Badlands Journal

8-8-11

Lloyd G. Carter Chronicle of the Hydraulic Brotherhood
Budgets, Billionaires, profits and the Brown Family - Part Two
http://www.lloydgcarter.com/content/110808512_budgets-billionaires-bonds-big-profits-and-brown-family-part-two
 
The Browns and 50-Years of GO Bond Debts
Part Two
By Patrick Porgans and Lloyd G. Carter

Even though none of the flak about the new UC Merced chancellor, Dorothy Leland, indicated that she knew anything about Merced other than that the finance, insurance and real estate special interest "stakeholders" want a UC Merced medical school, the Badlands Journal editorial board would like to welcome Leland, a scholar of existentialism a great big San Joaquin Valley En soi/Pour soi, wish her -- when fear and trembling strike -- happy rowing on Lake Yosemite with her ether oars, and hope she finds oodles of Socratic Irony out there on the wildlife habitat and former wetlands to ease the sickness unto etc.

Since we didn't see much difference between Leland and other officials that have come and gone at UC Merced -- people unable to distinguish between propaganda and education -- we are sending her a 7-year-old letter to a planner,  two letters we wrote to former Chancellor Steve Kang, and the 6-year-old report by Christopher Butcher of UC Davis on how Merced County completely corrupted the Williamson Act.

We realize land-use policy is an esoteric topic for a Kierkegaard scholar, but we have some advice on the medical school direction, too. Since the destiny of the campus is to be a combination Indian casino/senior living facility, why not start now by training geriatric nurses also certified in slot machine repair? -- blj

7-16-11

Merced Sun-Star

High-speed rail: Ag worries over project voiced

Elected officials and growers discuss effects on farmland… AMEERA BUTT

http://www.mercedsunstar.com/2011/07/16/v-print/1971373/high-speed-rail-ag-worries-over.html

Farmers in Merced County voiced their concerns about the impact of high-speed rail on ag land at a joint hearing organized by state senators Friday afternoon.

Sen. Anthony Cannella, R-Ceres, and Sen. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord, who leads the Senate Transportation and Housing Committee, held a joint hearing, "From Food to Rail: High-Speed Rail Impacts on Agriculture" on Friday.

Sen. Doug LaMalfa, R-Richvale, and Sen. Alan Lowenthal, D-Long Beach, also attended.

The event weighed the effects on ag land by the proposed railway, intended to carry passengers between San Francisco, Sacramento and Los Angeles by way of the San Joaquin Valley at speeds of up to 220 mph.

Cannella said the event provided a chance for politicians to hear from the agricultural community, a major part of California's economy. It generates more than $30 billion a year in revenue.

Quentin Kopp, a durable dope in California politics for at least four decades, apparently led the charge of the state's high-speed rail commission to blame its PR firm for the purblic's accurately dim view of the high-speed rail project, the first leg of which will be built in the only backyard along the route where opposition is unlikely -- the feudal agribusiness baronies south San Joaquin Valley.

In truth, public perception of the high-speed rail commissioners, its ethically challenged staff, the strong-arm tactics excluding the public from its "public" meetings, and the general lying that pervaded the entire project from the bond act forward, would have taken more than any PR firm could have been expected to spin, suppress, etc. But wait, there is one PR firm, Burson-Marstellar, that was able to convince media throughout the nation that California was experiencing a "man-made" drought on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley that was costing tens of thousands of jobs, destroying agriculure as we know it, causing disruptions in world food markets -- you name it, B-M claimed it and found some fool with a TV show or a job with the New York Times to buy it. Yet none of it was true.

We are not holding our breath for the next barrage of the well-known substance about the famous high-speed rail system that is destined to make California as modern as China.

Badlands Journal editorial board

7-1-11

6-16-11
CounterPunch
Fire's Manifest Destiny
The American West in Flames
By CHIP WARD
http://www.counterpunch.com/ward06162011.html
Arizona is burning. Texas, too. New Mexico is next. If you need a grim reminder that an already arid West is burning up and blowing away, here it is. As I write this, more than 700 square miles of Arizona and more than 4,300 square miles of Texas have been swept by monster wildfires. Consider those massive columns of acrid smoke drifting eastward as a kind of smoke signal warning us that a globally warming world is not a matter of some future worst-case scenario. It's happening right here, right now.

Air tankers have been dropping fire retardant on what is being called the Wallow fire in Arizona and firefighting crews have been mobilized from across the West, but the fire remained "zero contained" for most of last week and only 18% so early in the new week, too big to touch with mere human tools like hoses, shovels, saws, and bulldozers. Walls of flame 100 feet high rolled over the land like a tsunami from Hades. The heat from such a fire is so intense and immense that it can create small tornadoes of red embers that cannot be knocked down and smothered by water or chemicals. These are not your grandfather's forest fires.

Finance, insurance, real estate special interests in the north San Joaquin Valley, home of the worst foreclosure rate in the nation, are suffering high anxiety that the University of California might convert UC Merced, anchor tenant for the real estate boom and bust, into a liberal arts college.
Furthermore, this idea is being advanced on the floor of the state Senate by none other than that notorious liberal, former mayor of Berkeley and wife of the present mayor of Berkeley, state Sen. Loni Hancock.
Readers of the Sonny Star's latest brothel ballad are asked to get into the injustice of the story by recalling a quote by Ronald Reagan, while campaigning for president against President Jimmy Carter: "There you go again." That famous half whisper, that complex mixture of contempt and exaspiration, that famous Reagan attitude, the same that tear gassed UC Berkeley students from helicopters when he was governor, that same attitude, contempt and exaspiration for law that urged Reagan to enable the shipment, production, sales and distribution of crack cocaine in Hancock's district.
But Hancock's district contains even more. For example, it contains the first UC campaign, Berkeley, and the UC Office of the President, the headquarters for the entire UC system. Hancock is not acting as an adversary of the UC president or Board of Regents here. She is representing them, raising the trial balloon that must be sending all the local Mr. and Ms. UC Merceds straight to their cardiologists.

A story about China's bullet trains reminds us of what they are all about -- one more segregation by income group. Affluent Americans would much prefer to ride by flashy new bullet trains so that they too can be a part of solving the energy crisis. But we the people will of course have to build a separate train for them in the same way that we keep giving them unconsionable tax breaks. Since the public is paying for these high speed railroads, yet another subsidy for they wealthy, ticket prices ought to be subsidized for the "middle class," which in the current political jargon is the income group that contains everyone but millionaires or those eccentrics that prefer to live outdoors.

Public transportation, paid for with public funds, ought to be for the public, not just for the affluent. High speed rail is a very expensive way to rub peoples' noses in the econopmic inequality of their societies.

Badlands Journal editorial board

4-7-11
Sacramento Bee
China's bullet trains divide rich, poor…Tom Lasseter
http://www.sacbee.com/2011/04/07/v-print/3533851/chinas-bullet-trains-divide-rich.html

This is a grim tale about the "greening" of nuclear energy in the US, done by national environmental corporations. -- Badlands

3-18/20-11
Counterpunch.com
How Global Warming Rescued the Atomic Lobby
The "Green" Nuclear Cabal
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
http://www.counterpunch.com/stclair03182011.html

This is an excerpt from Jeffrey St. Clair's environmental history, Born Under a Bad Sky, published by AK Press / CounterPunch Books.

Striding into Kyoto in December of 1997 claiming to be a mighty warrior in the battle against global warming was a familiar beast, the nuclear power industry. Some of the industry's biggest lobbyists, men such as James Curtis (a former deputy secretary of energy during the Reagan years), prowled the streets and sushi bars of this ancient city (itself running on juice from an aging nuke) angling for some positive words in the treaty for their troubled enterprise. The big reactor makers, GE, Westinghouse, and Combustion Engineering, were there too, dissing the oil and coal lobby, downplaying the long-term viability of natural gas and generally treating the eco-summit as if it were an international trade show.

"Unfortunately, we are...being bombarded by sensational headlines and commentary that stretches the bounds of scientific reality to the point of utter fiction," Nunes saidWednesday. "Based on media reporting, one might reasonably assume that the embattled Japanese reactors were soon to engulf the island nation in a nuclear explosion -- sending radioactive debris akin to Chernobyl into the atmosphere." -- Fresno Bee, March 17, 2011

The Dark Imp of Visalia, Rep. Devin Nunes, is at it again folks, giving us the perspective on the complex problem of nuclear reactor meltdown in Japan: any questions about it constitute participation in the liberal conspiracy to obtain accurate information on issues that potentially impact our health in order to attempt to make rational decisions about those issues. The Dark Imp knows that as things appear less and less reasonable, the appeal of irrationality grows stronger. Just taking a stab it the problem, that could be because in an economy built on growth, recessions and depressions don't make any sense to a great many people.

But the imp don't worry about the metaphysics of it. He's just paying his dues to his contributors in the nuclear energy industry. The question of whether politics as usual will end in disaster has never occurred to the imp. And he's not alone. The black hole of leadership is very crowded.

Badlands Journal editorial board