Badlands Journal

WASHINGTON -- A visibly relieved House Rules Committee on Tuesday finally found the cause of the global Great Recession. The truth was uttered by Rep. Devin Nunes, Manic Seer-CA.

And surely the congressman should know because he speaks from the epicenter of destruction in the nation from the foreclosure crisis -- the San Joaquin Valley. He carries the further authority of being a Republican, the party in power when the crisis first broke.

We last heard from Nunes on this subject in the summer of 2009 during the period of the "man-made drought" in California. With every eastside reservoir and Southern California reservoir full, it was kind of hard to tell which "men" Nunes was talking about, but it was certain that the men who own him -- the same then as now -- are from finance, insurance and real estate (agribusiness and developers) special interests. These "men" rally their political pieces like Nunes against environmental laws and regulations that protect creatures like the Delta Smelt from extinction. Finance, insurance and real estate special interests and their congressional minions honor these laws very highly by routinely  breaching them. So, actually, insorfar as there were water curtailments that year to protect the environment as mandated by law, it was a "law-made" water shortage and what Nunes is braying against is law.

...and the technocrats hope that their environmental documents will be so long, so convoluted, so trugidly technological and full of flimsy assertions of "balance between environmental, urban and agricultural needs" that, in the ensuing lawsuits, judges will measure the adequacy of the documents by the hundredweight and political pressure rather than by anything as radical and masochistic as reading them.

Badlands Journal editorial board

2-27-12
San Franciscoo Crhonicle
California water project won't be decided at poll
Wyatt Buchanan
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2012/02/27/MN6U1NBMVG.DTL

Sacramento --

2-25-12
The Independent (UK)
Mormons posthumously baptise Anne Frank
Guy Adams
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/mormons-posthumously-baptise-anne-frank-7440503.html

Anne Frank, the famous diarist and Holocaust victim, was put to death on account of her Jewish faith. But earlier this month, she was nonetheless secretly co-opted into the Mormon Church.

So claim researchers investigating the US-based Church’s practice of posthumously baptising dead people - sometimes without the knowledge and almost always against the will of surviving friends and family members.

Ms Frank was “christened” at a Mormon temple in the Dominican Republic, in apparent violation of a pact between the Church and Jewish leaders. A local child, acting as her spiritual proxy, is believed to have been dunked in a font during the ceremony.

Computer records of the event register Ms Frank under her full name, Annelies Marie Frank, and say that she lived from 1929 to 1945. The baptism was “completed” at a temple in Santo Domingo on 18 February.

In an apologetic statement, the Mormon Church’s PR department neither confirmed nor denied that the event had taken place, but declared itself “absolutely firm in its commitment to not accept the names of Holocaust victims for proxy baptism.”

The finance, insurance and real estate oligopoly in California has bought itself a Congressional bill to destroy the San Joaquin River Settlement. The settlement, which took 18 years in court and three years in Congress to reach accord on how to put water back into a 80-mile  reach of the San Joaquin River diverted by the FRiant-Kern Canal. The bill, H.R. 1837, passed the House Resources Committee last week.

A great wrong, set right again, could be set wrong again.

We thought we would revisit some of the most basic policies and laws governing California in light of this current attempt to return to the spirit of primitive accumulation.

The two poles of water rights in California are riparian rights and prior appropriation rights.

Riparian rights came from the Middle Ages through English Common Law to the American Colonies. Under the riparian rights doctrine, only people owning riverbank land had rights to use river water to drink, water their crops and livestock. People living away from rivers and streams used wells. Riparian rights did not imply any ownership of the river. Rivers were conceived of as belonging to God or to themselves. The riparian right was a seen as a use right, not a property right.

The reason Merced achieved the twin distinctions of, in the early days of the housing boom, producing the most unaffordable housing in America and, in the aftermath of the Boom (aka the Bust), the distinction of frequently leading all metropolitan areas in the nation in its foreclosure rate, was very simple -- ask any developer -- UC Merced.

UC Merced swallowed the City of Merced. Only the countervaling force of the San Luis and Delta Mendota Water Authority, a seriously criminal enterprise, has saved the west side of Merced County from the dippy dither of campus life on the anchor tenant for the Boom-that-Busted. The ripples of that bust keep on moving through the public-notice pages of the Merced Sun-Star every day although in the real estate pages, were are once again beginning to see the faces of the young, dumb and pretty, recalling those halcion days when companies provided bevies of beauties geo-selected for your real estate-speculation pleasure. If you'd come from Cotija, Michoacan, a girl from Cotija was available to sell you a house on very favorable terms (for awhile) and a mortgage that was whisked nearly instantly out of Merced to a larger financial institution that bundled your little subprime in a nest of similar transactions, turned it into a derivative called a "mortgage-backed security," from whence it may have traveled on as far as Shanghai or Berlin.

2-16-12
Central Valley Business Times
House committee sends Central Valley water bill to House floor
http://www.centralvalleybusinesstimes.com/stories/001/?ID=20436

WASHINGTON, D.C. 

•  Pits California representatives against each other

•  A new North-South war?

The House Natural Resources Committee on Thursday approved H.R. 1837, the “Sacramento-San Joaquin Valley Water Reliability Act” authored by Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Tulare.

Mr. Nunes says the bill will restore the flow of water to farms and rural communities, and make unnecessary the construction of a $12 billion peripheral canal to bypass the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

Mr. Nunes call his bill a “remarkable North-South compromise” that will protect all water users.

But he apparently didn’t count all the noses.

Ten Northern California representatives say that as written, the legislation would divert additional water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Bay Delta to South-of-Delta water users, running counter to established economic and environmental policies.

I read the news today

Oh Boy ...

2-9-12

Asia Times
A real guarantor is needed
By Ellen Brown
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/NB09Dj02.html

A foreclosure settlement between five major banks guilty of "robo-signing" and the attorneys general of the 50 states was pending for Monday, February 6; but late last week it was still not clear if all the attorneys would sign. California was to get over half of the US$25 billion in settlement money, and California attorney general Kamala Harris has withstood pressure to settle. As of late Monday, she was among those who had not agreed to the proposal.

That is good. She and the other attorneys general should not sign until a thorough investigation has been conducted. The evidence to date suggests that "robo-signing" was not a mere technical default or sloppy business practice but was part and parcel of a much larger fraud, the fraud that brought down the whole economy in 2008.

2-15-12

San Francisco Chronicle

Study: Sierra snowfall conssitent over 130 years

Peter Fimrite

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi f=/c/a/2012/02/15/BA8N1N7HNQ.DTL

Snowfall in the Sierra Nevada has remained consistent for 130 years, with no evidence that anything has changed as a result of climate change, according to a study released Tuesday.

The analysis of snowfall data in the Sierra going back to 1878 found no more or less snow overall - a result that, on the surface, appears to contradict aspects of recent climate change models.

John Christy, the Alabama state climatologist who authored the study, said the amount of snow in the mountains has not decreased in the past 50 years, a period when greenhouse gases were supposed to have increased the effects of global warming.

The heaping piles of snow that fell in the Sierra last winter and the paltry amounts this year fall within the realm of normal weather variability, he concluded.

As the days grow unseasonably warm and buds begin to swell on early blooming trees, our thoughts and dreams of gain turn to the noble almond tree, of which we grow the largest amount in -- let us not be modest -- the universe, because they produce a nut universally admired for any and all nutritional health benefits agrascience has not yet been able to engineer out it. And, our thoughts turning to the Great Nut, a small cloud passes over our revery and lines appear even on the clean, clear childlike brows of our various Almong queens, because the Great Nut must be pollinated by bees. In fact our area attracts more commercially raised and transported bees than any other place on the -- let us not be modest about this either -- the planet.

And bees are in a helluva lot of trouble. Which means that we are too. And since beekeepers first noticed the problem five years ago, the great scientists of the greatest public research university in the -- let's not stop now -- the galaxy, have found no solution to the problem they had so much to do with creating in all the ways that galactically famous university research scientists have of completely improving agriculture.

Badlands Journal editorial board

2-12-12

AlterNet

Thomas Wittman of Ecofarm, whose Genetic Engineering Newslist keeps us informed about the state of the GMO mess, has sent a request for signatures for a nationwide petition to label GMO foods and and an article reporting the latest news on the costs of such labeling -- nearly zilch despite what the trogs at the Biotech Industry Association put out.

Thanks to Thomas' unremitting work over the last decade we also know that the dirty little story of GMOs is in: they don't cut down on pesticide demand, gene drift via pollen makes GMO-crop fields major contaminators of their regions, Monsanto and its weak sisters in the industry move with relentless barbarism through the courts to enforce their "patents on life," trying to create a Meek New World in which farmers will not save seed and will pay whatever the biotech corporations demand for genetically modified seed. And that's just for starters.

Information about how you can join the Genetic Engineering Newslist is at the bottom of this page.

Badlands Journal editorial board

1-10-12
Ecofarm.org
Action Alert - Tell FDA You Want GE Foods Labeled!
Thomas Wittman

Dear Readers,
   Please go to the NOC site www.NationalOrganicCoalition.org or the Just Label It site to see all active links and to take action.
Thank you,
Thomas

Viewing Main St. from a coffee shop, say the one next to Bob Hart Square c. 2006, the special characters that stood out on the sidewalk were chunky fellows in designer California casual attire and cellphones glued to their ears as their mouths made real estate deals. Today, looking out the window of a new coffee shop near the Art Kananger Center the special characters on the sidewalk are the homeless pushing babycarts bearing all the person's worldly goods and someone barrelling down the street on a mountain bike spouting off because she's off her medication for Tourette's Syndrome.

Yet so many of the people who made the decisions that turned Merced into the least affordable real estate market in the nation and then into one of the consistently highest per capita foreclosure-rate metro regions in the nation are still doing business at their old stands. They aren't sleek as they were once. In fact, some have aged so badly they can't be easily recognized beyond the confines of their offices and labeled public seats.

But, the chatting classes are expanded because of the arrival of UC Merced, which produces larger numbers of vacuously confident, subsidized students, youth in numbers still insufficient to become a municipal profit center. Alas, the students of UC Merced may never live up to the myth of their eternal prosperity-producing powers during the heyday of the Boom.

Badlands Journal editorial board

1-28-12
Merced Sun-Star

The Pimlico Kid is so lame all he can think about is the sweet pasture that lies ahead at taxpayers' expense after he leaves Congress. In the following letter to his constituents he limps along in the shadow of -- of all people -- the President, whose wife the Kid insulted by preferring to attend the Preakness with lobbyists to attending a UC Merced graduation featuring the First Lady as commencement speaker.

And, of course, he lied about the whole thing, claiming he couldn't make the event due to family commitments. The Kid finished dead last by 50 lengths in that contest.

Today, in his letter, he indicates that at last the president has recognized that he, the Pimlico Kid, had the right idea about the foreclosure crisis all along. It is a simple, three-part strategy: Do everything in the power of a politician to stimulate housing growth in your district; get the taxpayers to bail out the banks for the weak mortgages on their books; sell the package as a bail out of the people. Cover the whole campaign in the Kid's patented unctious piety and you've got as fine an example as you'd ever want to see of absolute political irrelevance.