Badlands Journal

McCloskey an unlikely opponent for Pombo

By JIM BOREN
Fresno Bee
27-JAN-06

I was momentarily confused by the radio snippet I heard the other day about a Republican challenging Rep. Richard Pombo, the Tracy, Calif., Republican who has raised the ire of some for his conservative positions on the environment and property rights. Did the newscaster really say that former Congressman Paul M. "Pete" McCloskey would run against Pombo?

It was time to do the math because I covered McCloskey's last campaign, an unsuccessful U.S. Senate race 24 years ago. My first thoughts: How old is McCloskey now, and can he really be serious about winning a campaign against a Republican power broker?

The answer to those questions came quickly when I heard that familiar voice a few days later in a telephone interview: "Yes, I'm serious," McCloskey said. "At 78, you don't give up five months of your life to lose an election."

His determination aside, the odds are against the one-time Marine who served 15 years in
Congress. Pombo has $555,000 in the bank, and could spend $5 million on a re-election
campaign. Pombo also has a solid GOP base, although he faces criticism over ties to admitted felon Jack Abramoff, the disgraced lobbyist.

But few think Pombo is in serious trouble unless further revelations surface. For McCloskey to win the June primary, he will have to persuade Republicans in a Northern California congressional district that he's a better party nominee than the incumbent.

That's where it gets a bit tricky for McCloskey, who has been called a maverick Republican for most of his career. Some think that means he's not really a Republican.

Wayne Johnson, Pombo's political consultant, said the more voters learn about McCloskey, the less enthusiasm there will be for him. He really should be running in the Democratic primary, Johnson said.

If McCloskey's campaign takes hold, Pombo undoubtedly will point out that his opponent has often gone against his party, starting with McCloskey's 1972 challenge of President Richard Nixon over the Vietnam War, and then supporting Democrat John Kerry over President Bush in 2004.

That isn't a record that you'd expect to be a roadmap for success in a rock-solid Republican district that covers parts of San Joaquin, Contra Costa, Alameda and Santa Clara counties.

But McCloskey says 11th District voters want someone they can trust, adding that Pombo caters to the powerful and ignores his constituents.

"This is going to be a fun campaign," McCloskey said in a telephone interview from Lodi, Calif. "Pombo has a hotshot campaign consultant who says Pombo won't debate me, which is an interesting position for someone who is part of Congress, which is a debating society."

McCloskey began his political career amid much applause. He defeated Shirley Temple Black, whose career as a child actress made her a household name. That began a congressional career that saw him making news often because of his direct talk.

Among his accomplishments in Congress was co-authoring the Endangered Species Act, which Pombo is trying to dismantle. Now that has made this personal.

McCloskey understands that he may not be taken seriously by the political establishment or the media. But he said he's committed to changing the minds of doubters.

"You are entitled to view with skepticism why a 78-year-old retired farmer and attorney from Yolo County would move 90 miles to San Joaquin County in order to challenge incumbent Congressman Richard Pombo of Tracy," he said last week during his campaign announcement.

McCloskey looked for other Republicans to challenge Pombo, and decided to get into the race when he couldn't find a serious candidate. Despite his age, he said he is willing to take a stand.He said Republicans in Congress have strayed from party principles of smaller government, less intrusion into citizens' lives and a commitment to the environment.

"It was a Republican, Teddy Roosevelt, who gave us a strong environmental policy to protect parklands, wildlife preserves and wilderness, as well as anti-trust laws to control business excesses," McCloskey said.

It's a battle for the soul of the Republican Party, he said.

We'll see whether Republican voters in California's 11th Congressional District see it that way. McCloskey, at least, will give them a choice in the GOP primary. At a time when gerrymandered districts have sucked the interest out of congressional elections in California, this one might be fun to watch.

(Distributed by Scripps-McClatchy Western Service, http://www.shns.com.
-------------------

I was sorry to read that the McClatchy Co. has decided to bury Pete McCloskey's challenge to Rep. Richard Pombo, Buffalo Slayer-Tracy, in the rhetoric of the horse-race. For the corporate media, whenever political values threaten the tranquil flow of business (the real estate business in California), it instantly resorts to handicapping as a form of political coverage.

Bill Hatch

January 28 / 29, 2006
www.Counterpunch.com

The Impeachable Mr. Bush
An Aggregation of High Crimes and Misdemeanors
By RALPH NADER

What will it take for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to be held responsible for a multitude of political crimes, recklessness, prevarications and just plain massive ongoing mismanagement of the taxpayers government?

The first step is to aggregate these travesties so they add up to a more comprehensive judgment. Then, together they confront us with an awful truth -- that our present system of constitution, law and checks and balances have failed to be invoked by the elected and appointed officials of our Congress and our Courts. This is happening even though the polls have been dropping on the Bush regime for over a year and are now quite negative on many important questions.

Consider the following sample of irresponsibility and flouting of the law and then ask yourself how much more will it take to start holding the Bush/Cheney crowd of serial fibbers and dictacrats accountable? Is there ever to be a tipping point in the Washington world of spineless Democrats and supine Congressional Republicans worried about Bush losing the 2006 elections?

1. The drug benefit boondoggle, starting January 1, 2006, has been by all reports maelstrom of confusion, deprivation, gouging and misadministration, leaving many sick people in a frightening limbo. That is Bushland messing up big time while giving the gouging, long-subsidized profit-glutted drug companies hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade paid by the taxpayer.

2. Katrina! The breaching of the levees was predicted at least over a year before and warned about just before the Hurricane hit by federal officials but ignored by the Administration. Bush's godliness complex let him give the public the impression that the destruction was an unavoidable Act of God, when it was an avoidable disaster of Bush. The White House earlier had cut the Army Corps of Engineers budget designed for hurricane defense in the New Orleans area. The Corps itself is not blameless, but its commander in chief is, after all, George W. Bush.

3. Bush-Cheney plunged our country into an endless war-quagmire in Iraq on an often repeated platform of falsehoods, cover-ups and deliberate distractions from the ignored necessities here at home. Tens of thousands of American have lost their lives, their limbs or their health over there and casualties of innocent Iraqi adults and children are much more numerous. Already costing hundreds of billions of dollars, the mismanagement of this war of choice is the material of hundreds of Pentagon audits, Congressional reports, official admissions, firsthand press reports and Congressional condemnations by the respected Government Accountability Office (GAO).

"Iraq Rebuilding Badly Hobbled", U.S. Report finds, "is a recent front page headline in The New York Times-- one of many such headlines in recent months. The corporate contractors, such ass Halliburton, will set records for waste and worse as the facts spill out to the people.

4. The impeachable George W. Bush imperiously asserts that he will continue to violate federal law and place the American people under any surveillance that he chooses to impose without ever using a Congressionally approved procedure which requiresfor a quick and secret court warrant that is even permitted to be retroactive.

He and his pitchmen claim that they are pursuing terrorists. But the National Security Agency's (NSA) electronic dragnets are enveloping millions of people, flooding the FBI with what that agency says is mountains of indiscriminate undigested data that are useless.

Besides, as of the end of 2004, Bush and John Ashcroft, his then Attorney General had arrested 5000 people on suspicion of terrorism, jailed them, most without charges, and then proceeded to strike out. Two were convicted and the convictions were overturned in Michigan. The Bush scorecard, according to Georgetown Law professor David Cole was 0 for 5000! Does this record qualify for chronic abuse of legal process or is it just sloppy law enforcement designed to produce political press releases?

5. Bush pumps "the ownership society" and opposes attempts to give investors the power that should accrue to them as owners over the self-enriching managers of the giant corporations. As a result, big time corporate executives keep vastly overpaying themselves, through their rubber-stamp Boards of Directors (starting at $7200 an hour in 2002 and upward for the CEOs of the top 300 corporations). Warren Buffet called runaway executive compensation and stock options a central cause of cooking corporate books and undermining jobs and their own companies' financial stability.

6. Cutting life-sustaining programs for needy children, sick adults and regulatory health-safety protections for most Americans while reducing the taxes of the richest one percent, including his own and Cheney's taxes, invites Biblical condemnation. He has left many Americans defenseless from preventable hazards here at home, while he plays the providential Viceroy of Iraq. At the same time, Bush's forked tongue touts "the safety of the American people" as his highest responsibility.

7. He encumbers young children with taxes (who will have to pay the debt) through massive federal deficits brought about significantly by huge numbers of corporate handouts, giveaways, subsidies and tax escapism. That's one way of leaving children behind.

8. Mismangement and underfunding implode his educational distraction called No Child Left Behind. Just ask the Republican state of Utah or millions of teachers beset with constant, vapid standardized multiple choice tests created by corporate consultants.

9. He huffs and puffs about spreading democracies around the world while condoning and encouraging the shipment of whole American industries and jobs to the communist Chinese dictatorship, and other dictatorships on which he continues to lavish such globalized policies.

However, his boomeranging foreign policy may yet turn him into an unintended patron saint of elected Islamic theocracies.

These and many other documentations of his tortured tenure can demonstrate what their aggregation can contribute to motivate the American people toward holding him and Cheney accountable to them under the rule of law. But don't count on the Democrats leading. They blew another election -- Congressional and Presidentially -- against the worst Republicans in American history.

Aggregation, my fellow citizens, is up to your independent minds and judgments to absorb and act upon.
------------------

Have we reached a moment when from our observations we have come again to basic doubts and questions? The doubts and the questions are no more than the normal course of history for any nation; in a democracy they must become public or we cease to be a democracy. Have we reached a point where we are able to turn to those we know have acted and thought on principle for decades and yet are still, fortunately, among us, thinking publicly, sober, hard-working, thinking men, like Ralph Nader?

Bill Hatch

The newspaper coverage of the tragic death of Greg Gomez, 20, of Merced, has from the beginning raised more questions than it has answered. With each succeeding article, the story gets more obscene.

A Badlands reader suggested that without putting all the official reports of the matter together, end-to-end, it is impossible to tell what actually happened. However, in politically sensitive matters including large private or public institutions, police reports do not always make things clearer.

The best we can do it put the timeline of newspaper coverage of the event in some kind of order and raise questions we believe ought to be asked.

The Modesto Bee reported at 4:15 a.m. on Dec. 20 that Gomez was hit by a car driven by UC Merced student, Antony Jay Ducray, 18, of Los Angeles, about 11:30 p.m., according to a California Highway Patrol report. He was taken to Mercy Medical Center Merced.

CHP Sgt. Sam Samra said the accident happened about 2,500 feet west of Lake Road, near the UC Merced campus. Gomez was wearing dark clothes and walking in the road; there are no streetlights in the area, according to the CHP. Though it wasn't raining, it was cloudy and the streets were wet, Samra said.

Ducray, who was driving about 50 miles per hour, did not see Gomez walking in the road before his car struck him, the CHP reported.

Gomez was thrown into Ducray's windshield, and suffered major injuries. Ducray was not hurt, and a passenger in his car, 18-year-old Daniel Joseph Wilson of Rancho Bernardo, suffered minor cuts to his left hand, the CHP reported.
No one was arrested and the CHP said speeding and alcohol do not appear to have been factors in the accident. The collision remains under investigation.

On Dec. 21, Merced Sun-Star writer Rosalio Ahumada reported that Gomez died about 23 hours after he was struck by Ducray’s car. We got more details of the case.

The UC Merced student was not arrested.

Speeding and driving under the influence do not appear to be factors, the report stated, but the car accident is still under investigation, Ahumada wrote.

Evidently Ducray was tested clean for alcohol and drugs.

Ducray, a UC Merced student from Los Angeles, was driving a 2000 Toyota Corolla westbound on Bellevue Road at an approximate speed of 50 mph when the car struck Gomez.

Gomez was reported to have been wearing dark clothing and walking “on a small paved portion of the shoulder of the road. The road has a larger dirt and gravel portion of the road shoulder.” There are no streetlights on that country road.

Samra, the CHP officer on the scene, told Ahumada, “the road was wet and it was cloudy, but officers reported it was not raining when the accident occurred and there was not any fog or other visual impairments.”

The coroner’s office said it would do an autopsy to establish the cause of death on Thursday of that week. We saw no follow-up on that story but the Christmas weekend was coming and the cause of death could not have been more than the listing of injuries sustained from being hit by a car.

The first question that arises is why isn’t this story being covered by the Sun-Star’s veteran police reporter, Mike De La Cruz? The first report from the Modesto Bee has no byline. The second story was covered by the reporter on the UC Merced beat, at least until shortly after this story. Since January 16, another reporter seems to have taken over UC Merced coverage.

How could the CHP officer know the students were driving about 50 miles an hour? Was he on the scene before the accident? Were there witnesses? Is there electronic speed monitoring equipment on that stretch of road?

The story disappeared for a month only to return this week.

On Tuesday, Ahumada’s apparent successor on the UC Merced beat, Janet Pak, informed us:

University of California, Merced, students who want to stay downtown or enjoy a movie late at night won't have to worry about transportation.

A new shuttle service called "Nite Cat" will run every hour from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. on Friday and Saturday, said UC Merced spokeswoman Ana Nelson Shaw.

"It helps them be more connected with the community," she said. "A lot of students don't have a car.

"It provides them with a new option to go see a movie that ends late at night or to go eat out at one of the dining locations or see friends who live off campus."

Riggs Ambulance Service, presumably the same ambulance service that took Gomez to the hospital (there is no other in Merced), sponsored the shuttle, “paying $20,000 for the van, fuel and labor costs.” Sounds pretty cheap to me. I wondered if a farm labor contractor could get a van, driver, fuel and maintenance at that price for eight, 20-mile roundtrips a week.

Nite Cat would also prevent people from driving back in poor weather conditions.

"It's not exactly a great drive," he said. "It's dark, narrow and foggy."

There is no evidence Pak even asked if the shuttle might also be connected to Gomez’ death, which would have raised the issue protecting the public against UC Merced students rather than simply protecting UC Merced students from themselves.

At this point, the Badlands editorial board began to study a few UC Merced police reports.

Police Calls...UC Merced calls...Last Updated: January 27, 2006, 07:45:32 AM PST
http://www.mercedsunstar.com/local/policecalls/story/11736459p-12459406c.html
The UC Merced Police Department responded to three calls on Wednesday.
WEDNESDAY
12:35 a.m. -- Officer took student report of a possible burglary.
12:34 a.m. -- Officer checked a suspicious vehicle parked in the staff parking lot.
5:20 a.m. -- Driver verbally warned at a traffic stop at Bellevue and Lake roads.

Police Calls...UC Merced calls
Last Updated: January 24, 2006, 08:05:33 AM PST
http://www.mercedsunstar.com/local/policecalls/story/11724321p-12448098c.html

Saturday
11:05 p.m. -- Driver issued a citation for failing to stop at a crosswalk in the student parking lot by Tulare Hall
10:08 p.m. -- Driver given a verbal warning for failing to stop at a crosswalk on Scholars Lane and Emigrant Pass.
12:49 a.m. -- Driver given a verbal warning for failure to stop at a crossing walk on Scholars Lane and Mammoth Lakes Road.

FRIDAY
10:34 p.m. -- Citation issued for failure to stop at crosswalk on Lake Road south of main entrance.
10:08 p.m. -- Citation issued for failure to stop at crosswalk on Scholars Road.

Last Updated: January 10, 2006, 06:45:36 AM PST
http://www.mercedsunstar.com/local/policecalls/story/11672477p-12400494c.html

SATURDAY
3:33 p.m. --Verbal warning issued for failure to stop at a posted stop sign at Scholars and Emigrants Pass.

UC MERCED CALLS
The UC Merced Police Department responded to 9 calls Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

SUNDAY
1:22 p.m. -- Driver issued a verbal warning near front entrance to Lake Yosemite.
11:42 a.m. -- Officers assist two male adults stuck in an elevator.

SATURDAY
11:50 p.m. -- Driver of a suspicious vehicle parked in the residential parking lot given a verbal warning.
3:33 p.m. --Verbal warning issued for failure to stop at a posted stop sign at Scholars and Emigrants Pass.
3:01 p.m. --Driver issued a verbal warning during a traffic stop at Bellevue and Lake roads.
2:31 p.m. -- Driver issued a verbal warning during a traffic stop on Scholars Lane at the dining hall.
Driver issued a verbal warning during a traffic stop at Lane and Trovare roads.

FRIDAY
7:37 p.m. -- An electrical fire smell in the east wing of the library determined no fire risk.
8:16 a.m. -- Driver of a vehicle blocking the emergency exit found and vehicle removed.

Last Updated: December 10, 2005, 07:21:14 AM PST
http://www.mercedsun-star.com/local/policecalls/story/11576675p-12309523c.html

UC MERCED CALLS
The UC Merced Police Department responded to 6 calls Thursday and Wednesday

Thursday
5:08 p.m. -- Report of a noninjury hit-and-run accident that occurred sometime in the day in the Lake parking lot.

Thursday
6:33 p.m. -- Assisted a disabled motorist with a flat tire.
5:08 p.m. -- Report of a noninjury hit-and-run accident that occurred sometime in the day in the Lake parking lot.

Wednesday
11:32 p.m. -- Two students in the construction area given a verbal warning.
9:53 p.m. -- Assisted a UC resident assistant in student housing.
6:29 p.m. -- Escorted a staff member to the parking lot.
6:27 p.m. -- Conducted a student welfare check at the request of a family member.

Last Updated: November 24, 2005, 06:50:36 AM PST
http://www.mercedsun-star.com/local/policecalls/story/11517885p-12254904c.html

5:08 p.m. -- Report of a noninjury hit-and-run accident that occurred sometime in the day in the Lake parking lot.

UC MERCED CALLS

The UC Merced Police Department responded to 3 calls on Tuesday.
10:53 a.m. -- Traffic stop on Lake Road at Bellevue Road. Driver was warned.
4:53 p.m. -- Noninjury accident reported at Ranchers and Lake Road.
4:18 p.m. -- Reports of students barbecuing on campus next to dining commons.

Last Updated: October 20, 2005, 06:45:34 AM PDT
http://www.mercedsun-star.com/local/policecalls/story/11373686p-12120637c.html

9 a.m. -- A hit-and-run accident reported in the Lake parking lot. The responsible party returned to the scene.

Badlands editors, after daring to post this police description of the vehicular situation out at the UC Merced campus, got their money down on the question of whether the public would ever see another UC Merced police log.

Lulu from the Badlands Religion desk, who tipples, complained that UC Merced had never offered to pick her up and take her downtown for Blues night and bring her back home all safe and sound, soul full of throbbing bass guitar.

D.A. May Have Served Alcohol to Underage Drinker Who Died
The Novel and The Tape
http://www.mercedsunstar.com/local/story/11741563p-12463552c.htm

Saturday Sun-Star readers encountered a novel of 3,288 words in their newspapers and an accompanying audiotape on the newspaper’s website, concerning a political tangent associated with this tragedy. The story would not have suffered at all if a regular police reporter had done it in a few hundred words, something like:

Merced County District Attorney Gordon Spencer served drinks at the Merced Country Club for an employee Christmas party attended by Greg Gomez. Gomez, 20, later died as the result of being hit by a car driven by UC Merced student Antony Jay Ducray, 18, of Los Angeles. Three hours after Gomez was admitted to Mercy Medical Center, a test revealed a .245 blood alcohol content, about three times the legal limit for driving a car. Gomez was on foot when Ducray’s vehicle hit him.

Spencer said he tended bar at the party for about an hour until the employee-guests went to dinner. He added that he left the party four hours before Gomez was struck by the UC Merced student’s car as he was walking on the side of Bellevue Road .

Spencer explained he had an agreement with three managers at the country club that they were responsible for checking IDs. He said it is possible he served Gomez but did not serve anyone as drunk as Gomez was reported to have been three hours after he was hit.

Chris Collins, one of the Sun-Star’s political reporters, wrote the 3,288-word novel. Collins appears to believe that good district attorneys grow on grape vines or almond trees (the same place they grow good cops) or are as rapidly multiplying in Merced County as his celebrity-of-the-week Greg Hostetler’s housing products. This indescribable travesty of journalism, complete with tape selections, is available at http://www.mercedsunstar.com/local/story/11741563p-12463552c.html. It comes off, whether intentionally or not, as one of the most blatant political hatchet jobs in the paper’s dismal history of political coverage. But it is also, fundamentally, something else: a distraction from who killed whom.

UC bobcatflaksters must have danced on their monitors when this novel was published. People will be thinking about Spencer for days, weeks, forgetting who killed whom, all those fraudulent pay packages for top UC administrators and the new generation of nuclear weapons to be built at UC’s two national laboratories of WMDs.

Other evidence that it was some kind of political hatchet job or a PR diversion is that Collins never shares with his readers who it was who told him Spencer was serving drinks at a private country club employees' party. Nor, in the midst of nothing but a political story around manslaughter, does he ever mention that Spencer has announced his retirement. Nor does he ever list, in this political story about manslaughter, either Spencer’s political friends or his enemies.

Jonathan Arons, a San Francisco attorney who specializes in legal ethics, said Spencer had entered a "very gray" area ethically., Collins wrote, 2,500 words into his masterpiece.

Who might the deep, terribly obscure Arons be?

The only guy in the Badlands organization who took the bet Gomez v. Spencer would be studied in Torts courses by future law students pondering the mysteries of causality was Bobo. Bobo’s in sports.

Compared to the fact of his death, did it matter at all that Gomez was 20 instead of 21? If a 90-year-old senile escapee from a rest home in a dark housecoat on a black walker had been in that place at that time, would she have fared any better than Gomez or a Labrador Retriever? Did it matter that the district attorney, doing a volunteer stint as a bartender for his club’s employee Christmas party, said he wouldn’t deny he might have served Gomez a drink four hours before he was struck by the UC Merced student’s car?

No.

Spencer’s suggestion that there was something called personal responsibility poured gasoline on Collins’ passion to play the political blame game with a tragic mystery that could not be reduced to gotcha without violating common decency.

Why was Gomez, drunk, on foot, two miles from the country club at 11:30 p.m.? It must have been the DA’s fault.

Wrong.

There is another, grimmer possibility that would not have come to light without Collins’ reckless novel. With perhaps better information than the public has, Spencer seemed to suggest at one point on the tape that Gomez had thrown himself into the car. If Collins had not been so intent on lynching Spencer, he might have heard that warning. Having done this stupid thing, he raised the issue of suicide – more doubt and misery for the family he describes with such saccharine bathos in the last several hundred words of his opus. Adn what of the misery of the driver and his passenger?

Forget them: we must have the novel of blame, which will soothe all wounds.

Wrong.

Do Collins’ editors have a shred of common sense?

Bill Hatch

Film shouldn't show here - Letter to the Editor of the Merced Sun-Star, Published 01/26/06

Merced

When rightwing kooks start calling cowboys sacred symbols the culture is showing signs of mid-flight from the edge of the cliff. People who idolize cowboys this much should be watched very carefully in bars on Rodeo Day for signs that perhaps they too, like those cruising cowgirls, "go nuts for Wrangler butts."

The flap over the movie reminded me of the founder of the American conservative movement, Barry Goldwater. Goldwater, who had some homosexual relatives, campaigned for gay rights in the same way he championed the cause of many other oppressed minority groups through his long, honorable political career.

"You don't need to be straight to fight and die for your country. You just need to shoot straight," he wrote in a 1993 letter to an editor.

"Brokeback Mountain" is based on a short story by Annie Proulx, so right off you know the writing behind the film is good and set in a beautiful place. "The Shipping News" (2001), based on her second novel, was a great movie and set on on the shores of Nova Scotia. And Larry McMurtry was involved with the script. Has any contemporary writer written better about cowboys and been a better mentor of Western writers than anyone since Wallace Stegner, his mentor? Leslie Marmon Silko credited McMurtry with helping her through the ordeal of writing Almanac of the Dead, the darkest anti-mythological novel ever written about the West.

"Brokeback Mountain" is directed by Ang Lee. He directed the spectacular "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" (2000) and came back three years later with "Hulk."

The 80 members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association that give out the Golden Globes gave "Brokeback Mountain" four awards, setting it up as the leading contender for Oscars.

This is probably a good movie.

Mr. Anderson's values are as phony as a carpetbag full of three-dollar bills and as lowdown mean as the ayatollahs who put the fatwah out on Salman Rushdie for Satanic Verses. Like bigots the world over, he's so in love with himself he just can't get enough of his own intolerant image in his own mirror, so he projects his antidiluvian political agenda on the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Perhaps he has anxieties about his precious bodily fluids or something.

Lest this criticism of Anderson seem too severe: "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue" -- Barry Goldwater.

"Brokeback Mountain" is the top box office attraction in the UK this week. Last week it was number two in France, tops in Paris.

Locations and showtimes for "Brokeback Mountain" in the north San Joaquin Valley and Foothills.

Clovis - UA Sierra Vista
(12:15 PM) (3:15) 7:00 10:00 PM

Fresno - Edwards Fresno Stadium
Large Screen Format (10:20 AM) (1:20) (4:20) 7:20 10:20 PM

Fresno - Manchester Stadium 16
(12:05 PM) (3:15) 6:40 10:00 PM

Lodi - Lodi Stadium 12 Cinemas
Stadium Seating (11:55 AM) (2:40) 7:05 9:50 PM

Modesto - Signature Stadium 10 - Modesto
(12:40 PM) (3:50) 7:05 10:15 PM

Modesto - Brenden Modesto 18
(3:40 PM) 6:50 10:00 PM

Riverbank - Galaxy Theatre - Riverbank
12:05 PM 3:30 7:05 10:15 PM

Sonora - Signature Stadium 10
(12:20 PM) (3:25) 6:30 PM

Merced - WTC-Mainplace Stadium Cinemas
(2:15 PM) (5:15) 8:15 PM

Stockton - Signature Theatres City Centre Cinemas
(12:45 PM) (3:55) 7:35 10:30 PM

Tracy - Cinemark Tracy Movies 14
(1:00 PM) (4:00) 7:00 10:00 PM

Turlock - Signature Theatres Turlock Stadium 14
(3:25 PM) 6:30 PM

Cattle and Beef Production in the United States and California

The beef industry is the largest segment of American agriculture and in 2003, U.S. cash receipts from livestock and livestock product marketing was approximately $98.3 billion.There are approximately 1.4 million jobs attributed to the U.S. cattle industry. In California,cash receipts for cattle and calves was $1.56 billion.

There are approximately 800,000 beef cattle producers in the United States, conducting business in all 50 states and contributing economically to nearly every county in the nation. In California, there are approximately 14,000 beef cattle operations and 2,500 dairy farms. On January 1, 2005 there were 95.8 million cattle in the United States and in California 5.4 million head. There are 720,000 beef cows and 1.74 dairy cows in California.

Notes:

http://www.mercedsunstar.com/opinion/letters/

http://www.ashbrook.org/publicat/guest/06/kleinerman/warpowers.html
http://www.afn.org/~afn04641/thies2.htm

http://www.variety.com/ac2006_article/VR1117936467?nav=news&categoryid=1985&cs=1

Dr. Strangelove (1964)

http://www.mercedsunstar.com/movies/rating/r/story/11538092p-12273719c.html

http://www.calbeef.org/index/pdf/About%20the%20Beef%20Business.pdf.

More than a decade ago, Castle Air Force Base was closed and consigned to the absurdities of a local joint-use authority, composed of Merced County and the cities of Merced and Atwater (which adjoins the former base) and some representatives from other entities, like Rep. Gary Condit's office.

But the comment letter that forced a delay in the project approval wasn’t “based on bad information.” It was based on little or no information; and that, we suggest reluctantly, is exactly how Mr. Fowler likes it. Nevertheless, Owens and Kathleen Lopez jack-hammered the Castle walls with questions the public needs to ask regardless of the chances of getting any answers out of the Castle, Fowler, or the supervisors, who we feel sure haven’t read as much of the voluminous Castle documents as Owens has.

CASTLE REDEVELOPMENT

Bryant Owens
2683 South Plainsburg Road
Merced CA 95340-9550 (209) 769-0832

CASTLE REDEVELOPMENT

Bryant Owens
2683 South Plainsburg Road
Merced CA 95340-9550 (209) 769-0832

Monday, January 23, 2006

To:
Merced County Board of Supervisors
2222 M Street
Merced CA 95340 ` Via fax (209) 726-7977
And via email

RE: Public Hearing 1-24-06 et seq/ Establishment of Ordinance of the County of Merced approving and adopting the redevelopment Plan for the Castle Airport Aviation and Development Center Redevelopment Project

Ladies and Gentlemen:

Thank you for the opportunity of comment on, and object to this proposed ordinance.

In reviewing the Report to the Board of Supervisors produced by the consulting firm of Kayser Marsten in Oct. of 2005, many concerns became manifest to which we would like to direct your attention:

Notably the report of the county financial officer was incomplete: i.e.. The consultant was left to extrapolate tax benefits and/ or expected disbursals from and to the nine taxing agencies that have jurisdiction over the various portions of the project area.

Notwithstanding the guesswork in the consultants report to the board, what exactly prevents that information from being gathered and presented for your and our consideration in a timely fashion, and prior to making this decision?

The County is receiving a windfall from the USAF represented by the transfer of title (whether fee simple, or with restrictions) to the former Castle Air force Base to the County. According to the Redevelopment Plan the County will subsequently/simultaneously “?” transfer that same title to the Merced County Castle Airport Redevelopment Agency.

Beside the nine taxing agencies previously mentioned, what mechanism exists to spread this potential windfall economic boon around to the rest of the unincorporated areas of the County of Merced?

Why does the decision to invest housing set aside funding from this project, into areas outside the boundaries of the project area represent a benefit to those other unincorporated areas without a similar dedication of a corresponding percentage of the accruing rental/lease/sale or tax base funds gradually accruing over the life of the Castle Airport reuse project?

If low and very low income housing is to be built or fostered through Agency programs in other areas of the county how do the other blight alleviating benefits of the Castle Redevelopment Ordinance flow along with this redirection of low income housing into other areas of the county?

How will ALL of the additional infrastructure requirements necessary to support this redirected low income housing, be met or enhanced in areas outside the boundaries of the Castle Airport Redevelopment Plan?

What economic benefits /incentives does the Castle Redevelopment plan provide to offset the enhanced negative impacts on other blighted communities in the county which according to this proposed ordinance, must now absorb this proposed low and very low income housing?

What mechanism exists to more proportionately benefit the other unincorporated communities in Merced County in which blight is already endemic?

What mechanism exists to prevent that very blight from being fostered and further exploited, simply to allow the proposed economic development at the Castle Site?

Under California Community Redevelopment Law the Agency is authorized to enact tax increment financing as a possible funding scheme, and the referenced Report to the Board of Supervisors goes into great detail as to both the need for this financing scheme, as well as the relative potential for success and failure.

The Consultants Report to the Board of Supervisors of Oct 2005 is quite clear as to the crucial importance of securing an Cargo Transport Company as the anchor tenant of the Castle Reuse Plan, yet the bulk, of the proposed redevelopment activities are cosmetic in nature and seem tailored to the needs of the tenants and users of the current facilities. Why does this make sense?

In so far as the Board of Supervisors and the Members of the Redevelopment Agency are the same persons wearing different hats, what mechanism exists for public oversight with regard to the expenditure of County funds, as opposed to Agency funds in furtherance of this redevelopment?

What compels the Redevelopment Agency to be cautious with public funds if there is no enforceable indebtedness incurred by the Agency under the aegis of this ordinance? How does this plan interconnect with the existing Foreign Trade Zone?

If the Agency transfers title to portions of the project area to the County, how does the County avoid becoming liable (indebted) for Agency approved redevelopment activities in the execution of any of the improvement projects associated with this redevelopment? The public remains uncertain as to how the proposed Redevelopment Agency may incur indebtedness that is not ‘debt’ under the US or California Constitutions.

What prevents that indebtedness from becoming a liability of the County if and when (as the Agency is authorize to do) the Agency transfers a portion or portions of the redevelopment area to the County Board of Supervisors?

If that potential indebtedness does become a liability of the county at that point, at what point does the public have any say about the imposition of that additional collective tax liability and about servicing such debt?

What mechanism exists to compel the County to spread any of the potential economic benefits of the Castle Redevelopment to the other unincorporated areas of the county? Why shouldn’t areas, where the ‘residential beneficiaries’ of this proposed redevelopment are being directed, also receive a portion of the anticipated economic benefits of redevelopment?

To be more specific, and in the mode of comparing oranges with oranges, be reminded that the statistics referenced in the supporting documentation referred to Merced County’s losses, as a whole, when the US government stopped providing payroll for Castle AFB personnel and their families. Those statistics represent comparisons with the county’s then current employment statistics, available jobs, and available housing.

How do the redevelopment and the reduction of blight at Castle translate into countywide availability of jobs, when the new jobs will be concentrated within the project area and the new housing will be outside the project area?

How are other areas of the unincorporated Merced County to be protected from over-development of residential housing if the consultant-mandated Cargo Transport Facility is not realized in the end?

Beside the 10 year report required under the various sections of the California Health and Safety Code, pertaining to the housing set aside funding generated by this proposed redevelopment plan, what other ‘canaries’ (monitoring mechanisms) will assure the public that this infrastructure redevelopment plan is working financially for the county?

What mechanism ties the activities of the Merced Housing Authority to the Castle Redevelopment Agency, in terms of Merced County’s state obligation to provide low and very low income affordable housing, as required by (for example) RTIP grant funding from the state?

What is the date certain by which time an anchor tenant (described in the Report by Kayser Marsten as a Cargo Transport Company) must be contractually secured in order to assure the public that this redevelopment remains financially in the best interests of the county as a whole?

How are the planned and proposed infrastructure improvements in projects in close proximity to the Redevelopment Plan Area such as the RMP Motor Sport Park proposal, integrated with the proposed redevelopment project at points where those several project intersect, or in instances when the infrastructure in question is in common use by all county residents?

In making findings of consistency with the Housing Element of the County General Plan, what effort has been made to incorporate the statistics for housing development projects under County jurisdiction in the unincorporated areas of Merced County, to show that the county has met or exceeded its state mandated quotas for the various levels of available housing, and on which continued funding of other county revenue streams depend such as the Community Development Block Grant Program.

Have the impacts to the housing market from the County Supervisor’s prior approval of the University Community Plan, Vista del Lago, Yosemite Lake Estates, and any other similar SUDP expansions (i.e. internally inconsistent General Plan text amendments), and the Merced Housing Authority’s decision to demolish the Felix Torres Migrant Camp in Planada (also a severely blighted unincorporated community in Merced County) been incorporated into the estimations on which the report to the Board of Supervisors consultant makes its cautiously optimistic recommendations as to the probable success of this venture?

We feel that making any such findings of consistency with the County General Plan would be an abuse of your discretion in this matter and urge you to delay making such findings until such time as the county general plan is both internally consistent and up to date.

In making the determination to delay CEQA analysis of this project for 18 months the public is curious to know what the County has been doing over the last 5 years that Castle AFB has been under their jurisdiction that has prevented an environmental analysis of this project heretofore? Is there any legitimate reason for the delay? Castle AFB has been the subject of extensive environmental review as a superfund site, and the County has most certainly been involved with earlier environmental assessments of the designated areas during the existence of the Castle Joint Powers Authority.

We appreciate your consideration of these concerns and look forward to your timely written response to these and any other questions you may receive during public testimony on this matter on Jan 24th 2006, and what ever subsequent date you may consider this item.

Sincerely,

Bryant Owens and Kathleen Lopez

Planada Community Development Corporation

2683 South Plainsburg Road

Merced CA 95340 Cc: San Joaquin Raptor/Wildlife Rescue Center, Protect Our Water

Creators Syndicate
January 20, 2006

I Will Not Support Hillary Clinton for President

By Molly Ivins

AUSTIN, Texas --- I'd like to make it clear to the people who run the Democratic
Party that I will not support Hillary Clinton for president.

Enough. Enough triangulation, calculation and equivocation. Enough clever
straddling, enough not offending anyone This is not a Dick Morris election. Sen.
Clinton is apparently incapable of taking a clear stand on the war in Iraq, and
that alone is enough to disqualify her. Her failure to speak out on Terri
Schiavo, not to mention that gross pandering on flag-burning, are just
contemptible little dodges.

The recent death of Gene McCarthy reminded me of a lesson I spent a long, long
time unlearning, so now I have to re-learn it. It's about political courage and
heroes, and when a country is desperate for leadership. There are times when
regular politics will not do, and this is one of those times. There are times a
country is so tired of bull that only the truth can provide relief.

If no one in conventional-wisdom politics has the courage to speak up and say
what needs to be said, then you go out and find some obscure junior senator from
Minnesota with the guts to do it. In 1968, Gene McCarthy was the little boy who
said out loud, "Look, the emperor isn't wearing any clothes." Bobby Kennedy --
rough, tough Bobby Kennedy -- didn't do it. Just this quiet man trained by
Benedictines who liked to quote poetry.

What kind of courage does it take, for mercy's sake? The majority of the
American people (55 percent) think the war in Iraq is a mistake and that we
should get out. The majority (65 percent) of the American people want
single-payer health care and are willing to pay more taxes to get it. The
majority (86 percent) of the American people favor raising the minimum wage. The
majority of the American people (60 percent) favor repealing Bush's tax cuts, or
at least those that go only to the rich. The majority (66 percent) wants to
reduce the deficit not by cutting domestic spending, but by reducing Pentagon
spending or raising taxes.

The majority (77 percent) thinks we should do "whatever it takes" to protect the
environment. The majority (87 percent) thinks big oil companies are gouging
consumers and would support a windfall profits tax. That is the center, you
fools. WHO ARE YOU AFRAID OF?

I listen to people like Rahm Emanuel superciliously explaining elementary
politics to us clueless naifs outside the Beltway ("First, you have to win
elections"). Can't you even read the damn polls?

Here's a prize example by someone named Barry Casselman, who writes, "There is
an invisible civil war in the Democratic Party, and it is between those who are
attempting to satisfy the defeatist and pacifist left base of the party and
those who are attempting to prepare the party for successful elections in 2006
and 2008."

This supposedly pits Howard Dean, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, emboldened by "a
string of bad news from the Middle East ... into calling for premature retreat
from Iraq," versus those pragmatic folk like Steny Hoyer, Rahm Emmanuel, Hillary
Clinton, Joe Biden and Joe Lieberman.

Oh come on, people -- get a grip on the concept of leadership. Look at this war
-- from the lies that led us into it, to the lies they continue to dump on us
daily.

You sit there in Washington so frightened of the big, bad Republican machine you
have no idea what people are thinking. I'm telling you right now, Tom DeLay is
going to lose in his district. If Democrats in Washington haven't got enough
sense to OWN the issue of political reform, I give up on them entirely.

Do it all, go long, go for public campaign financing for Congress. I'm serious
as a stroke about this -- that is the only reform that will work, and you know
it, as well as everyone else who's ever studied this. Do all the goo-goo stuff
everybody has made fun of all these years: embrace redistricting reform,
electoral reform, House rules changes, the whole package. Put up, or shut up.
Own this issue, or let Jack Abramoff politics continue to run your town.

Bush, Cheney and Co. will continue to play the patriotic bully card just as long
as you let them. I've said it before: War brings out the patriotic bullies. In
World War I, they went around kicking dachshunds on the grounds that dachshunds
were "German dogs." They did not, however, go around kicking German shepherds.
The MINUTE someone impugns your patriotism for opposing this war, turn on them
like a snarling dog and explain what loving your country really means. That, or
you could just piss on them elegantly, as Rep. John Murtha did. Or eviscerate
them with wit (look up Mark Twain on the war in the Philippines). Or point out
the latest in the endless "string of bad news."

Do not sit there cowering and pretending the only way to win is as
Republican-lite. If the Washington-based party can't get up and fight, we'll
find someone who can.

The three-legged stool

Viewed from an ecological perspective, rooted in the environment of the San Joaquin Valley of California, politically affairs this week seem to be perched on a very wobbly three-legged stool.

The short, skinny leg

When (funded) “value-free facilitators” begin showing up in your community, it is probably time to count the silverware or, from an ecological perspective, inventory the environmental quality of your neighborhood. We have an area called “South” Merced, where, traditionally, minority groups have lived south of the tracks and the highway. Through the years, the city has done a pretty decent job of hustling federal funds to repair and restore old single-family houses and build some multi-family apartment complexes. The county housing authority is located there. However, the area has almost no business, at least business useful to the residents, like a decent shopping center with a supermarket. In recent months, the city has proposed the development of a specific urban development plan for the neighborhood, appointed a citizen’s advisory commission and has engaging consultants to draw up a land-use plan.

What the area needs is development that pays its way for the schools it overcrowds, a decent shopping center with a supermarket, and more employment. A dark thought is that it will the area in which the city will fulfill its low-income housing quotient required to keep its general plan correct. Several new low-income complexes have already been built and more are already in the planning pipeline.

“We’re just glad to be here to facilitate this process,” said the value-free facilitator with a Crash Davis (“Bull Durham”) grasp of cliché, before a group of about 40 at a meeting two weeks ago. A number in the audience were government officials, including three city council members (including the mayor) and two supervisors. A city planner led a significant portion of the meeting.

An elderly resident complained about the governing vocabulary. “My tax bill doesn’t tell me I live in North or South Merced,” she said. “It says Merced. All we want is to have the same facilities throughout Merced.” She described 24 empty streetlights on her street. Later, an officious city councilman told the group those streetlights were in the county, not the city, so the city wasn’t responsible.

“There is something ignorant about this whole thing,” the resident commented. “Let’s use our intelligence and forget this North/South Merced.”

The value-free facilitator and the city planner went right on calling it South Merced, referring to my neighborhood as “Middle Merced.” North Merced is where the growth, induced by the arrival of UC Merced, is rapidly doubling the size of the city.

One of the neighborhood’s present dilemmas is what to do with Carl Pollard, an African-American resident of the neighborhood who, after losing six campaigns for the city council, was recently appointed to it. Less than a month after the appointment, he was charged with driving a car without insurance, with an open container of alcohol and some amount of marijuana in it. He has been fired from his realtor job. If convicted, presumably he would lose his council seat. Pollard led an invocation at the beginning of the meeting.

There are better people than Pollard, a political accident that has happened, trying to work for a decent level of services (at least one supermarket south of the tracks, for example), as development that does not pay its way rages to the north and more “low-income” housing development – horribly impacting schools in the south – is planned for the neighborhood. Perhaps, if they organize themselves, beginning by believing almost nothing of what city and county officials tell them, they will have a prayer the Rev. Pollard shall not lead.

“Value-free community organizing” facilitated from the top down by University of California personnel is illusory. What has worked in a modest way in the neighborhood has been volunteer crime watches that have existed for years. What will make things more miserable is crowding in more low-income residents to satisfy regional low-income housing mandates into an area with a chronically low level of services and usable commercial enterprises.

The fat, middle leg

A year ago, the Sacramento Bee did a series of articles exposing a classic situation of corporate power in diary processing. Hilmar Cheese had been polluting surface and groundwater near its site for years. The San Joaquin Regional Water Quality Control Board had been effectively bought off by the corporation. Publicly embarrassed, the board levied a $4-million fine against Hilmar.

After the state Water Resources Board in November refused Hilmar Cheese’s proposal to pay a fraction of the fine the regional water quality board had levied against it for polluting its area with huge quantities of wastewater, the federal EPA approved a test deep-injection well this week. Presumably, if the engineers on this project are more skillful than on the plant’s last techno-fix, the test will be successful, paving the way for injection of Hilmar Cheese’s 2-to-3 million gallons a day of waste water more than 3,000 feet below the Valley surface.

Meanwhile Hilmar’s corporate lawyers and water board lawyers continue to negotiate a settlement of the fine. The board should hear a new proposal by March, Catherine George, water board attorney, said today.

Vance Kennedy, a retired hydrologist from Modesto, told me yesterday it was as “done deal:” EPA has the power to override the state water board’s decision, on the grounds that deep injection is out of the state board’s jurisdiction over surface and ground water.” George confirmed Kennedy’s report.

“Ground water” refers to the aquifers several hundred feet down from which well water is drawn for domestic and agricultural use.

Kennedy said the EPA is using the analogy of water injection into oil and gas wells to force the products to the surface from beneath impenetrable layers. Hilmar, he said, is supposed to have a 100-foot thick layer of shale deep down, presumably impermeable.

He repeated the point he made in several hearings on the project: that water is incompressible and will move laterally, for miles, until it begins to push salty water up into groundwater aquifers lying above “impenetrable” layers.

“The sad thing is that salty water elsewhere may not show up for years or decades,” he said. He added it might not ever be possible to trace salt-water intrusion into wells back to the lateral pressure caused by Hilmar’s deep injection system.

Worse, Kennedy said, it’s a precedent for the San Joaquin Valley. Every wastewater facility from Redding to Bakersfield will be looking at this technology. EPA approved a number of wastewater deep-injection wells in Florida, providing another decade of rapid growth. The Sierra Club sued in February 2005, citing massive ecological damage. Kennedy said he’d been told Miami effluent has been traced as far away as Bermuda.

This middle leg is overweening corporate power to dominate surrounding communities and destroy their environments. Merced, the second largest dairy county in the nation, is afflicted with Big Dairy, an extremely powerful lobby from county to country devoted to the propositions: Bigger and More. The best comment I’ve heard on the economic philosophy of Big Dairy was from a small dairyman who said: when someday milk is so over-produced it isn’t worth a penny, some dairyman will say it’s a good day to buy cows.

The Hilmar Cheese deal reveals a tendency in our economy toward outright corporate ownership of government. In the lexicon of American politics exists the phrase, which covers the situation so well a book about the political career of a former Merced congressman, Tony Coelho, is titled, “Honest Graft.”

This sort of corruption tends to spiral out of control, as in the present case of the Abramoff affair. Some economists argue that eventually, the power of special interests devours the nation’s substance for the gains of very few, if gigantic firms. In the case of US transnational corporations, the approach has been to cause deep structural unemployment of domestic industrial workers and devour other nations’ substance at very low wages. The process is well advanced in the US, particularly in California, where the state budget is beginning to resemble the budget of Third World nations like Argentina and Chile, raped by utility and development corporations and thrown into the tender claws of Wall Street for the foreseeable future.

The impact of the EPA decision may go far beyond Hilmar.

The housing development industry is a radical example of the domination of sheer financial interest over the construction of subdivisions containing rows of three or four “housing products.” Everything about the structure of this “industry,” from the elaborate system of subcontracting to the pittance the state requires it pay for the schools it overcrowds, is designed to protect the developer investor from any public liability. In employs mobs of illegal aliens, heretofore always called “unskilled farmworkers,” to do highly skilled construction work for well below union wages. It has bought wholesale political and legal attacks on state and federal environmental law. It is pricing out farmers on agricultural land while making large rural landowners who sell for development rich. Development in states like California and Florida has made a mockery of any concept of urban planning.

If the deep-injection fix takes off in the Central Valley, residents and farmers will be the losers but the corporations will be the winners in the near term, which is their only time frame. Meanwhile, laws that haven’t already been written will be written to limit or exempt them from liability. But, one might object, wastewater facilities likely to jump on this fix are public entities. They are public entities driven every step of the way into surface and groundwater pollution by private development corporations. The system to protect the genuinely public interest is broken, corrupted, for sale, less and less often these days with even a pretence of being other than for sale. Growing numbers of rightwing politicians aggressively promote the ideology that public policy ought to be for sale to the highest bidder. Up and down the ranks of the Republican Party, this is considered to be “the hard, right decision.”

The local glaring, daily example is the loss of rights of existing residents of a region to the same quality of life they had before a UC campus was located in their county and development took off, running roughshod over law, regulation and resources. Against the local land-use authorities’ power to reject projects under the California Environmental Quality Act is the constant drum of developer propaganda: “Growth is inevitable.” You hear it on street corners out of the mouths of people who were once citizens but now passively accept the role of being mere subjects of alien, hostile government. It makes you wonder what else could have been done with all the money it took to convince Californians of this suicidal proposition that has, in 30 years, distorted this state out of all self-recognition, that has replaced, for private gain, a state composed of cities, towns, communities with abundant natural resources and rural economies of hope, with a slurbocracy of mere subjects.

Hilmar Cheese, “largest cheese plant in the world,” is using demonstrably bad Florida technology because its industry largely owns its regulators. Not that the EPA needed much encouragement to worsen the environment of the San Joaquin Valley. Its present administrator started his scientific career at Litton Bionetics, one of the nation’s leading developers of chemical and biological weapons: he is the perfect Bush fox for the EPA henhouse.

But, in our terribly contemporary political culture here in the 18th Congressional District, in Rep. Dennis Cardoza, Shrimp Slayer-Merced, we have the epitome of the emerging one-party state, under the relentless pressure of special interest corruption. Cardoza is referred to locally simply as the south end of O Pomboza, the northern end being Rep. RichPAC Pombo, Buffalo Slayer-Tracy. Pombo is an exemplary modern American fascist, complete with his corruption problems linked to Abramoff, who he denies knowing, and his strong penchant for breaking laws he can’t change, like the Endangered Species Act.

The EPA decision leaves people to believe – and they are definitely meant to believe – they are powerless to stop this level of pollution, corporate irresponsibility and corruption, because the corporations, the Pomboza and the regulating agencies don’t give a damn about the people and believe they exist to do the bidding of the least responsible whim of the corporations who effectively own their own regulating agencies. Some political theorists call this form of government corporatist and describe it as a precursor to fascism. We will content ourselves with the homey old American expression, “honest graft,” well established in government during the McKinley administration, apparently the guide to all domestic politics in the W. administration.

There are residual American political tactics against such corruption. People concerned about this well and its implications for the future of groundwater in the Central Valley ought to consider starting a national boycott against Hilmar Cheese products. A boycott has the old-fashioned charm of asserting the dignity of human communities in the face of inhuman corporate power. People might find it a refreshing diversion from being oppressed and depressed by decisions affecting their lives over which they have no control.

The long, weird leg

A preface is required to begin to describe the last leg of the current stool. I’ve chosen a passage from Douglas Dowd’s book on Thorstein Veblen, an American economist who wrote this during the McKinley administration, at the turn of the 20th century:

“Business interests urge an aggressive national policy and businessmen direct it. Such a policy is warlike as well as patriotic. The direct cultural value of a warlike business policy is unequivocal. It makes for a conservative animus on the part of the populace. During war time, and within the military organization at all times, under martial law, civil rights are in abeyance; and the more warfare and armament the more abeyance … a military organization is a servile organization. Insubordination is the deadly sin. (The Theory of Business Enterprise, Thorstein Veblen, 1904, p. 391)

What is true of those directly involved in the military applies also to the civilian population in significant degree:

“They learn to think in warlike terms of rank, authority, and subordination, and so grow progressively more patient of encroachments upon their civil rights … At the same stroke they (patriotic ideals) direct the popular interest to other, nobler institutionally less hazardous matters than the unequal distribution of wealth or of creature comfort. (Ibid. p. 393)

But for those who might see this as a triumph of business enterprise over the threat of social change led by workers, it is turned by Veblen into a hollow triumph. For, if the discipline and values of the warlike and patriotic society may “correct” the institutionally disintegrative trend of the machine process, it is just as probable that, for the same reasons there would be “a rehabilitation of the ancient patriotic animosity and dynastic loyalty, to the relative neglect of business interests. This may easily be carried so far as to sacrifice the profits of the businessman to the exigencies of the higher politics (Ibid. 395).

Thus, Veblen sees the system of business enterprise caught in a terrible historical dilemma: If, to offset the institutional and threatening imperative of industrialism, it encourages, or acquiesces in, developments that will cause social unrest to “sink in the broad sands of patriotism,” it is faced with the equal probability that what is quicksand for one will sooner or later pull down the other.

The last paragraph of the Theory might be Veblen’s epitaph for the system of business enterprise:

“It seems possible to say this much, that the full domination of business enterprise is necessarily a transitory dominion. It stands to lose in the end whether the one or the other of the two divergent cultural tendencies wins, because it is incompatible with the ascendancy of either. (Ibid. p. 400)

(Thus, in the late 1930s, German industrialists who had supported Nazism as a “corrective discipline” for the political and economic troubles of the early 1930’s found themselves increasingly harassed by regulation, taxation, and general interference in their affairs by Nazi Party and Wehrmacht functionaries.) – Thorstein Veblen, by Douglas Dowd, 1964, pp. 52-53.

In our suddenly radical contemporary experience in Merced, we now host UC, a university whose two national laboratories of mass destruction are now competing for the design award for new nuclear weapons. Therefore, we must ask, for what end, the Cold War having ended some years ago? Our current, neo-McKinley imperial administration cum dynastic, monarchal pretensions, aims at nothing less than world domination. Like the Nazis, the neocons didn’t come to power just to regulate, tax and interfere with business. They came with a plan for world domination. Read all about it at the Project for the New American Century (http://www.newamericancentury.org).

The details of the vision really don’t matter nearly as much as the absurd fact of the vision itself “for the spread of American ideals.” For the neocons, the vision is the only fact that matters. One observes the tendency daily in the president. In fact, as opposed to vision, America cannot even fight successfully in two war theaters, let alone the many anticipated by the PNAC. And their he-man, Ariel Sharon, is in a coma.

On the other hand, they have our UC to build new nuclear weapons.

The fat leg should be called by its name: totalitarian ambition. It has not happened yet. The Alito confirmation hearing was held up for a week. Investigations of scandals mount. The drums for impeachment tap, if inaudibly to the ears of American subjects. However, “yet” is a highly ambiguous term in such a moment, because, although we are aware of the velocity of change, we aren’t able to measure it accurately, in large part for lack of honest media. The totalitarian ambition has been an old dream of American industrialists and financiers, evident to Veblen in 1904, far more overt before the two world wars, and the Bush family has been heavily involved in it since before WWI.

The only question of any importance today is whether the American people have the intelligence to see it and the energy left, in this rapidly decaying economy, to resist it, particularly without an effective opposition political party. Appeals to the ideals of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights fall on largely deaf ears. The fundamental right for which American subjects of the British crown fought was the right of political participation. After a century of fraudulent commercial advertising and government propaganda, is there enough citizenship left in the subject population to resist the neocon plan to make the Mideast safe for Israel, US oil companies, conduct an eternal Indian War against Arabs, and subject the US population to enough terror so that it doesn’t notice the absurdity of the neocon vision and the destruction of both the domestic economy and its environment.

The question is important, however, as a preliminary to the larger, more dangerous problem of how we confront global warming and lesser forms of environmental destruction. We haven’t a prayer of avoiding the global tipping point without strong state regulation of corporate environmental destruction. It also leads one to wonder just how many UC-built nuclear bomb blasts it would take to tip the planet over the edge. It is hard to imagine anything more destructive to the environment than a nuclear bomb. But, UC Merced is an environmentally conscious campus.

And they ask why the public mind is boggled so often these days.

Veblen’s prognosis for American business is a useful anchor:

“It seems possible to say this much, that the full domination of business enterprise is necessarily a transitory dominion. It stands to lose in the end whether the one or the other of the two divergent cultural tendencies wins, because it is incompatible with the ascendancy of either.” (Ibid. p. 400)

“Full domination” has been achieved all too successfully. The rule of law is rapidly crumbling before this full domination. Law was the arena in which the divergent tendencies met and argued. Without law effectively protecting the rights of citizens, the United States of America ceases to be itself and the voice of reason is drowned by the screaming antinomy between privileged and desperate subjects in a rapidly deteriorating environment. The reasonable solution would appear to be something less than “full domination of business enterprise,” beginning with regulatory agencies that are permitted to perform their necessary public function, uninfluenced by either political pressure or foxes in henhouses. The political irony is that business enterprise would have to call for a rapid, perhaps radical reduction of its domination in order to save the system of government that nurtured its rise to power. That would require an act of reason probably beyond the capacity of corporate attitudes today and equally beyond the capacities of its bought and sold political class. The real road to Hell has been paved with done deals between special interests and government.

But that’s just how things look from the middle of the San Joaquin Valley in California.

Bill Hatch

Notes:

Hannah Arendt: Origins of Totalitarianism, On Revolution

Douglas Dowd: Thorstein Veblen

Hilmar Cheese Permitted to Drill Test Well
http://www.mercedsunstar.com/local/story/11676192p-12403995c.html

Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations

Brooks Jackson, Honest Graft: Big Money and the American Political Process

Upgrades planned for U.S. nuclear stockpile. Agency leader expects significant warhead redesigns...James Sterngold
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/01/15/MNGTTGNL5P1.DTL&type=printable

Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush

Central Valley and Foothills cattlemen, conservationists, and state and federal resource agency officials held a historic summit Jan. 11 in Sacramento. The all-day conference was called to develop a broad action plan to implement the California Rangeland Conservation Coalition Resolution, a statement of joint goals reached last year.

"Today we have embarked upon a historic partnership to preserve and enhance California's working landscapes," said California Cattlemen's Association President Mark Nelson. "The California Rangeland Resolution serves as the foundation of an extraordinary partnership between ranchers, environmentalists and governmental agencies ... Our CCA members have a unique standing with respect to the conservation of our state's rangelands, given that ranchers own and/or manage over 30 million acres in California. Given the sheer volume of property managed by ranchers, and the well-documented preference by imperiled species for these properties, it is clear that meaningful species recovery or conservation efforts require the voluntary cooperation of landowners. Put another way, the protection of our state's most valuable natural resources is highly dependent on working partnerships between conservation interests and landowners."

John Hopkins, director of Institute for Ecological Health, said, "The California Rangeland Conservation Coalition is an exciting and important new venture. The conservation organizations that are signatories to the Coalition's Resolution are very pleased to be working closely with agricultural organizations and a wide array of state and federal agencies in crafting and implementing the important goals of the Resolution.

"Private owned grasslands and oak woodlands around the Central Valley and its surrounding foothills support a stunning variety and abundance of native wildlife and plants. Maintaining the private ranches and their economic viability is essential for the conservation of these critically important natural habitats and their native species.

"This Coalition provides a major opportunity to achieve widespread conservation of rangeland, to aid stewardship and help maintain ranching as a viable way of life. These are steps that are necessary to maintain the many large tracts of grasslands and oak woodlands that are vital to the future of our state's wildlife. For example, vernal pool grasslands possess a rich array of endangered and threatened animals and plants that are found nowhere else in the world. The grasslands are home to the highest diversity and density of wintering birds of prey in North America. Oak woodlands are essential for hundreds of vertebrate species."

Hopkins added that, "Two key areas for future action are the 2007 federal Farm Bill and possibilities for additional funds for rangeland conservation in state bond measures." He said that the CCA and the state Farm Bureau have good relations with members of the House and Senate agriculture committees, while environmentalists have good relations with more urban members of Congress. The Coalition, putting "teams of cowboys and environmentalists in Congressional and legislative offices is very politically effective, he said. "Jaws can drop."

Paul Henson, assistant regional director of the California-Nevada US Fish and Wildlife Service office, pledged to add staff to help qualify ranchers for safe harbor agreements. In these agreements, developed in 1999, the Service will issue a permit to ranches to "enhance the propagation or survival" of an endangered or threatened species, once the Service is satisfied that actions undertaken by the landowner produce a "net conservation benefit" to the species.

Bill Chrisman, Director of the state Department of Resources, promised the members of the Coalition that the state would work on ways to streamline environmental regulations to provide certainty in a timely manner, possibly involving changes to the California
Environmental Quality Act.

Ryan Broderick, director of the state Department of Fish and Game, told the Coalition that the large blocks of land held by Valley and Foothills ranchers are "the key" to conservation of endangered and threatened species of animals and plants. In response to a question from Dan Macon, director of the Nevada County Land Trust, Broderick agreed that the future will see more public/private partnerships for the effective management of publicly held land. The CDFG now has tenant farming agreements that are both economical and good stewardship of the land. "The Department of Fish and Game does a lot of farming,” Broderick added.

California benefits less relative to its size and the value of its agricultural output from the federal Farm Bill than the Midwestern grain states do, said Michael Bean, attorney and chair of the Wildlife program for Environmental Defense, a national environmental advocacy organization. California ranchers benefit even less. The Coalition of California ranchers and environmentalists working together, presenting a unified voice before Congress, could yield better federal funding for California ranching.

Henson, (USFWS) added that the resource agencies agree that rangelands need to stay in ranching and that they need to help ranchers stay on the land by "removing regulatory disincentives and getting more funding for conservation easements."

"We have come together as one and must continue to strengthen our bond, CCA President Nelson concluded his address. "We must not let the opportunities presented by this partnership pass us by, and we look forward to transforming the targets defined earlier today into real-world, on-the-ground successes."

The California Rangeland Conservation Coalition came to life through the following resolution:

The California Rangeland Resolution

The undersigned recognize the critical importance of California’s privately owned rangelands, particularly that significant portion that encircles the Central Valley and includes the adjacent grasslands and oak woodlands, including the Sierra foothills and the interior coast ranges. These lands support important ecosystems and are the foundation for the ranching industry that owns them.

WHEREAS, these rangelands include a rich and varied landscape of grasslands, oak woodlands, vernal pools, riparian areas and wetlands, which support numerous imperiled species, many native plants once common in the Central Valley, and are home to the highest diversity and density of wintering raptors anywhere in North America;

WHEREAS, these rangelands are often located in California’s fastest-growing counties and are at significant risk of conversion to development and other uses;

WHEREAS, these rangelands, and the species that rely on these habitats, largely persist today due to the positive and experienced grazing and other land stewardship practices of the ranchers that have owned and managed these lands and are committed to a healthy future for their working landscapes;

WHEREAS, these rangelands are a critical foundation of the economic and social fabric of California’s ranching industry and rural communities, and will only continue to provide this important working landscape for California’s plants, fish and wildlife if private rangelands remain in ranching;

THEREFORE, we declare that it is our goal to collaboratively work together to protect and enhance the rangeland landscape that encircles California’s Central Valley and includes adjacent grasslands and oak woodlands by:

Keeping common species common on private working landscapes;

Working to recover imperiled species and enhancing habitat on rangelands while seeking to minimize regulations on private lands and streamline processes;

Supporting the long-term viability of the ranching industry and its culture by providing economic, social and other incentives and by reducing burdens to proactive stewardship on private ranchlands;

Increasing private, state and federal funding, technical expertise and other assistance to continue and expand the ranching community’s beneficial land stewardship practices that benefit sensitive species and are fully compatible with normal ranching practices;

Encouraging voluntary, collaborative and locally-led conservation that has proven to be very effective in maintaining and enhancing working landscapes;

Educating the public about the benefits of grazing and ranching in these rangelands.

Current signers of the California Rangeland Resolution include the following:

Alameda County RCD

Alameda County Board of Supervisors

American Land Conservancy

California Cattlemen’s Association

California Resources Agency

California Wildlife Foundation

Central Valley Land Trust Council

Bureau Land Management

Defenders of Wildlife

Butte Environmental Council

Environmental Defense

California Audubon Society

Institute for Ecological Health

California Cattlemen’s Association

Natural Resources Conservation Service

California Dept of Fish and Game

San Joaquin Raptor/Wildlife Rescue Center

California Dept of Food and Ag

San Joaquin Valley Conservancy

California Farm Bureau Federation

Sierra Foothills Audubon Society

California Native Grasslands Association

The Nature Conservancy

California Native Plant Society

Trust for Public Land

California Oak Foundation

US Fish and Wildlife Service

California Rangeland Trust

US Forest Service

California Resource Conservation Districts

VernalPools.org

Wildlife Conservation Board

For your entertainment only!

The dull-witted boy’s mother came home one day and opened her credit card bill, never a pleasant chore after Christmas, especially since she was unemployed at the time. Looking down the list of her mounting debts she spied an unexpected item: Danny@jahbook.com, for $500.

“What is a jahbook? she asked. What is jah?” she asked. “Who is Danny and why did I pay him $500?”

The dull-witted boy played dumb, furiously working his yo-yo, and quit the premises abruptly to seek the advice of his friend and fellow gambling freak, Li’l Hector Cienfuegos.

“What do I do now?” he asked Hector.

“First, what did you do then?” Hector asked.

“I bet one of those drivers – Biffle or Martin or Stewart – to win. The odds were fantastic,” the dull-witted boy said.

“So, you wouldn’t listen, right?”

“Listen to what?”

“What I told you. You can bet to win in horseracing, but you bet the head-to-heads in stockcar racing. You bet Biffle against Stewart, Stewart against Martin. You never get suckered into betting to win. The odds are long for a reason.”

“Oh, yeah, I forgot that. So now this Danny from Jahbook is going to break my mother’s legs?”

“Why? Danny already has her money. Why did you use your mother’s credit card, anyway?”

“Do I have a credit card?”

“You should have asked me for one of mine,” said Hector, a third grader with half a dozen credit cards. “Not that I would have loaned it to you on a bet to win in a stockcar race,” he added.

The dull-witted boy pondered. The real answer was that he was tired of always getting upstaged by a third-grader. It wasn’t that he didn’t like and admire Li’l Hector, his neighbor and best friend, but a man in the sixth grade had to step out on his own.

“I would have, but you know, the newspapers all say that stockcar racing is a family sport, so I thought I’d win one for mom, since she ain’t working right now. She’s real excited about that Atwater track because she thinks she can get part-time work there.”

“Isn’t working,” Hector said. “Gambling is a grammatical endeavor. So, now you owe your mother $500 plus the credit card vig, of what – 18 percent?”

“Maybe I don’t have to tell her?” the dull-witted boy said, weakly.

“Pathetic!” Hector said. “Gambler always pays his debts. It’s the code.”

“But how?”

“Well, first you tell your mother. If you’d just listened to me, you’d have made some money for her, like I do for my mother – by betting the head-to-heads. Then you go to your Uncle Henry and maybe he can find you a job after school.”

“You what?” his mother said, when the dull-witted boy, Hector at his side, spilled the beans and came clean on the Jahbook deal. “You gambled on my credit card? Why? What possessed you? Where did you get the idea?”

“Well, mom, Hector and I have been experimenting a little on the computer, with poker, bingo and stuff,” the dull-witted boy lied. “Paid for most of your Christmas presents,” he added, hopefully. “I bought a new carburetor for Uncle Henry’s pickup,” he said defiantly. “I was making me some money,” he said ungrammatically.

Hector winced.

The dull-witted boy’s mother groaned.

“I did it for my family!” the dull-witted boy yelled. “They say stockcar racing is a family sport. So I bet it. Turns out if you lose, it ain’t so family-friendly.”

“What the hell?” his mother said, grabbing the phone and dialing furiously. “Henry, you get yourself over here immediately and I don’t mean tomorrow,” she yelled in the phone.

Purring smoothly thanks to better carburetion, the genuine ’56 Chevy pickup coasted to the curb of the disturbed household, and Uncle Henry arrived.

“What’s the rumpus?” he inquired.

He got an earful from his sister. His nephew hung his head.

“Ah,” he said, when the outraged mom fell silent. “Hmmm. NASCAR? They bet that? I’m out of touch with reality, evidently, since I cleaned up.”

“Henry, right now I do not give a whatever for your holy cleanup and newly found righteousness, etcetera,” the dull-witted boy’s mother said. “This one,” she said indicated her son, “is screwed up. He is claiming it is OK to steal my credit card number and gamble with some Jamaica bookie online on stockcar racing because this Riverside Motorsports outfit keeps telling the newspaper stockcar racing is about family values – in his case the value of my credit. What it is is embezzlement.”

“Well, let’s march him down to the station and get him arrested,” Henry said.

“I’m thinking about it,” she said.

“I could probably get him a job up the crik long enough so he could pay it back,” Henry suggested.

“Right!” the mother exploded. “From the frying pan into the fire. Doing what, exactly?”

“Well, since the boy’s chosen a path of crime, and you need the money, does it make any difference?” Henry asked.

“Stockcar racing is s’posed to be about family values!” the dull-witted boy moaned.

“That does it!” his mother said. “Take this criminal away!”

In the pickup, Henry thought about it, glancing at the morose, defiant nephew of his, clearly taking the wrong path in life. He thought maybe the pastor should be consulted before going up the crik into the world of alternative economic enterprise.

Pastor Nasrudin was sitting in the cross-legged position, communing with his brother Achmed back in the ‘stans, when they arrived and knocked at his door. He and Achmed had been discussed how their beauteous niece, Jasmina, resented wearing the burka, concealing her sizzling lips. “Are the old ways the best ways?” Achmed was asking. “Who knows, these days?” Nasrudin answered. “She could get her masters here at Stan State, I guess. Marry an almond grower. She wouldn’t have to wear the burka, anyway.”
“I’ll think about it,” Achmed said, as Henry’s knock on the door interrupted the telepathic communication. “Got to go,” Nasrudin said, “my flock calls.”

The moral dilemma presented, the pastor considered his response. “Hmmm.”

The minutes stepped slowly by in the silence.

“Hmmm,” Nasrudin finally said. “Betting on automobiles?”

“Stockcars,” the dull-witted boy replied.

“Cars?” the pastor said, incredulously. “That’s absurd. One does not even bet on camels, my son. Not that some don’t, you understand – and they can be forgiven for not knowing better – but really, child, one does not bet on either camels or cars. It is ridiculous.

“One bets on horses. Mankind has always bet on horses. What – pray tell – are the bloodlines of an automobile? How on earth could you handicap a machine? How many stockcars, as you call them, sire stockcar foals in a breeding season?

“No, child, you are wandering in darkness.”

Turning to Henry, Nasrudin said, “I will take him at $5 an hour to clean up around the church.”

“The mother might think that’s a little slow. Up the crik they pay top wages, you know.”

“Right,” the pastor said sternly, “young, nimble fingers, pick-pick-pick. Nothing good to learn there. No. I will buy the boy’s debt and he will learn, here.”

Nasrudin counted out the money from his wallet, gave it to Henry, turned to the dull-witted boy and said, “There is a broom. Sweep.”

And so the dull-witted boy was saved from a life of crime. After the third after-school session sweeping the grounds of the church, he returned the broom to its corner in the pastor’s office and said goodnight.

“Come here,” the pastor, reading a newspaper, said from his desk.

The boy approached.

“Now, boy, this is the Racing Form. Start with the claiming races. If the horse finished in the money in its last three starts, if it’s racing every 10 days, and it’s carrying top weight, consider it, after checking its trainer. Crosscheck here with the trainers’ standings. Bet the trainer! Never bet a filly to beat a colt! Top weight, no ties! Beware of a dark horse some great trainer is bringing in below class for an easy win! Was the horse claimed in after the last race? Can it go the distance? Beware of drops and rises in class! Here’s the studbook. I expect a full report next week on the first 50 pages.”

Six months later, Li’l Hector was amazed as the dull-witted boy explained the intricate calculations behind betting a trifecta. Hector swore off betting NASCAR head-to-heads that very day, and when the dull-witted boy finished paying off his debt, Hector took the broom, still warm from the other boy’s hands, and began sweeping.

“But you don’t owe me anything,” Nasrudin said.

“I want to study with a master,” Hector replied.

“Ah,” the pastor said. “In that case, there is the studbook. Memorize.”

It seemed to begin so auspiciously. UC presented us with a builder of educational bridges, here in the Valley, a man who came talking about a "balance between excellence and equity." We were dazzled, as we were meant to be.

Stanford Professor Kenji Hakuta Named as Dean of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts at UC

Merced
May 13, 2003

MERCED, CA. --- Kenji Hakuta, Ph.D., is an experimental psychologist by training, a teacher and researcher by profession, and a builder of bridges by nature. He will bring this passion for building bridges to educational excellence, opportunity and enlightenment to the University of California, Merced as the newly named founding Dean of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts...

Hakuta is best known for his research on the psychology of bilingualism and second language learning, as well as for his work in education policy and equal educational access for minority students...

"At UC Merced, I will be busy hiring and developing the academic program, but the precious time that I have for research will be trained on improving access to higher education," Hakuta said. "I look forward to partnering with K-12 educational institutions to increase regional student access to the University of California and developing methods to more extensively track progress toward improvement. Fortunately, there is great staff in student outreach already in place at UC Merced, and my goal is to give that effort as much research backing as possible..."

Hakuta is particularly excited about applying knowledge he has acquired from the field of education toward building the liberal arts component of the campus. He has a clear vision for the academic foundation he hopes to help create: an educational environment that fosters critical and reflective reading, persuasive and analytic writing, and effective and responsible leadership.

"I feel it is important to achieve a balance between excellence and equity," Hakuta said. "As a new campus, there also is the really interesting challenge of creating the kind of culture where teaching has a shared priority with research. We want to recruit faculty who have spectacular research programs, but who also see themselves as teachers. That kind of supportive teaching environment is especially vital given UC Merced's special mission to serve students of the Central Valley, many of whom may be the first in their families to attend a university, along with students from the balance of California."

As with the mix of students, Hakuta aspires to attract a mix of faculty, including some with local connections. Another personal priority is hire faculty members whose interests cut across divisions of academic discipline and who are committed to increasing educational access and, more broadly, to regional development such as the environment and the economy. He is intrigued by the opportunity to contribute to the World Cultures Institute, one of UC Merced's two signature research institutes. Looking at the institute as a means to facilitate cultural and linguistic understanding through scholarship and internship programs, he points to the learning opportunities that arise when connections are made between the cultures and languages at the local scale with cultures and languages at the global scale...

So went the UC Merced bobcatflak campaign around the arrival of Dr. Hakuta at UC Merced in the spring of 2003. Last week UC Merced announced he would leave in July 2006.

He said he had considered the move for the past two months, but new job opportunities leading research teams at two California universities would allow him to live closer to his aging mother in the Bay Area.

"There's a lot of things I want to get done," Hakuta said. "We figured the campus is open now, and this is a pretty good time to make the move."

One job option is at a UC campus and the other is at a private university, but he would not say which one he is interested in, because those job searches are still ongoing. His decision should come in February, he said.

Hakuta is the primary caretaker for his mother, who lives in Woodside, so he wants to live in closer proximity as her needs increase.

He was also itching to get back to conducting research in his scholarly work, which emphasizes the psychology of bilingualism and second language acquisition.

"Some of my friends in the field kept saying they missed me, my research," Hakuta said. "I felt guilty to not be training some of these faculty members..."

A research university in the Central Valley would be a fertile ground for bilingual research projects, but the life of an administrator leaves little time for direct contact with research...

Beyond his leadership role as one of three founding deans, Hakuta has made contributions to creating a campus culture that values academic excellence and promotes community interaction, said David Ashley, UC Merced executive vice chancellor and provost...

Regionally, Hakuta has been actively engaged in building connections with the Great Valley Center, where he also serves on the Board of Directors. The non-profit think tank recently entered into a formal partnership with UC Merced.

He said he would continue to serve on the board as long as the Great Valley Center wants him there. He and his wife, Nancy Goodban, will continue to be advocates for the region.

"The Central Valley is something that we'll always carry with us," Hakuta said. "The future of California depends on how successfully the Central Valley transforms itself..."

In the meantime, Hakuta said he still has to lead his school in searches for 10 new faculty members, fundraising and helping current faculty get research funding. But establishing the UC Merced Child Development Center is a project that is very close to his heart.

The childcare center is expected to serve 150 children up to 5 years old, and will include an infant care unit. Officials are aiming to open the campus center in early 2008.

He said he would help the chancellor in the search for a successor, and announcing his departure in January will allow the university to make a smooth transition.

There's no prescription for the perfect leader, he said, but maintaining a Valley focus should be a major focal point for the new dean.

It’s good to know that Hakuta and his wife, who seems to have founded a group called Valley Hopefuls, will continue to advocate for the region from back in the old Bay Area. We got the impression, from more than one Hakuta public appearance, that UC was finally going to explain us Valley people to ourselves and to the rest of the world. Why are we so poor, for example.

But these were the naive speculations of the untutored masses. Instead of a live dean of social science, arts and humanities, we now have a partnership between UC Merced and the Great Valley Center. UC Merced and the recipients of its "outreach" have been saved from intellectual ferment for as long as the grants hold out.

A man, two of whose favorite authors are Gabriel Garcia-Marquez and Noam Chomsky, should be missed out at the former municipal golf course. But who, in our humble Macondo, could tell what goes on out there? We are, after all, or were, the objects of research, not its subjects. The objects of UC research are, by definition, incapable of speculation. This explains why whatever UC says to us sounds like flak, and whatever we say to UC sounds like pure cafone.

We were interested in the high praise given Hakuta for a

clear vision for the academic foundation he hopes to help create: an educational environment that fosters critical and reflective reading, persuasive and analytic writing, and effective and responsible leadership.

People have come to the Valley and stayed their whole lives with a vision less clear and grand than that. Here we thought leadership was at least as much about what the leader did as what he said, except that there shouldn’t be too much difference between the two. But, again, you see, we just lack the culture. What sort of example did Hakuta set for the students and faculty, we ask, rudely.

Sal, si puedes? (Get out if you can?)

It is not for us to judge the ways of UC professors or even to attempt to interpret them from the dubious sources broadcasting the rumor of Hakuta's departure. We don't possess the culture to understand. Possibly, it is a question of options.

But, stumbling through the Internet in our crude auto-didactic way, we did learn that UC Merced just hired another professor.

Renowned Berkeley Physicist Raymond Chiao to Join UC Merced Faculty

December 14, 2005

In a major recruiting triumph for the University of California, Merced, Professor Raymond Chiao of the UC Berkeley Physics Department has accepted a joint faculty appointment in the fledgling university's schools of Natural Science and Engineering. He plans to pursue a new line of research in gravitational radiation when he assumes his new post.

"Professor Chiao's expertise and experience as a researcher and teacher will be enormous assets," said Dean Maria Pallavicini of the UC Merced School of Natural Sciences.

"Faculty members and students will benefit from his insight and example, and his high-level research is going to have a major impact on the physical sciences and engineering academic programs. It's an honor for UC Merced that he has decided to join us."

"The potential for engineered applications based on Professor Chiao's scientific research is tremendous," said Dean Jeff Wright of the School of Engineering. "We're extremely pleased that he will be part of UC Merced's Energy Institute, where we are already working on solar energy solutions that use advanced optics. His work will simultaneously fit our mission and expand our capabilities ..."

Clearly, Chiao is a man who deals with immutable facts of nature, not the ephemeria of social life and living languages. Here's solid man, who can produce a win-win public/private partnership to capture earth radiation, just like UC captured cow farts.

Hakuta’s departing insight, with its theme of "balance," suggests prolonged, unhealthy exposure to Rep. Dennis Cardoza, Shrimp Slayer-Merced and the Great Valley Center leaders of "smart growth."

"There needs to be a balance between the regional and national aspect of this university. It can't just be a UC campus that happens to be in the Valley."

Thoughts like that could end up costing people money, if UC administrators don't remain diligent in their sustained efforts to suppress anything resembling rural sociology in California. That would be because people in the Valley need money and there are reasons that they don't have money. If you started studying that topic, there would be rumblings from the trustees of the UC Merced Foundation, who have all the Valley money.

But, whatever are the Valley Hopefuls going to do without the Hakutas?

V.I. Ratliff

Notes:

http://www.ucmerced.edu/news_articles/05132003_stanford_professor_kenji_hakuta.asp

http://www.mercedsunstar.com/local/story/11663623p-12391714c.html

http://www.ucmerced.edu/news_articles/12142005_renowned_berkeley_physicist_raymond.asp

Fontamara, Ignacio Silone

One hundred years of solitude, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez

Yesterday the Tracy Press published an editorial that noted Rep. Dennis Cardoza, Shrimp Slayer-Merced, had also received money from Washington super-lobbyist, now singing to federal prosecutors. The amount is small, compared with what Rep. RichPAC Pombo, Buffalo Slayer-Tracy has received, but Cardoza felt called upon to protest today even the mention of his name in connection with the wholesale corruption now being investigated. So, on account of a thousand dollars from an Indian casino, we get this:

I have never met Mr. Abramoff, nor have I had any dealings with him. Period. In fact, the contribution I received from the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians occurred long after the tribe had cut all ties with Mr. Abramoff and his firm.

Cardoza wrote in a letter to the Tracy Press today.

Mr. Abramoff’s admitted crimes are shameful and flagrant abuses of the public trust. Any public official convicted of wrongdoing in this matter should be punished to the furthest extent of the law... The scandal surrounding Mr. Abramoff has cast a dark cloud over Congress and threatens to further weaken the public’s trust in the integrity of their government.

he continued.

When the Shrimp Slayer conjures up "the public's trust" to defend his moral rectitude, the public gets the fantods. The man speaks like a neo-con hack. The Pomboza, Cardoza and Rep. RichPac Pombo, Buffalo Slayer-Tracy's wholesale attack on the public trust in their suite of bills to dismember the Endangered Species Act, comes to mind. The Pomboza collecting their contributions from developers last spring at their joint fundraiser at the Grupe ranch in Lodi comes to mind. It turns the public mind to the Pomboza trip, with Interior Secretary Gale Norton, in January 2004 to the Marianas, where Abramoff textile sweatshops are located. Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez is now calling for a House investigation (along with other on-going investigations) into connections between members of Congress, Ambramoff's Marianas clients, and legislative affecting the area.

Of course, out there in the Great Water, where Bikini was and the US still conducts tests, maybe the Shrimp Slayer was scouting out territory for UC weapons of mass destruction testing.

More questions are raised than answered by Cardoza's pious denial. For a congressman who doesn't know Abramoff, he's certainly up to date on when and for how long the lobbyist was connected with the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians. In fact, Cardoza's deep dependency on Pombo, Doolittle, DeLay and the rest of the hard rightwingers in the House suggests involvement with their top money guy, Abramoff. We may never know, however, because campaign financing in this country is a hall of mirrors equal to its tax code, federal highway and HUD funding. Given the public's low level of trust in its congressmen, Cardoza raises a good question: why trust his denial of involvement with Abramoff? Or is just because the other half of The Pomboza, Pombo, denies knowing a lobbyist who gave him $55,000?

Any public official convicted of wrongdoing in this matter should be punished to the furthest extent of the law ...

Cardoza intones. Are we looking at a falling out among thieves? Next thing we know, Cardoza will deny every having known Pombo -- who is in the limelight, along with Rep. John Doolittle, R-Rocklin -- of this investigation. Will Cardoza also deny knowing Rep. George Radanovich, R-Mariposa, who received $8,500 from the Abramoff operation? Will he give up membership in the Portuguese American Political Caucus of the House of Representatives, whose members received $200,700 from various Abramoff pots? For example, Patrick Kennedy, D-RI, co-chair with Pombo of PALCUS, received more than four times ($42,500) what Rep. Nick Rahall, D-WVa, ranking minority member of the Resources Committee received ($10,000) from Abramoff.

Just exactly where will all the denial end? Who knows, but probably the Abramoff affair will test the limits of absurd denial as it unfolds.

The Tracy Press wasn't making this up. It came from

http://capitaleye.org/abramoff_recips.asp?sort=N, whose parent website is
OpenSecrets.org.

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

Notes:

http://tracypress.com/voice/2006-01-06-your-voice.php
No Abramoff dealings

EDITOR,
I would like to clarify a few points from Thursday’s editorial, “Reform U.S. Capitol lobbying,” which stated that I had received a contribution from an Indian tribe connected to Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff. I have never met Mr. Abramoff, nor have I had any dealings with him. Period. In fact, the contribution I received from the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians occurred long after the tribe had cut all ties with Mr. Abramoff and his firm.

Mr. Abramoff’s admitted crimes are shameful and flagrant abuses of the public trust. Any public official convicted of wrongdoing in this matter should be punished to the furthest extent of the law.

I strongly agree that Washington needs to take immediate and dramatic action to reform lobbying. This is long overdue. The scandal surrounding Mr. Abramoff has cast a dark cloud over Congress and threatens to further weaken the public’s trust in the integrity of their government. My sincere hope is that Americans’ outrage over this violation of the public trust will force Congress to enact meaningful reform that will crack down on these abuses and demand greater transparency from lobbyists and public officials. I pledge to speak out and fight for these reforms.

Dennis Cardoza
---------------------

Reform U.S. Capitol lobbying

Super lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s squealing to federal prosecutors may expose the depth of this sordid game of special interests exchanging monetary gifts for political influence in the halls of the U.S. Capitol.

Among those on Abramoff’s trail of deception, fraud and money exchange are about 300 members of Congress, both Republicans and Democrats. They include Reps. Richard Pombo, R-Tracy, and Dennis Cardoza, D-Merced. Between 1999 and today, Pombo has received $54,500 in contributions from Abramoff and the American Indian tribes that hired him as a lobbyist. Cardoza has accepted $1,000.

Pombo’s contribution from Abramoff and Abramoff-connected parties is the fifth highest among the members of Congress (Rep. J.D. Hayworth, R-Ariz., is No. 1 with $101,620). Since 2003, Pombo has been chairman of the House Resources Committee, which handles Indian affairs.

Neither Pombo nor Cardoza has been implicated publicly in the Abramoff case. Pombo says he has never met the guilty lobbyist. Fortunately, Pombo’s rise in leadership came at the same time Abramoff’s influence as a lobbyist was dwindling because of federal investigations.

Accepting campaign contributions from a lobbyist, an Indian tribe or other special interests isn’t a crime unless there is a direct quid pro quo, and even then it is hard to prove in court. That’s why prosecutors let Abramoff and his associates make deals — so they can squeal on the lawmakers.

Abramoff was associated with the K Street Project that was designed by the Republican Party to force big business and trade groups to hire more Republican-connected lobbyists. The K Street Project created an almost seamless relationship between members of Congress and corporate America. Abramoff was the middleman who profited from the monetary influence.

After the partisan finger-pointing ends in Washington over the Abramoff case, Congress must to embark on immediate lobbying reform with tougher disclosure laws and stricter professional standards.

The Abramoffs of D.C. reflect the wrong side of democracy — the freedom to commit greed and fraud when no officeholder wants to look. This disregard of fairness in government disillusions Americans, who wonder if all lawmakers are crooks, not statesmen.

Among the ways the statesmen can regain the confidence of Americans while decreasing the influence of lobbyists and political action committees with fistfuls of dollars is by interacting more with the folks in their districts and states and less with Abramoff-clone lobbyists.

http://www.tracypress.com/voice/2006-01-05-our-voice.php

http://capitaleye.org/abramoff_recips.asp?sort=N

http://www.hillnews.com/thehill/export/TheHill/News/Frontpage/041405/miller.html
Miller Calls for Probe into Abramoff's Marianas Dealings
By Josephine Hearn
Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) today called for a congressional investigation into former lobbyist Jack Abramoff's dealings with the commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands, which Abramoff represented from 1994 to 2001.

Miller wrote a 7-page letter to Rep. Richard Pombo (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Resources Committee, which has jurisdiction over U.S. territories, asking that the committee exercise its appropriate oversight responsibilities without further delay to investigate a variety of allegations of improper behavior, including the overpayment for lobbying services, interference in territorial elections, interference in contract procurement, and the questionable payment of overseas trips for Members of Congress and staff. Abramoff has been at the center of a growing scandal over sizeable fees he and his associate Michael
Scanlon charged Indian tribes for lobbying and public relations. Two Senate committees, a federal taskforce and the Interior Department¹s inspector general are conducting separate investigations into the duo and their dealings with members of Congress and administration officials.

Abramoff arranged for House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) to visit the islands in December 1997 to tour textile factories. The commonwealth¹s government, an Abramoff client at the time, and the Saipan Garment Manufacturers Association paid for the trip.

A senior GOP aide to the Resources Committee said that the committee had seen Miller¹s letter, was still reviewing it and had no response at press time.

Miller and Abramoff have long been at odds over labor and immigration policy in the islands, with Miller contending that current laws are abusive to immigrant workers. Abramoff has represented garment manufacturers seeking to maintain the islands¹ exemption from certain U.S. immigration and labor laws.

Meanwhile, in other Abramoff-related news, watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington launched a new web site, www.jackinthehouse.org, to chronicle Abramoff¹s association with various members of the Congress, lobbyists and conservative activist. The group is urging visitors to the web site to contact House ethics committee Chairman Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) and ask that the committee begin an investigation.

http://www.ktvu.com/news/5839523/detail.html
Miller: Abramoff Money Halted Sweat Shop Legislation

POSTED: 7:50 am PST January 4, 2006
UPDATED: 12:39 pm PST January 4, 2006

UNDATED -- East Bay Congressman George Miller just couldn't understand why his legislation to end sex and textile sweat shops in the Northern Mariana Islands -- a U.S. protectorate in the Pacific -- was being blocked in the House of Representatives. Now, he has his answer.

Miller had run into a roadblock allegedly thrown up by lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

"There is no question that Jack Abramoff is no run-of-the-mill lobbyist," Miller said on Mornings on 2. "The Mariana Islands were one of Abramoff's clients…The garment industry there was importing young men from China and elsewhere work in sweat shops…There's a sex rade…labor camps."

"I was trying to get legislation passed in the House," Miller added. "It passed out of committee in the Senate and had bi-partisan support. I just couldn't get it to the floor of the House of Representatives."

Miller said it was time to investigate why the legislation was being blocked.

http://www.badlandsjournal.com/old/getarch2.php?title=Blue%20dog%20in%20South%20Pacific
Blue Dog in South Pacific.

Delegation arrives for 2-day visit By Mark-Alexander Pieper Pacific Daily News;

mpieper@guampdn.com

TO THE POINT

* A congressional delegation arrived on island last night for a two-day a fact-finding trip.

A six-member congressional delegation visiting the Micronesia region on a fact-finding mission arrived on Guam last night for a two-day stay...

The delegation, accompanied by Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton and David Cohen, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Insular Affairs, was greeted by local dignitaries at the island's commuter terminal adjacent to the Antonio B. Won Pat International Airport, Guam...

The delegation includes California Congressman and House Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo, Delegate Eni Faleomavaega from American Samoa, Reps. Frank Lucas, R-Okla., Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., Dennis Rehberg, R-Mont., Rep. Dennis Cardoza, D-Calif., and Guam Delegate Madeleine Bordallo. All are members of the resources committee with the exception of Lucas.

After the statements, the delegation was whisked away to a hotel. Media was denied interviews with the delegation.

Earlier yesterday, the Interior Department announced that Norton and CNMI Gov. Juan Babauta signed a grant that will provide more than $5.1 million to the CNMI to mitigate the impact of migration from the Federated States of Micronesia, Palau and the Marshall Islands.

"These funds will help the CNMI provide health, education and other social services to the citizens of the freely associated states who are permitted to migrate to the CNMI under the Compacts of Free Association," said Norton, who made her first visit to the Northern Marianas this week before arriving on Guam.

Capitaleye.org lists Rehberg received $30,000 and Lucas $2,500 from Abramoff operations.

While some in Merced scratch their heads and chew their pencil erasers trying to comment on a large Riverside Motorsports Park Master Plan and Draft Environmental Impact Report and others don their black RMP caps to rally in support of the track, John Condren, CEO of RMP, and Kenny Shepherd, RMP president, take their dog-and-pony show to Tracy to talk about the wonders of an expanded Altamont Speedway and about expanding their lease on the Speedway from two to 10 years.

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

Changes come to local raceway
Christopher H. Roberts

Tracy Press -- Jan. 6, 2005

Major changes are afoot at Altamont.

Just three weeks after the surprise announcement that Riverside Motorsports Park, LLC, of Atwater are the Altamont raceway’s new managers, the company’s CEO and president revealed the vision for the track’s future at a meeting Thursday in Tracy.

Among the planned improvements are a new Musco lighting system, membership in NASCAR, a remodeled pit area, effective wind-screens and the ability to convert the quarter-mile oval track into 27 different street courses.

Riverside, currently in the middle of a $230 million racetrack construction project in Merced, chose to take on the added burden of managing and improving Altamont for the overall good of the sport, CEO John Condren said.

“We’ve had more tracks close in the past 12 months than in the entire period (from) 1975 to 2005,” he said. With Stockton 99 due to close at the end of 2006 “we cannot afford to lose another track, so we stepped up to the plate.”

The meeting began with a blend of urgency and fatalism.

“Motorsports is in trouble,” Riverside president and former racer Kenny Shepard said. “If we don’t do something, Altamont will be a business park in two years.”

“Failure is not an option,” Condren said.

To explain the business side of the venture, Condren and Shepard used a mix of racing talk and corporate speak.

Condren announced that the days of one event a week at Altamont are over, as a wider variety of events spread over three to five days make for “multiple revenue streams.”

“I like to call this a paradigm shift,” he said.

However, many racers present raised fears that their particular racing classes would be phased out at Altamont, fears that neither Condren nor Shepard allayed.

“We’re looking at what’s going to work for the next 10 years,” Condren said. “If your class gets eliminated
— I’m sorry.”

The problems that have plagued Altamont for years — shoddy lighting, primitive pits and the legendary high winds — were specifically addressed.

And news that a new Musco lighting system was already on the way drew a round of applause.

Still, the 200-odd assembled drivers, mechanics and racing fans were skeptical at first.

“These are promises we’ve heard before,” Ken Benhamou of Pleasanton said to Condren. “You’ve got a big task ahead of you — if you make promises, I want to see you commit.”

To this, Condren pointed to the $1.5 million already invested by Riverside in Altamont as proof that the new management will stay for longer than the initial two-year lease.

He also emphasized the large amount of work already done.

“We’ve moved a mountain in three weeks” since signing the agreement to lease the track, Condren said.
The plan is simple at its core.

“The goal is to get the stands full,” Shepard said. “This conversation means nothing if that track is a
ghost town.”

To do that, Riverside will need to make sure Altamont’s image becomes much more ubiquitous.

“A lot of people in this town don’t know that the track is still around,” Gayle Widgay of Tracy said.

Condren and Shepard assured that a sophisticated marketing plan is already under way, including extensive media advertising and corporate sponsorships.

The professionalism seemed to encourage those present that 2006 would truly usher in a new era at Altamont, and any fears held going into the meeting were relieved — at least for now.

“They seem like real businessmen,” racer Ryan Steele of Pleasanton said. “Not just some old guys running a track. And that’s what Altamont needs.”

http://www.tracypress.com/sports/2006-01-06-raceway.php

From: Lydia Miller, President
San Joaquin Raptor Rescue Center
Merced, CA 95341

Steve Burke
Protect Our Water (POW)
Modesto CA 95350

To: Mr. James Holland January 6, 2006

Merced County Planning Department
2222 M St.
Merced, California 95340 Emailed
Fax: (209) 726-1710

Re: Comments on Draft Environmental Impact Report, Riverside Motorsports Park – General Plan Amendment No. 03005,Zone Change No 03007, State Clearinghouse # 2003071138

Dear Mr. Holland,

We are commenting on the DEIR of the Riverside Motorsports Park.

This project, as meticulously described in detail in the DEIR, does not need the flexibility provided by a special zoning designation. Therefore we object to the development plan zoning designation. This proposed major auto raceway, with great cumulative impacts on the environment of Merced County, should, under no conditions, be permitted to change its plan subject only to the administrative approval of a new, out-of-state director of Development Services.

The DEIR is so narrowly focused on the needs of the project that it fails to even consider the broader impacts the project would have to natural resources, public health and safety and infrastructure needs.

We found it unacceptably confusing that the master plan didn’t coordinate in any obvious way with the DEIR.

Until the county General Plan is properly updated, even to consider the number of possible amendments this project would be asking for is irresponsible land-use planning. Currently, the County is claiming an update in 1995. This is not true; it was amended. An amendment is not a comprehensive update. Since then, a number of other amendments have so warped the General Plan that it is now admitted by all to be a useless policy document.

The County has yet to coordinate responsibly with other jurisdictions on other projects like the Bellevue Corridor and the Atwater/Merced Expressway Project.

Racetracks have a history of failure and this one is competing with several major tracks in nearby counties, including Laguna Seca and Sears Point. Proponents require special zoning that will give them extreme flexibility, despite the apparent level of detail and narrow focus of this DEIR. Under the master plan, changes can simply be made by administrative decision of the director of Development Services. Given these three factors, we must consider the probability that this RMP is a holding pattern, just like a golf course, and that at any time, at the administrative discretion of the director of Development Services, the project can be converted, at taxpayer expense, into commercial development, part of a commercial corridor.

The environmental checklist is so over defined by the needs of the project, as opposed to the needs of the environment, that the proposed mitigations and the lack mitigations fail to reach the standard of a competent DEIR, leaving the public and the resource agencies unable to accurately address this project.

Growth is happening in this area in a haphazard, unplanned way. The impacts from this growth have not been taken into consideration in this DEIR. Mitigation measures in this DEIR defer responsibility to other plans, which, like the regional water plan anticipated for six years, are plans to make plans, for example the Traffic and Circulation Management Plan on page 4-31 of the Master Plan. Mixed in with these plans to make plans, are concrete proposals, such as the creation of a new road, Riverside Drive, without any analysis or alternatives.

This document provides no proof for its claim that there will be no impact to wildlife and habitat from the project.

The document displays a faulty understanding of environmental benefit, for example, on p. 4-2 of the Master Plan.

There is no analysis of the pharmaceutical and solvent content of wastewater proposed to be used in the project.

These documents rely on the infrastructure of the former Castle Air Force Base, yet there is no discussion of this infrastructure or its environmental condition.

We have been consistently involved in this area of the county for a number of years, and have provided the County with numerous public comments on environmental concerns.

We are reserving the right to submit additional information at the time of the public hearing on the FEIR.

In conclusion, we support the no-project alternative because this project fails meet CEQA standards and the county’s current, out-dated general plan.

Respectfully submitted,

Lydia Miller

Steve Burke

cc: Interested parties
William Hatch, Badlandsjournal.com

The Merced County chapter of the League of Women Voters recently published its January 2006 newsletter concerning a meeting on county land-use policy. Badlands attended and reported on the meeting, Unanswered questions on Merced growth, Wednesday, December 7th, 2005. That meeting was bogus. A large crowd was encouraged to write down questions about growth, listened to a panel of planners, and then the meeting was shut down -- the panel did not answer any of the questions. The reason given was that City Hall was not available beyond a certain time, that time arrived, therefore the meeting was over. There was also some funny business with the computer projector that took up additional (precious) time.

Soliciting questions from the public about growth in one of the two fastest growing regions in the state, and then not answering them but passing them on to the political classes, descends to the level of mere pandering to the remarkably corrupt local, pro-growth power structure of Merced.

While the Badlands editorial staff doesn’t mind critically covering local political events (we think that’s what journalism ought to be and used to be), the staff collectively winces while performing the unpleasant duty of criticizing the League of Women Voters. Badlands staff grew up listening to mothers talk about the League, reading League newsletters and voter education pamphlets. The staff learned its first lessons in democracy from League mothers.

But, says the Merced League, it distributed all the questions to the people that matter. These are the same people who have voted consistently for the development engulfing the county. These are the people who hold unanimously as their first, collective metaphysical principle, that “growth is inevitable.”

According to the newsletter, the League had retired UC professor, Dr. William Teitz compile all the questions and then they were sent to all the presenters (Teitz, the former county planning director and three city planners), the county Board of Supervisors, the mayors of the six cities in the county, and the Merced Sun-Star and Merced County Times.

The whole League-orchestrated Q-but-no-A “public meeting” was a hoax. Tietz, the retired UC professor, gave a very interesting, somewhat drastic presentation about Valley growth that might actually have had some impact if it had been given before UC Merced was a “done deal.” The county planning director (since demoted) gave a countywide overview. Three city planners provided their views on development in their cities. Fast-growing Atwater, strangely, was not represented.

Did the League want to put on an event about growth that looked like it was really open to public, in order to log it in under that title so that it could be referred to later as a real “public dialogue”? Were the planners and the questions window dressing in some sort of display? If it really had been set up to be a town hall meeting it would have gone on until 3 in the morning at a local church. Perhaps, League officers are just hooked on the architecture of these chambers of local government, in which officials are always seated above the public.

The miasma of growth now hangs over Merced political life like a permanent, toxic tule fog. The real war for the future of the county is all but won by developers. It’s a perfect game of political blackmail. The developers have their teeth deeply buried in county government now. If farmers who want to continue farming publicly criticize growth policies, things can happen. Everybody knows how this goes. But, dragging the tradition of the League of Women Voters into it stinks.

The League of Women Voters is committed to making democracy work in Merced, California, across the country and around the world,

Its newsletter claims.

Join us in educating and encouraging men and women to be active citizens and address the issues that affect our lives—election administration reform, campaign finance reform, civil and human rights, citizen engagement, judicial independence and criminal justice, education, health care, urban sprawl and our natural resources …

The newsletter urges. These are important values. Mothers in League chapters during the dark days of McCarthyism were accused of being communists for standing up for these values. Right here in the San Joaquin Valley, 50 years ago. Imagine!

Respect for their mothers’ political bravery requires Badlands staff to make a critical remark of a greatly respected institution: it takes more than a scarf to make a League president. It takes a willingness to stand up for values, which, although non-partisan and thoroughly American, are always controversial. If you don’t stand up for them, but just quote them in your newsletter, you’re betraying them.

But, not content with League value statements, this League chapter has to drag Margaret Mead into it.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has. -- Margaret Mead

This business of using old values, hard fought for, as advertising and propaganda for an organization that dares not understand what these values mean, and what they cost these women, and for how long, is a widespread bad habit or our era, drowning in propaganda. But those values meant something and should not be simply stuck in a newsletter like decoration or a shopping ad.

Just because you’re not on the front lines of things, doesn’t mean you have to be in the lap of power, either. Just because you are not contributing to a public dialogue does not mean you have to fake one. If you aren’t on the front lines as the League used to be, you ought to go have tea somewhere out of the way.

The way the League handled these questions, they became ammunition and rhetoric for the status quo, thoughtlessly committed to catastrophic growth in Merced County but wise to any advantage provided that will make them look less than the authors of catastrophe. An opportunity for a real public town hall meeting was misrepresented and misused. It was as bad and Cardoza the Shrimp Slayer’s “town hall meeting” in the same venue several months earlier.

Rumors have reached the Badlands staff that the League official facilitating this meeting is planning a career in elective office. Considering that we’ve seen more democratic public meetings at Chairman “Fox Hills” Sloan’s county Planning Commission, we’re taking an early, negative stand on this candidacy. In our view, Merced does not need more of the same-old, same-old well-known substance that seems to get tracked onto every institution in this county, regardless of former ideals. Developers have their teeth in the throat of local government here. This is no time for the League of Women Voters to be used as a platform for political postures.

The League newsletter concluded with a stirring letter from a mother in 1951 about how to raise a democratic child:

HELP MAKE DEMOCRACY LIVE

I can help make democracy live because the best citizen is not the one who knows the most, but the one who cares the most. Because I am a mother, I can teach my children to care about people and those values essential to democracy.

If I show my child that his rights and possessions are respected, if I teach him to take his turn and to do his share, if I help him to feel loved and valued for himself, I’ll be teaching him to believe in the inalienable rights of all people.

I will not train my child in blind obedience born of fear, for that makes dictators possible. I will expect only the conformity suitable to his age. I will not demand acceptance of all my opinions. I will tolerate the stress and strain of disagreement in order to encourage that free expression of ideas which enriches group life and in order to further the self-discipline required for democratic living. My child can become truly democratic only by practicing that way of life.

By my example, I will seek to show my child that democracy is worth all it costs. I will obey the laws, even those I dislike. I will pay my taxes without evasion. I will be fair to people who differ from me in race, religion, or political philosophy. I will study my government in order to vote intelligently. I will take time to serve my community.

In such simple everyday ways we can do our share as citizens. If we parents care enough, we can make democracy live.

Martha Fugate Pitman
Reprinted from the July 1951 Parents’ Magazine

What a beautiful dream, and how widely shared it was in the Valley in those years. They were not the easiest years economically or politically, but there was that sweet dedication of parents who had known depression and war and had transmuted harsh experience into love and care for the next generation. And with that love went these high ideals, League of Women Voter ideals. There was a code for “democratic living,” and we thought we were learning it. But we let the code down, not understanding, I think, the amount of struggle that lay just behind it, in perhaps the previous three generations. It may well have been children of League mothers of that era who reminded us of Susan B. Anthony, Mother Jones and the other heroic women in American history. We inherited it; we didn’t earn it. Eventually, that movement for democracy, became fatally involved with the power aspirations of the Democratic Party and was corrupted as horribly as conservatism, allied with the Republican Party, is now being corrupted.

In fact, unfortunately, the values Mrs. Pitman so eloquently articulated during the recession of the early 1950s, are a code of conduct almost guaranteed for failure in practical affairs in America. Unless checked by concerted public action, the lying, bullying, lawless thief is far more likely to gain power and wealth in this society.

I wish there had been a real town hall meeting on development because I think it is only in that sort of forum that real public power over the public future can be developed. But, following the well-established pattern of orchestration established by UC Merced and its local boosters in and out of government, that did not happen this time.

And time is running out. If the Merced public is not to be coerced into complete slurbocracy, town meetings in which citizens – whether feeling safe or not – do get up and speak their minds directly to power are necessary. Otherwise, the Merced public cannot expect anything but more of the slurbocracy now engulfing it. The developers came to play and they wrote many of the rules of the game.

Here are the unanswered questions, rescued from the League of Women Voters’ dead question office. They are doubtlessly now being eagerly studied by our political leaders as carefully as a comment letter on an environmental impact report. The Badlands staff is holding its breath and turning blue in the face waiting for the detailed answers the supervisors, mayors and newspaper editors are going to give in public to these questions.

1. Does the urban growth of Merced County benefit current residents economically more than outside investors/developers?
2. How does it reflect on our community when we raise children that can’t afford to live or work here? Why must we continue the urban growth of Merced County at the expense of our quality of living?
3. How will the urbanization affect our cost of living? Do we as citizens, have rights to object to any of your plans if we don’t like them?
4. Why has growth not taken place along Hwy 5?
5. Where are all these future residents going to work? And shop? And go for recreation? Is this more cars on the roads driving out of the area, spending money in other areas?
6. What happens to the houses + land that is left over from the development that is moving to the north?
7. How will the proposed Wal-Mart distribution center affect traffic on 99 and air quality?
8. What are some major planning issues? Are the requirements that developers have to meet to develop really feasible? These requirements can sometimes kill development and instead maybe could make incentives or fee reduction.
9. Why so much low density residential in the county expansion plans?
10. Are the community plans financially constrained? Who is paying for the new infrastructure + expanded services?
11. Should the county and cities adopt a jobs/housing balance into their general plans?
12. In terms of the growth in Franklin / Planada what is the plan for wastewater?
13. What steps are being taken to expand the city of Merced (i.e. ready existing streets and freeways) to accommodate so many more people?
14. What conjectured growth could be attributing to U.C. Merced? (As a single catalyst)
15. Should major roadways be determined before development is approved?
16. Do you foresee an eastside freeway being constructed? The route could follow the old road before the railroad. The route would create beltways around urban areas like Visalia, Fresno, Merced, Modesto, and Sacramento.
17. What about roads?
18. Due to infrastructure capacity constraints can new alternatives be used, for example, recycled water (tertiary treatment-package plants) to meet the needs of new development?
19. Has the underground water supply for the San Joaquin Valley been quantified? If not how can continued urban growth continue?
20. Growth is inevitable however it is taking away the farmland. The same people wanting to build are the ones that will complain when food is expensive. Why do they always choose to use high producing agricultural areas to build houses? Why can't they use non-producing land?
21. In view of the diminishing acreage of productive agriculture land, an irreplaceable resource will boards of supervisors and city councils ever be able to contribute to the preservation of agricultural land? If not what do you suggest?
22. Can agricultural businesses continue to survive at the height of urban development?
23. What’s going to happen to the farm based business with urban growth?
24. Has there been consideration of growing up in multiple story housing complexes in order to preserve agricultural land?
25. Where’s the water?
26. What is the proposed plan for wastewater tax for?
27. Why is the prime farmland scenario unrealistic?
28. Food security requires farmland be protected. Should we require protection by state or federal government to protect farmland like environment is protected?
29. Why are the farmers so dead set against urbanization? Can’t individual farms continue to farm in the middle of growth?
30. To curb urban encroachment into Prime farmland is anything being done to encourage high-rise apartments/condos & office space?
31. Who should determine if a local food supply is important far future generations? Should food security be a public policy issue?
32. What measures are being taken to 1) To ensure resource conservation and 2.) Protect wildlife and natural areas?
33. Can the panelists comment on the potential for collaborative planning between local agencies for regional development in Merced County and throughout the central valley.
34. Dr.Teitz you write in your report that “Valley residents are skeptical about their government institutions ability to solve problems.” (Pg. 80) What can governments do to reduce the skepticism and meet the needs of the future?
35. With all these general plan updates going on, where to how can individuals (local) organizations be most effective in getting what WE want? (Versus out of area investors) Can the panelists comment on the potential for collaborative planning between local agencies for regional development in Merced County and throughout the central valley?
36. You mentioned “resistance to growth” from the Bay Area (as one of the forces of population growth+ urbanization to the valley) what have they done and why can’t we also resist such growth?

A fine example of pro-racetrack poison penmanship appeared in the Merced Sun-Star on Friday. It is offered with a few questions in reply below.

Critics' motives are tainted

Editor: I'm getting very concerned with the ulterior motives of the few but very vocal detractors of the Riverside Motorsports Park facility. Much of what they write is conjecture; the rest is simply untrue.

What are the real reasons they push so hard against such a facility that can add millions of dollars in tax revenues that can then be spent on University of California, Merced, programs, working with RMP as a test lab, to solve some of the problems these people claim to represent? What are they really after?

Many are the same who opposed UC Merced. For that, I would say that RMP is keeping very good company. However they did delay UC Merced's opening for a long time, and when you Google some of the opposing organizations, all you get is a page full of lawsuits and out-of-court settlements. I haven't seen where any of that ill-gotten gain has been spent to solve water or air quality problems. I do see in the environmental impact report that RMP has a plan to save water. If some of our problems are solved, do the detractors lose a source of income?

They are even attacking backers now, claiming that backers are in it for the big bucks. I'm a backer, and I don't stand to gain a dime. We just want a facility that we can be proud of, and this one is like no other in the country.

Speaking of big bucks, where do you suppose all that money from litigation went? To fund a letter writing smear campaign?

DAVID WOOD

Let's try a few simple questions on this smear by Mr. Wood. What ulterior motives would opponents of the racetrack have other than trying to protect their air quality in one of the top two worst air basins in the nation? What ulterior motive would they have beyond trying to avoid incredible traffic congestion and noise?

What's the connection between any tax millions the track might earn and the UC campus? Is he conjecturing that sales taxes will flow from one to the other? The track folks have been suggesting lately a win-win public/private partnership with UC on automotive problems. But I am not familiar with any statements made by UC about this partnership. Have I missed something? Has the UC Merced chancellor endorsed Riverside Motorsports Park?

Where does Wood get the idea that the people who oppose the track are many of the very few people who opposed UC Merced? Where has Wood found a website or any other information describing any out-of-court settlements between UC Merced and opponents? What is he talking about?

Isn't the RMP track similar to the major NASCAR track at Sears Point, about 100 miles from Merced? Aren't the RMP people already exploring a backup plan to expand the old Altamont track near Tracy, which they now manage? How would Mr. Wood know the proposed track "is like no other in the country"? Has he been to the other tracks in the country or is he relying on RMP's Mr. Condren's sales pitch?

Is Mr. Wood just very badly informed or is he deliberately lying on behalf of the racetrack? It doesn't matter because the damage is done. He's made a mean fool of himself in print to anyone who knows anything about the areas he covers in his letter.

But, mean foolishness is all part of this project. The fundamental problem is that the proposed facility -- quite aside from its obvious environmental impacts -- is a temple to denial of reality, like the Iraq War. With more than 2,100 American dead and 16,000 wounded, and around 30,000 Iraqi confirmed dead, we are losing a war lies got us into so that US oil companies could exploit those resources to make gasoline for our cars. Is the motive behind the pagan ritual of stockcar racing (What would Jesus drive?) that as long as the worshippers can see the cars zooming around the tracks, they can forget the reality of shrinking natural resources that will steadily erode the quality of life for all of us?

Kurt Vonnegut summed it up nicely:

"We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we're hooked on." -- http://www.counterpunch.com/swanson12272005.htm

Personally, I like the idea suggested recently that we should have a racetrack as long as all the racecars on it are solar-powered.

Bill Hatch

The Merced Sun-Star editors Saturday licked the frosting off their fingers from the cake they imagine they have and are eating, while others in the community imagine the editors been had and are being eaten. Looking at the "many great things" brought in the past year, they said:

Perhaps the biggest was the opening of the University of California, Merced, campus. This dream for several decades finally became a multi-million dollar reality last fall as the first students occupied dorms and classrooms.

Odd choice of words, "multi-million dollar reality." It certainly was a multi-million dollar investment for the taxpayers of California. It certainly raised landowners' property values for development, and home building and land ripping is certainly going along -- involving many millions of dollars going one way and another.

However, the sugar fix is in at the Sun-Star as always: UC Merced was not even a glimmer, much less a dream even in the greedy little minds of the various Mr. and Ms. Merceds, when, as the result of a joint environmental/agricultural lawsuit in the late 1980s, a general plan was finally written for the county in 1991. This general plan, despite Sun-Star frosting delirium, was never updated, as it is now proposed it might be at some point in the next several years. It was amended, amended, and amended, to the point where it is useless as any kind of guidance for development. And the mother amendment of them all has been UC Merced and the UC Community Plan.

Then one wonders at the lapse of adverbial consistency. In the lead, UC Merced is described as the "most notably" good thing. Here, it is merely "Perhaps the biggest." This lapse can be explained by the terrible strain the Sun-Star editors have been under since the UC Merced "done-deal" that wasn't, in 1998, until now. A steady stream of UC Merced Bobcatflak for seven years or more has drowned thought and silenced the critical mind in that newsroom. But the immediate cause is the frosting high from the delusion of having and eating the cake.

The loss of a newspaper is a political tragedy, A.J. Liebling, one of our greatest newspaper critics thought, back in the 1950s. Today it is a foregone conclusion whenever any institution with an adequately staffed flak office moves to town. Merced has a prison, the WalMart and a whole bunch of big-box retailers, and now UC Merced. Merced is now far, far too important for anything as tacky as journalistic inquiry.

A stunning example springs to mind from what the paper calls its news department. A week after County CEO Dee Tatum introduced Bobby Lewis to the Board of Supervisors as his choice to directed the planning department -- nobody on the board or in the planning department seemed to know anything about Lewis -- the newspaper did a story on the appointment. It focused on the "demotion" of former director, Bill Nicholson.

"There isn't quote-unquote a need for a new director," Tatum said. "We really need to focus on what services we're giving people and what the board wants."

Presuming Tatum actually uttered this meaningless statement, reporting, writing and printing it serve only to further fog the public brain, already misted over by the steady stream of Bobcatflak dutifully reprinted as "news" in the Sun-Star for lo, these many years (but not yet decades).

He (Lewis) spent 17 years working in the planning departments for the cities of Las Vegas and Henderson, Nev.

In 1998, he started his own engineering and surveying company and eventually ended up as vice president for a Las Vegas developer.

It would have been awfully nice to know what Las Vegas developer Lewis worked for and whether or not this Las Vegas developer has interests in Merced or is planning to have interests in Merced. There is no evidence our newspaper even thought to ask. The whole article, in fact, increases public suspicion that a new fix is in at the planning department.

Returning to the collective mind of the editors that passed on this story, municipal joy is asked for federal highway funding for the Mission Interchange, which will permit traffic to bypass Merced on its way to UC -- perhaps not a boon to downtown business but a windfall to a number of landowners with farming roots (like Lewis says he has) selling to developers along the Campus Parkway. And if that weren't enough joy, Merced has landed "a major Wal-Mart distribution center which will provide hundreds of good jobs for local residents." Organized labor in America hates WalMart like no other corporation. Is it possible organized labor has some reason for its hatred? Then, of course, there is editorial joy for passage of the obligatory "enhanced" police/fire bond to keep those local residents employed by WalMart, and even some who aren't, in line, and to provide new fire stations for new neighborhoods.

Editorial joy for new school construction is muted because there is nothing to be joyful about after the developers whupped the school administrators into submission this year. The quality of Merced K-12 public education was the big loser for years to come as a result of the UC Merced-induced, speculative housing boom. The concluding pious hope for lower crime rates and better public education is pure frosting revery.

Bill Hatch

Notes:

http://www.mercedsunstar.com/opinion/story/11642823p-12372373c.html

http://www.mercedsunstar.com/local/story/11636386p-12366520c.html