Mood swings
Planning in Merced, since the University of California first cast its greedy eyes on a large donation of seasonal pastureland north of the county seat, has been dominated by one agenda: the transfer of large rural properties to developer ownership. This is not to say that a number of other things haven’t happened, but the dominant agenda has been this phenomenon: the willing sale of ranch and farmland to developers.
An only slightly less important theme, much more public, has been the transfer of public funds to Merced, mainly through UC Merced, but now including federal highway funds and other public expenditures made necessary by the extraordinary growth of the east side of the county. UC Merced, in fact the anchor tenant for the proposed growth of the east side of the San Joaquin Valley, including a freeway and a canal, publicly brags that it is a tremendous magnet for public research funds (as if that’s going to help the average citizen of the county). Add to this growing public funding for the growing community of poor people.
Among the many elements of the propaganda campaign waged to soften up us hard-headed Valley people, was the report by the state Department of Finance in the waning months of former Gov. Pete Wilson’s last term, warning California of catastrophic population growth, a desperate need for new housing and, of course, a new UC campus.
In an era when state legislators like Sen. Dick Monteith and Assemblyman Dennis Cardoza (now the famous shrimp-slaying congressman) curled their lip and snarled, “Junk Science!” at any biological evidence of endangered species on the land UC and developers coveted from the willing ranchers and farmers, these demographic figures – debunked in 2000 by the state Legislative Analyst’s Office – may turn out to have been the greatest developer-cooked junk science of all.
"The demographic story behind the housing market boom, as we always thought, was a giant hoax," Merrill Lynch & Co.'s North American economist, David Rosenberg, wrote in a recent report. (1)
A negative sales forecast from home builder Toll Brothers Inc. Tuesday cast doubt on the health of the housing market and sent stocks falling after four sessions of gains. (2)
Unemployment in California, the biggest plunger in this mad housing speculation -- in part due to junk demographics, in part due to capital flight from the stock market -- is estimated to rise by 2 percent as the speculative housing bubble bursts. Given that 33,000 of the 46,000 new jobs created last month in the nation were in construction, a combination of rising prime interest rates and winter is likely very soon to cause a major recession in the state economy.
Locally, of course, the most prominent public proponents for Valley population growth remains the corporate-funded Great Valley Center, created by former Modesto mayor Carol Whiteside. Under the guise of “smart growth,” “agricultural preservation,” “signature landscapes” and other confections of the developer public relations art, GVC has sought, largely successfully, to appropriate local resistance to the absurd building boom in the Valley to create a vast, non-profit corporate inland empire. It reminds one of what happened when the federal Office of Economic Opportunity co-opted the wave of volunteer energy rising out of the miserable poverty in the Valley during the 1960s.
And yet, if GVC had advocated ideas remotely resembling those expressed here, it would not have received a nickel of corporate funding and would not have been able to provide forums for discussion of regional issues rarely if ever offered before. Nor would have it been able to staff an office or buy an old church from which it can expand its influence over regional affairs. However, I feel reasonably confident in saying that when dinosaurs mate, they typically produce little dinosaurs: GVC will not go down in history as ever having had a useful notion about what to do because the size of the organism does not indicate the size of the brain.
There is no lack of planning, management and leadership in the Valley. But it was never better described than in a full-page ad in the Bakersfield Californian, published on the eve of the 1964 general election, a picture of Barry Goldwater on horseback, facing backwards, under which was written, “You know in your heart he’s wrong.” The ad was bought by a small group of California Republicans in town who also didn’t believe Earl Warren, a Bakersfield native, should be impeached for being a communist, like the John Birch billboard on 99 north of town said.
Mood swings
There are times when California is just plain idiotic. At the moment, we are apparently at a state in which the coast and the inland regions of the state find their greatest political meaning in denying each others’ values. Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters opined last week:
It was a sad day for the man who with his celebrity, his independence and his mainstream ideology had a true opportunity to recapture the Capitol for Californians who just want their government to do its job effectively. And it's new evidence that in a very fundamental sense, California may be ungovernable.
(3)
The UK Guardian reported this weekend:
So it was with some surprise that participants in last week's oil summit in Rimini, Italy, heard Mr Schlesinger give a speech warning of a grave threat to the world economy from a coming peak in oil production.
Addressing a select audience that included oil ministers and senior officials from the oil cartel Opec, the energy watchdog International Energy Agency, and the UN, plus advocates of a premature oil peak such as the former British cabinet minister Michael Meacher, Mr Schlesinger offered a graphic analogy.
The peak-oil threat and the response to it are reminiscent, he said, of the rumbles under Vesuvius and the reaction to them of its hapless residents. "The peak or plateau is coming," he said.
He's right. We don't know exactly when, but the probability is sooner rather than later. When it comes to oilfield discoveries these days, oil companies are finding small deposits, in contrast with the massive oilfields of old. In fact, 80% of global production today still come from the oilfields discovered before 1970, and these are being rapidly pumped towards exhaustion.
Yet demand is soaring. "Political systems do not deal easily with long term threats, even if they have a probability of 100%," Schlesinger warned.
His message was clear: economic horror will descend on the world if we do not plan ahead, and the time to start is now. We are asleep at the wheel, like the citizens of Pompeii and Herculaneum were, looking up at their volcano and thinking that its dormant state would be destiny. They ignored the rumbles, and ended up buried under ten metres of ash. (4)
George Monbiot, Guardian columnist, noted in August 2004 that we were “Losing the Battle with Entropy:”
Just as the oil supply begins to look uncertain, global demand is rising faster than it has done for 16 years. Yesterday morning, General Motors announced that it is spending $3bn on doubling its production of cars for the Chinese market.(11) Seventy-four minutes later, we saw the first signs of entropy: the International Air Travel Association revealed that the airlines are likely to lose $3bn this year because of high oil prices.(12) The cheap carriers complained that they could be forced out of the market.
If the complexity of our economies is impossible to sustain, our best hope is to start to dismantle them before they collapse. This isn’t very likely to happen. Faced with a choice between a bang and a whimper, our governments are likely to choose the bang, waging ever more extravagant wars to keep the show on the road. Terrorists, alert to both the West’s rising need and the vulnerability of the pipeline and tanker networks, will respond with their own oil wars.
“Every time I see an adult on a bicycle,” HG Wells once wrote, “I no longer despair for the human race.” It’s a start, but I’d feel even more confident about our chances of survival if I saw George Bush and Dick Cheney sharing a car to work. (5)
If it weren’t for hurricanes Katrina and Wilma, and the mountains of corn growing on little Main streets in the Midwest because it cannot be shipped out of New Orleans, we could perhaps forget global warming. But California has become such a massive contributor to it that it is not fair to neglect the topic, if only to say that unlimited, insane growth over farmland that will soon become priceless in the Central Valley, is yet more evidence of an irrational mood of our political leadership.
We should also include the reality of genetic pollution from genetically engineered food crops, now accepted as fact everywhere but in the recesses of biotechnology’s propaganda apparatus, the University of California administration and state Sen. Dean Florez’ office (where diabetic blindness has resulted from over-indulgence in corporate lobby sugar).
Then there is the imponderable question of what magnitude of disaster it will take to rescue the hyper-powerful US government from its millennial psychosis.
Charting the moods of leadership here in the Valley, we see a pattern that characteristic of rightwing ideology in general: avoidance of reality with, of course, requisite name-calling of anyone who dares to suggest reality exists. This sort of political spiral is inevitably fueled by the anticipation of short-term pecuniary gain – the long and the short of the political economic philosophy of Valley leadership.
In their theology, needless to say, environmentalists are the Devil’s spawn. Accordingly, representatives RichPAC Pombo, Buffalo Slayer-Tracy, and Dennis Cardoza, Shrimp Slayer-Merced, have launched a frontal assault, in the rightwing one-party House of Representatives, on the Endangered Species Act, one of the most popular laws in the land. Meanwhile, local land-use planners police growth, efficiently moving the congested traffic of bulldozers off the pavement onto the land.
Above all things, the propaganda goes, environmentalists, environmental laws and regulations are anti-economical. The line goes that environmentalists want to stop growth and destroy the entire economy in the name of little critters. Growth, in this theology, is the alpha and omega of all economy. Leadership sets aside, conveniently, as is the habit of the best propaganda corporations can buy, the thorny problem of the bare minimum of natural resources – breathable air and obtainable water – people need to survive even if their children will not flourish, as if we children of God are not subject to the laws of nature that affect the little critters. The theology goes that we, the blessed, have been granted divine dispensation to consume everything forever. Ungodly science, soon to be illegal in Kansas, argues differently. Pastors of frightened flocks preach not to heed science. But, although science is satanic, technology (in the fists of the right godly leaders) is still approved.
In that regard, Merced should be in the best of all possible worlds: it has a genuine UC campus now and mega-churches hustle for tax-exempt land near it. UC will build us the black box that will save us all, sayeth UC and our leaders. So far, they seem to have an emphasis on engineering, with a fixation on nano-technology, apparently primarily useful for triggering nuclear weapons. So, we return to Monbiot’s theory of the big-bang ending. UC comes to town, announcing itself as a “high-tech engine of growth,” while we lie gasping and begging for a growth of wisdom. If we look to UC, we are looking in the wrong place.
The UC Lawrence Livermore National Lab is reopening a plutonium plant (6) and was just received more funding for a gigantic laser. (7)
The National Ignition Facility, meanwhile, gets the full $337 million requested by President Bush. The device is meant to simulate the explosion of a hydrogen bomb by focusing 192 lasers at a single point to create a huge release of energy. The project is nearing completion at Lawrence Livermore, and $2.8 billion has already been spent on it.
Meanwhile, California flood control remains woefully under-funded.
From an ecological viewpoint, it is clear that our leaders and the high priests of technology are thinking on a scale so far beyond the merely human, let alone that of the San Joaquin kit fox or Orcutt grasses, that if the bang don’t get us, the flood will.
At this point I see before my eyes hostile officials demanding something other than criticism. Give us your solutions so that we may mock them!
One could suggest a short reading list, but why bother? They don’t have time to read anything but each others’ press releases – all positive, confident leadership self-promotion. Besides, if they stay out of jail, every leader stands to make a bundle and move to the coast. And long-term planning is an ungodly communist/environmental plot, after all. Merced County leadership, the special interests who control it, and UC, richly deserve to be shown up for the irresponsible, greedy, shortsighted, anti-intellectual, anti-social as well as anti-environmental cabal they are.
But this is mere petulance, one’s own form of avoidance of serious matters ahead.
There are places in the world that become laboratories for everything wrong. They too serve a vital function, as examples not to be followed. The San Joaquin Valley is squandering its wealth, destroying its communities, raping the source of its sustainability, has ruined its air quality, and its whining leaders and special interests willingly sell its land and its water – applying ever-greater doses of self-pitying propaganda as their thing comes undone.
The only thing that could threaten the preservation of the power of this hard little group is a national mood swing back toward reality, which would focus on the obstructions to justice that have kept their like in power too long. Regretfully, always assuming that oil is peaking, global warming is happening, special interests have corrupted government beyond the tipping point and the mounting evidence that insanity is as fashionable as narcotics among the wealthy and powerful, all combine to suggest that it does not matter if a few national and local leaders go to jail. It won’t matter if a repentant mainstream media cover the details of the show trials with utter scrupulousness, having been proven –when it mattered – corrupt and dead wrong by a handful of bloggers with one-thousandth their resources. It won’t matter if The Weeping Jesus replaces Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank.
It doesn’t matter that all this was foreseen and well articulated 30 years ago, globally as well as locally.
Nevertheless, people have to start again somewhere. In the peripheral counties of California, they have begun. In Merced, reaction against reality grows denser by the month.
Bill Hatch
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Notes:
(1) http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/248140_boomsover12.html
(2) http://www.suntimes.com/output/business/wallstreet08.html
(3) http://www.sacbee.com/content/politics/columns/walters/story/13844020p-1... -- Nov. 10, 2005
(4) http://www.guardian.co.uk/oil/story/0,11319,1636920,00.html -- Nov. 8, 2005
(5) www.monbiot.com
Losing the Battle with Entropy – Aug. 6, 2004
(6) URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/n/a/2005/11/07/state/n100916...
(7) URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/n/a/2005/11/07/state/n175625...