We are going to preface this detailed reply to Bill McEwen’s Fresno Bee Sunday column, “Valley on verge of a catastrophe,” with three remarks:

 

1. Environmentalists did not create the drought. In fact, it is possible the drought would have been less severe if environmentalists’ warnings about global warming had been heeded earlier.

 

2. Environmentalists did not create the economic depression now overwhelming the San Joaquin Valley. Finance, insurance, and real estate special interests created the economic depression, now spreading around the world. Their basic weapon was fraudulent securitized mortgages. Valley environmentalists, who opposed a number of development projects, actually fought finance, insurance and real estate interests in, among other places, the congressional district with the highest foreclosure rate in the nation, when Rep. Dennis Cardoza, Shrimp Slayer (then of Merced), local government, media (particularly the McClatchy Chain) which were making money hands over fists on real estate advertising, were pumping the speculative boom for all it was worth. Environmentalists, not land-use authorities or the media, called for developers to pay for the infrastructure to mitigate for their subdivisions. Furthermore, eco-justice groups have consistently called for decent housing, sanitary water supplies, better education and working conditions for the Valley’s farm workers. And when a blatant example of racism regarding citizenship  occurred in a McClatchy newspaper in the Valley two years ago, it was environmentalists, as the McClatchy board of directors will remember, who protested the strongest, while MAPA wouldn’t touch the issue.

 

3. On-lines sources of news and commentary like Badlandsjournal.com and lloydgcarter.com and countless others regionally and across the nation would not have thrived as well as they have if the mainstream media had not sunk from a fairly decent level of journalism back into something out of Upton Sinclair’s The Brass Check (1919).

 

 

 

 

 

2-22-09

Fresno Bee

Valley on verge of a catastrophe...Bill McEwen

http://www.fresnobee.com/columnists/mcewen/v-print/story/1214311.html

California's water system is failing.

 

To view the water system as separate from finance, insurance, real estate, agribusiness and the political system in their pay is unacceptably obtuse and the premise launches this article off on its erring way. The water system flowing through the San Joaquin Valley is a product of decades of oligarchic scheming, bribery and greed. If this history of corruption, going back nearly to passage of the federal Reclamation Act is finally snared in its own lies, overall this is an excellent result. Federal subsidized water has brought great wealth to a few, who systematically corrupted reclamation law, and misery to the many along with incalculable harm to wildlife and the natural resources of the region.

 

And now the House of Representatives is about to break it completely by providing $88 million to bring salmon back to the San Joaquin River.

 

The alternative to the House approval of the San Joaquin River Settlement is a return to federal court in Sacramento, where Judge Stanley Karlton has promised he will rule according to the actual laws broken to establish the Friant-Kern Canal, which will create a situation worse than what Friant Water Users and environmentalists have agreed to.

 

Don't get me wrong. I'm for restoring the San Joaquin River below Friant Dam.

But the plan that Congress is expected to approve in a few days will cripple the Valley economy and create an environmental nightmare.

 

Agribusiness crippled the Valley economy and its politics from the start. It is faintly possible, though unlikely until existing political and agribusiness leadership shuffles of its mortal coil, that destroying the feudal economy of the south Valley would provide the region an opportunity to get all the way to the 18^th century.

The problem with the plan is that it only puts water in the riverbed. There isn't another spending bill dealing with farmland retirement and the spike in unemployment that will occur if land goes fallow.

 

There's also no acknowledgment that farmers with significantly reduced access to river water will pump groundwater until the aquifer is degraded and exhausted.

 

And McEwen doesn’t acknowledge that the demand for the Friant-Kern Canal, like its equivalent below the Mendota Pool on the west side of the Valley arise from degradation and exhaustion of wells in Tulare, Fresno, Kings and Kern counties 50 years ago. It was that degradation and exhaustion of groundwater that created the political economic drive for these water projects.

 

Finally, there isn't a dime for infrastructure to offset the effects of cutting water deliveries to farms.

 

Decent housing for farm workers? Sanity water supplies for them? That sort of thing probably doesn’t belong in an omnibus wilderness bill, but we will be watching to see the efforts in these directions made by Valley congressmen in the future.

 

By this point in this erring article, the author has completely forgotten that the real water-delivery cuts this year are caused by drought, not by Rep. Nunes’ “radical environmentalists” or Radanovich’s “eco-terrorists,” even by Sen. Feinstein or any other malevolent San Francisco Hetch-Hetchy sippers.

 

If you're wondering who to blame for this pending disaster, look no further than Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the key player in the river's restoration settlement.

 

So, now congressmen Radanovich and Costa are blaming it all on Feinstein despite carrying the Settlement bills in the House. Bad Faith, Thy name is Fresno.

 

Based on what she has shepherded through the halls of Washington, D.C., you would think that no one on her staff read studies prepared by the Congressional Research Service on river restoration and the extreme poverty in the San Joaquin Valley.

 

Feinstein was still a San Francisco supervisor when the 160-acre Limitation was finally defeated in the south Valley. Nevertheless, it is possible that her staff is sufficiently intelligent to realize that Westlands’ 600 growers in the poorest congressional district in the nation created that poverty by some of the most exploitive labor relations in the nation.

 

You also would think that the environmentalists pushing restoration are on another planet -- ignorant of the world recession, the economic plight of many Valley residents and California's water crisis.

 

Right. The environmentalists came from the planet of Judge Karlton’s courtroom with a verdict in their favor after 20 years of waiting. Karlton advised them to work with the Friant Water Users Authority and they did, fashioning an agreement both sides, with the exception of the Perpetually Dodging Upton of Madera, submitted to Congress for funding in late 2006, in a bill carried by Radanovich, sabotaged by San Joaquin River tributary interests (downstream irrigation districts all of which are in the district of Rep. Dennis Cardoza, Shrimp Slayer-Maryland).  So, the Friant Water Users are also “pushing” this settlement.

 

If we are going to go planetary in our rhetoric, what planet does the south Valley come from? The Planet of Denial of Law: environmental law, labor law, and the laws of nature.

 

 

The study on river restoration repeatedly states that the loss in jobs and the environmental consequences created by reduced irrigation flows can only be offset by improved water management.

 

Not, obviously, modeled on years of extreme drought.

 

In addition, the parties to the settlement of the long-running lawsuit filed by environmentalists over the destruction of the lower river have said this time and again: river water will be recirculated, recaptured and reused for the benefit of both the habitat and farms.

So where is the money for river recirculation and raising the height of Friant Dam to capture more Sierra runoff?

It's missing because the environmentalists aren't really interested in such things, and they have Feinstein in their hip pocket.

 

Again, back to the planet of the actual Settlement, there are two sides: environmentalists and water users. Both agreed to the Settlement before Congress. The idea that environmentalists have Feinstein in their hip pocket is too ludicrous to acknowledge, but it follows from the false premise of this whole errant excursion: that two Valley congressmen, Radanovich, first, then Costa, were not completely involved in this bill and that it would have gotten through the House without them. This is just nothing but a smokescreen for Costa and Radanovich to hide behind from their agribusiness contributors.

 

I've got another question: Where is the conscience of Congress? It always has turned a blind eye toward the Valley, ignoring the impoverished lives of the people who pick the nation's food and fiber.

 

Setting aside for a moment the ludicrous notion that Congress has a conscience, Congress approved the entire Bureau of Reclamation water project on both sides of the Valley. The federal government has primary responsibility for the Delta. After terminating the Bracero Program in 1964, Congress has done its very best to blind itself to illegal immigration for the aid and benefit of California agribusiness. Congress passes the laws that create the subsidies for much of the production of the south Valley – from cotton to milk, particularly in Tulare County, largest dairy county in the nation, neighboring Kings County, where J.G. Boswell Co. is the largest cotton producer in the nation.

 

Actually, during the 1960s, the Office of Economic Opportunity did not ignore “the impoverished lives of the people” here. At the time, although of many races, most of them were American citizens or at least resident aliens. At that point, the Valley had both feet planted in the 20^th century. Something had to be done and was done about that. The result is that today many farm workers come from places in Mexico like western Oaxaca barely touched by another 20^th-century event, the Mexican Revolution. So, farm labor lost three or four centuries in the last 40 years. And Cesar Chavez was prize fighter, wasn’t he? In any event, it remains to be seen if organization by tribe, clan and village can gain power against industrial agribusiness.

 

Now, with unemployment hitting 40% on the Valley's west side because of the drought and judicial rulings protecting the delta smelt, Congress is about to sock farmers and their workers in the gut in towns such as Exeter, Tulare and Chowchilla.

 

And salmon. What about the north coast fishery? This will be the second year with no commercial or sports salmon-fishing season. If you want to talk selfish interest, which is all this article amounts to, what about the selfish interests of California commercial sea fishermen? They don’t count at all? Absolutely no recognition of any selfish interest but Fresno’s? Commercial fisheries also employ people from Mexico, but they just aren’t “farmers and their workers,” because there is a very special relationship between “farmers and their workers.” Uh-huh. People get into real rhetorical problems trying to justify moral quagmire of the farm labor situation in California agribusiness.

 

We are spending more than a trillion dollars to shore up banks, bail out automakers and keep people in their homes.

What sense does it make to spend $88 million to put thousands of people in the Valley out of work? And what sense does it make to base San Joaquin restoration on bringing back salmon to their southernmost habitat?

 

Aside from the issue of who is making the decision to bail out banks and why, although we the people are paying for it, the proximate cause of farm-worker unemployment this year is going to be drought. As for the number of people that will suffer unemployment, we can just begin by noting the dripping hypocrisy of official Fresno’s solicitous concern for farm workers. Passing through the manifold layers of anxiety not mentioned here – for example probably quite rational fears of some social unrest in the region – we think that at the bottom we’ll find the eternal Valley grower fear: that workers will migrate and that – Heaven Forbid! – the rains will come again and growers will face a labor pool sufficiently diminished to exact a higher wage, the end of civilization as the south valley understands the concept.

 

Again, I refer to the Congressional Research Service study that says "all or many environmental factors may need to be favorable to permit this species to complete its migratory life history."

I'm not a scientist, but global warming would appear to make a salmon revival in the river a long shot.

 

We’re not Fresno journalists but it seems to us that  "all or many environmental factors may need to be favorable to permit” the continuation of the ruinous agribusiness that has gone on in the south Valley for decades.

 

Unless Congress spends for river recirculation, land retirement and a Valley-directed economic stimulus package, only enough water to make the San Joaquin a "real" river below Friant should be diverted from farms.

 

Again, the Friant Water Users signed off on the deal, carried through the House by Radanovich and Costa.

 

Salmon should only be reintroduced if scientific studies show that they can thrive in the river.

 

And canal water should only have been introduced into the south Valley when scientific studies could show a sustainable agriculture, economy and society would thrive. Scientific evidence that they would not thrive was at all times available when these “mistakes” were made. And they weren’t mistakes. They were extremely deliberate actions to corrupt the purpose of the Reclamation Act, backed by tremendous political will and bags of cash to all the right places. What was lacking and is lacking is any sense of care for land, community or environment – from the witless scale of the farming to 150 years of ruthless exploitation of labor to the ceaseless whining for more handouts from government.

 

In fact, since the rightwing is blathering all over the tube about “socialism,” it raises the question: what could possibly be  more dysfunctionally “socialist” than south valley agribusiness?  

 

Decades ago, the government made a huge mistake: diverting almost all of the water out of the lower San Joaquin. It's on the verge of compounding that mistake by trying to fix the river on the cheap and without regard to the disastrous effects on the communities reliant on irrigation water.

When the Senate approved the public-lands bill that included the $88 million, Feinstein said that restoring "the once-mighty" river was one of her "top priorities."

How about making the people who rely on that water to feed, clothe and house their families a priority, too, senator?

 

Since concern for “farmers and their workers” is so sincerely and deeply felt in the editorial offices of the Fresno Bee, we suggest the local McClatchy outlet begin a campaign to tax the farmers to support “their workers” in these harsh times of severe drought. The Bee and Fresno, Madera, Tulare, Kings and Kern county governments might begin their research into the viability of such a plan by consulting the excellent research done by the Environmental Working Group on farm subsidies in their region at http://farm.ewg.org/farm/index.php?key=nosign. Eighty-eight million dollars is peanuts compared to what farmers in that region haul down annually from the government to farm subsidized crops on subsidized federal water since federal water delivery began to the south Valley.

 

But, that’s just the emergency/drought solution – farmers taking care of “their workers” when there is no farm work due to a naturally occurring drought. Historically, similar things have happened in times of flood, too.

 

The longer-term solution would be to tax agribusiness to make up for the historic exploitation of farm workers with education and public health and services. The contradiction there, of course, is that the educated children would not want to do farm work, anymore than anyone who does it wants to do it because, although there are many who actually enjoy it (there is mores satisfaction in it than in a lot of jobs), the miserable pay and the poverty one must endure for the privilege of doing farm work take all the pleasure out of it. Therefore, the problem of a decent wage once again arises, which is the end of the conversation, if there ever was any conversation possible with agribusiness in the south Valley, which communicates only by the most preposterous, wolf-crying propaganda.

 

However, while we are on the subject of restoration, what about restoration of the toxic soils of the west side? Federal money for such a project might employ a lot of workers and it would be a good project if the money did not get siphoned off into agribusiness pockets, about as unlikely a prospect as are the current deep sentiments for farm workers expressed in the pages of the Fresno Bee.

 

The greed and corruption of Fresno has been so naked that even the University of California, an extremely ethically disadvantaged institution, was unwilling to locate its San Joaquin Valley campus there, where it was meant to go.