Badlands Journal

1-15-10

CounterPunch Newsleter

1-08-10
Asia Times 
 Russia, China, Iran redraw energy map...M K Bhadrakumar
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/LA08Ag01.html
The inauguration of the Dauletabad-Sarakhs-Khangiran pipeline on Wednesday connecting Iran's northern Caspian region with Turkmenistan's vast gas field may go unnoticed amid the Western media cacophony that it is "apocalypse now" for the Islamic regime in Tehran.
The event sends strong messages for regional security. Within the space of three weeks, Turkmenistan has committed its entire gas exports to China, Russia and Iran. It has no urgent need of the pipelines that the United States and the European Union have been advancing. Are we hearing the faint notes of a Russia-China-Iran symphony?

In the Democratic Party primary race for governor of Oregon, former Oregon Secretary of State Bill Bradbury is proposing a state bank modeled on the Bank of North Dakota. Historically, Oregon has provided good ideas to its sluggish southern neighbor, for example recall, initiative and referendum.

Badlands JOurnal editorial board

1-20-10

KATU.com

Bill Bradbury dreams of a Bank of Oregon
http://www.katu.com/news/local/82197232.html
This challenger for the 2010 Oregon Governor race on Wednesday calls for the creation of a Bank of Oregon "to keep Oregon money in Oregon and grow Oregon-based businesses."
PORTLAND, Ore. – At a presentation Wednesday in downtown Portland, a challenger for the 2010 Oregon Governor race called for the creation of a Bank of Oregon "to keep Oregon money in Oregon and grow Oregon-based businesses."

“It is time to declare economic sovereignty from the multi-national banks that are responsible for much of our current economic crisis," declared Democrat Bill Bradbury. "It is time to keep Oregon money here in Oregon working for Oregonians.”

1-15-10
Stockton Record
Look out below...Alex Breitler
http://blogs.esanjoaquin.com/san-joaquin-river-delta/2010/01/14/look-out-below/
Golfer Kyle Bowers of Stockton got a birdie Thursday. But not the kind he wanted.
Bowers had just arrived at the sixth hole of The Reserve at Spanos Park early Thursday afternoon when he ducked into the bathroom, a Porta Potty-like facility with a tank.
He lifted the toilet seat and was about to do his guy thing when he saw a face staring back at him.
The ghost-like face of a terrified barn owl.
“Oh my gosh… what is that?” he thought.
It was pretty dark in there, but Bowers could see the owl bobbing its head around. He quickly guessed that the owl had gone down an unscreened vent from the roof to the tank, and couldn’t find its way back out.
For some reason, nature was no longer calling. So Bowers started calling for help.
Just reach in there and grab the bird from the back, someone told him. No way, he said, fearing the owl would whip its head around and gash his hands with its beak.
He told the cart lady who sells drinks. She didn’t know what to do. The front desk wasn’t much more help.
“I’ll be honest, the golf course didn’t want to do anything,” Bowers said.

A shadow covers the Valley. It is in the shape of a fat, blue pig with its fronttrotter outstretched to receive cash from the rich to stuff it where the sun never shines.

Historically, the Blue Dogs were the logical outgrowth of the career of former Rep. Tony Coelho, D-Merced, who preceded Gary Condit and, more importantly, who was in the go-go Eighties the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the campaign slush fund for the Party's candidates and incumbents in the House of Representatives. Coelho got nailed for his involvement with Michael Millken, Wall Street's junk-bond king, later convicted for felonies and sent to prison. Coelho resigned rather than face an investigation and went into investment banking. When, in the course of managing Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign, Coelho's "colorful" career was getting more media attention than his candidate's speeches, he resigned. An excellent study of Coelho's political career is Honest Graft, by Brooks Jackson.

The Blue Dogs have never stood for anything but money. They are no more than vultures feeding off the corpse of the Democratic Party. Coelho was at the funeral. Through the years, as the economy has grown steadily more concentrated in fewer hands, Blue Dogs dug deeper into the pockets of finance, insurance and real estate than ever, hiding as best they could from the people.

ProPublica's Unemployment Insurance Tracker reveals that California is the largest among 25 states in the category of bankrupt unemployment insurance funds. Currently, according to ProPublica, the state has borrowed $6.5 billion from the federal government, has $113.8 million in the trust fund now and ProPublica predicts the state will be insolvent in six months. No other borrowing state has borrowed more than $1.5 billion (Indiana).

These numbers are a gauge of several factors: the price California pays for being the largest state; the over-concentration on one industry which, having been manipulated by the'big banksters, has laid off huge numbers of people -- from framers to tellers in formercommunity  banks -- a catastrophy that has devastated the entire economy, down to what you choose to buy your grandchild at WalMart, who goes to the farmers market these days, and everything in between. The economy has been contracting since before Obama took office.

As pressure builds on the unemployment insurance fund, as debt on the borrowing comes due, what will be the impact on benefits and the impact -- given the state's other billions in debt -- on the state's ability to remain a solvent government?

It's a wonder UC Merced didn't also take credit for helping invent some of the grimmest real estate statistics in the country. It certainly has a right to that "honor" along with all the awards and recognitions it's claimed in recent Golden Bobcatflak.

Too humble, evidently.

Badlands Journal editorial board

Everything about state Sen. Lois Wolk's career, from teaching high school, Davis City councilwoman and mayor, Yolo County supervisor, and assemblywoman before becoming senator expresses one overwhelming focu -- care; care for disadvantaged people, the sick, and the human and natural communities connected to the San Joaquin Delta. Even when under enormous, unfair and shameful attack from fellow politicians like our governor, the Hun, and state Sen. Darrell Steinberg, Twerp-Sacramento, she has responded with measured critique and a completely classy defense -- not of herself, but the communities and natural resources she represents.

Cal Poly Professor Robert Rutherford and UC Berkeley Journalism Professor Michael Pollan are critics of agribusiness.

When Sen. Wolk discovered that a backroom deal between the Hun, Steinberg, Westlands Water District and Metropolitan had rewritten a bill to create a Delta Conservancy she had authored, she withdrew her name from it.

When Harris Ranch, one of Westlands largest landholders, discovered that Pollan would speak at Cal Poly and that Rutherford was teaching a course called "Issues in Animal Agriculture and -- even worse -- offended a Harris corporate suit by "unsolicited" comments that he thought water should be withdrawn from Westlands, Harris has threatened not to contribute $500 million to Cal Poly.

Every year about this time, California begins an annual religious rite, taking snow measurements in the Sierra and speculating on their meaning. California, which once worshipped conventional, modern gods has regressed, as its population and agribusiness has outstripped its water supply, to a more primitive, more energetic diety -- the Storm God. No longer requiring prophets and visionaries to track our Storm God because we have all the latest tracking technology -- satellites, GPS, GIS, etc plus the most up-to-date media technology -- California worships the Storm God with rituals so high tech and scientific that most people don't even realize it is, at base, as primitive as worship of Vico's early thunder-clapping, lightning-bolt-hurling, volcano dieties.

The idea of former Rep. Richard Pombo representing a district that includes Yosemite and Stanislaus national forests and the San Joaquin River from its headwaters to the Mendota Pool on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley revivifies the ancient political cliche about foxes in henhouses. Pombo, former chairman of what was known during the "Gingrich Revolution" in Congress as the House Resources Committee (its former name, Natural Resources Committee restored after Pombo and the Republican majority were defeated in 2006), operating out of his family's Pombo Real Estate Farms in Tracy, successfully killed funding year after year for the CalFed process to try to fix the Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta; supported three bills to gut the Endangered Species Act; tried to put a new freeway to the Bay Area through his family's land; and was defeated in his former seat because constituents were sick of his corrupt involvement with Jack Abramoff and Indian casinos...and that's just for starters.