Welfare For Fat Cats At Every Turn
Judith Lewis writes for the LA Weekly about what the late "Heal The Bay" founder deemed California's fake water drought. If we managed water better, Dorothy Green claimed, there would be plenty for the state of California:
I didn't go to talk to Dorothy Green because she was dying. I wasn't looking to do a tribute. I went because I was working up a story about water, about how we use it and abuse it, mismanage it and waste it, and about how the bipartisan water bond being pushed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Senator Dianne Feinstein -- with its provisions for new dams and "water conveyance" projects -- is a really bad idea. In August, I had gone to a protest rally against the water bond at which Green had spoken, and in the brief interview we had that day, I realized how much of my thinking about water -- about Southern California's wasted storm water, the Central Valley's reckless and polluting agricultural irrigation, the rage that simmers up in me when people call storm drains "sewers" and dump crap into them --traced back to Green. I had never sat down and talked to her. She gave me her card and told me to call.A few weeks after the rally, I did. I told her I wanted to follow up on some of the ideas she'd brought up, specifically her claim that California wasn't really suffering an epic drought. "It's a manufactured drought," she'd told me. "It's being staged so that Big Ag can take control of the water supply and sell it back to consumers at a profit." I asked if we could set up an interview.
"Sure," she said, "but you'd better hurry. Because, you know, I'm dying."
...The melanoma she'd fought back for 30 years had resurfaced in 2003 as a brain tumor, "the first of a half-dozen metastases," she explained, and left her struggling to keep her body balanced and her mind from stubbornly wandering. "Oh, brain!" she'd say as she paused, and then continue on in a perfectly articulated explanation of the Reclamation Act of 1902, which stipulated that water subsidized by the state, harnessed and husbanded for agricultural irrigation, should go only to family farms.
Her pauses were mitigated by the urgency of her message, by the sense she had that this was her last chance to save the declining species of the California Delta, including the smelt and salmon, and to put right more than a century of corruption that had robbed California's citizens of their right to clean, safe water -- to drink, to water their gardens, to swim in.
"If water were managed differently -- better -- there would be plenty of water for the state of California, even with all the people in it now," she insisted. "What we need is for the state to do its job." She was calling for a restructuring of the State Water Resources Control Board, "so that appointees to the board could never be fired for political reasons." She was still working hard to make it happen.
And she was still trying to persuade California's lawmakers and citizens that "Big Ag," as she called it, had spent the past century pulling a fast one on the public. At the time of the Reclamation Act, "a family farm was 160 acres," Green explained. "The Central Valley clearly does not have family farms. And yet they exist on water subsidized by the state. It's a huge scandal." As she explains in her 2007 book,Managing Water: Avoiding Crisis in California
, the limit was later raised to 960 acres. "But before that, they played a lot of interesting games, setting up farms to make them look like family farms, when they were actually corporations.
"What we want to find out now is who really owns the farms in the Westlands Water District, which is the largest water district in the nation. Nobody has really taken a look at this business of Big Ag, of all these corporations. Who are the real owners? How many owners are there, really, of this subsidized water?"
"If water were managed differently -- better -- there would be plenty of water for the state of California, even with all the people in it now,"
This is an interesting allegation. I am under the impression that vast quantities of it come to LA from the Colorado River - in Nevada. I am treated repeatedly to stories of people in SoCal dealing with fires and power outages in serious health trouble due to heat, indicating unwise civic planning. I also note that for quite a few miles up the coast from San Diego, SoCal is actually coastal desert. "Desert" is a code word, really, for "you don't have any water here without extreme measures".
I have to ask: just where is ANY reasoning being applied to development in California?
Radwaste at October 19, 2008 4:10 PM
>>>>the Central Valley's reckless and polluting agricultural irrigation,...
Central Valley farmers are pretty good by national standards. Is your water better spent on a cotton field or a lawn in LA?
I get a little tense when environmentalists start adding up numbers.
doombuggy at October 19, 2008 9:12 PM
While I understand the motive, the ship sailed on family farms in California quite a while ago. We're not going to get cheap food from boutique growers, and for good or for ill, Americans want cheap food.
Big Ag? Are Napa's millionaire hobbyist vintners in that group? Family owned organic farms that sell to bigger outfits==like Strauss dairy farmers?
Kate at October 19, 2008 11:06 PM
I remember one heated exchange of opinions regarding Californian rice farming on what would naturally be arid land. One group of environmentalists wanted to stop the rice farming, since it uses insane amounts of water. Another group of environmentalists claimed that the rice paddies had become too important for certain species of endangered birds...
The most important change that would bring some sanity to the situation is this: annull all water rights that apply to water that doesn't come from your own land. Let the market decide afresh where this water ought to go.
Rice will have to be raised elsewhere - it won't make economic sense. Other, less water-intensive crops will replace it. The vintners will be just fine.
The second important change is to start recycling water sensibly. There was once a project to pump treated sewage up into the hills, and let it rejoin the natural water table. This was shot down by overly sensitive nitwits who think the water coming out of their tap ought to be immaculately conceived.
Of course, the chances of anything meaningful happening are essentially zero. Big Ag pays the politicians to keep the status quo...
bradley13 at October 19, 2008 11:46 PM
While I remove the snow from my driveway this winter, I'll be feeling your pain. Mine will go away, when I take a long hot shower, courtesy of the Great Lakes. We've got 20% of the world's fresh water and uncrowded roads. We've also got high taxes, a long winter, and an unresponsive state government which does not allow initiatives, referenda, or recall.
Nobody has it all. When your politicians mess it up badly enough, you'll have uncrowded roads too. By then your job will be in Colorado.
bradley13's right. If everybody paid the same price for water, your problem would solve itself.
MarkD at October 20, 2008 7:23 AM
Many libertarians bristle at terms like "Big Ag" or "Big Business." I don't, because Big Business exercises an inordinate political power at the state and federal level. I advocate free-markets, and free-markets aren't controlled by big or small or any business.
Businessmen are the worst capitalists. They seek the coercive power of government to create monopolies.
Most environmental problems result from the abrogation of property rights or from government meddling in prices. The former is the strategy of environmentalists; the latter of Big Business. Both strategies suck.
I call government price meddling 'corporate welfare.' At all levels, welfare distorts prices. Price distortions disturb the efficient rationing of goods and services. Inefficient rationing causes shortages and gluts. Shortages and gluts make life hard and can even kill people.
Corporate Welfare is a deadly business. The Fat Cats step over the tax-soaked victims all the way to the government-backed bank.
Jeff at October 20, 2008 8:09 AM
Amy Alkon
http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2008/10/19/welfare_for_fat.html#comment-1598810">comment from JeffI don't want subsidies for anyone -- family farmers or big corporations or my tiny business. Make it on your own two feet, not a handout from the rest of us, whomever you are.
The LA Weekly is largely written in socialist-speak -- I just sort of ignore that, much in the way I suspend disbelief in a movie, and try to glean the good parts. I forgot to note that when I posted this.
Amy Alkon
at October 20, 2008 8:19 AM
> I just sort of ignore that,
> much in the way I suspend
> disbelief in a movie
Brilliant analogy. I'm gonna steal it.
(PS- It's hard to find time for movies anymore, either)
Crid [cridcridatgmail] at October 20, 2008 10:22 AM
Also, the LA Weekly is Bollywood, and the LA Times is Hollywood.
Crid [cridcridatgmail] at October 20, 2008 10:23 AM
I guess that's one of the downfalls of democracy. Lobbying and corporate welfare. I have read many pundits decry its destructive effects but have never heard anyone offer a real solution ...
Charles at October 20, 2008 12:30 PM
Rice farming in the desert-why not? Makes as much sense as expecting me to feel bad for people whose houses burn in california wildfires, or get destroyed by earthquakes, or the idiots that live in hurricane zones with no insurance. Americans are very, very good at making really stupid decisions and then whining about the outcome. I don't live in a floodzone, but I have flood insurance. Responsibility, people. You don't value your own belongings enough to insure them, don't ask me to pay to replace them!
Water ownership will be the gold of the future. Wait and see.
momof3 at October 20, 2008 6:43 PM
"Lobbying and corporate welfare."
And I have yet to see people who use the term, "corporate welfare" demonstrate any great knowledge of what a corporation is: a legal fictional entity created to coordinate an activity, in effect the same thing as a governmental agency or other body.
There seems to be this idea that every corporation is General Motors. Nope. And that taxes on corporations don't get directly passed on to consumers in the price of the product. Nope, again. Or that the net result of having a company like BMW, Bridgestone/Firestone, Pirelli and Michelin locate in your state because of the bidding of state governments allaying startup costs is negative. Nope, again.
Although these are not questions asked here, they should be. If you use the word, "corporation", it's only smart to do more than repeat some ill-thought party line.
Radwaste at October 22, 2008 2:07 AM
Interesting post, I just came back from 5 days in Palm Springs. They're seeding some of the golf courses this time of year, which entails keeping the surface of the lawn wet whenever the sun is out. So basically the sprinklers run more or less constantly and the lawns are soaked like a sponge all day. It was a little hard not to be disgusted. But I'll be re-seeding my lawn in April.
When I first started modeling water utility networks I was under this mistaken notion that water flows down hill, when in fact water flows in whichever direction money pushes it.
smurfy at October 24, 2008 12:45 PM
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