October 2018

The only way the local neighbors and fellow Delta farmers can find to correct The Nature Conservancy's negligent farm practices on Staten Island, is to sue it. TNC is so big, so rich, so politically connected, and so arrogantly deaf to local voices, that spending the money to go to court is all that's left.
TNC's  environmental management on the Delta isn't any better than its rampage of dubious and sloppy "perpetual" conservation easements to mitigate for UC Merced was.

 One reason we will be reminded of this nightmare regime we want to forget and another reason our children will learn about it is the fine work on display below, thanks to Associated Press and investigative journalists Garance Burke and Martha Mendoza. They have made the banal horror of these authoritarian times live for us, always in danger of numbing down, and for historians in the future. This is an excellent first draft of the history our children and grandchildren should read because It Is Happening Here Now.
Bravo Garance and Martha! -- blj
 
10-9-18

NOT!^1.
After a lengthy and serious public hearing, pitting angry citizens and against techno-babbling consultants and the city council and the Invisible Few who are paying for their re-election campaigns, the council voted 5-2 for a rate-increase scheme in which lower income and lower water users subsidize higher income, higher water users. 
Nobody was talking about how "development pays for itself" at that meeting.
And nobody talked about how Safeway bottles Merced City.^2. water to sell.