July 2011

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.

We post this article by Ellen Brown to respond to a comment from a reader expressing great concern for the whole Western financial system. In this piece, Brown focuses on another pernicious aspect of interest and banking -- why banks are not lending to businesses, particularly small businesses, other banks, and to individuals.

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

 “Now we’re going to have to start all over again,” Isabel Bravo, retired long-time president of the Placer County CA chapter of National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), told me Monday. She said she’d met last week with the new police chief in her city, Roseville, and he didn’t know anything about NAMI training programs for departments to build “crisis intervention teams” so that police could identify the mentally ill, differentiate them from people either stoned or drunk, disarm them if necessary, and talk them down from “the ozone.”