Badlands Journal

Fresno County leaders are trying to salvage a farmland protection plan that has drawn resistance from at least one small city and, ironically, from some farmers as well.-- Fresno Bee, 3-6-10

 

We were curious why Rep. Dennis Cardoza, Shrimp Slayer-Merced, was working so hard for the Westlands Water District in the recent attempt by Sen. Dianne Feinstein to put an amendment on a Senate jobs bill to suspend the Endangered Species Act on the Delta. The amendment was designed specifically to provide more water to Westlands. Cardoza seems to be representing a water district south of his congressional district and possibly to the detriment to the west side district he actually does represent, the Central California Irrigation Districts, also known as the exchange contractors, headquartered in Los Banos.

Part of the explanation may be in a donation to his 2010 campaign of $6,800 by Roll International and $5,000 from California Westside Farmers Inc.

Roll International is a holding company owned by Stewart and Lynda Resnick. Roll International controls Bakersfield-based Paramount Farms and POM Wonderful, the largest citrus, nut and pomegranate operations in the nation. The Resnicks, campaign contributors to Feinstein (in larger amounts than to Cardoza), were widely reported to have persuaded Feinstein to convene a scientific panel to review the two federal resource-agency biological opinions that restrict pumping from the Delta to the west side. They were also reported to have been behind Feinstein's unfortunate proposed amendment, which was not included in the jobs bill.

Felix Smith, retired US Fish & Wildlife biologist, discovered the deformed and death wildlife at Kesterson Wildlife Refuge in western Merced County that resulted in cessation of west-side drainage of selenium-laced agricultural waste water to that site. Smith is extremely well qualified to address the senator on issues of political interference with embattled federal scientists defending the public trust and environmental law and regulation. He's seen it all.

Badlands Journal editorial board

February 19, 2010

Honorable Dianne Feinstein – Senator

331 Hart Senate Office Building

Washington, D.C. 20510

Dear Senator Feinstein: 

...the first truth is that the liberty of democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism -- ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way to sustain an acceptable standard of living. -- President Frankin Delano Roosevelt, "Recommendations to the Congress to Curb Monopolies and the Concentration of Economic Power" (April 29, 1938), in Empire of Illusion, Chris Hedges, 2009, p.177.

US Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, D-Nevada, has made headlines by scrapping an $85-billion bipartisan jobs bill and replacing it with a $15-billion bill because he said the first, larger bill was full of "pork."

This raises questions, among them how many jobs pork bills do or don't create. But another curiosity is a rider Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, attached to Reid's new, porkless jobs bill, the Emergency Temporary Water Supply amendment, which will temporily suspend the Endangered Species Act restrictions on pumping water out of the San Joaquin Delta imposed by federal court.

While Feinstein has diverted the attention of outraged California environmentalists by the thought that all the Delta water would go to the agribusiness oligarchs of alkali on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley to create more seasonal farm jobs, another issue simmers in the pot. We would be more confident in Feinstein and Reid's compassion for the workers if we were not aware of the hundreds of millions of dollars the private owners of public, federally subsidized water in the Kern County Water Bank have made selling it the the highest urban bidders in the last decade. If the water bank's offices were not in the headquarters of Paramount Farms in Bakersfield, we would feel even more confident. But Stewart Resnick, owner of Paramount, is one of Feinstein's largest financial contributors,

Admittedly, there is an economic catastrophe in the San Joaquin Valley. In fact, it could be said that agribusiness has been an economic catastrophe for its workers for the past century. We would suggest that farm-worker unemployment on the west side is not much higher than normal for this time of the year. The main reason people are still working for western agribusiness today is the even more catastrophic economy of Mexico. Farmworkers on the west side have always faced "complete economic ruin without help." The entire political economy of agribusiness is to blame for that. To hear agribusiness and its political lackeys cry, "Lo, the poor farmworker," is scraping the bottom of the barrel of hypocrisy, credit and unsustainable farming.
Today, west-side towns are not the only places in the valley or in California where people are standing in bread lines.
California is not a breadbasket. It grows specialty fruits, nuts and vegetables. However, at times it has grown a great deal of grain, much of it dry farmed.

Last Sunday, I listened to a roundtable of learned talking heads on Meet the Press instantly agree with the assertion one of them made that of course the federal government could not actually create jobs.

Later that afternoon, I went out for a walk in Merced. It is difficult to walk anywhere in my neighborhood without seeing the familiar stamp in the sidewalk that reads either "WPA 1940" or "WPA 1941."

WPA stands for Works Progress Administration, one of the keystones of the New Deal. During the Great Depression the federal government created a great number of jobs. Chances are that if you are of a certain age, you will remember your father talking about his Civilian Conservation Corps or WPA job or work in other government programs. Hundreds of thousands of Americans, from all walks of life, were in fact employed by the federalgovernment to do work they already knew how to do but for which money was lacking due to the collapse of credit.

The Central Valley Soldier Settlement Act gave preferred rights to qualified veterans of WWII to purchase farm land irrigated by the Central Valley Project, funded by the federal government, along with low-interest loans from the government and banks That created much work for many people for years. Today, military expenditure in the US is more than the rest of the world combined. The resource wars are employing many people in the most resource-wasting activity known to man: war. 

1-15-10

CounterPunch Newsleter

ProPublica's Unemployment Insurance Tracker reveals that California is the largest among 25 states in the category of bankrupt unemployment insurance funds. Currently, according to ProPublica, the state has borrowed $6.5 billion from the federal government, has $113.8 million in the trust fund now and ProPublica predicts the state will be insolvent in six months. No other borrowing state has borrowed more than $1.5 billion (Indiana).

These numbers are a gauge of several factors: the price California pays for being the largest state; the over-concentration on one industry which, having been manipulated by the'big banksters, has laid off huge numbers of people -- from framers to tellers in formercommunity  banks -- a catastrophy that has devastated the entire economy, down to what you choose to buy your grandchild at WalMart, who goes to the farmers market these days, and everything in between. The economy has been contracting since before Obama took office.

As pressure builds on the unemployment insurance fund, as debt on the borrowing comes due, what will be the impact on benefits and the impact -- given the state's other billions in debt -- on the state's ability to remain a solvent government?