The Modesto version of the Denny Show sounds about the same as its Merced prototype (see article below): The congressman, local elitists and bureaucrats tell stories that comfort themselves in a setting designed to look like a meeting with the people which prevents the people from speaking directly to the great man without appearing to interrupt the steady flow of self-serving propaganda.

To interrupt:

The Valley needs to stop growing. Building should cease until people have had time to consider what this boom is doing, in which 20-30 percent of the houses are built for speculators.

We clearly need more agricultural land and natural habitat, not less. Selfishly, we need it for our health and survival – for better air and water and to do our part to stop global warming. At a higher level, natural resources have their own intrinsic values. We need to remember what we knew before we could conceive of the scale of destruction now engulfing the state: Nature has value for us if we can accept it.

Special interests and their politicians cannot accept it; slurbocracy is the result.

Politicians all repeat the lines of corporations, developers and big landowners, usually also major USDA subsidy farmers who pay what the people cannot afford to pay, the cost of political campaigns. The largest costs in campaigns are for media, principally for televisison. An equal and adequate amount of television should be made available for free to all candidates for public office in the United States, regardless of party. Media corporations work ceaselessly to keep that issue out of public consciousness, spending millions to lobby to erase the very thought of it. Politicians are afraid to liberate themselves from the domination of corporate media.

The only serious dialogue that occurs about the environment, at least in California, occurs either in court or under threat of court. Cardoza, a typical tool of the environmentally destructive faction, thinks, "There are organizations that are being funded solely by the lawsuits they file under the act … Everybody is suing. That is not governing properly."

Bipartisan window dressing in the all-Republican House of Representatives, Cardoza became the rear end of the Pomboza when he co-authored the Gut-the-Endangered Species Act with Rep. RichPAC Pombo, Buffalo Slayer-Tracy. He has wormed his way up in the hierarchy of Democrat sycophants in the House, lately becoming the co-chair of communications for the Blue Dog Coalition. The Blue Dogs are a group of conservative Democrats, mainly from large USDA-subsidy districts, who, being dogs, vote mainly along with their Republican masters. Now that he is the top Blue Dog barker, he doesn’t have to listen to anyone else anymore except Pombo.

For the record, however, the last time Dennis Cardoza met two of the most active members of the environmental community in his district was on the night he received word he would be made chairman of the Rules Committee in the state Assembly. The meeting occurred in Simon’s Restaurant near the state Capitol. Cardoza came over to their table, flanked by a couple of new staff, and asked if the diners were going to oppose UC Merced. On hearing that this was likely, he gave the table his rump, announcing over his shoulder, “Then we will do battle.” He has not spoken a word to these people since, nor has his staff. That’s a competent politician at work?

The Shrimp Slayer would have you believe he genuinely can’t understand why some people in his district are willing to go to court to defend environmental law and regulation. They do it because it is an authentic public right and responsibility and the last and only means for the public to protect the environment against drastic destruction and to protect the Public Trust and the legal processes of government. For example, in 1985, US Fish & Wildlife biologists discovered evidence of massive selenium poisoning in Kesterson Wildlife Refuge, in the middle of the district Cardoza now represents. The campaign by politicians, the Bureau of Reclamation, water agencies (principally Westlands Water District), and farmers to suppress the hard scientific ground-truthing was so grotesque Congress passed an act to protect whistleblowers the following year.

The Shrimp Slayer would have you believe that because UC Merced brings its enormous (if tarnished) prestige to his district and the promise of great wealth to an already wealthy faction in his district, that it is categorically exempt from state and federal environmental law and regulation. When obstacles to this legal theory developed, the Shrimp Slayer introduced legislation to change national environmental law to prove his point. His point, at this juncture, remains unproven. That’s a competent politician at work?

His contention that people are making a living off environmental suits is false, at least in his district. But it raises another question: How much money does Cardoza’s campaign receive from special interests destroying the environment, environmental law and regulation by lawsuit, legislation and intimidation?

He complained recently, allegedly on behalf of two irrigation districts in his district, about the “secrecy” surrounding the confidential negotiations in the 18-year-old lawsuit on the flow of water into the San Joaquin River below the Friant Dam. For the last 50 years, the Friant-Kern Canal has taken about 90 percent of the water creating a dead river from Fresno County to the Delta.

We notice on Cardoza’s campaign website that he is not being honored by these two irrigation districts. However, in mid-March, he will be “saluted” by Tom Birmingham, CEO of Westlands Water District, and two large, very rich Westlands’ customers, Mark Borba (cotton), and John Harris (beef, vegetables and racehorses). Westlands, under Birmingham the Litigator’s reign, is probably the most litigious water agency in the nation as well as being the largest. During the last round of negotiations on Friant, Westlands sued each party, has filed numerous suits since, and are backing the limitation of the definition of wetlands under the Clean Water Act being currently heard in the US Supreme Court.

Whenever Cardoza mentions “balance,” it is hypocrisy and corporate money talking. He thinks lawsuits are just dandy if they are on behalf of large special interests. If they are against the large special interests, the Shrimp Slayer considers them bad governing.

Was it good governing when, as chairman of the state Assembly Agriculture Committee, he sold out the Williamson Act to Merced County as “mitigation for UC Merced”? Was his Select Committee on Tire Fires good governing? The only justice the victims of the Filbin tire fire got was what they sued for. They didn’t get it from Cardoza.

Is it good governing to squat on the third floor of the Merced County Administration Building during the biggest building boom in county history carefully nurturing the development of UC Merced by circumventing the legal processes of land-use land, planning and environmental law and regulation. He started his career as one of the many Mr. UC Merceds in the state Legislature cooking up schemes to “fast track” UC – induced growth in the San Joaquin Valley.

But what’s interesting about the Shrimp Slayer’s Republican, conservative, corporate ass-kissing in a district that took home $335 million in farm subsidies and much more in water subsidies between 1995-2004, is how little there is to show for it. The Bush 2007 Farm Bill proposal will hurt cotton, dairy and rice as it stands.

Or is the Bush Farm Bill proposal merely a cynical, calculated shakedown of agriculture for political contributions? Will Blue Dogs hunkering under Massa’s table get some scraps?

Farming in the Valley is sick unto death. There is a frenzied sense in it now, a feeling that no amount of production can catch up with falling commodity prices and groundwater levels, and rising real estate prices. Today, it seems largely a corporate land deal with some meanwhile crops, trees, vines or cows. In the present economy of real estate speculation bubble and developer ownership of the state’s politicians, farming has lost its future, its creativity and its grip on reality. While the farmer can't plan, the developer plants.

Developers run the political economy of the state and they own the politicians as completely as the Railroad once owned them, before the Progressive Era. This financial domination of absolutely everything by the state’s top development corporations has created a situation in which a farmer can’t be a farmer or a politician a politician, a teacher a teacher, a doctor a doctor, even a newspaper reporter a reporter, and on and on – because “Development” won’t allow any professions or vocations to exist without its corrupting paws in their pockets or over their mouths. American government from city hall to Washington is in a coma. Business is about profit, loss and risk. It tries to maximize the former and eliminate the two other factors as best it can. Buying and destroying government regulation is a logical strategy. When political representatives will no longer protect the people and their natural resources against business, it’s time to find representatives who will.

Yes, you can blame politicians for being corrupt, venal and sycophants of power. You can blame them for selling out the general public, the Public Trust and the common good for a bone under the table. Their job is to defend the government so that it can defend the people against the periodic surges of corporate power that are well known features of capitalist economies and the periodic fantasies of world domination in our diseased dynastic political class. When politicians sell the government to the corporations and the autocrats, they sell their sworn duty, the honor of the office and the Constitution upon which we rest.

End interruption.

Bill Hatch

Modesto Bee
Cardoza criticizes port deal, Bush Drug plan. But environmentalists take him to task at public forum...Roger W. Hoskins
Congressman Dennis Cardoza's traveling town meeting came to Modesto on Saturday and a round table of experts answered questions and offered a glimpse of the Central Valley's future...representatives from Caltrans, the state air quality board, Modesto Mayor Jim Ridenour, Great Valley Director Carol Whiteside, a farmland preservation advocate and a pharmacist. Stanley Gainer of Keyes...Why can't we ask questions?" "It's supposed to be a town hall meeting, not a town control meeting." ...environmentalists interrupted Cardoza as he explained why he was part of the move to modify the Endangered Species Act. "There are organizations that are being funded solely by the lawsuits they file under the act," Cardoza said. "Everybody is suing. That is not governing properly." Merced College professor Eric Caine was skeptical..."I don't think a reform bill led by Richard Pombo (R-Tracy) will take into consideration enough science,"... Jeanni Farri of the Farmland Working Group..."The valley is the eighth wonder of the world (with its farm production)," she said. "We dare not pave it over." Whiteside..."Affordable housing may come as close as there is to an insoluble problem"...growth in the valley also was linked to water quality...conserving potable water should be a valley priority.