Badlands Journal

GlobeScan Chairman Doug Miller commented: “America is the last place we would have expected to see such a sharp drop in trust in the free enterprise system. This is not good news for business.”

4-6-11
Globescan.com
Sharp Drop in American Enthusiasm for Free Market, Poll Shows
http://www.globescan.com/news_archives/radar10w2_free_market/ 
LONDON—American public support for the free market economy has dropped sharply in the past year, and is now lower than in China, according to a GlobeScan poll released today.

The findings, drawn from 12,884 interviews across 25 countries, show that there has been a sharp fall in the number of Americans who think that the free market economy is the best economic system for the future.

When GlobeScan began tracking views in 2002, four in five Americans (80%) saw the free market as the best economic system for the future—the highest level of support among tracking countries. Support started to fall away in the following years and recovered slightly after the financial crisis in 2007/8, but has plummeted since 2009, falling 15 points in a year so that fewer than three in five (59%) now see free market capitalism as the best system for the future.

Leaving his family and his racehorses in Maryland to make the arduous journey back to his congressional district -- our home -- Congressman Dennis Cardoza made one of his rare public appearances at the Merced County Board of Supervisors meeting this week. He congratulated a few honored volunteers before turning the task over to an inanimate staffer who repeated the identical congratulation to each of the remaining volunteers, regardless of their accomplishments.

After excusing himself, Cardoza mentioned that he would be traveling to Israel in the coming week. We could not help but be happy for our congressman because travel broadens the mind as well as the waistline. Voyaging again to the "Holy Land," our congressman will find yet another opportunity for spiritual growth.

Ellen Brown comments below on the international banking aspects of the Libyan "revolution." Brown is an American treasure. She knows what Frank Baum, author of the Wizard of Oz, and humdreds of thousands in the Populist Movement knew over a century ago -- some fundamental things about money. Her book, Web of Debt, about money in general and the Federal Reserve in particular, is the most readable book on the subject we have found since the financial crisis that has flattened Merced County, the San Joaquin Valley, along with countless other areas of the US, following the dismal histories of so many countries caught in the coils of debt by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. That story has affected so much of the Third World over the last 30 years. It has been marked by poverty, destruction of local economies and lately by wholesale, coordinated regional resistance, most noticeable perhaps in the US as the concerted efforts of several large Latin American countries, despite repeated coup attempts agaianst prominent leaders like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez.
Less known by far to the US have been similar attempts, detailed below, by African nations, in which the Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi has played a major role.

Since the beginning of awareness among decent people that the largest financial fraud in world history was occurring, Gretchen Morgenson at the New York Times and Gilian Tett at the Financial Times have been covering the story as honestly and fearlessly as Semour Hersh with New Yorker Magazine has covered Iraq and Afghanistan; and, as Hersh once remarked about his work, it looks like "an alternative history" compared with the constant bombardment of propaganda dished out by mainstream media ("real estate prices set to rise" in the near future, etc. etc.)

Reading Ms. Morgenson's latest pair of articles below raised questions that extend beyond financial fraud. It raises the question: what kind of national government do we actually have because it sure isn't a democracy "by, for and of the people" at the moment. The milder, more judicious and closely tied critics began calling it an oligarchy. An oligarchy means simply means rule by a few, making no judgment about the virtues or lack of the few who rule. It all depends on the moral qualities of the few. Less judicious critics a bit farther from Washington Consensus began calling it a plutocracy -- rule by the rich. Although again, nothing specific is intended about the moral virtues of the rich rulers. They may be quite nice people who care deeply for the people.

We've long known that the industrial chemists that create our pesticides test for one thing and one thing alone: how effective is the poison for the targeted pest. We know another thing: no pesticide ever annihilated any pests. Pests develop resistance which keeps the poisonmakers in business. A third thing we know is that the poisonmakers do not test for collateral damage to the environment or other species.
In the case of the new, souped up rat poison, there was no thought given -- except perhaps to conceal and deny -- the inevitable damage the poison would do to the many predators who eat rats and mice as a regular, perhaps even primary part of their diets. The existence and wide-spread use of this new super poison may explain a mysterious outbreak of eagle deaths in the Madera foothills reported last year and perhaps continuing to this day.
The existence and distribution of the poison is immoral. The government's failure to regulate and enforce is immoral. The whole greedy, politically cowardly slide into wanton killing of wildlife is despicable. We conclude that among the many owners of wildlife agencies we must include rat poisoners. The slimy deal here is that most, if not all, the predator species being poisoned are already listed as threatened or endangered so agencies like the state Department of Fish and Game do not make any money selling tags to hunters to hunt them.

Badlands Journal editorial board

A story about China's bullet trains reminds us of what they are all about -- one more segregation by income group. Affluent Americans would much prefer to ride by flashy new bullet trains so that they too can be a part of solving the energy crisis. But we the people will of course have to build a separate train for them in the same way that we keep giving them unconsionable tax breaks. Since the public is paying for these high speed railroads, yet another subsidy for they wealthy, ticket prices ought to be subsidized for the "middle class," which in the current political jargon is the income group that contains everyone but millionaires or those eccentrics that prefer to live outdoors.

Public transportation, paid for with public funds, ought to be for the public, not just for the affluent. High speed rail is a very expensive way to rub peoples' noses in the econopmic inequality of their societies.

Badlands Journal editorial board

4-7-11
Sacramento Bee
China's bullet trains divide rich, poor…Tom Lasseter
http://www.sacbee.com/2011/04/07/v-print/3533851/chinas-bullet-trains-divide-rich.html

4-8/10-11
CounterPunch.com
A Concise History of the Rise and Fall of the Green Establishment (Part 9)
How Green Became the Color of Money
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
http://www.counterpunch.com/stclair04082011.html
Munich in the Big Woods.

The Wilderness Society was founded in 1930 by three early heroes of the environmental movement: Aldo Leopold, Benton McKaye and Robert Marshall. MacKaye and Marshall were both socialists, who believed that corporate-owned forest land should be seized by the federal government. Leopold was the father of modern forest ecology and author of Sand County Almanac, the classic text on “land ethics.”

The modern Wilderness Society, with its cautious political approach and $20 million a year budget, bears little resemblance to the lean and radical organization started by Leopold and Marshall. The Society’s board of directors is culled from the elite ranks of corporate America and the social register. In the 1990s, the board included John Bierworth (former CEO of defense contractor Grumman International), David Bonderman (CEO of Continental Airlines), oil heiress Caroline Getty, Christopher Elliman (Rockefeller heir) and Gilman Ordway (heir to the 3M chemical forture).

4-4-11
Lloydgcarter.com
Drought of Candor
By Lloyd G. Carter
http://www.lloydgcarter.com/content/110404477_drought-candor
The House Subcommittee on Water and Power, now under the control of Republicans, will hold a field hearing in Fresno April 11 with the provocative title “Creating Jobs by Overcoming Man-Made Drought: Time for Congress to Listen and Act.”

The phrase “man-made drought,” like the terms Obamacare, death tax and death panel, was cooked up by political consultants with the intent to trigger an emotional response from listeners, rather than intellectual analysis. Use of the phrase began surfacing in 2009 when water deliveries to the western San Joaquin Valley were significantly reduced, thanks to reduced rainfall and snowpack and deteriorating ecological conditions in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, triggering the Endangered Species Act.

It was “1984” author George Orwell who wrote that political language “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”  That is the case with the phrase man-made drought.

Below is a letter to Katherine Hart, Chair of the Regional Water Quality Control Board, Central Valley Region, concerning the failure of the present Irrigated Lands Regulatory Program Framework.

One of the more than 100 signatories to the letter summarized it by saying:

You may remember that the causes of the crash of the ecosystem in the Delta were mainly 3 issues - water diversions (limited at times under the BiOps), toxins flowing into the system, and invasive species.  Not addressing this, and giving an additional 5 year waiver means that we will NOT be addressing one of the 3 causes of the Delta crash, which makes no sense to most of us. 

Many members of the Merced County public will remember Kate Hart, to whom the letter is addressed. Kate, an attorney representing Merced County at the time, was one of the masterminds behind railroading the Riverside Motorsports Park project through its local land-use hurdles. The project eventually wrecked on a California Environmental Quality Act lawsuit. The new governor might consider replacing Katie with someone more friendly to the California environment than she is.

Badlands Journal editorial board

ENVIRONMENTAL, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, AND RECREATIONAL AND
COMMERCIAL FISHING COMMUNITY JOINT COMMENTS ON PROPOSED
IRRIGATED LANDS REGULATORY PROGRAM FRAMEWORK
CENTRAL VALLEY REGIONAL WATER QUALITY CONTROL BOARD

4-2-11

Global Research

Lawsuit seeks to invalidate Monsanto’s GMO patents
by Rady Ananda
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24103
  

  “A new invention to poison people … is not a patentable invention.” Lowell v. Lewis, 1817

A landmark lawsuit filed on March 29 in US federal court seeks to invalidate Monsanto’s patents on genetically modified seeds and to prohibit the company from suing those whose crops become genetically contaminated.

The Public Patent Foundation filed suit on behalf of 270,000 people from sixty organic and sustainable businesses and trade associations, including thousands of certified-organic farmers. In Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association, et al. v. Monsanto, et al. (U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, Case No. 11 CIV 2163), PUBPAT details the invalidity of any patent that poisons people and the environment, and that is not useful to society, two hallmarks of US patent law.

"As Justice Story wrote in 1817, to be patentable, an invention must not be 'injurious to the well being, good policy, or sound morals of society,'” notes the complaint in its opening paragraphs, citing Lowell v. Lewis.

A stark and terrifying warning has been made by a reputable source concerning the health of RoundUp Ready crops -- corn, soybeans, and now alfalfa. Monsanto, manufacturer of the genetically modified seed, has of course launched its counter-attack against the warning, an effort involving political contributions, lobbying, and propaganda rather than scientific investigation.

The biotech corporate science has been good enough to modify the genetic structure of food crops but has not shown the same enthusiasm for investigating consequences of the radical biotechnology.

Michael Meachum, the first environmental minister in the Tony Blair cabinet in the UK, expressing his opposition to genetically modified crops, said that he admired the American public for permitting itself to be an experimental population for biotechnology inadequately tested by the US government for its health and safety, but the British, he thought, lacked that kind of "courage."

Badlands Journal editorial board

2-22-11

GlobalResearch.com

"Col. Don M. Huber" - Genetic Engineering. Roundup or Roundup-Ready Crops May Be Causing Animal Miscarriages and Infertilityv
February 28, 2011
By Col Don M. Huber

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=23335