What if?

The local McClatchy Chain outlets blared the good news this morning that the stock market rebounded yesterday. Hot damn! Today the Dow lost 110 points, the S&P 500 lost 1.2 percent and the Nasdaq composite lost 3.5 percent.
We didn't notice the list of foreclosure announcements was any shorter in the Merced Sun-Star. Yesterday, in fact, we noticed that the Sun-Star's publisher had received a notice on his $507,000 home in McSwain. Evidently, we’ve had a real estate speculator running the paper during most of the boom. Mr. Vander Veen must have believed the propaganda he has been publishing.
The only politician calling for a moratorium on foreclosures is Barak Obama, also the best funded presidential candidate. However, here in Merced, an Obama lawn sign from the campaign office is reported to cost $10, and a tee shirt, $25. Blue Dog idiocy at the wheel as usual.
Maryland's newest Blue Dog congressman, Dennis Cardoza, Shrimp Slayer-formerly Merced, ought to stop down at the old U of M and have a chat with Herman Daly, a distinguished economist recently retired from the World Bank to the university department that once fostered the work of Mancur Olson. Olson is important to the Valley because without his theoretical guidance, Brooks Jackson would not have been able to write so clearly his illuminating study, Honest Graft (1990), a seminal, prophetic work on political corruption in Congress that focused on the career of former Rep. Tony Coelho, Michael Milken's Friend-Merced.
Daly explained recently why Merced, Modesto and Stockton, metro centers of Cardoza's rotten-borough district here and metro foreclosure-rate capitals of the nation, have no reason whatsoever to rejoice with the McClatchy Chain corporate outlets over the stock markets and the bailouts:

10-14-08
CounterPunch.com
Why the Rescue Plan is Fraudlent
The Wall Street Coup and the Bailout Scam
By ISMAEL HOSSEIN-ZADEH
http://www.counterpunch.com/zadeh10142008.html
...As Herman E. Daly, University of Maryland economist, puts it, “The value of present real wealth is no longer sufficient to serve as a lien to guarantee the exploding debt. Consequently the debt is being devalued in terms of existing wealth. No one any longer is eager to trade real present wealth for debt even at high interest rates. This is because the debt is worth much less, not because there is not enough money or credit...Financial assets have grown by a large multiple of the real economy—paper exchanging for paper is now 20 times greater than exchanges of paper for real commodities.” 

Economic fundamentals are beginning to show like broken bones poking out of accident victims. Merced has the fourth highest unemployment rate in the nation, the highest rate in the Valley. More than 12,000 people in Merced are on the unemployment roll. This must be the famous "balance" of which Cardoza of Maryland often speaks, seeking to gut the only laws on the book that might have lessened this crisis. As Bat Masterson put it in his reporter days in New York:

“There are many in this old world of ours who hold that things break about even for all of us. I have observed, for example, that we all get the same amount of ice. The rich get it in the summertime and the poor get it in the winter.”

We were just wondering, what if any of the elected officials whose job description includes protecting the public interest rather than simply the special interests of their families and friends, had actually read and responded to an open letter submitted to them at the end of 2004, when the boom was raging.
-----------------------
Reply to a local planning official
Tuesday, December 21, 2004
From: Lydia Miller, President San Joaquin Raptor Rescue Center, Merced CA
Steve Burke Protect Our Water, Modesto CA
To: Merced County Board of Supervisors Merced CA December 21, 2004 (via fax and email)
Re: December 21, 2004 Board agenda item: 10:30 a.m. Planning - 2004 Cycle III General Plan Amendment; University Community Plan.
The following is submitted for the record regarding the Board’s consideration of the University Community Plan.
An article titled “Reply to the Chancellor on UCP” was recently posted on the Badlands website (http://badlandsjournal.com). A local planner responded with the question: What do you think will happen if we don’t plan for the growth that will result from UC Merced?
It is a serious question, we appreciate it, and will try to articulate what we think about Merced County/UC Merced planning. The first word that caught our attention in the planners question was the word, we. Who, we wondered was the planner intending to include in the word, “we”?
Participants in the sordid political deal in which Merced got the UC in return for Condit delivering the Valley for Davis in 1998, ripping the campus from the talons of Fresno where they had committed to locate at least a medical school as early as 1965, and had land already donated in Kearney Park?
Participants in the whole cover up, inconsistency, tendentious obfuscation, regulatory-agency avoidance in the process to streamline UCM permitting run out of the governor’s and congressman’s office?
Participants in the process of gagging the press, buying the press, and intimidating reporters so that no critical questions would appear in the media about the UC project?
Participants in the UCM propaganda machine, which featured huge, UC-produced, publicly paid-for PR supplements in the local paper?
Local paper regurgitation of UCM press releases as objective journalism? Tiny tots in UCM T-shirts lining state Capitol corridors?
Greenlining Institute, proclaiming all Hispanic students would, should, and could go to UC if only they could stay in their family homes here in the Valley?
Promoters of a campaign to name a mascot that gave the prize to a species that does not appear in Nature?
Great Valley Center’s smart-growth propaganda, emanating from that tower of planning rectitude, Modesto?
Dot-driven public focus groups confronting lists of projects that contained all pre-cooked possibilities but no project?
The Nature Conservancy?
Producers of meaningless planning documents like the CAA, CPAC, CAPS, various MCAG plans, Merced Water Supply Plan, NCCP/HCP, storm drain master plan?
Grant hustlers using the East Merced Resource Conservation District to legitimize bogus plans and be a conduit for mis-spending public funds?
Authors of numerous General Plan amendments that have rendered a weak document utterly unintelligible as a planning tool?
The red and green teams?
The black-and-blue team?
Scientists scouring the pastures for endangered species who also found a dead baby Black Bear?
Participants in the political process of suppressing ground-truthed science about the biological inventories on UCM land?
The political geniuses behind adopting a blanket Agricultural Preserve over most of the county to mitigate for UC, the most significant restriction of private-property rights in the history of the county?
Right-wing propagandists who whipped up a mob of land owners against the much less intrusive Critical Habitat Designation?
Every scofflaw in the county Planning Department?
Members of a county bureaucracy that systematically obstructs public access to public documents?
Aggregate-company and developer lawyers who write planning documents and General Plan amendments?
Private and publicly funded indemnifiers against lawsuits opposing local land-use decisions? Politically directed judges?
Contemptuous EIR-writing, finger-flipping, harassing consultants?
Packard Foundation money launderers?
Venal, punitive local political staffers, hit squads for congressmen, state legislators and the special interests who pay them?
Land-boom speculators in elective and appointed public offices?
Elected officials that constantly, publicly harass members of the public who object to what only the county calls a planning process?
Returning to the question: “What do you think will happen if we don’t plan for the growth that will result from UC Merced?”, the next word that perhaps requires more definition is the word “plan” itself.
Now, what could the planner have meant by this pregnant term?
A hopelessly out-of-date General Plan created in 1992 as the result of a lawsuit brought by the public against a county that could not provide the court with evidence that there was a Merced County General Plan; a General Plan the state Attorney General directed the county to update at least every decade; a General Plan that was never followed anyway, but has now been rendered absurd by the superimposition of huge development amendments over a plan that valued the county’s agricultural and natural resources?
The donation of a large tract of land to UC by a land trust too hapless to run a golf course during the height of popularity of that sport, manipulated by a local water lawyer, (his partner under indictment for defrauding Waterford), and a county planning department unwilling to enforce environmental law on its wetlands takes?
The wholesale use of programmatic UC EIRs to secure mandates for “plans to make plans” that avoid any concrete analysis of inevitable negative impacts to natural resources, public health and safety that set a new, low, irresponsible planning standard for Merced County? 
Lawyer-guided, side-stepping of inconvenient permits, and building without them?
The policy of UC to continually whine that UCM is the first campus it has attempted to build since serious environmental protection laws were passed, therefore it can’t really be held accountable to laws of the land? The splitting of land-use authority in two pieces: the county and UC?
The splitting of local planning offices in two: the county Planning Department and the UC Development Planning Office? Wholesale confusion and lack of coordination between the two offices and between one or the other or both of them with the City of Merced?
The complete lack of an adequate, comprehensive water plan for eastern Merced County?
The disturbing eagerness and insanity of UC and its speculating boosters, landowners, and surrounding developers to double and triple the size of the Merced population in what has become the worst air-pollution basin in the nation?
The willingness of the City of Merced to break its own ordinance to supply water and sewer services to UCM, once UC promised to indemnify it from legal challenges to its decision?
A resource-easement program designed to fail?
The wholesale, unrelenting stream of planning propaganda in place of accurate information, leaving the public in as much dark as could be decently managed at every step in the process? (For just one example, the completely bogus presentation of the Williamson Act as mitigation for UC and its induced development.)
Leading the public into unpleasant speculations about future suburbs that could be named Smithville, Kelseyville, Crookhamton, Cardoza/Coelho Azorean Estates, Cuidad Cortez-Keene, Lynch-Adam-dAdamoville, Tatum Corners, Wellman Retirement Community, Lyons Industrial Park?
Every project in the county driven by the heretofore not really, fully, completely permitted location of UCM?
Rumblings of bribery and corruption in the county Planning Department?
In conclusion, what do we think will happen if we don’t plan for the growth that will result from UC Merced? Well, Mr. Planner, the only answer we can give is: what’s happening at the moment. Merced’s agricultural and natural resources are being auctioned off to the highest bidders because of what you and your fellow planners did, while subjecting the public to an endless barrage of bureaucratic procedures and documents claiming you would not do exactly what you have done, are doing and will continue to do until your actions become so transparently corrupted that even the local judiciary will be unable to blind itself to them.
Sincerely,
Lydia Miller
Steve Burke
Cc: Interested parties
------------------------------

What if all the lies had not been told?
What if the Great Valley Center and the University of California had not advocated the faith that “growth was inevitable,” and simply respected the environmental laws and regulations on the books?
What if Great Valley Center had said that the growth projections of their developer sponsors and contributors and the California Department of Finance were unacceptable?
What if the Pomboza (representatives Richard Pombo, Buffalo Slayer-Tracy and Dennis Cardoza, Shrimp Slayer-Merced/Maryland) had not tried three times to gut crucial provisions in the Endangered Species Act to allow even more construction of half-built subdivisions losing homeowners by the day?
What if there had been any concern in local governments for environmental law and regulation beyond how to avoid both?
What if there had been more than a tiny handful of people willing to resist publicly the wholesale destruction of environmental law and regulation in Merced County during the speculative real estate boom that has now, catastrophically, busted?
What if development had actually paid for itself?
What if local McClatchy outlets, the Merced one led by a squalid speculator in a half-million-dollar house, had written accurate journalism instead of being the chief pimp for finance, insurance, real estate, University of California. Riverside Motorsports Park and the WalMart distribution center?
What if Valley judges had ruled to uphold environmental law and the laws of public process in cases involving the permitting of developments that not only ruined the environment but, if not the entire global finance economy, at least the economy of these Main-turning-Mean streets?
What if people opposed to their own environmental destruction had been able to withstand the public hazing dished out by rightwing politicians on the dias and in the audience that they were “socialists” and “anti-growth nuts,” “tree-huggers,” “fairy shrimp lovers,” etc.?
What if more people in Merced had regarded the economy as something other than a casino and politics as more than a high school popularity contest?
What if agricultural special interests, who benefit constantly from the help of eco-justice advocates, had not demonized them completely behind their backs, as if farm and ranchland ownership were a license to lie, cheat and steal? What if agriculture could escape its schizophrenic state – are we farmers or are we owners of parcels for development? What if local, state and federal government did not perpetually subsidize our yeomen stewards of attractive real estate parcels for future development?
What if our esteemed local business and political leaders had conceived of economic growth as something – anything – other than housing construction? What if they had realized that housing is about the most wasteful economic growth investment possible? What if they began to cope with the contradiction between their “free-market” ideology and their abject begging of government for grants and loans, bailouts and subsidies for the stupidities of the Merced Main Street?
What if the term “jobs-housing balance” had ever been taken seriously?
What if, as Mayor Ellie Wooten recently said, 80 percent of the entire Merced housing market actually was speculative?
What if local government had actually retained any meaningful control of growth after the arrival of UC Merced?
What if landowners, developers, financial and insurance institutions and local, state and federal politicians had not conspired o destroy the environment and economy of Merced, in some instances including their own institutions?
What if any elected or appointed official among Merced County’s land-use boards and councils had ever taken their responsibilities as anything other than to enrich themselves and their cronies?
What if planning and administrative staff had planned rather than accommodated growth that is both environmentally and economically ruinous?
What if any of these complacent, overpaid, incompetent officials had ever had a clue about the relationship between the environment and the economy, between protection of natural resources and the greedy, speculative boom, or the difference between housing growth and economic growth? What if they had ever had any sense of the balance of things, rather than becoming experts in coercion of the public and corruption of the laws?