Flak, propaganda, public relations, political campaign messaging -- there are a hundred names for what millions of dollars of broadcasted lies can do to public memory. We are going to get another dose of it this spring in the Proposition 16 campaign, the purpose of which is to make it practically impossible for any local government to establish a public power utility.

The great bubble brains among us are buying signatures this spring for a November initiative that would suspend AB 32, California's global warming law, until the state's unemployment rate dropped below 5.5 percent. The unemployment rate, now at 12.4 percent, has not dipped below 5.5 percent since September 2007, when the speculative real estate bubble was popping, with a sound heard round the world.

The great theoreticians of the economy that ate Merced speak in lovingly of "creative destruction." I suppose, from the vantage point of a tenured chair in a university economics department committed to free-market ideology, it all must seem terribly exciting. The public and elected officials (currently enjoying the lowest popularity ratings since such records began), may be excused for not fully embracing our culture's universal approval of all that is "creative." The destruction is not a new problem.

Some rightwing Anglos out at UC Merced recently posted a racially offensive video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDWAJYFi3UA). It's a cartoon featuring a semi-bald Anglo with a snotty British accent interrogating a female Chicano student, with no accent, involved in trying to start a Chicano Studies Program at the limping U. The Brit gets the best of the staged argument (sic).