Badlands Journal

Even though none of the flak about the new UC Merced chancellor, Dorothy Leland, indicated that she knew anything about Merced other than that the finance, insurance and real estate special interest "stakeholders" want a UC Merced medical school, the Badlands Journal editorial board would like to welcome Leland, a scholar of existentialism a great big San Joaquin Valley En soi/Pour soi, wish her -- when fear and trembling strike -- happy rowing on Lake Yosemite with her ether oars, and hope she finds oodles of Socratic Irony out there on the wildlife habitat and former wetlands to ease the sickness unto etc.

Since we didn't see much difference between Leland and other officials that have come and gone at UC Merced -- people unable to distinguish between propaganda and education -- we are sending her a 7-year-old letter to a planner,  two letters we wrote to former Chancellor Steve Kang, and the 6-year-old report by Christopher Butcher of UC Davis on how Merced County completely corrupted the Williamson Act.

We realize land-use policy is an esoteric topic for a Kierkegaard scholar, but we have some advice on the medical school direction, too. Since the destiny of the campus is to be a combination Indian casino/senior living facility, why not start now by training geriatric nurses also certified in slot machine repair? -- blj

 “Now we’re going to have to start all over again,” Isabel Bravo, retired long-time president of the Placer County CA chapter of National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), told me Monday. She said she’d met last week with the new police chief in her city, Roseville, and he didn’t know anything about NAMI training programs for departments to build “crisis intervention teams” so that police could identify the mentally ill, differentiate them from people either stoned or drunk, disarm them if necessary, and talk them down from “the ozone.”

Strange, I thought. Dee Dee Gunther, spokeswoman for the Roseville PD and another voice from my past as a reporter in that town, had told me the week before that the teams were alive and well in Roseville and at the county sheriff's office.

7-16-11

Michael Hudson's blog

Wall Street's euthanasia of industry

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7-16-11

Merced Sun-Star

High-speed rail: Ag worries over project voiced

Elected officials and growers discuss effects on farmland… AMEERA BUTT

http://www.mercedsunstar.com/2011/07/16/v-print/1971373/high-speed-rail-ag-worries-over.html

Farmers in Merced County voiced their concerns about the impact of high-speed rail on ag land at a joint hearing organized by state senators Friday afternoon.

Sen. Anthony Cannella, R-Ceres, and Sen. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord, who leads the Senate Transportation and Housing Committee, held a joint hearing, "From Food to Rail: High-Speed Rail Impacts on Agriculture" on Friday.

Sen. Doug LaMalfa, R-Richvale, and Sen. Alan Lowenthal, D-Long Beach, also attended.

The event weighed the effects on ag land by the proposed railway, intended to carry passengers between San Francisco, Sacramento and Los Angeles by way of the San Joaquin Valley at speeds of up to 220 mph.

Cannella said the event provided a chance for politicians to hear from the agricultural community, a major part of California's economy. It generates more than $30 billion a year in revenue.

We post this article by Ellen Brown to respond to a comment from a reader expressing great concern for the whole Western financial system. In this piece, Brown focuses on another pernicious aspect of interest and banking -- why banks are not lending to businesses, particularly small businesses, other banks, and to individuals.

Below, we have added the text of California Assembly Bill 750 (Hueso, D-San Diego) to create "the investment trust blue ribbon task force to consider the viability of establishing the California Investment Trust, which would be a state bank receiving deposits of state funds." Authored by a freshman legislator with a lot of experience in the financial side of local government, at first glance AB 750 looks too timid to survive, but perhaps the only way it can make it onto the table is with a consensus building approach. We hope Assemblyman Hueso gets a bill creating a sensible state bank passed and signed by the governor before he is termed out of the Legislature. As we see it, the present risk to the idea is that the blue=ribbon commitee will be composed of a majority of reprresentatives of interests dead set against a state bank, who strangle the baby in its blue ribbon crib. 

Edmund Gerald "Jerry" Brown Jr."s father, Edmund G. "Pat" Brown, once said to a group of supporters in Plumas County in the far north of the state that the state would take all the water in that region for Southern California. Realizing the gaff, he covered himself by saying he meant that a huge pipeline would be built from Canada to LA instead. Pat Brown was a true believer in dams, aqueducts and the whole panoply of water development for "this Great Big Number One State of Ours," particularly if the infrastructure had his name on it.

Gov. Jerry Brown (both a former governor and a present governor) waffled as much on the peripheral canal as he did on Prop. 13, the property tax initiative. His choice of Gerry Meral as assistant secretary of Natural Resources in charge of the Bay-Delta conservation planning and an advocate for a peripheral canal indicates the governor is for a peripheral canal.

Let us suggest a name for the peripheral canal as worthy of Jerry Brown as his father's name is worthy of  the Edmund G. "Pat" Brown California Aqueduct. Let's call the new "Delta conveyance," a peripheral canal by another name, "Moonbeam's Ditch."

Badlands Journal editorial board

7-9-11
Switchboard…Natural Resources Defense Council Staff Blog

Why We Work to Protect California's Bay-Delta Estuary…Doug Obegi’s Blog

7-4-11

Sacramento Bee

California university system fears talent loss to deeper pockets…LARRY GORDON, Los Angeles Times

http://www.sacbee.com/2011/07/04/v-print/3746290/california-university-system-fears.html

LOS ANGELES -- The University of California at San Diego faced a losing battle recently when it tried to hang on to three star scientists being wooed by Rice University for cutting-edge cancer research. The recruiting package from the private Houston university included 40 percent pay raises, new labs and a healthy flow of research money from a Texas state bond fund.

Another factor, unrelated to Rice, helped close the deal: The professors' sense that declining state funding for the University of California makes it a good time to pack their bags.

Quentin Kopp, a durable dope in California politics for at least four decades, apparently led the charge of the state's high-speed rail commission to blame its PR firm for the purblic's accurately dim view of the high-speed rail project, the first leg of which will be built in the only backyard along the route where opposition is unlikely -- the feudal agribusiness baronies south San Joaquin Valley.

In truth, public perception of the high-speed rail commissioners, its ethically challenged staff, the strong-arm tactics excluding the public from its "public" meetings, and the general lying that pervaded the entire project from the bond act forward, would have taken more than any PR firm could have been expected to spin, suppress, etc. But wait, there is one PR firm, Burson-Marstellar, that was able to convince media throughout the nation that California was experiencing a "man-made" drought on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley that was costing tens of thousands of jobs, destroying agriculure as we know it, causing disruptions in world food markets -- you name it, B-M claimed it and found some fool with a TV show or a job with the New York Times to buy it. Yet none of it was true.

We are not holding our breath for the next barrage of the well-known substance about the famous high-speed rail system that is destined to make California as modern as China.

Badlands Journal editorial board

7-1-11

7-1-11
Merced Sun-Star
CoreLogic data show Merced home prices fell 9% while U.S. home prices rose in May...Sun-Star Staff
http://www.mercedsunstar.com/2011/06/30/v-print/1951995/corelogic-data-show-us-home-prices.html

SANTA ANA, Calif., June 30, 2011 –CoreLogic (NYSE: CLGX), a provider of information, analytics and business services, today released its May Home Price Index (HPI) which shows that home prices in the U.S. increased on a month-over-month basis.

In Merced, home prices, including distressed sales, declined by 9.20 percent in May 2011 compared to May 2010 and declined by 5.85 percent* in April 2011 compared to April 2010. Excluding distressed sales, year-over-year prices declined by 1.14 percent in May 2011 compared to May 2010 and declined by 1.99 percent* in April 2011 compared to April 2010.