This article was first published on Alternet.org

A group of water oligarchs in California have engineered a disastrous deregulation and privatization scheme. And they’ve pulled in hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars without any real public outrage. The amount of power and control they wield over California’s most precious resource, water, should shock and frighten us — and it would, if more people were aware of it. But here is the scary thing: They are plotting to gain an even larger share of California’s increasingly-scarce, over-tapped water supply, which will surely lead to shortages, higher prices and untold destruction to California’s environment. (more…)

How about this for a plan for sprucing up our nation’s crumbling housing projects: ship lazy black folks out to the subprime suburbs, privatize their apartment buildings and hand them over to real estate developers. That’s what T.A. Frank, a New America Foundation think tank shill, thinks Los Angeles needs to do with Jordan Downs, a notoriously dilapidated and crime-wracked project in Watts: (more…)

Here’s yet another depressing area in which Victorville excels: According to the latest Housing Hall of Misery stats released by the National Association of Realtors, the greater San Bernardino metropolitan area came in 3rd place in the race to the bottom of the biggest collapse in last quarter’s home prices. And while it’s not #1, the area did manage to edge out some pretty fast-crashing competition from the likes of Phoenix, Reno, Orlando and Fort Lauderdale. (more…)

Ames emailed me a New York Times blog post from last February by one Casey B. Mulligan–which may sound like a fictional baseball player’s name, but no, he’s real all right, just another in a long line of insane econ professors from the University of Chicago. In the blog post, Mulligan cheerfully announced that when it comes to commercial real estate, we’ve got nothing at all to worry about. There’s no danger of a CRE  crash, like the one we’ve experienced in the residential market, so we can all go back to being happy free market beneficiaries.

No CRE crash? Ha-ha! I just love these Chicago School alchemy frauds! It is truly a joy to see them make such fools of themselves on the permanent public record. And not surprisingly, although Mulligan struck out, he’s still at the plate, batting out barely comprehensible economic fatwahs for the New York Times like nothing ever happened—that’s the kind of free market a real Chicago School economist likes. (more…)

To compliment today’s article by Matt Harvey exposing the media bullshit behind New York’s supposed heroin epidemic, here are a couple of drug-related stories we published in the past year or so that you might have missed.

1. Pancho Montana’s maiden dispatch from deep inside Mexico’s drug war about neighborhood drug stores called “tienditas.” They’re sort of like your local Rite Aid, but they don’t carry any Tylenol. (more…)

A few days back, Jon Stewart had a great segment ridiculing CNN for “playing journalist” by getting tough on an SNL skit for “not getting the facts right,” even though CNN regularly allows health insurance shills to trash healthcare reform without subjecting them to the same fact check that they give to the comedy skit.

The sad thing is that CNN’s pro-corporate bias no longer outrages, or even surprises, us. This country is becoming more cynical, accepting the Pravda-ization of its media with a “yeah, no shit” shrug. Kind of like how Russians cynically accepted Pravda long after knowing it was full of shit. We know that there’s an overarching Corporate Party line, and a handful of organs that spread its propaganda. (more…)

We had ourselves one hell of a crime-filled summer out here in the greater metropolitan area of Victorville. And it’s only getting hotter as the High Desert transitions into the icy nights and gale-force winds of autumn that are starting to roar through. Case-in-point: just in the past week, there were three four bank robberies, a triple homicide, a couple of deadly shootings and a foiled drive-by (and that’s not counting all the usual petty crime and DUI manslaughter stuff). (more…)

Fuck, why did I listen to the asshole who told me that ground water up here in the desert was some of the cleanest in the nation? I’ve been drinking it straight out the tap for six months now, and just yesterday I found out that I’ve been gulping a whole lot of arsenic down with it.

The EPA recommends that there be no more than 0.02 ppb (parts per billion) in drinking water, and California’s set the limit to 0.01 ppb or less. In Victorville, most recent tests show a concentration of 11 ppb. That’s a 1,100 times over the limit! Let me repeat that: the concentration of arsenic in Victorville’s water is ONE THOUSAND TIMES  over the threshold of safety.

(more…)

This article was first published by Vice magazine.

We do not live in a democracy because America is all about serving the haves and the have-mores: a capitalocracy, where money talks and broke nobodies like you and me walk. Many people vaguely understand this, but I get to see it every day up close and personal in my adopted home of Victorville, California. (more…)

Someone on Jon Stewart’s staff molested me this past Tuesday. He or she plagiarized my Fresno/Hannity story, which Alternet ran Monday, and the Daily Show aired Tuesday, much to my horror. It was as though someone—say, a writer/producer—fondled my funny-taint, and now it’s bleeding. Well, I am not pressing charges, yet, but I am attaching an Invoice. (more…)

Once again, the Case/Schiller Index has lived up to its name. All summer long, real estate shills have used it to jack up homebuyer confidence and fluff the housing market. Now, they are doing it again. Just look at the bullshit headlines coming out today:

U.S. Economy: Home Prices Increase by Most Since 2005 . . . US home prices up for third month . . . Index shows home prices rose for 3rd month in July . . . Money Daily Brief: US home prices rise for third straight month . . . Home prices gain for 3rd straight month . . . Denver home prices rise again, getting closer to 2008 levels

Most of this unbridled optimism is based on the just released Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller’s U.S. National Home Price Index data for the month of July, which showed that home prices went up by 1.2% since June. A one-point-two-percent month-over-month increase? Ain’t that something! (more…)

Border Barrier Blues:
Mexican footpaths on the Arizona side of the fence

Last week, the Government Accountability Office released a depressing audit of the US-Mexico border fence we’ve been trying to put up for the past three years. The report caused about 8 hours of pretend outrage and was promptly forgotten. It found that we’d already shoveled $2.4 billion to half-seal 600 miles of the border since 2005 (we still have about 100 to 200 miles to go) and we would need to spend an additional $6.5 billion over the next 20 years just plugging up holes punched in the fencing.

(more…)

This should be nothing but good news for local Mexican haters, but don’t be fooled. While it may bring smiles to their faces, the story has a dark-lead lining for hardworking red-blooded Americans: (more…)

VICTORVILLE, CA—Following the general trend seen all over the country, there’s been a push around these parts to convince people that the recession will soon be a thing of the past. Local papers have been publishing articles with laughable headlines like “SoCal housing market may be stabilizing” or “Local economy back in growth mode.” Meanwhile, the city of Victorville has been abandoning non-mission-critical development projects, raising utility fees and borrowing from itself like mad to keep a few core development projects afloat to, you know, keep up appearances. Last week, community elders pulled together a who’s who of obscure shills for the 10th Annual High Desert Economic summit, hoping that a pep talk and some community time will help shake out the recession blues. (more…)

This article was first published by Vice magazine.

It was a hot day, still 98 degrees at 6 PM, as I zoomed through gridlock on my freshly fixed 1979 Kawasaki KZ-400, squeezing between the monster trucks and lifted SUVs clogging one of Victorville’s main drags, pouring sweat into my helmet and leather jacket on my way to an anti-Obamacare “town hall” meeting at the local community college.

I thought I knew what to expect when I got there. Like everyone else in this country, I had been watching the packs of deranged tea bagger types and their astroturfing overlords dominate the healthcare reform debate like a pack of retarded howler monkeys in heat. But TV hadn’t quite prepared me for the reality of it. You can’t really appreciate how fucked this country really is until you see, as I did, hundreds of blue collar Americans sync up their primitive brains in a paranoid racist-hick seance, channeling White Power ideals through Reagan’s damned soul. (more…)