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Trouble at Bobcatflak Central

There are a number people in this town and county that are not going to be unhappy to see this legal notice. It announces that Patty Waid, assistant vice chancellor for university communications (one of the better paid and better protected public jobs in the county) is a deadbeat who has defaulted on her mortgage. These people would include all who have ever tried to get a straight answer out of UC Merced about anything at all.
Presumably, her mortgage was subsidized by UC Merced, in other words, by the public.
Badlands Journal editorial board

Foreclosures keep on going on

4-6/8-12
Counterpunch.com
The Housing Doldrums
The Bottomless Pit
by MIKE WHITNEY
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/04/06/the-bottomless-pit/

“There are many good reasons to believe that the 5.5 million foreclosures we have seen are barely halfway through their full course. The United States may end up with a total of 8-10 million foreclosures before we are finished.”
– Barry Ritholtz, The Big Picture

UCD ghouls of science

The Bureau of Reclamation, which wishes the extinction of the Delta Smelt because it will make the the final destruction of the 
Delta less messy, pays off some UC Davis scientists to do yet another study on the poor species in the very process of its "extirpation."
This isn't science. It is bureaucratic and academic pathology.
Badlands Journal editorial board
4-5-12
Sacramento Bee
Needs of threatened Delta fish to be studied at UC Davis
By Matt Weiser

Toll road on Highway 152

Merced County Association of Governments, the regional transportation joint powers authority, is proposing a toll road for Highway 152 on the Pacheco Pass, incidently the same route that is proposed for the high speed rail system. The proposal is a clear example of how the transportation bureaucracy would like the public to adjust to the incredible expense of the high speed rail system -- create toll roads.

MID conflicts of interest

Merced Irrigation District! This group, which can't even handle its normal irrigation business without the odor of scandal, is supposed to be able to negotiate its relicensing with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission? The state Department of Water Resources trusts MID to lead, plan and administer the Integrated Regional Water Management Plan (IRWMP "Ear-wimp")?
MID is a very shaky organization.

Wrong lord of the universe

The bleak figures, however, need not be a harbinger of gloom, said Michael Dozier, executive director of the California Partnership for the San Joaquin Valley, an organization of public officials and business leaders that aims to address the region's economic, environmental and social problems.

Look familiar, anyone?

To make a handful of landowners and local speculators richer; to put this county at the epicenter of the Great Recession; to further inflate the egos of a few political "leaders;" and to feed the edifice complex of an out-of-control and unaccountable public university system running off the rails -- UC Merced was built and opened and is now blithely expanding as our streets grow rapidly more dangerous for us who have shelter and for the growing population among us who do not have shelter.

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