Badlands Journal

Phil Angelides, California treasurer from 1999 - 2006, chaired the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission that recently made its report on the financial meltdown, focusing on the real estate market. As treasurer, he was an ex-officio member of the boards of the California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS) and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS), when combined the largest public retirement fund in the nation. In 1984, he was appointed president of Sacramento-based AKT Development Corporation, owned by Angelo Tsakopoulos. Two years later, Angelides formed his own company, River West, and developed a flood plain outside of Elk Grove in the Sacramento area. Angelo Tsakopoulos and his daughter, Eleni Tsakopoulous-Kounalakis, to Angelides various campaigns, including for governor of California in 2006. As California State Democratic Party chairman, Angelides was one of the main architects of the Party's takeover by corporate and union special interests.
Investments he urged CalPERS and CalSTRS to make when he was treasurer cost the pension funds billions of dollars.
Big surprise!
An even bigger surprise is that, judging from the Fresno Bee editorial below, Angelides' financial crisis commission blamed ever special interest involved in the largest financial fraud in history but institutional investors.

In the last three years 333 small banks have closed their doors and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation estimate that there are 860 "troubled" banks now. The FDIC insurance fund was $8 billion in the red at the end of September. It is the worse rate of bank failure since 1993, in the depths of the savings and loan disaster.

Badlands Journal editorial board

1-29-11
Washington Post
Regulators shut banks in Colo, NM, Okla, Wis…MARCY GORDON, The Associated Press
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/28/AR2011012805377_pf.html

WASHINGTON -- Regulators on Friday closed banks in Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Wisconsin, lifting to 11 the number of bank failures in 2011 following last year's toll of 157 taken down by the weak economy and piles of soured loans.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. took over the banks: First Community Bank, based in Taos, N.M, with $2.3 billion in assets; FirsTier Bank, based in Louisville, Colo., with $781.5 million in assets; First State Bank of Camargo, Okla., with $43.5 million in assets; and Evergreen State Bank, based in Stoughton, Wis., with $246.5 million in assets.

Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon. His newest book, Born Under a Bad Sky, is published by AK Press / CounterPunch books. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net.  This essay is excerpted from the forthcoming book GreenScare: the New War on Environmentalism by Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank.

1-21-11
counterpunch.com
A Concise History of the Rise and Fall of the Enviro Establishment
How Green Became the Color of Money
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
http://www.counterpunch.com/stclair01212011.html
"Gestures of Goodwill"
Given his attenuated record in Arkansas no one should have expected President Bill Clinton to live up to his campaign promises of attacking “special interests” and defending the “little guy.” Any precious illusions about such a possibility disappeared even before the inauguration, when Clinton stock-piled his administration with an assortment of corporate lawyers (Mickey Kantor and Bernard Nussbaum), financiers (Robert Rubin of Goldman Sachs), lobbyists (Howard Paster and Ron Brown) and corporate executives (Mack McLarty).

The highly successful soap opera about foreclosure, "Pyramid of Greed," is already three episodes into its 2011 season: "GI Joe and Jane and the Temple of Greed"; "Who owns the mortgage?" ; and "A monitor for Mammon (Part 1)".

In "GI Joe and Jane and the Temple of Greed", "JPMorgan Chase acknowledged this week that it overcharged some 4,000 military families for their mortgages and wrongfully foreclosed on at least 14. It's not clear how much the mistakes have cost these families, but the bank told NBC News that it’s collectively refunding about $2 million [1] to those affected. It has also promised to restore the homes that were lost..."
Viewers will be thrilled by this drama of how the nihilistic amoral American plutocracy is throwing the nation's own soldiers out of their homes.

"Who owns the mortgage?" is a fascinating episode, set in Massachussetts, about the angst zombie banks faced when a state high court ruled in favor of homeowners against the banks in two foreclosure cases, arguing that the banks could not prove ownership of the mortgage due to gaps in the chain of paperwork between the actual mortgages in the possession of the homeowners and the securitized bundles of mortgages where the actual mortgages ended up in derivative form. It's a real tear jerker.

1-14-11
counterpunch.com
A Concise History of the Rise and Fall of the Enviro Establishment (Part Three)
How Green Became the Color of Money
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
http://www.counterpunch.com/stclair01142011.html

In the Clinton era, the contours of environmental politics settled into a triangulated landscape, bounded by the Executive Office Building and its agency outlets (where administrative fiats were handed down with devastating finality); the committee rooms of Congress (where the chairmen of the all-important appropriations committees dole out pork and pollution); and the grey mansions of the special interest lobbies, both environmental and industrial, stacked along K Street. Daily the inhabitants of these centers of power determined the levels of lead in the blood of children in south-central Los Angeles; the number of Chinook salmon chewed up by hydro-electric dams on the Columbia River; the gallons of dioxin flushed into the Mississippi; and the fate of such animals as the grizzly bear, whose habitat can remain protected public land or be transformed into clearcuts or cyanide-laced heap leach gold mines.

1-9-11
Modesto Bee
Members of Congress told to increase security, Rep. Cardoza says...Michael Doyle
http://www.modbee.com/2011/01/08/v-print/1503144/members-of-congress-told-to-increase.html
WASHINGTON -- The shooting of Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords on Saturday struck homewith California public officials of all stripes, reminding them anew of their ownvulnerabilities.
Shortly after the shooting, Rep. Dennis Cardoza, D-Atwater, said he and other House members received multiple e-mail warnings from Capitol Hill law enforcement officials.
“They told us to increase our vigilance, and to have more security at our public events,” Cardoza said, adding that “we will follow the recommendations of the police ...It’s a real problem,” Cardoza said of the security conundrum. “You want to be accessible, but I also care very deeply about the security of my staff and of the people who attend these public events.” Cardoza said security considerations contributed to his previous decision to relocate his Modesto and Merced congressional district offices to government buildings that already maintain a security presence.
He indicated security concerns also played into his earlier decision to curtail some public town hall meetings during the politically heated summer of 2009...

"It's one of those perfect storm situations," said UC Merced economics professor Shawn Kantor. "So it will take a very long time for this area to recover." ..."This particular area has chronically had high unemployment relative to the state and the country, which all ties to low educational attainment and poverty," Kantor said. "The circularity of the socioeconomic conditions make it difficult for this area to succeed economically. And then it got hit with the housing and government bubbles bursting." ... "Even though agriculture is healthy and we can expect further growth, it doesn't have the job-generation capacity to mop up all this displaced construction labor," said Jeff Michael, director of the Business Forecasting Center at the University of the Pacific in Stockton.--Merced SunStar, January 6, 2011

12-31-10
Indybay.org
Supreme Court Terminated Governor's Last Ditch Petition to Sell State Properties
by Dan Bacher
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2010/12/31/18667918.php
Outgoing California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and his collaborators have waged a campaign to greenwash his absymal environmental legacy through a plethora of press releases, photo opportunities and puff pieces before he leaves office. One of the most shameful examples of these efforts to rewrite history by casting Schwarzenegger in the role of "green governor" is Terry Tamminen's Huffington Post puff piece, "He'll Be Back" (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/terry-tamminen/hell-be-back_b_802128.html).

"In 'Terminator', Arnold Schwarzenegger famously utters 'I'll be back.' The world should hope that he'll be back to keep working on these issues with the unique style of public service that is the basis of his unprecedented green legacy," Tamminen claims.

In stark contrast, Patrick Porgans, a longtime advocate for the public trust, has written a superb piece exposing the Governor's last ditch petition to sell 11 state office properties to private corporations before leaving office. The plan was supposedly designed to pay off a portion of the state's multi billion deficit and increasing debt load.

For Immediate Release: January 5, 2011

Contact:       Dr. Mark Rockwell, California Representative, Endangered Species Coalition,

                        V.P. Conservation, Federation of Fly Fishers, 530 559-5759

Leda Huta, Executive Director, Endangered Species Coalition: 202-320-6467

Dear Arnold, or "chaparito," as the girls at the In-N-Out here in town dubbed you when you visited us once during your first campaign, good-bye "Shorty," we loved you well. You were a magnificent obsession, nearly as good as the Great Ronald Himself. You took our minds off our problems. You distracted us from the bad news of our collapse. You were the ultimate Man Without Qualities, the nostalgic memory of the Austro-Hungarian Empire's special gift to poor us. Those of us unfortified by the magnificent, 1,500-page, unfinished comic novel by Robert Musil, which would include a very comfortable majority of us Californians, were putty in your hands.

How were we to imagine that after your ridiculous terms as governor, you'd be rushing back to Hollywood to write the novel of your life as the basis of the film script? My very own Greedy Hun. I salute you. We will never be rid of you, it seems. You will be in our face forever -- a jerk, a joke, both.