Badlands Journal

Followers of the pollution caused by Hilmar Cheese, "the world's largest cheese plant" (WLCP), will recall that whenever the wastewater pollution achieves a level that state regulators can no longer comfortably ignore, the WLCP comes up with yet a new "black box" technology and requests an exemption from regulation to try it out for a few years. WLCP hires ace flak Michael Boccadoro, the Moutha Gold, to invite the public to marvel at WLCP's brilliant new black box, designed by the world's most ingenious engineers at enormous sums of money, which are always mentioned to show how hard the WLCP is trying.

The regulators ordinarily grant the exemption to test the new black box, it never works, the WLCP skates by environmental regulation for another year or two until the regulatory agency gets antsy again, whereupon the whole process repeats itself.

Nor is there any mention in this flakodoro "journalism" of the three most obvious facts in this case: Hilmar Cheese will not control its pollution of groundwater; it probably can't because it is the world's largest cheese plant; and it is already expanding its plant in Dalhart TX.

Badlands Journal editorial board

A peek beneath the propaganda on lawsuits

Whenever any environmental group files a lawsuit on behalf of the public interest and trust according to the California Environmental Quality Act, the National Environmental Protection Act, the Clean WAter and Clean Air acts, or other laws designed to protect the environment and public health and safety, immediately a howling commences about "litigious" enviros from elected, appointed and otherwise recruited representatives of corporate welfare for the wealthy. However, for a truer view of reality, take a look at the current litigation schedule for Westlands Water District.

Badlands Journal editorial board

WESTLANDS WATER DISTRICT
FINANCE & ADMINISTRATION COMMITTEE
NOTICE OF REGULAR MEETING AND AGENDA
NOTICE
Notice is hereby given that a regular meeting of the Finance & Administration
Committee of the Board of Directors ofWestlandsWater District will be held on December 15, 2009, at 12:00 noon at the District's Fresno Office, 3130 N. Fresno Street, Fresno, California
93703.
COMMITTEE MEMBERS
Ted Sheely, Chairman
Don Peracchi
Todd Neves
Jean Sagouspe, ex officio

As Merced goes into the holiday shopping season starting next Friday, all economic indicators are thumbs down.

Official unemployment crept up a point from last month to 16.4 percent, with an increase expected for November. This means that actual unemployment is over 20 percent now and will rise toward 30 percent as the winter wears on.

In October 361 Merced homes received notices of default, down 33 from September; there were 459 trustee sales, up 61 from September; 273 homes went back to banks, 36 more than in September; and 50 homes were sold to third persons, up slightly from September and greatly from October 2008, when only nine homes were sold to third parties.

Citing unemployment as the driving force, the Los Angeles Times reported last week: "One in seven U.S. home loans was past due or in foreclosure as of Sept. 30, putting that quarterly delinquency measure at its highest level since 1972, when the Mortgage Bankers Assn. began reporting it. At the beginning of this year, 1 in 10 loans was past due or in foreclosure."

There seems to have been an interesting speaker in town last week, Vaughn Grisham, director of the McLean Institute for Community Development at Ole Miss. The elite was there, led by Bob Carpenter, Mr. UC Merced. According to the local McClatchy Chain outlet, Grisham thought Merced had it made in the shade because of UC Merced. It made us wonder if that was his view, why he was invited at all to the sixth most economically stressed county in the nation with one of the three highest national foreclosure rates. But, apparently, Mr. UC Merced is now leading something called the Tupelo Committee of Merced County.

Prior to looking into Grisham and McLean, the editorial board only knew about Tupelo for two of its famous sons, Jimmy Rogers, the Singing Brakeman, and Elvis Presley, “T for Texas” and “You Ain’t Nothing but a Hound Dog (jest a-cryin’ all the time).”

George McLean was a great man. We’ve included some very inspiring material below about him and what he did in his lifetime in northeast Mississippi.

Too big to fail -- lenders to the CA dairy industry
 
If Washington had had any real concern for the dairy industry, in California or anywhere in the US, it would have dealt with the artificially low milk prices that have plunged the entire national dairy deal into unprecedented debt.
 
Perhaps, Western United Dairymens's Mike Marsh (WUD is a California dairy lobbying group) was correct that the USDA should have started buying the overstocks of bulk cheese months ago. The crisis, in the wake of the huge ethanol speculations of 2008 that pushed up feed prices, was known, seen, acknowledged. There was no mystery about what was happening and there were remedies -- in pricing and in badly needed programs like simply supplying food banks with commodity cheese, as Marsh suggested.
 
But, instead, the situation was allowed to simmer, the Washington opinion was "over-production" was causing the problem when, in fact, as almost always in agricultural commodities, the problem is distribution, as in providing food to hungry Americans for whom, if they live in places like Merced and Tulare counties in California -- the two largest dairy counties in the nation -- the economy sure looks more like depression than recession. The foreclosure rate in Merced increased to nearly 20 percent last month and is showing no signs of abating. Tulare County's August unemployment rate was 15.2 percent. Merced's was 16.7 percent. And that's "official."
 

We have no appreciation for the Hun, our governor. We think he is a public embarrassment. But, in terms of the time-honored political phrase – the people get the government they deserve – the Hun is a tribute to the political idiocy of the California population, composed of people who all think state history began when they got here, either is immigrants from the US and elsewhere, or as babies.

You have to hand it to Rep. Devin Nunes, Tragic Hero-Visalia, he’s a performer. In fact, you have to stand in line to hand it to him, behind national PACs, agribusiness and oil and gas to hand it to him. He’s raised nearly a million dollars for his campaign next year and if some strong Democrat contender lurks in Nunes’ district, that contender lurks below the surface so far.

The Costoza, representatives Jim Costa, D-Fresno and Dennis Cardoza, Fairy Shrimper- Annapolis/Merced, are not in Nunes’ league. The political theater-going public, knowing this, has dispensed a mere $350,000 and change to each of these chorus boys. . The fourth member of the Valley congressional delegation, Jerry McNerney, Goose Egg-Pleasanton, who represents the actual Delta, tries to keep the Altamont between him and the Valley as much as possible. Closer to Mother Nancy, McNerney gets nearly half a million.

Every culture has its sacred texts. Chinese, the Sumerians, Indians, Persians, Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, Arabs -- and on and on. You name the culture and we'll name the sacred text -- from the I Ching to the Koran and beyond. It is the world's greatest literature,

the true treasury of the deepest human values and highest human visions.

In California, we have the water news. Because we are so young, dynamic and full of the belief that economic growth equals population growth, the notion that natural resources, especially water, may have limits, has created a theological crisis here in California.

With the sounds of families splitting up in our ears, late-model cars disappearing to the repo man, empty houses standing all over town, and an unemployment rate correlated to one of the highest foreclosure rates in the nation, people in Merced are not inclined to weep for the plutocrat growers of Fresno, Kings, Tulare and Kern counties. We have all the water we need for agriculture on both sides of our county (they are provided by different sources) and our unemployment rate is worse than all the counties just listed.

Review of Dairy Industrialization in the First Place: Urbanization, Immigration and Political Economy in Los Angeles, by Jess Gilbert and Kevin Wehr, Rural Sociology, 2003

Thanks to the century-long special relationship between the University of California and California agribusiness, Californians are basically as innocent of knowledge of American rural sociology as they are of Uighar oral poetry. Although Wehr was born in Oakland, he had to travel to the University of Wisconsin, where Gilbert teaches, to study rural sociology and only got his PhD the year this article was published. So, from the beginning, there is a political aspect to this study: it could be and was done out of University of Wisconsin, in the second largest dairy state in the nation; Californiaovertook Wisconsin for the crown in 1994.

"Diary Industrialization in the First Place" is an historical account of the first time and place this form of agribusiness occurred, among Dutch dairymen in Los Angeles County. The authors assert their independence from previous academic works on the subject dairy industrialization by their emphasis on time and place, no doubt unconsciously emulating the "espacio-temporal" theory employed successfully by El colegio de la frontera norte in its research into the history and development of Tijuana and other Mexican border towns beginning in the late 1970s.