Badlands Journal

The regulations under which lobbyists in the state Capitol operate are not onerous for them, their clients or the legislators they influence to choose the Special Interest over the Common Good. When you receive money from developers and oil-and-gas traders, for example, to influence legislation by contacts with lawmakers, you are expected to fulfill the minimum requirement of political decency by registering as a lobbyist and reporting the fees you have collected from your clients. After you have done these simple things, you are free to foment any attacks on the Common Good your clients pay you for in the practice of your profession as a lobbyist.

and the Merced Sun-Star, as stupid as usual... -- blj

 9-26-13

Merced Sun-Star

Our View: New fracking law a good step, compromise

The authors of this piece are a CEO of a plastic packaging/recycling company, a “new venture” based in Salinas and depending for its raw material on the diversion of plastic bags from landfills. The other is executive director of Keep California Beautiful, a front for the environmental visions of McDonalds, Pepsi, and Disney. Both are tied utterly to the kind of “win-win/public-private partnerships” that blunt government’s political ability to respond to environmental crises with appropriate legislation. Anyone who has ever been to a landfill on a windy day in the last 25 years knows that the plastic-bag environmental crisis has been upon us for some time. Yet, behind the flimsy little bag lies the weight of the petrochemical industry as well as people against tree destroying paper bags.

 The autumnal spate of water-anxiety articles appears in the desert regions of California as the first big rains hit the northern part of the state. The descriptions of “our water problem” become more neurotic and technically sophisticated each year. Our society maintains, despite all indications that it should be most wary, its sublime faith in the power of American engineering know-how and the democratic process in our state Capitol, where finance, insurance and real estate (especially agribusiness) buys the votes proffered by our elected officials for sale in our sacred “decision making process.”

This is a large amount of material containing conflicting information and opinion regarding California’s new law to regulate hydraulic fracturing. We’ve organized it to first present the reasons that environmental groups originally supporting the legislation in the end backed away from it in response to last minute oil-company amendments reportedly solicited by Gov. Brown  Following these two articles from EnergyWire are several reports of the news of passage of the law from mainstream media sources done in typical sports-page style, emphasizing who won and who lost including a set of vague abstractions to describe the game itself that have been agreed upon by government and the oil companies.

Separate state and federal executive, legislative and judicial jurisdictions,  two sets of lawsuits, two sets of “studies” proposed to be done,  the Middle Eastern oil patch going up in flames, a war is shaping up between the people of California and the oil companies. As we are witnessing in Colorado now, global warming has caused a “1,000-year” flood and one major source of pollution in the flood waters is the toxic and secret  fracking fluids used in thousands of wells in the flooded area.

Alan Autry was disastrously wrong when he was the Developer-Fool mayor of Fresno during the boom years, a radio talk-show blowhard forever urging the public to do “the right” thing (wink, wink).

 The military/industrial/cultural complex is engaged in a propaganda campaign to persuade the stubbornly opposed 99 percent of  Americans  to bomb Syria to punish its government for its alleged use of chemical weapons. It is all part of a plan for exceptional people like they suppose themselves to be, to rule the Mideast.

The marijuana deal had reached a mature state of corruption 40 years ago;  today it is demented.

The Merced  County Counsel’s Office has waxed almost poetical on its themes -- enforcement, administrative hearings, civil proceedings, liens and such -- in the composition of its juridical masterpiece of the year, “An Ordinance Establishing the Regulation of Medical Marijuana Cultivation."

 Merced Fire Chief’s political talent shines

"We've been more conservative on our approach of what's considered dangerous,"  Merced Fire Mike McLaughlin was quoted as replying to a question by a Sun-Star reporter about the fire hazard of tall weeds in vacant lots and on the lawns of empty houses left over from the Great Foreclosure.

"We've been more conservative on our approach of what's considered dangerous,"  he said. It is worth repeating the quote because rarely have we seen important words like “conservative” and “dangerous” rendered so meaningless as these coming out of the mouth of this political fireman. If he keeps blathering like this in public he’ll soon be in charge of CalFire, perhaps only a stepping stone toward a federal career.--blj

Jerry Brown, our governor, has been scandalizing California adults for years now with his scathing critiques of environmental law, particularly the California Environmental Quality Act, which he calls “the blob” from which any exemption for development is good, of which any enforcement bad.

He has chosen several instruments not of his making to make his dark vision of CEQA real for his entire, gigantic parish of eligible votes. With his tool in the Legislature, Senate pro tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, he has crafted legislation to “streamline” i.e. gut CEQA. But this craft seems to have broken up on the shoals of sensible opposition, at least for the current session of the Legislature.