Badlands Journal
Social, Economic, and Environmental Justice
Badlands owes the community an apology. We published a letter to the McClatchy board of directors last week that complained about an article in the Merced Sun-Star some Valley citizens found extremely offensive to Hispanic neighbors, friends, Mexico and Hispanic culture in general.
PL49-GP Update Polices
May 2, 2006
Merced County Board of Supervisors’ Agenda Item # 55
(Transcribed from Board Agenda for May 2, 2006 – BH, April 29, 2006)
TO: BOARD OF SUPERVISORS
THROUGH: DEMITRIOS O. TATUM, COUNTY EXECUTIVE OFFICER
FROM: ROBERT A. LEWIS, DEVELOPMENT SERVICES DIRECTOR
SUBJECT: General Plan Amendment Policy and Procedures during the General Plan Update
Central Valley Safe Environment Network
P.O. Box 64
Merced, CA. 95341
cvsen@sbcglobal.net
Senior Officers of The McClatchy Company
----Gary McMillen
3 April 2006
One of the nation's greatestest Christians, William Sloan Coffin, died a week ago and the eulogies have been coming, one by one, from the great people whose lives he touched. We're thankful for the blogs of conscience -- CommonDreams, Truthout, Counterpunch, and others -- for making them so easily and generally available.
Americans too young to remember the Vietnam War or those who have an iron-clad case of amnesia do not know how bad a really rotten war can get on the home front of the invader, passing over the millions of the invaded such wars kill. You are only beginning to get a taste of it. An immeasurable aid to national complacency about the Iraq Disaster is that it is being fought be other peoples’ children, almost exclusively from the nation’s less fashionable, less politically influential neighborhoods.
… but you can’t.
Yes, you’d like to believe a prominent local businessman whose opinions are almost professionally written and with great authority and the appearance of logic and reason.
But, I think it would be unwise to take a recent letter in the Merced Sun-Star, “Keep to linear plan,” (April 12) at face value.
It begins, as we often do begin our analyses in the Valley, with a mythical Golden Age of universal harmony:
We used to have some self-respect and pride in the Valley. We worked hard, weren’t rich, but were deeply involved in our communities, in our agriculture, our economy, and in our environment.
The greatest threat to that self-respect – based on a sense of reality and truth – that we have ever seen is UC Merced-Pomboza. And all that is pathetically distorted about this land scheme masquerading as a university is epitomized in its first “Family-Oriented Fairy Shrimp Festival” to be held on Earth Day, Saturday, April 22.
Representatives Dennis Cardoza, Shrimp Slayer-Merced, and George Radanovich, Bankrupt Winemaker-Mariposa, are proposing a National Agricultural Science Center for Modesto and have introduced a bill in Congress for funding. They argue that because Modesto has produced more ag politicians since World War II than any other city in the US, Modesto deserves this national center.
At their June 13 meeting, supervisors will take a vote on one of five options for how to handle developer-driven growth. Those options range from leaving the system as it is to enforcing a moratorium on any growth that requires changing the general plan. – Chris Collins, Merced Sun-Star, April 12, 2006