Badlands Journal

Here is a typical example of the Great Valley Whine: the Fresno Bee is tearful that we didn't get as great an increase in federal spending in recent years as San Francisco, home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, did, and our Medicare reimbursement rates "barely cover costs." You can hear McClatchy's finest stamping their penny loafers.

Berryhill throws out a real bum

The congressional campaign of Ceres Republican Mike Berryhill, running against Rep. Dennis Cardoza, Pimlico Kid-Annapolis, is not a thing of beauty. In a year when voters are so frustrated -- especially in Cardoza's congressional district, wracked with some of the worst foreclosure and unemployment rates in the nation and housing prices that still cannot find a bottom -- all they want to do is throw the bums out, at least Berryhill threw one bum out, John D. Villarreal, his campaign manager for a couple of weeks.

McClatchy reporter was able to summarize Villarreal's argument in a couple of sentences. But Villarreal took about 40 minutes on YouTube to rave, simply rave -- there is no other word to describe it -- about his relationship to the Berryhill campaign.

Two possibilities for the performance on YouTube (searching under "Villarreal Berryhill" will get you to the four-part series) are: 1. Villarreal was putting something other than sugar in his Starbucks; or 2. conservative political operatives have gone completely insane.

Badlands editors, some of whom are veterans of Valley political campaigns, are no strangers to abusive campaign managers. But with jaws dropped watching Villarreal's mad ravings on YouTube, they quickly agreed that if that guy had come into any campaign they were working in, it would have taken them less time than the 40-minutes on YouTube to pack their briefcases, clear their desks and draw their pay. This guy appears to be a campaign manager from Hell's Cellar.

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

"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.

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.

Those vaguely worded ballot measures can come back to haunt you.

We've noticed, driving around Merced and Stanislaus counties these days, that everything seems to be owned or controlled by bankers somewhere else. We wish we had a prize -- an award for real and sustained public service -- to offer J.N. Sbranti of the Modesto Bee, whose great coverage of complex financial issues in this area that has been shining a strong light since the speculative real estate boom began to go soft. We've appended a brief history of the Orrick law firm (from its website) below because the name Orrick has been associated with public bonds in California for a very long time.

Badlands Journal editorial board

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

Considering the source, we found the comment curious. The writer is listed as a supporter of the Merced County Citizen's right to vote on expansion of residential areas initiative, which, on its face and in its propaganda, appears to express the deepest faith in democracy.

The initiative was peddled in a petition drive in front of Merced County supermarkets as "The Initiative to Amend the General Plan of Merced County to Save Farmland and Open Spaces." Petition gatherers were provided a slick "summary" of the initiative that said it would save Merced County farmland and open space. In other written propaganda and public appearances, the paid and unpaid flacks for the initiative have stressed how "simple" the initiative is and how it will save farmland.

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. Wolin's knowledge of the history of American politics is so thorough that, in the course of holding up the Bush regime to the light of deep trends and themes in our political history, he redeems American political science in one book. Democracy Inc. justifies our curiosity, craving and desperation of knowledge of our own political system in a period in which it is even hard to see the mirrors for all the smoke. He reminds us of the courageous intellectual history and democratic tradition of American society until 30 years ago, and the inseparable bond of intellectual and political life as vital to democracy as democracy is to it.

We got interested in Wolin's book as a result of reading about it in columns by Chris Hedges, who interviewed Wolin for his latest book, Empire of Illusion.

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.

We in the Valley, like no doubt people all over the nation, are hunkering down, focusing on local issues, trying to forget a world out there that has turned on us. Our political leaders have honed to a fine edge the rhetoric of blaming the state and federal government for everything while in Washington they are alarmed at states asserting states' rights, as in the case of Arizona. The California state Legislature is a rotten stew that blames lesser jurisdictions for the state's problems.
Despite the severe rational limitations of "putting a face on the enemy," there are in fact forces beyond the political economic imagination of the ordinary citizen that are playing important, very nasty roles in our contemporary history. Below are two articles that discuss some aspects of these macro forces. They are not exhaustive treatments of the subject. That will await historians in future generations. But we believe the authors accurately name some of the historical forces at work now.