political leadership.

"The faith community is outraged and is drawing a line in the sand against immoral national priorities. It is time to draw that line more forcefully and more visibly."

http://www.usnewswire.com
-----------------------

Notes:
(1)http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/swissinfo.html?siteSect=143&sid=6252371&cKey=1132444232000

(2) http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=1171451

In California, you still don’t want to get the Hearsts too angry with you. The arrogance and often ludicrous propaganda of the University of California has been for years more than a match for state Legislature committees and Congress, but apparently it has finally managed to irritate the Hearsts. There are rules, after all, and at least some newspapers will eventually get fed up with a diet of pure flak from a university.

 Read More »

The US/Mexican border is a place generally despised by the interiors of both nations. The general idea is that the border is to be exploited for whatever you can get out of it.

 Read More »

“UC gets $8 million to study San Joaquin Valley's bad air...” (1) trumpets this morning’s Fresno Bee. Variously called “the most” or “one of the most” polluted air basins in the nation, depending on the month or the intent of the writer, San Joaquin Valley air is bad, Fresno’s childhood asthma rate is four times the national average, and things aren’t getting any better.

 Read More »

This is the best article on the GMO situation in months, from the Wall Street Journal. Wall Street may be asking some pointed questions about agricultural biotechnology at the moment, as market resistance shows no signs of fading and billions in investment go to pay biotech corporate lawyers, lobbyists and propagandists.

 Read More »

Planning in Merced, since the University of California first cast its greedy eyes on a large donation of seasonal pastureland north of the county seat, has been dominated by one agenda: the transfer of large rural properties to developer ownership. This is not to say that a number of other things haven’t happened, but the dominant agenda has been this phenomenon: the willing sale of ranch and farmland to developers.

 Read More »

Karl Rove, “Bush’s brain,” wanted to send the American economy back to his personal golden age, the McKinley administration, when Cleveland businessman Marcus Hannah played the role of “McKinley’s brain,” encouraging the obscene enrichment of big business trusts as Rove, Bush and Cheney have done for corporations like Halliburton, Bechtel, Enron, etc. McKinley started the Spanish-American, our first major, extra-territorial imperial war. In retrospect, it makes sense they were talking about invading Iraq long before 9/11.

 Read More »

I didn’t like this lead in an Oct. 20 story in the Merced Sun-Star.

Two former Merced County lawmen took center stage Wednesday at a state law enforcement change of command ceremony held at the Christian Life Center.

I assumed it was factual and that the event actually took place. It is only in the ninth graph in the story that state Attorney General Bill Lockyer sneaked in, as if from the basement:

 Read More »

Are mergers and acquisitions the best path to public health in California?
Novartis never left

Bill Hatch – Nov. 5, 2005

At a county health clinic in Merced last week, hundreds of people, mostly elderly, waited for about an hour, in and out of doors, for their flu shots, made available for $2 due to a law authored by Valley Assemblyman John Thurman, D-Modesto, years ago. We quipped in the line that no one not old enough to remember John belonged in the line.

We were lucky, according to the Sacramento Bee Nov. 5 story, Flu-shot supplies lagging for US:

 Read More »

For lack of a titled nobility

We just have no noble titles available for global liars who slaughter other peoples’ children; our deteriorated democracy has no proper social reward for the size of their whoppers, spouting geysers of innocent blood.

Bill Hatch
Oct. 31, 2005

 Read More »

Salsa McClatchy Badlands Journal replies to Sacramento Bee editorial on Pombo Bill Hatch -- Nov. 2, 2005 The Sacramento Bee editorial, Pombo mambo, actually looks like the McClatchy Co. going after a bad actor in Congress, one of DeLay’s wretched little henchmen, while the Hammer is back in Texas under indictment for illegal campaign funding. Although green is not really McClatchy’s color, like any good editorial, Pombo mambo provokes thought. For example, how can Sacramento Bee editorialists mention Pombo’s Gut-the-ESA bill without mentioning its co-author, Rep. Dennis Cardoza, Shrimp Slayer-Merced, whose district encompasses the circulation area for two of its papers, the Modesto Bee and the Merced Sun-Star. The editorial first appeared in Sacramento last week and was reprinted in the Modesto and Fresno Bees yesterday. Perhaps the reason for McClatchy reticence lies in the landscape of its region and the shape of the Pombo/Cardoza bill to gut the Endangered Species Act.

 Read More »