Badlands Journal

“The Bush Administration is seeking to gut the Endangered Species Act on its way out the door,” Attorney General Brown said.

News Release
December 30, 2008
For Immediate Release
Contact: Christine Gasparac 916-324-5500

http://www.ag.ca.gov/newsalerts/release.php?id=1644&

Attorney General Brown Sues to Overturn Bush Administration Rules Undermining Endangered Species Act

SAN FRANCISCO– California Attorney General Edmund G. Brown Jr. has filed suit in federal court to block an “audacious attempt” by the Bush Administration to gut provisions in the Endangered Species Act mandating scientific review of federal agency decisions that may threaten endangered species and their habitat.

 “This is an audacious attempt to circumvent a time-tested statute that for 35 years has required scientific review of proposed federal agency decisions that affect wildlife.”

The new regulations, initially proposed by the Departments of the Interior and Commerce in August 2008 and made final on December 16, largely eliminate a requirement in the Endangered Species Act that mandates scientific review of federal agency decisions that might affect endangered and threatened species and their habitats.

The Merced Irrigation District has been in the news in recent days because there is evidently some conflict over its 2009 budget, set off by a staff proposal to sell $3 million worth of water during a severe drought. Proposals like that make farmers nervous.

In the course of the conflict, as Merced Sun-Star articles below indicate, the issue of how well MID runs a public meeting has come up.

The Merced Irrigation District has been in the news in recent days because there is evidently some conflict over its 2009 budget, set off by a staff proposal to sell $3 million worth of water during a severe drought. Proposals like that make farmers nervous.

In the course of the conflict, as Merced Sun-Star articles below indicate, the issue of how well MID runs a public meeting has come up.

The Contra Costa Times, covering a story of Port of Oakland air pollution, supposedly of interest to its readers, missed the crucial political fact of the year on this issue: that Gov. Schwarzenegger, vetoed the bill that would have provided the most money for air clean up, by putting a surcharge on all full containers passing through the port. The additional fact that Gov. Sarah Palin, Barfly-AK, had something to do with persuading him to veto the bill, was also missed.

The Contra Costa Times was, until recently, owned by Knight-Ridder, which sold it to the McClatchy Co, which sold it to Denver-based MediaNews Group. Moody's has just again downgraded MediaNews's credit rating and pointed to significant challenges in the chain's near future.

Meanwhile, according to Project Finance Magazine, on Dec. 9, five multi-leteral export credit agencies pledged $5.25 billion for widening and improving the Panama Canal, another blow to westcoast ports. Shipping by sea remains the cheapest means of transport.

Another aspect of the problem of ports, pollution, and the money to improve air quality around the ports, is that the planned "inland ports," warehousing and truck depots in the San Joaquin Valley reached by rail from the ports, have lost one big pot of expected public funding as a result of Schwarzenegger's veto.

Blago the Terrible and other stories

“I got this thing, and it’s (bleeping) golden. … You just don’t give it away for nothing,” (Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich) said, according to a criminal complaint filed by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald.

“Then he (Obama) just laid out an economic analysis (for his 2004 US Senate campaign). It becomes about money, because he knew that if people knew his story they would view him as a better candidate than anybody else he thought might be in the field. And so he said, ‘Therefore, if you raise five million dollars, I have a fifty-per-cent chance of winning. If you raise seven million dollars, I have a seventy-per-cent chance of winning. If you raise ten million dollars, I guarantee victory.” (New Yorker, July 21, 2008)

Blagojevich is correct: the bleeping Senate-seat appointment is worth quite a bit more than any of the recorded or suspected offers for it. Even shaving Obama's $10 million down to $9 million, Jesse Jackson Jr.'s alleged offer of $1 million for the last two years of Obama's Senate term is a clear savings to plutocrat investors in politicians of $2 million in the middle of a bad recession. Later, the incumbent advantage might be worth as much as $3 or $4 million more. It just makes sense.

San Francisco Chronicle

GARDENS IN UNLIKELY PLACES MEAN HOPE, FREEDOM...Ron Sullivan,Joe Eaton...10-12-08

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/12/10/HOVP14GTN1.DTL&type=homeandga

When we follow the operations of school and community gardens, we find ourselves speculating about the existence of a gardening instinct in our species.

When we happen upon "guerrilla" gardens like Alemany Farms or the Tenderloin National Forest, a converted alley off Ellis Street, we're tempted to make a most unscientific pronouncement confirming it.
It's dangerous to call anything in humans instinctive - not because we're such an exceptional case among mammals but because deciding what a human instinct is would be like that old koan about trying to bite your teeth. Never mind; it seems that growing things is so common to us and so persistent within us that it's almost a tropism.

We have local examples. The gardens on Alcatraz are so unlikely that half of us living here don't know they exist. To start them, early outposts on the island had to import soil because the place is natively a rock with a lot of bird droppings on it. Lichens, maybe mosses, grew there, and maybe there were a few tenacious succulents wedging themselves into cracks. The birds that have nested there for centuries probably brought seeds with them, on their bodies or in the nesting material some of them use.

for immediate release, December 2, 2008
 

for more information, contact:

Robert Schwartz, Staff Attorney, Tri-Valley CAREs, (925) 443-7148
Marylia Kelley, Executive Director, Tri-Valley CAREs, (925) 443-7148

BAY AREA GROUP SUES TO COMPEL OPEN GOVERNMENT, ENFORCE PUBLIC RIGHT TO KNOW:

LIGITIGATION CHARGES PATTERN OF ABUSE, HAS NATIONAL IMPLICATIONS

LIVERMORE, CA - This morning, Tri-Valley CAREs filed a lawsuit in federal district court in San Francisco against the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and its National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The suit alleges numerous violations of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the nation's key open government law enacted to ensure public access to federal government records.

Tri-Valley CAREs was forced to pursue litigation after DOE and NNSA failed to respond to six, separate FOIA requests within the 20-day timeframe generally required under the statute. By forcing Tri-Valley CAREs to wait up to 18 months and longer with no substantive response, DOE and NNSA have not only violated the law but greatly diminished the value of the information sought, which often becomes less relevant over time.

“In a government of law, the existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.” -- US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, 1856-1941

12-5-7-08
CounterPunch.com
How Washington Arrogance Helped Drive the Mumbai Attacks
Muslim Revolution
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
http://www.counterpunch.com/roberts12052008.html

We were deeply struck by this ancient theme -- that the polis is the teacher of its citizens -- because it is as true now as it has always been.

But, what of that other institution so terribly important to the education of our citizens and others, our universities, specifically "the greatest public higher education research institution in the world" ... (listen to those trumpets blare) ... the University of California?

Is UC a good teacher?

For information:
Carolee Krieger, Executive Director and Board President, California Water Impact Network, (805) 969-0824,
caroleeekrieger@cox.net
Bill Jennings, Chairman, California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, (209) 464-5067, (209) 938-9053 (cell),
deltakeep@aol.com
Michael Jackson, Counsel, California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, and Board Member, California Water
Impact Network, (530) 283-0712, mjatty@sbcglobal.net
For a copy of the complaint filed in Sacramento Superior Court, see www.c-win.org or www.calsport.org.

Calling it “the biggest lawsuit about the biggest ecological and legal catastrophe in California today,” the California Water Impact Network (C-WIN) and the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance (CSPA) filed suit in Sacramento Superior Court Friday, November 28, 2008, to protect Delta public trust resources—including endangered migratory fisheries of salmon and open water fish species—and to end wasteful and unreasonable diversions of water from the Delta by big state and federal water projects.

The suit also asks the court to halt irrigation of several hundred thousand acres of selenium contaminated lands on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley, the drainage from which pollutes wetlands, the San Joaquin River, and the Delta.

Where are all the doomsayers of 2006? Those people, who said the speculative real estate boom could not last, were a kind of answer.

Their argument necessarily called for a governmental solution, a need for immediate, perhaps even drastic regulation of a bubble gone wild and spreading, via securitized debt, throughout the world. By 2007, the doomsayers were even saying that this could result in a global credit freeze. These days, they content themselves with documenting the damage.

Government didn't listen; it continued to enable the bubble. Today, the lame duck Bush administration is desperately trying to restore credibility to securitized credit debt at unbelievable, unimaginable but inadequate public expense, as wave upon wave of defaults, we are told, are yet to come -- more residential mortgage defaults, commercial mortgage defaults, credit card defaults. The ever-cheery mainstream press is beginning to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find credentialled prophets willing to predict even a mid-term reversal of economic bad news.

Obama promised Change! but we doubt he'd like to take any credit for the real changes happening.