Badlands Journal
Social, Economic, and Environmental Justice
"Stanislaus County is further through the process than the rest of California," said Sean O'Toole, whose company ForeclosureRadar tracks homes in mortgage default throughout the state. "We are going to continue to see a general decline in foreclosure activity there."
The relationship between unemployment and environmental concern is treated in a paper by professors Matthew E. Kahn and Matthew J. Kotchen.
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.
This would have been a far more useful story if the reporter had bothered to ask and record the answers to these simple questions: did the California Environmental Protection Agency investigate the allegations against Merced Irrigation District? What did it find? What enforcement action was or might be taken? A quote "cannot comment because of an ongoing investigation" from CEPA would have added a nice symetry to the story.
Those vaguely worded ballot measures can come back to haunt you.
7-19-10
Truthdig.com
Calling All Future-Eaters
Chris Hedges
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/calling_all_future-eaters_20100719/
We received the following comment the other day about our posting on Sheldon Wolin's Democracy Inc.:
It's never been nor will it ever be a democracy.
"If voting made a difference it would be illegal." --Emma Goldman
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.
The word "recession" has outworn its shoplife in the US Supermarket of Empty Flak. We are in a prolonged economic depression the severity of which has not been experienced in 80 years and so has been largely forgotten by the living.
Elderly, white, self-righteous harridans lecture county boards of supervisors on their sacred duty to throw the homeless beyond the county line. We hear the echoes of history even as our leaders do their very best to deny history, which at this point is our only faint possibility of a means of learning what time it is.
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.