Badlands Journal

 Friends of the Badlands editorial board sent us this letter that a group of neighbors wrote to Merced City Councilman Michael Murphy, who made a campaign visit to a house party on their block this weekend.

Murphy is running for mayor.

He graciously received the letter, read most of it and told its bearer that he agreed with several of the issues the letter raises. He appeared open to hearing about the problems of that neighborhood which, we imagine, are not so different from a number of neighborhoods in town.

The neighbors were impressed with him and he may have changed a few votes on the block in his favor. -- blj

One thing Trump's race baiting and Hillary's neocon foreign policies have in common is slavery. Trump's "southern strategy" (copying Nixon in 1968) is based on racial prejudice that goes back to slave days in the USA and the police story has never changed except for the attention or lack of it paid to the shameful truth. Hillary's neocon policy of blowing up the Middle has increased the amount of slavery wherever American ordnance and American soldiers (with or without boots) have landed.

Contemporary literature on the booming slave trade is copious. One recurrent theme is that while you can only sell a particular package of drugs once, you can sell a human being many times over for sex or for work.

 Loose Cheeks 9-18-16

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Loose Cheeks: Hot Tips
By Lucas Smithereen
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 "Proximity is destiny," Carol Tomlinson Keasey, first chancellor of UC Merced, often said. It was one of her slogans and like almost everything she said, it was nonsense. While we were still pondering Keasey's koan and looking for evidence that Merced was somehow becoming smarter because there was a UC campus on its outskirts, Keasey left, Chancellor Steve Yang came and went, and now we have Chancellor Dorothy Leland, voted one of four "power women" in the state of Georgia in 2009.

Leland, a minimal scholar of Simone de Beauvoir, ^1. professor and university administrator, ^2. reported to "the community" (Merced City Council, Merced County Board of Supervisors) last week on the UC Regents' decision in July to approve the $1.3-billion expansion of the UC Merced campus.

 Merced City Council Meeting, 8-1-16

Sustainable Groundwater Management Act study session

Prop. 13 is a gift that keeps on taking from the California public. The real estate special interests, including the financial and insurance industries, advertise throughout the world the advantages of California famous Proposition 13, which sharply limit the annual increase of property taxes and, as George Skelton reminds us, required a two-third vote of the state Legislature to raise any taxes.

The two-thirds requirement is generally an insurmountable obstacle to the 120-member state Legislature. The state Secretary of State's office doesn't post (or in any convenient place) the number of registered lobbyists doing business in the state Capitol. However, starting at the beginning of the alphabetical list, we reached 120 at William Barnaby III, a ruggedly handsome young fellow with a law degree and fashionable stubble who is a hereditary member of the lobbying firm Barnaby and Barnaby. 

 Streets, roads, marijuana, and recreation-department salaries highlighted the August 1st meeting of the Merced City Council. 

Streets

The amount of $876,000 in CalTrans funds has been made available to the city through the Merced County Association of Governments. MCAG, as you might remember, is the only local agency authorized by CalTrans to either forward local jurisdiction requests for US Highway Administration funds, and is the only agency authorized to distribute those funds.

At the last meeting, the city council voted to stop payment of certain funds to MCAG that may end the city's eligibility to either propose projects or dispose of highway funds.

 Since the Merced County public is again being assaulted by the claims that housing and commercial construction are the one and only way of reducing unemployment in our economy, dominated by government subsidized agribusiness, we thought we would compare some unemployment statistics from past years.

These numbers are for Merced County as a whole, but since construction is ramping up on both sides of the county, they seem indicative.

All figures are for June of the year.^1.

6/2016: 10.6 percent

A cabal of Merced City Council members, city staff and developers ripped off the citizens of Merced for a bundle two weeks ago. Just in case we couldn't put a face on the usual suspects, developer and almond grower Greg Hostetler showed up at Monday's council meeting to berate retiring Mayor Stan Thurston for speaking truth to the city's development staff.

The issue was whether Merced would quit paying fees it collects from developers to pay for mitigation of the traffic impacts caused by their business. The city council decided to quit paying the fees for two years. This puts the public in the position of either suffering the results in traffic congestion or being forced to pay for it themselves.

Part 1 of the $420-million Question can be found on Badlands Journal on June 1. At that time, the City of Merced's new General Manager, Steve Carrigan, was likened to a Pit bull, drooling at the mouth to take a bite out of Merced County CEO, Jim Brown because the County was not rolling over for the combined wishes of UC Merced, landowners and the City to annex about 650 acres along the Bellevue Road approach to the UC campus.  Carrigan was only prevented from mauling Brown, so the urban narrative went, by the Chihuahua behind him, Assistant General Manager Mike Conway.