Since Candace Adam-Medefind took control of Healthy House, how much public funding for the non-profit has ended up in the campaign coffers of Adam Gray, son of Ms. Adam-Medefind and the Democratic Party candidate for state Assembly in the 21st district? The employees claim she is paying her husband, former Chairman of the Merced County Democratic Central Committee Mark Medefind for janitorial and PR services to Healthy House. Medefind claims he has donated his time to the non-profit. Is she diverting funds from Healthy House to him to work on his stepson's campaign? Or his the money going even farther afield, to her brother, Robin Adam, veteran local political fixer?

Badlands Journal editorial board

7-28-12
Merced Sun-Star
Merced nonprofit Healthy House an unhealthy work environment?
Workplace allegations surface
By YESENIA AMARO

http://www.mercedsunstar.com/2012/07/28/2440814_p2/merced-nonprofit-heal...

The issue is clear: Adam Gray, his mother, his step-father and his uncle, ethically disadvantaged political fixer Robin Adam, have been lying about the boy's credentials for elective office, as in, he don't have none but we rubes are so dumb we'll go along with it because he's a Democrat.

They have managed to alienate the bC Merced's Bobcatflak office, which has brought us propaganda campaigns too numerous to mention, the main thrust being that by building on the largest contiguous set of vernal pools in the US and rapidly roofing, asphalting and cementing over the heart of the aquifer that supplies fresh water to the City of Merced, not to mention being the anchor tenant for the biggest, most fraudulent building boom in world history, UC Merced is somehow the greenest campus ever constructed in the universe on the unmarked mass grave of 15 endangered species. The Greenest Campus in the Universe was expected to be our "high tech, biotech engine of (economic) growth," as if the creators of the technological weapons of predatory corporate capitalism are of any more use to us than the midieval swordsmith was to the peasants his products chopped up. But a university, especially a public university, paid for by public funds -- what a way to make the money-grubbing business of land speculation Respectable!

Evidently the big crooks resent the little crooks and are swatting them off the trailing end of the UC skirt.

The only time I ever saw the great black pitcher, Satchel Paige, was when he pitched an exhibition game at the former Modesto Reds ballpark on the banks of the Tuolumne River in what is now called West Modesto. He was playing for a black traveling team, I forget the name, against a team of bearded white men. It was in the mid-Fifties, less than a decade after Branch Rickey had integrated major league baseball by hiring Jackie Robinson to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Paige was the most famous pitcher of the Negro Leagues and a year after Robinson went to the majors the Cleveland Indians hired Paige to help them win a penant race. He went on to play for two more major league teams and ended his career as a coach.

At Modesto High School, near the ballpark, the only Cleveland Indians fan in our group got ahold of some of Paige's wit and wisdom and used to utter the sentences in ominous tones. But we never took the title quote too much to mind because we really didn't have that far to look back.

Things are different now. But don't worry: "Age is a case of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it don't matter. " Satchel Paige

Badlands Journal editorial board


 

Our colleague, Steve Burke, founder of Protect our Water (POW), Vance Kennedy and Al Brizard -- two other veteran public activists in Stanislaus County -- joined forces to produce a very convincing argument against Modesto Irrigation District's proposed water transfer to San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. They write from the authoritative view that MID is a local public utility created by the Wright Act of 1887, written by C.C. Wright, state assemblyman from Modesto at the time. The act was the first in the US to create publicly governed irrigation districts to combat private water pirates like Henry Miller of Miller Lux Cattle Company, who bought riverfront land wherever he could, gaining control of the river's water through the law of riparian rights.

The injury is economic depression, mislabeled constantly as "recession." But "constantly" is the problem because it has gone on too long and every prediction for turnaround has proved false. The doom sayers, the negative thinkers, the skeptics and the doubters have all been correct. So much for the injury.

The insult is the politics, from City Hall to the White House. It is bad enough to feel the economy -- one's future -- sliding out to sea like sand under one's toes as the wave recedes. What is intolerable is the lying politics. And at the top of the list of the political goon squad is the superPACs, founded on the utterly cynical belief backed by tons of cash (proving there is still a helluva lot of money in America) that the public (you and me) can be steered, directed, and sent down the chute to the butcher's sledge hammer.

Immediately on finishing, in fact while still reading this appendix to the first part of Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics, we couldn’t help thinking of the many fine religious people, especially political leaders and decision-makers, who ‘paved paradise and put up a parking lot,’ often  in the name of the same god who had so guided man’s wisdom that he had created the greatest tool in history: an eternally rising real estate market.

We are all dimly aware, even out of the political campaign war zone here in California, that something extraordinary is taking place as the result of the Citizens United decision by the US Supreme Court, and how it recently upheld itself in its decision by striking down a century-old Montana law barring corporate contributions to political campaigns.