Badlands Journal

A tale of two predatory species

Rep. Dennis Cardoza, of Annapolis MD, has never met an endangered species he doesn't want to kick into extinction. He is undoubtedly afraid of the race horses he owns but thoroughbreds aren't an endangered species. However, a fairy shrimp, a three-inch smelt or a salmon smolt? Species that are down on their luck due to the pressures of man, the species destroying the global environment for everyone, even itself? When Cardoza sees a species like that, subject to endangered species regulations that might interfere with one of his contributors, he gets all puffed up and mean. How dare such insignificant creatures stand between a developer or agribusinessman and his next million! It's immoral.

Cardoza & Co. regard the striped bass as an exotic predator that is one of the main causes of the decline of several endangered species in the San Joaquin Delta. Set aside that the stripers have been an established game species in the Delta for more than a century and the crash of endangered species in the Delta has occurred simultaneously with increased demands of agribusiness, Santa Clara and Southern California for Delta water in the last decade.

Global experts on water (for example Steven Solomon in Water: The Epic Struggle for Weatlth, Power and Civilization) consider that California has built the most advanced water-delivery systems in the world. Yet the United Nations "independent investigator for the U.N.'s safe water and sanitation campaign" has decided to study two places in California, a tiny village in Tulare County and the City of Redding. The investigator compares the water situation of the Tulare village of Seville with water problems in Bangladesh as a Congressional research report several years ago unfavorably compared the San Joaquin Valley to Appalachia.

Valley business and political leaders, always ready to spend other people's money on vast projects like a high speed railroad, new reservoirs or the perennial favorite -- cotton subsidies -- for the benefit of the wealthy few to the detriment of the many inhabitants who will experience more environmental degradation as a result, have absolutely not taste for repair and maintenance or anything from deteriorating dams to rusty municipal water pipes. And they are correct. There is apparently no point in a political economy veering ever closer to the simple, disastrous ideal of a "self-regulating free market" in  absolutely everything, of taking care of people or the infrastructure that supports society.

Two recent strong criticisms of the current state of state water politics reminded us of our prophetic article of February 19, 2007, when former Gov. Schwarzenegger (aka "Our Hun") experienced his "Delta Vision" -- "Hun appoints next peripheral canal campaign committee."

-- Badlands Journal editorial board

2-18-07
Badlandsjournal.com
Hun appoints next peripheral canal campaign committee
http://www.badlandsjournal.com/2007-02-18/00240

Our Hun announced after deadline Friday that he has appointed a Blue Ribbon Task Force to develop a "Delta Vision." Badlands editorial staff predicts this is the beginning of the next campaign for a peripheral canal.

The 41 leaders on the task force are a Who's Who of Usual Suspects, chaired by former state Assemblyman Phil Isenberg. Isenberg, who knows everyone in the world but his world doesn't extend beyond the Sacramento city limits, is an interesting choice. Throughout Willie Brown's long speakership in the Assembly, Isenberg, whatever committee chairs he might be sitting in, was Willie's nuts-and-bolts campaign foreman in election years. Isenberg could actually run an effective statewide campaign for a peripheral canal. It is hard to see than he would have any other interest in the Delta beyond having the levees break downstream from Sacramento.

The attack on public employee unions, including teachers, is a brilliant tactic by Republicans against the Democratic Party. President Obama chose a national leader of charter schools, the privatization of public education, his secretary of education. Public school-teacher unions are among the most powerful of all the public employee unions now under such serious attack by several Republican governors. Republicans understand that public employee unions have been an essential part of the Democratic Party for several decades. Public employee union members provide much of the work the party needs to maintain its political power. Obama, following former President Clinton, is selling out the base and the political volunteers in the Democratic Party because the White House is like Congress beholden to Wall Street and Wall Street dictates a policy that no president will use his bully pulpit to recognize the savage class warfare that Wall Street has inflicted on the entire American middle class and its growing population of poor and destitute citizens.

Why did this happen? Why did even the near-collapse of the financial system, and its desperate rescue by two reluctant administrations, fail to give the government any real

leverage over the major banks?

By March 2009, the Wall Street banks were not just any interest group. Over the past thirty years, they had become one of the wealthiest industries in the history of the American economy, and one of the most powerful political forces in Washington. Financial sector money poured into the campaign war chests of congressional representatives.

 

A more critical view of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission than the one offered by McClatchy editorialists a few days ago in a shallow defense of one of its favorite son, Phil Angelides, Sacramento developer, protege of Angelo Tsakopoulos, former state treasurer and gubernatorial candidate, who chaired the commission.
Badlands Journal editorial board

2-2-11
Propublica
In Postcrisis Report, a Weak Light on Complex Transactions
by Jesse Eisinger
http://www.propublica.org/thetrade/item/in-postcrisis-report-a-weak-light-on-complex-transactions/
 The report from the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission has been assailed [1] as a confusing [2] mishmash [3] -- poorly organized, unclear about what's new and weakened by conclusions that are at once obvious and unsatisfying. The problems of the commission were evident from the start: its mandate was too broad, its timetable too short, its budget too small and its commissioners too partisan.

Those criticisms are true, but overdone.

The report is full of fascinating information, rich detail and fine documentary evidence. The commission should be celebrated for putting more than 1,100 documents online [4] for anyone to search.

"It's one of those perfect storm situations," said UC Merced economics professor Shawn Kantor. "So it will take a very long time for this area to recover." ..."This particular area has chronically had high unemployment relative to the state and the country, which all ties to low educational attainment and poverty," Kantor said. "The circularity of the socioeconomic conditions make it difficult for this area to succeed economically. And then it got hit with the housing and government bubbles bursting." ... "Even though agriculture is healthy and we can expect further growth, it doesn't have the job-generation capacity to mop up all this displaced construction labor," said Jeff Michael, director of the Business Forecasting Center at the University of the Pacific in Stockton.--Merced SunStar, January 6, 2011

12-31-10
Indybay.org
Supreme Court Terminated Governor's Last Ditch Petition to Sell State Properties
by Dan Bacher
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2010/12/31/18667918.php
Outgoing California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and his collaborators have waged a campaign to greenwash his absymal environmental legacy through a plethora of press releases, photo opportunities and puff pieces before he leaves office. One of the most shameful examples of these efforts to rewrite history by casting Schwarzenegger in the role of "green governor" is Terry Tamminen's Huffington Post puff piece, "He'll Be Back" (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/terry-tamminen/hell-be-back_b_802128.html).

"In 'Terminator', Arnold Schwarzenegger famously utters 'I'll be back.' The world should hope that he'll be back to keep working on these issues with the unique style of public service that is the basis of his unprecedented green legacy," Tamminen claims.

In stark contrast, Patrick Porgans, a longtime advocate for the public trust, has written a superb piece exposing the Governor's last ditch petition to sell 11 state office properties to private corporations before leaving office. The plan was supposedly designed to pay off a portion of the state's multi billion deficit and increasing debt load.

We in Merced City are far from the steely-eyed, realty-backed political leadership of our boom-time mayor, Ellie Wooten, a woman with a keen wit and a keen eye for her next buck. Now, we got Mayor Billy, Babbitt Incarnate, an individual who has never ventured beyond the never-never-land of Republican ideology of denunciation of "tax-and-spend liberals" except when Babbittry controls the public purse.

But, to be fair to Mayor Billy, the entire political class, our august leaders, the ones we actually elect for some reason, believe it is their burden and duty to put a happy face on our economic collapse. They take refuge in a Future of Prosperity if only the taxpayers sacrifice today.

Sound familiar? From back in the day when Development was supposed to pay for Growth and we were building houses for that mythical population of people who didn't even know they would ever come to live in Merced and, instead, built houses for bottom-feeding flippers.