Badlands Journal

Readers of the McClatchy Co.s Modesto chain outlet were greeting Sunday morning with a glowing review of a silly PhD dissertation republished as one of those highly perishable books academics must publish to keep drawing their state pay.

This one, by one Dr. Jan Goggans, an assistant professor of literature at UC Merced, is called "California on the Breadlines: Dorothea Lange, Paul Taylor and the Making of a New Deal Narrative." It can be read in about a half an hour. The notes, which consume half the book, would take longer.

"We were giving people false hope," Cardoza said. -- Rep. Dennis Cardoza, Pimlico Kid-Merced/Annapolis

Nobody was a more vocal booster for those false hopes out front and more engaged in backroom deals to benefit the real estate boom in the north San Joaquin Valley than Dennis Cardoza. He was of the little yapping Senorcito UC Merceds in the state Legislature and in Congress the author of three unsuccessful bills to gut the Endangered Species Act for the benefit of a handful of finance, insurance and real estate special interests in his district during the speculative real estate boom that has busted, catching tens of thousands of people in his district, who are now upside-down on their mortgages. Cardoza, his family and his social circle all benefitted from the speculation.

Since the real estate boom collapsed, Cardoza's public utterances have grown increasingly absurd. His attack on Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan is just one more example of his continual attempts to avoid the consequences of using his office to line his and his cronies' pockets.

Cardoza seems to think that HUD should be renamed HSD, Housing and Slurb Development.

Badlands Journal editorial board

The relationship between unemployment and environmental concern is treated in a paper by professors Matthew E. Kahn and Matthew J. Kotchen.

We suggest that "environmentalism" isn't a "good" of any sort. It is not a commodity any more than the people who have environmental concern, none at all, or some, are commodities. Nor is the environmental a "good," a commodity, except in the self-regulated, free market ideology of the two economists. They seem to have gotten so carried away with themselves that they fail to note what's most obvious: that high employment is linked to environmental destruction; high unemployment usually means that less environmental destruction is going on.

We are enjoying unusually good air quality this summer in the north San Joaquin Valley. However, we are anticipating the construction and operation of the WalMart distribution center within the next year or two. It will mean many, many trucks in town, which will permanently worsen our air quality, but a lot of jobs for construction and operation of the facility. With unemployment in Merced at Great Depression levels and with foreclosure rates still rising and home prices still falling, it's not much of a choice. But the people making the choice aren't thinking about "environmentalism" as a "good." In fact, people in this Valley generally know that asthma and respiratory disease are equal opportunity illnesses that attack rich and poor, employed and unemployed, and their young children and elderly parents alike.

Americans have been jerked around by the rapid serial montages of the "news cycle" to the point where even Rep. Dennis Cardoza, the Pimlico Kid-Annapolis MD, believes he can foist the rhythm on us, mere constituents of His Greatness, with impunity.

So, the Great Pimlico Kid Himself, makes marks on the administration like the all-powerful legislative lion, which he isn't,  by introducing a bill to cut the travel budget of the secretary of HUD, like it makes a difference.

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.

"I think it's actually a brilliant opinion in that it finally says we have to look at the big picture here, and not that endangered species trump everything," said Roger Marzulla, a Washington, D.C., lawyer who frequently sues the federal government over endangered species rules. "Don't we have to take some other things into consideration here?"
Others question the logic of requiring scrutiny of species protection rules under a second environmental law.

"It doesn't make any sense to do environmental analysis on the back end when you're trying to help the environment," said Holly Doremus, a professor at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law. "What he's (Federal Court Justice Oliver Wanger) saying is the agencies have to find absolutely the least burdensome way to save the species." -- Contra Costa Times, 6-14-10

We have taken "the big picture" for, in Bob Marley's words, "four hundred years," during which the species were offered absolutely no way to avoid massive destruction at the hands of an economic (and legal system) that was "absolutely" into "absolute" exploitation of natural resources, species, and anything else on which a profit could be made.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Our Hun, a man of action tragically restrained by mere government throughout his political career, has decided to build a "demonstration"

high speed rail link between LA and San Diego.

"...Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger doesn't want to wait that long to give the state a taste of the European-style system..."

Baloney. Our Hun just wants to put his hand on the transformer and run a great big electric train somewhere in California before he retires.

Boosters for a high speed railroad from Los Angeles to San Francisco have been hustling federal funds for this train, claiming that it will be the longest, fastest high speed railroad in the nation and will produce hundreds of thousands of new jobs all along its route. We aren't quite clear on how permanent these jobs will be, but if this boon to employment were to arrive, it would no doubt draw even more people into the state and probably go some way to reinflating the speculative real estate bubble. In part the high speed rail would be a great benefit for commuters to the Bay Area from the Valley, which is why it has such ardent supporters among Valley cities with abundant empty homes for sale, cheap, and official unemployment rates around 20 percent.

There is contention over parts of the route and as usual with recent schemes like new University of California campuses and railroad boondoggles, Merced, which already has two major track systems running through it, is at the center of it.

Did Merced get a high-tech, bio-tech "engine of growth" when it became the home of UC Merced. Rep. Dennis Cardoza, the Pimlico Kid, may be the only "local" leader so out of touch he still uses the phrase. Or did Merced get a baby dinosaur?

Badlands Journal editorial board

6-6-10
Washingtonexaminer.com
Higher education's bubble is about to burst...Glenn Harlan Reynolds
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Sunday_Reflections/Higher-education_s-bubble-is-about-to-burst-95639354.html

It's a story of an industry that may sound familiar.

The buyers think what they're buying will appreciate in value, making them rich in the future. The product grows more and more elaborate, and more and more expensive, but the expense is offset by cheap credit provided by sellers eager to encourage buyers to buy.

Buyers see that everyone else is taking on mounds of debt, and so are more comfortable when they do so themselves; besides, for a generation, the value of what they're buying has gone up steadily. What could go wrong? Everything continues smoothly until, at some point, it doesn't.

Investor's Business Daily's recent portrait of the "man-made drought" in California is written in the idiotic tradition of that rag, which claimed last summer that the great British physicist who suffers from muscular distrophy, would be dead if he had been taken care of by the British National Health Service. Of course, he had been and credited the Service with keeping him alive.

IBD's Monica Showalter, who sees things that aren't there, writes: "On a springtime drive through the Central Valley, it's hard not to notice how federal and state governments are hell-bent on destroying the state's top export — almonds — and everything else in the nation's most productive farmland."

Assuming intent, what exactly would "federal and state governments ... hell-bent on destroying the state's top export -- almonds -- and everything else in the nation's most productive farmland" look like? We who live up here a hundred or so miles and a world away from Showalter's flakroom, do not see this. What we see is a 130-percent snow pack after three years of light rain and state and federal government water resource agencies raising weekly the estimate of how much water they can deliver for agricultural and metropolitan use.

Some rightwing Anglos out at UC Merced recently posted a racially offensive video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDWAJYFi3UA). It's a cartoon featuring a semi-bald Anglo with a snotty British accent interrogating a female Chicano student, with no accent, involved in trying to start a Chicano Studies Program at the limping U. The Brit gets the best of the staged argument (sic). The Chicano students are stereotyped as entitled, racists themselves, who want their own program now just because they want it, and as incapable of arguing why. There was nothing "intelligent," "spirited" or "responsible" about the video dialogue between the two cartoon characters, despite what is said by an unnamed "university representative."

Since a Chicano Studies program is, by definition, about people of Mexican descent who are American citizens, the question why the Chicana doesn't wish to "identify as an American citizen" is purely bogus, displaying the classic rightwing combination of ignorance and racial hatred. Chicano means Mexican-American, and there is quite a history behind the origin of the word. But that history would be beyond the Little White Men on Campus and it gives UC Merced administrators and Chicano elders of influence on the campus a shuddering case of the vapors -- a disease that turns guts to mush.