December 31, 2010 - January 2, 2011
Counterpunch.com
New Year's Edition
http://www.badlandsjournal.com/node/add/blog

A Concise History of the Rise and Fall of the Enviro Establishment
How Green Became the Color of Money
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

In the early summer of 1995, Jay Hair quietly resigned as head of the National Wildlife Federation. This Napoleonic figure had transformed a once scruffy, apolitical collection of local hunting and gun clubs into the cautious colossus of the environmental movement with more than four million members and an annual budget of nearly $100 million. By the time Hair left, the Federation enjoyed more political clout in Washington than the rest of the environmental groups combined.

We in Merced City are far from the steely-eyed, realty-backed political leadership of our boom-time mayor, Ellie Wooten, a woman with a keen wit and a keen eye for her next buck. Now, we got Mayor Billy, Babbitt Incarnate, an individual who has never ventured beyond the never-never-land of Republican ideology of denunciation of "tax-and-spend liberals" except when Babbittry controls the public purse.

But, to be fair to Mayor Billy, the entire political class, our august leaders, the ones we actually elect for some reason, believe it is their burden and duty to put a happy face on our economic collapse. They take refuge in a Future of Prosperity if only the taxpayers sacrifice today.

Sound familiar? From back in the day when Development was supposed to pay for Growth and we were building houses for that mythical population of people who didn't even know they would ever come to live in Merced and, instead, built houses for bottom-feeding flippers.

Counterpunch.com

December 27, 2010

The Story of Want

Out Here in the Sticks

By BILL HATCH

Merced, California

http://www.counterpunch.com/hatch12272010.html

The disgust of some of us who were fortunate enough to experience a college education back when a great deal of it was about discovering one's intellectual limitations, is undimmed by the ceaseless parade of news stories about the equally undimmed greed of University of California administrators. Many listed in the group who wrote the UC Board of Regents demanding higher pensions have spent their lives mismanaging UC funds for the rest of the UC employees. What we are looking at, apparently, is a mini-Wall Street inside the university, a group that believe, absolutely, they have a right to the same bonuses and immense golden parachutes as their counterparties on Wall Street. Yet the funds they managed so unwisely -- public funds -- are in the toilet.

The other question is: where did the money come from from UC that made it the largest single contributor to the Obama presidential campaign?

This is a corrupt outfit, a golden calf inside the sacred cow -- whatever. Yet, under the glorious leadership of Regents' Chairman Richard Blum (husband of Sen. Diane Feinstein, this grotesquely tasteless, narcissistic greed is what the citizens of the state get as they watch the greatest public university in history dissolve before their eyes.

The editorial board bets that before our eyes, despite a struggle to conceal it, the regents will grant these thieves their demands for our money. These administrators have the guts of burglars.

The other greedy group seems to be our sainted medical profession.

Site 1B -- Riverside Motorsports Park (formerly Pacific ComTech Park and Morimoto Industrial Park:)

This property was foreclosed upon and subsequently purchased at public auction on November 12, 2009 by Castle Farms, Inc.---Merced County Board of Supervisors Agenda Item 52, December 14, 2010.

And so ... John Condren, CEO of Riverside Motorsports Park, bought Pacific ComTech Park when Morimoto went bankrupt in 2005, and now Castle Farms, Inc., which plans to develop a large property between the former Air Force base and Merced, has bought the property at public auction.

Castle Farms, Inc., a 2,600 planned community destined for annexation into the City of Merced went through its own approval process with the city about a year before RMP requested that the county Airport Land Use Commission override the noise/safety zone for Castle airport. Without the override, the race track could not be built. Coincidentally, Castle Farms, Inc. stood to gain the ability to develop several hundred acres of its land blocked by the existing Castle airport noise/safety zone.

State officials said the billions will be spent on buying rights of way, realigning roadways, relocating existing rail and utilities and building the two stations and rail bridges. Constructing the initial segment is expected to create more than 80,000 jobs.
To show commitment to expanding the route, board member Rod Diridon proposed dedicating $2 million each for environmental, engineering and design studies for high-speed rail stations in Merced and Bakersfield. That suggestion will be taken up at the authority's next meeting...Assemblyman Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo -- Galigani's colleague on the Assembly high-speed rail committee -- notes that if the rail authority's "worst case" funding scenario plays out, the Corcoran-to-Borden line would be the only stretch built.
In that case, Authority Deputy Director Jeff Barker said, the tracks could join another rail line. That requirement is included in the fine print of the bond voters approved to launch the project.
Amtrak trains on the San Joaquin line, which connects Oakland, Sacramento and the Central Valley, could travel up to 125 mph on the 65-mile stretch of "higher-speed" track, Amtrak spokeswoman Vernae Graham said. Currently, the limit is 79 mph.
"Our passengers would benefit," she said. -- Oakland Tribune, Dec. 2, 2010

Well, folks, this year's high speed rail season is over and now it's back to the peripheral canal again, but the team remains the same. It is the team that brought us UC Merced to educated us and enabled the Great Real Estate Boom and Bust that brought so much security to so many in their own homes.

When the last dollar rolls over the government presses, not worth the paper it's printed on, and the last drop of fresh water from northern California has been sliced, diced, packaged and sold like a mortgage derivative, there is one thing we can count on: the shrill whine of our leadership team, so highly cultivated in the science of dependency: "We want more!"

Badlands Journal editorial board

“If anyone is a master’s student in international relations and they haven’t heard of WikiLeaks and gone looking for the documents that relate to their area of study, then they don’t deserve to be a graduate student in international relations,” ...Professor Gary Sick, Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs

12-06-10
Wired.com
Columbia University Reverses Anti-WikiLeaks Guidance
By Sam Gustin
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/columbia-wikileaks-policy/

Days after Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) caused an uproar by warning its students against linking to WikiLeaks or discussing the secret-spilling website’s latest cache of diplomatic cables online, the prestigious training ground for future diplomats has changed tack and embraced free speech.

Last week, the SIPA Office of Career Services sent an e-mail to students saying that an alumnus who works at the U.S. State Department had recommended that current students not tweet or post links to WikiLeaks, which is in the process of releasing 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables — many of them classified — because doing so could hurt their career prospects in government service.

The story below is about the collision of agriculture and oil industries in Kern County on land that a few decades ago was mostly reserved for oil wells in sagebrush, habitat for roadrunners and coyotes. Irrigation development has brought orchards and row crops to a lot of it now, leading to a confrontation between the two industries.

We imagine that as natural gas drilling increases in the San Joaquin Valley that similar issues will arise between groundwater and the chemicals injected in the gas-drilling process.

Badlands Journal editorial board