Dirty Water, Dirty Tricks

 Merced County Supervisor, John "Ol'Slippery" Pedrozo don't fell in it again, proving that if the money's good enough, Ol' Slippery will grab a toboggan for a ride down the next manure pile in his political career. 

Ol' Slippery knows his manure piles real good and this one smells plum delicious to the former dairyman rumored by members of his own family to have gone belly up before entering politics at the rear of the milking string to squelch the candidacies of a couple of Hispanic women who were interested in poverty and stuff. 

 People who take seriously the information that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is cvurrently at 390 ppm when science has stated that the tipping point (where catastrophic sea-level rise begins) is at 350 ppm, observe the current debate about oil – from academic institutional and state and national environmental groups’ divestment of holdings in fossil fuel firms to California’s governor, the Great Reflector’s jitterbugging on fracking the Monterey Shale Formation – and could notice that political hypocrisy is also a petroleum by-product.

Badlands Journal editorial board

As long as we try to account for water policy from the profit and loss ledgers of agribusiness, we are not going to get anywhere at all on the problem of production, natural resources and consumption in the midst of a growing global eological crisis that most certainly does involve California in multiple ways, most of which are exascerbated by water policy established by oligarchs. Nothing rational can result from looking at the balance sheets of a miniscule number of agricultural plutocrats on the weat side of the San Joaquin Valley anymore than the leaders of finance, insurance and real estate can be counted on to develop anything rational about urban growth and water use.

California itself is a system of unsustainable growth.Until we begin from that standpoint, no helpful policies will develop.

Badlands Jouranl editorial board

4-15-13

Chronicles of the hydraulic brotherhood

 It was exciting for a moment, even for a whole Easter weekend because the judge created suspense beyond the well-known events – Crucifixion, Sepulcher, Ascension. Stockton could go bankrupt! We would know on Monday.

Sure enough, by mid-Monday morning we knew that the judge had ruled that the municipal government of Stockton could do what it had desired to do and been obstructed from doing by its creditors and their insurers: declare bankruptcy and weasel out of paying whatever debts it could.

This was News, we thought. We opined at the end of last week that if Stockton were allowed to Do This, other cities would soon follow in its footsteps. We shivered slightly at the chilling notion that Stockton should lead anyone anywhere, but at least it was clear, straightforward governmental action against Wall Street. The other cities mentioned included San Bernardino, Bakersfield, Fresno, Modesto and Merced. These are seats of the California counties worst affected by the Great Pop of the housing bubble.

Maybe when real men grow up in Kern County, they become oil lobbyists.

Anyone from the San Joaquin Valley can understand why a state senator from our area might find better things to do with his time than serve in a legislative body led by state Sen. Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento. But the abrupt departure of state Sen. Michael Rubio, D-Bakersfield, for the lobbying division of Chevron reveals a contempt for the democratic process that is something new in its aggression.

His quitting office at least temporarily deprives the Democratic Party of its supermajority and a Republican is at least as likely as a Democrat to be the next occupant of that seat. Hardly a good way to start a career as a lobbyist, one would think, but without knowing the inside game at the moment, that's just a guess.

Rubio's claims about the need to spend more time with his family seem totally bogus when it is considered that he will be lobbying in Sacramento and corporate offices from Chevron are in San Ramon, where they moved in 1965 from Kern County.

Rubio is yet another Valley product of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.