Badlands Journal
Social, Economic, and Environmental Justice
Anyone who has any illusion that Merced County government is capable of self-reform should meditate on the passages in bold red letters below, including rank hypocritical utterance hurled by a politically wounded county supervisor against the vices that breed like little mices in the County Temple of Misfeasance, Malfeasance and Nonfeasance on the corner of M and 23rd streets in Merced CA.
The "politicization" of the drought "could be the inflection point" that gets investors serious about water, says Simon Gottelier of Impax Asset Management in London, which specializes in environmental investing. Kathleen Pender, SF Chronicle, March 15, 2014
You betcha! -- blj
3-15-14
San Francisco Chronicle
California drought spawns investment opportunity
“Ballad for the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the State Department Victoria 'Fuck the E.U.' Nuland”
By blj, 2014
We don’t know where you’re taking us,
Miss Vickie. Is it to war with Russia?
Do we really need the Ukraine?
Are we the United States of Prussia?
Are you Point Lady for the neocons,
Projecting a century of American empire?
You’d launch our army, navy and our air force,
You’d throw my low-rent neighbors into that
Hyporcrisy dripped from the rafters and eves of the new UC Merced on March 3 when the great local water whine went up for the benefit of state officials meeting to "listen" to exactly such eloquent, entitled, hereditary complaint.
The very ground on which the whine was made and listened to receives water and sewer services from the City of Merced, although UC Merced is outside the city limits. At the time of the hookup and probably still, this is a direct violation of the City's own ordinance, which prohibits City sewer and water service outside the City's corporate limits.
Wayne Lysvardi, the Cal watchdog bringing illumination to all the lampposts, has delivered his considered opinion on what’s really wrong with the California water/energy system in a simply organized article of great duplicity. As is usual with Lysvardi, the deceptions are sprayed about so erratically as our watchdog trots through the night that it is difficult to bring them all to light. However, two “humps” and a few wobbles in his reasoned path do appear.
We are happy to see that the latest cypher to hold the position of chancellor at UC Merced writes so well about the campus’s impeccably green water policies and, particularly, its state-of-the-art technology.
Chronicles of the hydraulic brotherhood..lloydgcarter.com
Chronicles of the hydraulic brotherhood..lloydgcarter.com
Chronicles of the hydraulic brotherhood..lloydgcarter.com
There are two things that most well-read people knew about Russia 40 years ago: they had fought for their warm water port on the Black Sea, Sevastopol; and the Ukraine was one of the great “breadbaskets” of the world, along with the Midwestern states of the US and the Pampas of Argentina. We don’t mean “breadbasket” as it is misused by propagandists for the irrigation and water districts in the San Joaquin Valley; we mean it as one of the great grain growing regions of the world.
During California Gov. Gray Davis's administration, a study of California's 1,250 public and private dams found that only a handful were fully compliant with safety regulations. In this year of drought panic, there are nearly countless bills in some Western state legislatures and in Congress, the main thrusts of which are to override environmental law and regulation to provide more water for farming and municipal use.
Between 1995-2012, Bowles Farming Co. of Los Banos received $10.9 million in cotton subsidies.(1) But how much of a subsidy can you collect if you don’t have water to plant cotton? Our guess is that whether it’s called a “subsidy” or not, agribusiness and the federal government will figure out ways of getting at least a little something to its favorite “farmers,” like the Bowles family farm here.
Of the top 20 recipients of commodity subsidies in the 15th Congressional District, Los Banos agribusinesses received $50.1 million for the 1995-2012 period. – blj