Badlands Journal

The threat of bankruptcy overhangs local government across the nation. In Northern California, Vallejo declared bankruptcy last year, impoverished for a generation by the closing of the Mare Island Naval Base. Stockton recently declared bankruptcy, impoverished for a generation because it is the home of Developer Grupe and Builder Spanos.

The California story is simple: people, at the urging of finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) special interests, bought the idea that they could have contemporary, upscale public services without paying adequate property taxes to fund these services they believed they deserved. They voted for Prop; 13 in 1978 and continued to demand the same level of service. Local governments borrowed to provide the services but the quality inevitably eroded because the jurisdictions are legally required to balance their budgets and because of the interest on the loans. California, once a national leader in public K-12 education, now ranks 47th and falling. Rural county roads are reverting to their pre-pavement origins. Libraries are closed. On and on -- it is our daily experience.

UC Merced making water data available…JOSHUA EMERSON SMITH

http://www.mercedsunstar.com/2012/08/29/v-print/2502928/uc-merced-making-water-data-available.html

As concerns heat up around predicted losses in average mountain snowpack, UC Merced researchers have launched a new program to study the effects of climate change on the San Joaquin River and the millions of people who depend on it.

* Javanese shadow-puppet theatre

"It's just money," people say. But reading this article, one recalls that money talks.

Multi-layered escape from responsibility

Somewhere in an arid state to the east someone is figuring out the odds on a levee break in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. And the latest move by the US Army Corps of Engineers reported below may alter the morning line on the Great Delta Collapse.

The Army Corps, somewhat less controlled by the Obama Peripheral Tunnel Axis than is the Department of Interior, which contains both the Fish & Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Reclamation, declared yesterday that "the city of  Sacramento and 15 other areas of the Central Valley ... have failed federal maintenance criteria.

Restore The Delta

Finding faults…RTDJess

http://www.restorethedelta.org/cant-find-my-way-home/

Most recent discussion of earthquake risk in the Delta have been based on the Delta Risk Management Strategy (DRMS). DRMS was prepared by consultants (URS Corporation) for the Department of Water Resources.

Experts disagree about many of the findings in DRMS, which assumes five Delta fault systems.

For example, new modeling of the “Montezuma Hills Zone” fault by Shell Oil (which is doing a pilot test for CO2 injection wells) has confirmed what PG&E apparently knew years ago: that one of the faults identified in DRMS doesn’t exist, but is instead an “erosional feature” resulting from a meander of the Sacramento River.

In the lengthy compilation below you will find much fine insight, invective, wit, humor and history on water in California, as fascinating and horrifying to us Californians as the drug trade. The whole story is like a dark novel in which we are living and no one doubts that it will all end worse than we can imagine.
Jerry wants to get shit done. But, as one homeowner activist from LA put it, what would you say to a contractor who proposed building you a new house but didn't have either a blueprint or a budget?
Thus it is with the famous peripheral tunnels that would take fresh Sacramento River water, before it entered the Delta,
 around the Delta to tie into the grand canals that take so much Delta water south to the Heavy Metel Acres of the west side of the San Joaquin Valley and to Southern California for more growth. One question so far left undiscussed in the media as far as we know is how deep does the Delta peat go. This is not discussed because that Delta peat is the most fertile soil in California and "getting shit done" requires that we turn its water into salt to sent the fresh water down to Heavy Metal Acres. Don't ask. It has something to do with campaign contributions.
Nor do the new water literati mention the Public Trust Doctrine, enshrined in federal and state law, which requires that the government manage the resources for the benefit of all the public, rivers specifically for navigation, fishing and recreation, two out of three of which will be severely impacted if Jerry gets his shit done.

Tt was not so long ago when Carol Tomlinson-Keasey, the Cowgirl Chancellor of UC Merced, in deference to finance, insurance and real estate profiteers using the campus as the anchor tenant for the absurdly destructive building boom, said she refused to use the term "global warming," and, induer administration orders and using the "best science," called it "climate change" instead.

That was before a great deal of research funding was made available to study the problem. Now, all public spirited Mercedians are global warming affirmers at least in public even if in private everybody who is anybody in this town and county is praying not for rain but for another housing bubble.

Hopefully high powers are not in the same rut.

Today, global warming can be felt by the skin throughout the Midwest and Southeast and researh funds re growing. So, woila, it exists, especially in the universities, right beside that "high-tech, bio-tech engine of growth causing -- Voila again -- global warming. 

You cannot get there on the magic carpet of empirical science. There must be a commitment deep in the society against doing more harm to the environment we share with all the other creatures. American society is incapable of making that commitment.  

Badlands Journal editorial board

Statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) writes: “The July employment and unemployment numbers published today, August 3rd, were worthless and likely misleading.” ... The government that lies to you about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, about Iraq’s al Qaeda connections, about the Taliban in Afghanistan, about Osama bin Laden, about Libya and Gadhafi, about Iranian nukes, about Syria, about Pakistan, about Yemen and Somalia, about Bradley Manning, about Julian Assange and Wikileaks, indeed about everything under the sun, also lies to you about jobs, unemployment, economic recovery, GDP growth,  the “terrorist threat,” everything.  Try to find anything that the government has said over the past 6 presidential terms that is not a lie.-- Paul Craig Roberts, Counterpunch, August 6.

The drooling lunacy of high speed rail "planning" goes on. Would it be possible to find anywhere along even the allegedly rural route of the San Joaquin Valley, where more disruption and possibly more heavy equipment could be employed than in changing the vast underpass of Highwy 99 through the center of one of the valley's moe substantial burgs, Fresno (population 943,000)?

One of America's favorite old expressions, culled from bitter experience with the 19th century barony of finance, insurance and real estate, is, "This is no way to build a railroad."

This project is stupid, destructive, and driven by the greed of people in the county seats of the San Joaquin Valley half the size of Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt. Once, when America had a much lower percentage of college graduates and was a much better educated country, Lewis could create a national character of ridicule, the greedy small town businessman and chamber of commerce type, always boosting, always hustling, always the dupe leading his town to destruction. George Babbitt was the Dupe of Main Street.

As our nation became illiterate and lost its memory, the Babbitts sprang up again in every city hall and county building and state legislature across the land and in Congress. In the great game of oligopoly finance capitalism going on today, the neo-Babblitt is the local leader who lies to his constituents for his little crumb under the table.

Stockton CA is making news ever since it declared it wouls seek bankruptcy protection a few weeks ago. Assured Guaranty, the  Burmuda based insurance company that insures Stockton's bonds against default is livid because the city is "stiffing bondholders to give preferential treatment to employees and CalPERS.

The company called that 'a contortion of the bankruptcy rocess.'" Sacramento Bee, Aug. 3, 2010.

The conturbation grows as the off-shore finance operation lobs cannon balls across the bow of CalPERS, which manages many public employee pension funds in California, like a tax-evading Caribbean pirate ship.

CalPERS has seen it all before with the Vallejo bankruptcy and affirms that "pension obligations take precedence over lenders under California law."

There is no doubt that finance, insurance and real estate special interests have been screaming for the blood of public workers' pensions including every so-called "mainstream" newspaper, all of whom are so far in debt to the same special interests that independent thinking is not being encouraged.

So, if you just read this story about Stockton, it would look like the innocent port was being invaded by the above-mentioned pirates.

Yet, it is Stockton. In 2011 Stockton City Council, apparently failing to publicly notice it, voted Mayor Ann Johnston a large raise. Johnston turned down the raise but it still went to the mayor's office, still, according to the Stockton Record,
illegally.

The issue is clear: Adam Gray, his mother, his step-father and his uncle, ethically disadvantaged political fixer Robin Adam, have been lying about the boy's credentials for elective office, as in, he don't have none but we rubes are so dumb we'll go along with it because he's a Democrat.

They have managed to alienate the bC Merced's Bobcatflak office, which has brought us propaganda campaigns too numerous to mention, the main thrust being that by building on the largest contiguous set of vernal pools in the US and rapidly roofing, asphalting and cementing over the heart of the aquifer that supplies fresh water to the City of Merced, not to mention being the anchor tenant for the biggest, most fraudulent building boom in world history, UC Merced is somehow the greenest campus ever constructed in the universe on the unmarked mass grave of 15 endangered species. The Greenest Campus in the Universe was expected to be our "high tech, biotech engine of (economic) growth," as if the creators of the technological weapons of predatory corporate capitalism are of any more use to us than the midieval swordsmith was to the peasants his products chopped up. But a university, especially a public university, paid for by public funds -- what a way to make the money-grubbing business of land speculation Respectable!

Evidently the big crooks resent the little crooks and are swatting them off the trailing end of the UC skirt.