Badlands Journal

The Badlands Journal editorial board fully supports Measure C, which will be on the November 2010 ballot, and the board wishes to help publicize and support a fund-raising event that will contribute to the campaign. After a month of serious dialogue about what the measure actually says and might mean, board members Uncle Henry, the Dull-Witted Boy, Li'l Hector, and the Dull-Witted Boy's Mother, won the day. In fact, it was the Dull-Witted Boy's Mother that finished the dispute while waiting on the editorial board's breakfast table the other day.

"It's simple. Save farmland. What's your order? Special's an ortega-chili pepper 'n jack omelette -- six ninety-five," she said.

Measure C authors and supporters are holding a dinner to raise funds for the campaign to pass MERCED COUNTY CITIZEN’S RIGHT TO VOTE ON EXPANSION OF RESIDENTIAL AREAS INITIATIVE. The event will be held from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. at the Marchini and Giampaoli families' Bear Creek Pumpkin Patch on Plainsburg Road near Planada.

The featured speaker of the evening will be famous Fresno author, Mark Arax, (In my Father's Name, The King Of California: J. G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire, and West of the West).

9-28-10
Guardian (UK)
Foreclosure funny businessThat US banks can skirt the paperwork required for home foreclosures shows it's one rule for them and another for us...Dean Baker
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/sep/28/us-foreclosure-fiasco-banks
Virtually everyone has had the experience of being forced to pay a late fee or a bank penalty because of some fine-print provision that we overlooked. Sometimes, begging by good customers can win forbearance, but usually we are held to the written terms of the contract, no matter how buried or convoluted the clause in question may be.
That is the way it works for the rest of us, but apparently this is not the way the banks do business, at least when those at the other end of the contract are ordinary homeowners. As a number of news reports have shown in recent weeks, banks have been carrying through foreclosures at a breakneck pace and freely ignoring the legal niceties required under the law, such as demonstrating clear ownership to the property being foreclosed.

The new, farmland real estate bubble

Investment groups fleeing the stock markets are investing in farmland, including irrigated California farmland. Finance, insurance and real estate corporations have been discreetly buying and holding agricultural land for decades in the California Central Valley. Almond orchards and vineyards are good places to park money to wait for the next expansion of urban slurb. When the Enron/dotcom market crashed, California real estate, with its low property taxes, rapid growth and weak governments, was a very attractive investment. As a result, five or six county seats in the San Joaquin Valley have made the top ten for residential foreclosures for the last several years.

There is a lot of money in America; it comes and goes out of this valley like floods before the dams were built. Move over, Nathan Detroit, our economy is the richest floating crap game the nation has ever seen. But the players in this particular game may be farming the tax code more than the land and crops.

Some likely consequences of a major increase in outside-investor control -- control by financial entities not always interested in profits -- of agricultural production in California:

* Increasing over-production of nuts, fruits and grapes, depressing commodity prices;

* Impacts on water: more, larger wells, driving down the aquifers for real farmers;

9-16-10
The White House
Office of the Press Secretary
Statement by President Obama on Income, Poverty, and Health Coverage Data
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2010/09/16/statement-president-obama-income-poverty-and-health-coverage-data-releas
 “Our economy plunged into recession almost three years ago on the heels of a financial meltdown and a rapid decline in housing prices. Last year we saw the depths of the recession, including historic losses in employment not witnessed since the Great Depression. Today, the Census Bureau released data that illustrates just how tough 2009 was: along with rising unemployment, incomes failed to rise for the typical household, the percentage of Americans without health insurance rose to 16.7 percent, and the percentage of Americans living in poverty increased to 14.3 percent.
But the data released today also remind us that a historic recession does not have to translate into historic increases in family economic insecurity. Because of the Recovery Act and many other programs providing tax relief and income support to a majority of working families – and especially those most in need – millions of Americans were kept out of poverty last year.

...The solution lies in residents increasing their job skills, he (Kelvin Jasek-Rysdahl, an economics professor at California State University, Stanislaus) said. -- Modesto Bee, Sept. 15, 2010

After the largest financial fraud in the history of the world comes down, the worst effects of all in the north San Joaquin Valley, and we had the Pomboza (representatives Richard Pombo and Dennis Cardoza) trying to gut the Endangered Species Act in the midst of it, and now we have this Turkey Tech economics professor blaming the victims for not having degrees in computer science or something else of a professional nature. If only it had just been forklift drivers that lied on their mortgage applications, while people with proper academic degrees told the truth, did not engage in wild real estate speculation and were wise enough to avoid financial disaster, the Learned Man's judgment might make some sense. But that's not how it happened.

It is a sad, sickening thing to see in the regional press, day after day, from the bloviations of UC Merced "scientists" to the CSU pundits on down, just how completely the academic elites sold out their own society -- aka us -- to stay "on the same page" of their corrupt disciplines.

9/11/10
North County Times-
Hoover Dam could stop generating electricity as soon as 2013, officials fear...Eric Wolff
http://www.nctimes.com/business/article_b7e44e9e-087d-53b2-9c49-7ea32262c9a9.html
After 75 years of steadily cranking out electricity for California, Arizona and Nevada, the mighty turbines of the Hoover Dam could cease turning as soon as 2013, if water levels in the lake that feeds the dam don't start to recover, say water and dam experts.
Under pressure from the region's growing population and years of drought, Lake Mead was down to 1,087 feet, a 54-year low, as of Wednesday.
If the lake loses 10 feet a year, as it has recently, it will soon reach 1,050 feet, the level below which the turbines can no longer run.
Those hydroelectric generators produce cheap electricity for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which is responsible for pumping water across the Colorado River Aqueduct to hydrate much of Southern California.
Without that power, Metropolitan's costs to transport water will double or even triple, a district executive said.
That could result in a $10 to $20 a month increase in annual costs for residential customers, but could have greater impacts on business customers who use more water.

9-1-10

Lloygcarter.com

MORE DOUBTS ABOUT THE DROUGHT

USDA Figures show 2009, the so-called third year of drought in California, was the third highest yield of farm cash receipts in history

By Patrick Porgans

California High Speed Rail Authority

http://www.cahighspeedrail.ca.gov/library.asp?p=5890

Investor Relations

Merced County Director of Planning and Development Services, Robert A. “Bobby” Lewis, reportedly tendered his resignation on Friday. Numerous calls to different county offices to confirm the report met a stone wall.

Nevertheless, other sources convinced members of the Badlands Journal editorial board that the report was true.

The board issued a statement along with an article written when Lewis arrived nearly four years ago.

A member of the Badlands Journal editorial board was asked by a UC Merced student for a meeting so that he could learn more about the campus where he is going to college. The request was received the day Chancellor Steve Kang announced he would depart the campus at the end of the next academic year.

We thought, rather than having coffee with the student and attempting to tell that story in an hour or so, we would do two things: first, refer him to an audio tape made in the classroom of UC Merced historian Gregg Herken, a member of the founding faculty of social sciences, humanities and art at the campus, and who directed the production of a laughable bit of bobcatflak called The Fairy Shrimp Chronicles: An informal history of the founding of UC Merced. The students of that class learned how to write history as propaganda and suppress vital information, useful skills if they seek careers in the University of California system.

Here is a typical example of the Great Valley Whine: the Fresno Bee is tearful that we didn't get as great an increase in federal spending in recent years as San Francisco, home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, did, and our Medicare reimbursement rates "barely cover costs." You can hear McClatchy's finest stamping their penny loafers.