Badlands Journal

At the bottom of this series of articles on the ongoing foreclosure crisis,  we see Rep. Dennis Cardoza, Pimplico Kid-Annapolis MD, trying to rack up a few badly needed points off the suffering of foreclosed homeowners while his lead over his Republican challenger, Bill Berryhill, shrinks by the day. We may say with a great degree of confidence that the Kid's "HOME Act" will be as dead on arrival this time as it was the last time he introduced it. The Kid is a one-tune pony whose melody is legislation guaranteed to sound good in his district and at the same to guaranteed to lose so that it doesn't offend his contributors, of which two of the top five are banker PACs. Because this is shaping up as a close election, we are also confident that the Kid will receive a great deal more banker money than is now reported.

Does anybody remember Pimlico's three attempts to gut the Endangered Species Act for the benefit of a handful of developers in San Joaquin, Stanislaus and Merced counties? These developers and politicians, with Pimlico in the lead, guaranteed that these counties would sustain the highest foreclosure rates per capita in the nation for months. The Kid collected a lot of campaign loot on those bills, too.

Has the Blue Dog Brat's boss, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Plutocrat-San Francisco, done so much for us that we need to return His Insolence to Washington again?

As foreclosure and unemployment gnaw away at the social fabric in the crumbling tract housing of the Valley, like highly trained, professional rats babbling our language, the usual suspects of Valley leadership met and scampered through their consensual maze inside a mausoleum of commercial real estate hubris in Modesto, a city that has been ruining its promised land for 40 years with no end in sight for its wanderings in darkness. -- Badlands

10-10-10
Modesto Bee

Building a Future: Planning experts share wisdom at summit
By Garth Stapley - gstapley@modbee.com  Buzz up!
 
Standing alone may have served a romantic image of the great American West in years past. But for today's San Joaquin Valley, isolationism is death.

That's what planning experts said over and over when asked how the historically undervalued valley can expect to climb out of California's center rut and into a bright, vibrant future.

"The most important thing is coalition building," lobbyist Mark MacDonald said last week at a summit in Modesto, where planning specialists from near and far gathered to ponder valley strategy for hitting up money powerbrokers. "All your battles (must be) internal, before you get up to Sacramento."

California High Speed Rail Authority

http://www.cahighspeedrail.ca.gov/library.asp?p=5890

Investor Relations

Merced County Director of Planning and Development Services, Robert A. “Bobby” Lewis, reportedly tendered his resignation on Friday. Numerous calls to different county offices to confirm the report met a stone wall.

Nevertheless, other sources convinced members of the Badlands Journal editorial board that the report was true.

The board issued a statement along with an article written when Lewis arrived nearly four years ago.

A member of the Badlands Journal editorial board was asked by a UC Merced student for a meeting so that he could learn more about the campus where he is going to college. The request was received the day Chancellor Steve Kang announced he would depart the campus at the end of the next academic year.

We thought, rather than having coffee with the student and attempting to tell that story in an hour or so, we would do two things: first, refer him to an audio tape made in the classroom of UC Merced historian Gregg Herken, a member of the founding faculty of social sciences, humanities and art at the campus, and who directed the production of a laughable bit of bobcatflak called The Fairy Shrimp Chronicles: An informal history of the founding of UC Merced. The students of that class learned how to write history as propaganda and suppress vital information, useful skills if they seek careers in the University of California system.

Reading Sheldon S. Wolin's Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, is an eery experience and so we are grateful for this lengthy review of the book, written by Chalmers Johnson, author of the Blowback Trilogy. It is an eery book in part because it was published in the last year of the reign of George II, and it conjures up that period in every paragraph. Wolin's knowledge of the history of American politics is so thorough that, in the course of holding up the Bush regime to the light of deep trends and themes in our political history, he redeems American political science in one book. Democracy Inc. justifies our curiosity, craving and desperation of knowledge of our own political system in a period in which it is even hard to see the mirrors for all the smoke. He reminds us of the courageous intellectual history and democratic tradition of American society until 30 years ago, and the inseparable bond of intellectual and political life as vital to democracy as democracy is to it.

We got interested in Wolin's book as a result of reading about it in columns by Chris Hedges, who interviewed Wolin for his latest book, Empire of Illusion.

At the end of June and an 18-month campaign, the Hun, our governor, and other legislative lackies of the finance, insurance and real estate interests, announced they will now try to rally enough votes to remove the $11-billion water bond from the November ballot. This after heroic efforts of bribery and corruption to get the proposition on the ballot last year. But that was then – “the third year of the drought” – and this is now, with 150 percent of normal snowpack melting in the Sierra.

Porky Stables

On June 17, residents of the 18th congressional district of California were informed by McClatchy Chain local outlets that a new star was rising in the world of horse racing, Rep. Dennis Cardoza, Pimlico Kid-Merced.