December 2012

Where the profits of "the greatest public research university in the world" go

How long is the illusion that UC is a public university to go on? Or for that mater the CSU system?
We should be grateful that the CSU chief voluntarily takes a 10-percent cut in pay while tuitions continue to rise? If we had a functional loegislture he would not have had to make the agaonizing decision all by himself but would have been aided by elected officials in Sacramento.

World Bank predicts drastic global warming by end of century

In this hideous age of plutocracy and religious bigotry, there are very few writers who can maintain and expand their level of care for humanity and the planet the way Chris Hedges continues to do in a stream of books and articles on our most serious themes: perpetual war; relgious hypocrisy; consumer madness; and indigenous fascism, to name a few.
Below, Hedges reviews the World Bank's latest, most drastic report on global warming
Badlands Journal editorial board

A nouveau win-win public-private partnership for growth and despoilation of country

In the Great Age of Electrical Deregulation that has brought such benefits to California since 2001 that the state treasury has been in debt billions ever since, the Committee of crisis Capitalists, speaking through their mouthpiece du jour, Junior Brown, age 75 but still a brat, has decreed that all solar projects proposed by plutocrats should be built regardless of the cost to local government because they are "green," the new "small is beautiful" in Jr's playbook.

Fill in the blanks

________ has to grow (or else it is in crisis) and its very logic and motivated force impels growth.

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X-NONE

Fill in the blanks

________ has to grow (or else it is in crisis) and its very logic and motivated force impels growth.

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EN-US
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X-NONE

Marx makes the news cycle ...

...but will we remember his name in February?
Big Media controlled by the plutocracy (the rich people who own everything from the land to the elected officials representing the people who live in the land) is so confident of its absolute grip on American opinion that it has begun -- in a liberal and generous way -- to attack itself. In the minds of trained economists like liberal and Nobel Prize-winning Dr. Paul Krugman, the name Marx appears on the inner flash card (kinda like "civil unrest" produces the flash card "Bolshevik").

If farmers arn't stupid ....

So, the “Farmer Assurance“ thing – using farmers as their poster children — is
quite disingenuous. The biotech industry cares about farmers because farmers are their meal ticket.
Farmers are not stupid; we've learned that the promises of biotech were short
lived at best and to various degrees, simply false. The new GE crops are
basically the old GE crops, just redesigned to resist different, more toxic
herbicides while having become less effective at killing insect pests.
..Goodman, 12-14-12

Welcome to the new, completely rigged yet still called "free" housing market by the knuckleheads who lead us

We have read Mike Whitney's work with great interest for about six or seven years because this writer seems to do regularly what so few of the "official" economists are able to do: predict as well as anyone can what is going to happen economically. At first we were appalled by what we saw as his hard-edged, irritated cynicism. But we quickly came to see that Whitney has a very special message for Merced.

The Headlights and the Deer

The headlights are the coming collapse of the exchange value of the dollar, the world's previous reserve currency; the deer is the US Congress.
The article below, written by Paul Craig Roberts, is another, even sharper statement by  the member of former Pres. Reagan's Treasury Department of his basic, preidcitive premises: off-shoring American jobs has been an economic disaster; saving the banks rather than the economy has been another economic disaster; and imperial wars are the third.

The public banking movment is growing

Included are: an article by Pam Martens on public banking: AB 2500, a public banking bill in the California state Legislature; and an analysis of AB2500 The bill was introduced by Assemblyman Ben Hueso, D-Chula Vista, who withdrew it from a committee hearing in April of the 2011-12 session. We don't know if he will reintroduce it in the 2013-14 legislative session.  
Badlands Journal editorial board
 
11-15-12
Wall Street On Parade
← Four Years Later, More Madoff Details Emerge

New tools for grave digging

A few tools for digging our own graves
Submitted: Dec 29, 2012
By:
Badlands Journal editorial board

Cities with highest unemployment:

    El Centro, Calif. 27.2
    Yuma, Ariz. 23.7
    Merced, Calif. 16.9
    Yuba City, Calif. 16.8
    Fresno, Calif. 15.7
    Modesto, Calif. 15.5
    Stockton, Calif. 15.5
    Visalia-Porterville, Calif. 15
    Hanford-Corcoran, Calif. 14.7
    Madera-Chowchilla, Calif. 14.3

Cities with the lowest unemployment rates were as follows:

"It's a stupid, absurd, and insane question."

To help the reder imagine a different point of view from this fearful and mindless oil-company propaganda from the McClatchy Chain's Fresno outlet, we've included a brief quote from The Ecological Rift (MR Press, John Bellamy Foster,Brett Clark, and Richard York, 2010). -- blj
 
12-31-12
Fresno Bee

Chevron's CEO: Affordable energy is crucial…Jonathan Fahey, AP Energy Writer…12-27-12