Badlands Journal

Fresno County leaders are trying to salvage a farmland protection plan that has drawn resistance from at least one small city and, ironically, from some farmers as well.-- Fresno Bee, 3-6-10

 

We were curious why Rep. Dennis Cardoza, Shrimp Slayer-Merced, was working so hard for the Westlands Water District in the recent attempt by Sen. Dianne Feinstein to put an amendment on a Senate jobs bill to suspend the Endangered Species Act on the Delta. The amendment was designed specifically to provide more water to Westlands. Cardoza seems to be representing a water district south of his congressional district and possibly to the detriment to the west side district he actually does represent, the Central California Irrigation Districts, also known as the exchange contractors, headquartered in Los Banos.

Part of the explanation may be in a donation to his 2010 campaign of $6,800 by Roll International and $5,000 from California Westside Farmers Inc.

Roll International is a holding company owned by Stewart and Lynda Resnick. Roll International controls Bakersfield-based Paramount Farms and POM Wonderful, the largest citrus, nut and pomegranate operations in the nation. The Resnicks, campaign contributors to Feinstein (in larger amounts than to Cardoza), were widely reported to have persuaded Feinstein to convene a scientific panel to review the two federal resource-agency biological opinions that restrict pumping from the Delta to the west side. They were also reported to have been behind Feinstein's unfortunate proposed amendment, which was not included in the jobs bill.

Felix Smith, retired US Fish & Wildlife biologist, discovered the deformed and death wildlife at Kesterson Wildlife Refuge in western Merced County that resulted in cessation of west-side drainage of selenium-laced agricultural waste water to that site. Smith is extremely well qualified to address the senator on issues of political interference with embattled federal scientists defending the public trust and environmental law and regulation. He's seen it all.

Badlands Journal editorial board

February 19, 2010

Honorable Dianne Feinstein – Senator

331 Hart Senate Office Building

Washington, D.C. 20510

Dear Senator Feinstein: 

Admittedly, there is an economic catastrophe in the San Joaquin Valley. In fact, it could be said that agribusiness has been an economic catastrophe for its workers for the past century. We would suggest that farm-worker unemployment on the west side is not much higher than normal for this time of the year. The main reason people are still working for western agribusiness today is the even more catastrophic economy of Mexico. Farmworkers on the west side have always faced "complete economic ruin without help." The entire political economy of agribusiness is to blame for that. To hear agribusiness and its political lackeys cry, "Lo, the poor farmworker," is scraping the bottom of the barrel of hypocrisy, credit and unsustainable farming.
Today, west-side towns are not the only places in the valley or in California where people are standing in bread lines.
California is not a breadbasket. It grows specialty fruits, nuts and vegetables. However, at times it has grown a great deal of grain, much of it dry farmed.

1-15-10

CounterPunch Newsleter

1-15-10
Stockton Record
Look out below...Alex Breitler
http://blogs.esanjoaquin.com/san-joaquin-river-delta/2010/01/14/look-out-below/
Golfer Kyle Bowers of Stockton got a birdie Thursday. But not the kind he wanted.
Bowers had just arrived at the sixth hole of The Reserve at Spanos Park early Thursday afternoon when he ducked into the bathroom, a Porta Potty-like facility with a tank.
He lifted the toilet seat and was about to do his guy thing when he saw a face staring back at him.
The ghost-like face of a terrified barn owl.
“Oh my gosh… what is that?” he thought.
It was pretty dark in there, but Bowers could see the owl bobbing its head around. He quickly guessed that the owl had gone down an unscreened vent from the roof to the tank, and couldn’t find its way back out.
For some reason, nature was no longer calling. So Bowers started calling for help.
Just reach in there and grab the bird from the back, someone told him. No way, he said, fearing the owl would whip its head around and gash his hands with its beak.
He told the cart lady who sells drinks. She didn’t know what to do. The front desk wasn’t much more help.
“I’ll be honest, the golf course didn’t want to do anything,” Bowers said.

A shadow covers the Valley. It is in the shape of a fat, blue pig with its fronttrotter outstretched to receive cash from the rich to stuff it where the sun never shines.

Historically, the Blue Dogs were the logical outgrowth of the career of former Rep. Tony Coelho, D-Merced, who preceded Gary Condit and, more importantly, who was in the go-go Eighties the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the campaign slush fund for the Party's candidates and incumbents in the House of Representatives. Coelho got nailed for his involvement with Michael Millken, Wall Street's junk-bond king, later convicted for felonies and sent to prison. Coelho resigned rather than face an investigation and went into investment banking. When, in the course of managing Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign, Coelho's "colorful" career was getting more media attention than his candidate's speeches, he resigned. An excellent study of Coelho's political career is Honest Graft, by Brooks Jackson.

The Blue Dogs have never stood for anything but money. They are no more than vultures feeding off the corpse of the Democratic Party. Coelho was at the funeral. Through the years, as the economy has grown steadily more concentrated in fewer hands, Blue Dogs dug deeper into the pockets of finance, insurance and real estate than ever, hiding as best they could from the people.

The idea of former Rep. Richard Pombo representing a district that includes Yosemite and Stanislaus national forests and the San Joaquin River from its headwaters to the Mendota Pool on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley revivifies the ancient political cliche about foxes in henhouses. Pombo, former chairman of what was known during the "Gingrich Revolution" in Congress as the House Resources Committee (its former name, Natural Resources Committee restored after Pombo and the Republican majority were defeated in 2006), operating out of his family's Pombo Real Estate Farms in Tracy, successfully killed funding year after year for the CalFed process to try to fix the Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta; supported three bills to gut the Endangered Species Act; tried to put a new freeway to the Bay Area through his family's land; and was defeated in his former seat because constituents were sick of his corrupt involvement with Jack Abramoff and Indian casinos...and that's just for starters.

The essence of environmental injustice

Of 20 children known born in Kettleman City between September 2007 and November 2008, five had a cleft in their palate or lips, according to a health survey by activists. Three of those children have since died. Statewide, clefts of the lip or palate routinely occur in fewer than one in 800 births, according to California health statistics.
Besides these health problems, activists point to the high asthma and cancer rates in this largely Spanish-speaking farming community. -- Sacramento Bee, 12-22-09