Badlands Journal

12-31-09

Merced Sun-Star
Merced County's economic woes hit hard in 2009...DANIELLE E. GAINES. Reporters Jonah Owen Lamb and Corinne Reilly contributed to this story.
http://www.mercedsunstar.com/167/v-print/story/1254070.html

Followers of the pollution caused by Hilmar Cheese, "the world's largest cheese plant" (WLCP), will recall that whenever the wastewater pollution achieves a level that state regulators can no longer comfortably ignore, the WLCP comes up with yet a new "black box" technology and requests an exemption from regulation to try it out for a few years. WLCP hires ace flak Michael Boccadoro, the Moutha Gold, to invite the public to marvel at WLCP's brilliant new black box, designed by the world's most ingenious engineers at enormous sums of money, which are always mentioned to show how hard the WLCP is trying.

The regulators ordinarily grant the exemption to test the new black box, it never works, the WLCP skates by environmental regulation for another year or two until the regulatory agency gets antsy again, whereupon the whole process repeats itself.

Nor is there any mention in this flakodoro "journalism" of the three most obvious facts in this case: Hilmar Cheese will not control its pollution of groundwater; it probably can't because it is the world's largest cheese plant; and it is already expanding its plant in Dalhart TX.

Badlands Journal editorial board

The essence of environmental injustice

Of 20 children known born in Kettleman City between September 2007 and November 2008, five had a cleft in their palate or lips, according to a health survey by activists. Three of those children have since died. Statewide, clefts of the lip or palate routinely occur in fewer than one in 800 births, according to California health statistics.
Besides these health problems, activists point to the high asthma and cancer rates in this largely Spanish-speaking farming community. -- Sacramento Bee, 12-22-09

Having attended the Federal Energy Resources Commission's meetings for the last year about Merced Irrigation District's relicensing application for its hydro-electric plant on Exchequer Dam, we never noticed a Merced Sun-Star reporter in attendance. Therefore, we question the totally unsourced story and correction below. The title of the story is unfortunate because no "environmentalists" are mentioned in the story, only several federal and state resource agencies charged with regulating federal and state laws. In other words, as presented in the article, it is a completely inter-governmental argument. If the newspaper had bothered to cover any of the FERC meetings with MID, it would have witnessed a number of spirited discussions between MID, its consultants and lawyers, and several local and regional environmental groups, Native Americans, and several other governmental agencies and the newspaper might have learned enough to avoid the mistake of taking MID, its consultants or lawyers, at their word and reporting their word as fact. The lack of any mention of the sources for the information presented as fact below leaves us completely mystified about what happened in this highly charged political decision-making process regarding FERC relicensing of the dam. The confusion is deepened by the newspaper correcting the article at the top and then reprinting the same article it purports to correct. The public doesn't even know whose press release is being regurgitated here under the pretense of reporting.

Badlands Journal editorial board

A peek beneath the propaganda on lawsuits

Whenever any environmental group files a lawsuit on behalf of the public interest and trust according to the California Environmental Quality Act, the National Environmental Protection Act, the Clean WAter and Clean Air acts, or other laws designed to protect the environment and public health and safety, immediately a howling commences about "litigious" enviros from elected, appointed and otherwise recruited representatives of corporate welfare for the wealthy. However, for a truer view of reality, take a look at the current litigation schedule for Westlands Water District.

Badlands Journal editorial board

WESTLANDS WATER DISTRICT
FINANCE & ADMINISTRATION COMMITTEE
NOTICE OF REGULAR MEETING AND AGENDA
NOTICE
Notice is hereby given that a regular meeting of the Finance & Administration
Committee of the Board of Directors ofWestlandsWater District will be held on December 15, 2009, at 12:00 noon at the District's Fresno Office, 3130 N. Fresno Street, Fresno, California
93703.
COMMITTEE MEMBERS
Ted Sheely, Chairman
Don Peracchi
Todd Neves
Jean Sagouspe, ex officio

Special interests can't run a government that protects its citizens

The Fresno Bee on Monday praised the California Air Resources Board’s decision to roll back the new, tougher regulations on diesel emissions. California contains the two worst air-pollution basins in the United States, Los Angeles and the San Joaquin Valley.

Fresno, in the middle of the San Joaquin Valley, has earned the title, "Asthma Capital of California. Nearly one in three children in Fresno, about 75,000 in 2005, had asthma, according to the Fresno Bee. 2005 was the height of the speculative housing building boom.

Trucking companies are losing business in a recession, states the editorial, therefore emission regulations were rightly rolled back by the air board, despite evidence many trucking companies have already converted to cleaner burning trucks. Inconveniently, there are also a number of CARB sponsored programs to provide financial assistance to truckers to achieve regulatory compliance, for example:

As old readers of Badlands know, we've been great fans of George Monbiot for years and always recommend people visit Monbiot.com for a broad, deep perspective on environmental issues. Monbiot was in Copenhagen for the UN climate change conference. His report begins with a call for human decency and ends with a report of the probably tragedies arising from the failure of human decency at this conference. Of course, if tragedy is uncomfortable, one can always join the climate-change deniers and the onward stampede to continue idiotically plundering nature and destroying whole continents. This international mentality is mirrored at the local level because sewage always flows downhill. Apparently, awareness of natural limits on the planet has driven the major power states in the world into nakedly anti-democratic aggression against their own people and others. It is as if present and past imperial powers, when confronted with the planet's growing ecological distress, regress to imperial patterns of 150 years ago. Their policy is to seize more control while rejecting any responsbility for the human element in global climate change.

The California High Speed Rail Authority held a technical advisory council meeting on Monday, Dec. 7, at a public meeting hall called the Sam Pipes Room, in the Merced City Hall. Two members of the Merced public, representing the San Joaquin Raptor Rescue Center and Protect Our Water (POW), wished to attend. The regional director of the San Joaquin Valley unit of the rail authority had told the members of the public that a meeting would take place on Monday at a different location. The members of the public wrote to the regional director twice last week inquiring if they would be permitted to attend the meeting and asked her by phone. She replied that she had received the request and would talk to rail authority legal counsel. The members of the public requested that if they were not permitted to attend, that rail authority counsel provide written legal justification, considering that the authority was consulting with special interests like water districts, the farm bureau, insurance companies, etc. Not hearing back from the regional director at the end of last week or Monday morning, the members of the public called the rail authority headquarters in Sacramento and were informed of the time and different location of the meeting and that there should be no problem with public attendance of the meeting.

Those interested in reading the "Danish text" can find it through the link to the article. - ed.s

12-9-09
The Guardian (UK)
Copenhagen climate summit in disarray after 'Danish text' leak: Developing countries react furiously to leaked draft agreement that would hand more power to rich nations, sideline the UN's negotiating role and abandon the Kyoto protocol
John Vidal in Copenhagen http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/08/copenhagen-climate-summit-disarray-danish-text

The UN Copenhagen climate talks are in disarray today after developing countries reacted furiously to leaked documents that show world leaders will next week be asked to sign an agreement that hands more power to rich countries and sidelines the UN's role in all future climate change negotiations.

The document is also being interpreted by developing countries as setting unequal limits on per capita carbon emissions for developed and developing countries in 2050; meaning that people in rich countries would be permitted to emit nearly twice as much under the proposals.

The question on my mind: Can we swiftly mobilize such a heavily propagandized population to take mass non-violent action?
A growing population does not believe we can do so, and is on the verge of launching a heavily armed insurgency.--David DeGraw, "Af-Pak War Racket"

George Orwell once noted: "To see what is in front of your nose needs a constant struggle."

The subject of DeGraw's essay is the strategic advantage of the financial capital elite at the moment, the destruction its behavior is causing, the growing anger against it and the forms resistance against it may take.

He reminds us that the loss of faith in the political process at all levels of government is a mounting crisis in the United States and that political crises have a pace and consequences. Government and the people in whose name it claims to govern are moving in opposite directions. What is the velocity of this centripetal motion? Is it accelerating? As the people move away from a center that has been destroyed, which way will they move, left, right, or both? What are the prospects for the mass non-violent action that has restored a living center to political debate in the nation at times in the past?

To the public, American politics today sounds like the alarm of a vehicle being burgled. It also sounds like the new cop crowd-control noise machines, intended to shock, stun, immobilize. It sounds like anything but a call to wake up.

Anyone who does not already know that Rep. Dennis Cardoza, the Pimlico Kid - Merced, is a lying "sack of offal" (in the felicitous phrase of Fitzgerald of the Stockton Record) should not be trusted around public funds, should not be permitted to vote on any issue or be left alone with children. We all know that. But in the following little love note to Westlands and Metropolitan of Southern California, the Kid surrenders his heart and soul -- hook, line, bottle and bookie -- to the oligarchy of water, land, finance and insurance. Nobody who can get up in the morning, tie his or her shoelaces and go to work or go look for work believes anything the Kid says anymore. We all know he's just doing his daily assignment of kissing gold-plated butt in the middle of a regional economic depression. He's just doing his job.

We hope our readers enjoyed their holidays.

Badlands Journal editorial board

12-1-09
Congressman Dennis Cardoza
http://co113w.col113.mail.live.com/default.aspx?n=1430739263
Dear Friend: