California Drought: All About Control

"We are going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good." - Hillary Clinton

By Douglas V. Gibbs

If Barack Obama can bypass his legislature, and seize executive control like a dictator at the national level, California Governor Jerry Brown has determined he can do the same at the state level.  The liberal left blames Pat Brown, the California governor that was Jerry Brown's father, for the water crisis California faces by determining it was Pat Brown's decision to bring water to Southern California which encouraged millions upon millions to come to Southern California, which in turn created a population so big that there isn't enough water to quench the thirst of all of them.  The truth is, the fault does not lie in Pat Brown's "water evangelism," as much as that the largely liberal left leadership of California's past and present did not, and refuses to, prepare for the consequences of Pat Brown's incredible water projects that, yes, attracted millions of new people to California.

More than half of a century ago, California Pat Brown went on a crusade, to bring water to Southern California, at any price.  Pat Brown was governor of California from 1959 to 1967, and during his reign, he launched the California Water Project, a $1.8 billion initiative that turned California into an oasis.  The San Joaquin Valley in Central California was lush with farms, and became the Salad Bowl of the World. Today's farmland, minus the sacrificial lamb of the Central Valley, of which has been made into a dust bowl in the name of a little fish called a delta smelt, still covers 750,000 acres of irrigated farmland.

Pat Brown's water crusade recognized that the rain was in Northern California, but the need for water was in Southern California, where, if not for humanity's manipulation of the landscape, it would be an arid desert.

Brown succeeded, creating an incredible system that encouraged the population of California to boom from 1959's 15 million, to today's nearly 40 million people.  Much of the migration was from the old dust bowl in the midwest and the south, most of those people seeking to work on farms.  My grandfather was one of those folks - a poor sharecropper from Arkansas willing to work incredible hours in the fields to make a living, and live in a shack with no comforts of civilized life. . . a job today, we are told, Americans aren't willing to do, so we must import new workers, illegally, from south of the border.

With all of the new people in Southern California came new freeways to accommodate the sudden jump in population.  The water demand was on the rise as they came seeking a new life under the California sun.  Finally, now that a natural drought has reached us, a lack of preparation for what Sacramento knew could be a problem, and would be a problem, has put California into a situation where Governor Jerry Brown has decided he needs to take a dictatorial role and force the residents of California to cut water use by 25 percent.

However, along with that governmental mandate, the same attitude of non-preparation remains intact.  To appease screaming environmentalists, there are no plans, as there should have been from day one (and there wasn't), for building infrastructure to increase storage capacity, nor any plans for seawater desalination so that we may farm that big blue thing filled with water to our west called the Pacific Ocean.  The House of Representatives has even passed bills, H.R. 1837 and H.R. 3964, but the Democrats in the U.S. Senate have been unwilling, since the proposals emerged in 2012 and 2014, to allow the bills to pass. The bills would both restore water to the Central Valley/San Joaquin Valley, and create with federal funding help for California in creating infrastructure to increase the storage capacity of water with reservoirs and canals, and bring water from the north down into the areas most severely hit by drought conditions.

From a constitutional point of view, considering that the condition of "all's well throughout the republic" largely depends on the food coming from California, if the State of California wants (and asks for) the help, the federal government can offer it.  However, Governor Brown is not asking, and the Democrats at the federal level are refusing to offer.

Rahm Emanuel told us when Barack Obama had emerged on the scene, "never let a crisis go to waste."  To increase government intrusion on matters that is none of government's business, the people who consider themselves to be the ruling elite need a crisis as an excuse to impose such government intrusion.  Remember, for statists, the goal is not what is best for the country, the several States, or the people, but what is best for their agenda, which includes an increase of government control - eventually over every aspect of an individual's life.

Individualism is the problem, they believe, and so collectivism through government control must be thrust upon the people.

Or, as Jean Jacques Rousseau put it, prior to engaging in his part in the French Revolution, "Men must be forced to be free."

What a lot of folks don't realize is that much of the water that has been denied to the Central Valley, and denied to the consumers in Southern California, has been dumped into the Pacific Ocean.

Due to environmentalist demands, much of the rainwater we get here in California goes into the gutters, into the storm drains, and then out to the ocean.  Enough water to sustain 2.6 million California families was dumped into the ocean last year because there isn't enough storage capacity in the northern portion of the state, and environmental rules limit the amount of water that can be pumped to reservoirs in the south.  Last November's Water Bond, Proposition 1, passed because people know we need help regarding our water situation, and other bonds have passed in recent years as well, all of them totaling more than $22 billion.  The money, however, did not go into building more reservoirs, or working to change the laws limiting the amount of water than can be sent, or stored, in the south.  Most of that money went to funding environmental projects - projects being spearheaded by the same groups that refuse to allow more water to be sent or stored in the south or build more reservoirs in the north.  As a result, when it rains, fresh water is instead dumped into the ocean.

Droughts happen.  We know they do because we've had four here in California in the last 50 years.  The politicians know we have droughts, yet the leftist statists that run California refuse to prepare for drought conditions, and environmentalists, who are not in short supply in this State, block all efforts to create more reservoirs.

So, we must ask, "Why is it that these people are forcing us into a drought that we don't have to suffer through?"  If proper precautions were in place, we would not be faced with Jerry Brown's mandatory water restrictions.

Occam's Razor is a principle that provides us with a clue, "the simplest answer is often correct."

The simplest answer is that there is some kind of motive that is influenced by power, or money, or both - and that is exactly the reason why millions of families are being told they must fall under stricter government control regarding water.  With statists, individual needs will not be tolerated even when the answer is obvious.  And it is all being accomplished under the guise of "for the collective good."

Collective good, indeed.

Since the 1960s, there has been no real investment in water infrastructure since the 1960s, aside from smaller projects that barely survived the onslaught of environmentalist attacks.  The Diamond Valley Reservoir in Southwest Riverside County comes to mind.  The man-made lake in the Dominigoni Valley between the cities of Hemet and Murrieta was nearly impossible to build, staggering under the weight of a massive number of required permits, studies, and restrictions.  The Environmental Impact Report was voluminous.  The project somehow made it through all of the flaming hoops and hurdles.  Most projects don't, because of environmental impact lawsuits and lobbying by environmental groups .  In the end, what that means, is a population that has more than tripled in the last fifty years is using the same water infrastructure from fifty years ago.

Few reservoirs have been built, no new canals have been added, the laws limiting water have not been changed, and desalination plants (which have turned Israel into a lush nation in the middle of the great desert of the Middle East) have been rejected because they are not affordable when you take into consideration the costs attached to mandated 'green' energy that has led to electricity costs that are 50 percent higher in California than the rest of the country.

On top of all of that, the attempt to fix California's water problem is also saddled with environmental litigation costs, because every solution to California's water problem is immediately attacked by rapid, militant environmentalists who have decided that humanity is a parasite on the Earth, so we must thirst to death in order to save a delta smelt, and whatever else the environmentalists list above the safety of people.

At a Wal-Mart in Murrieta solar parking lot overhangs are being put in, which is fine by me, but in order to accomplish their "save the planet" (and I assume a reduction in electricity costs) strategy, they had to remove and kill nearly a hundred trees - yet these are the same kind of folks that refuse to stand aside for the logging of trees needed to build homes for an increasing population (trees, by the way, that are normally taken through selective logging, and replaced by two new plantings for the removal of each one tree).

Poseidon has spent six years in court getting permits for its desalination plant, and through the process has been told they have to restore 60 acres of wetlands.  Did you get that?  In order to create fresh water in the future they are being ordered to waste fresh water by creating even more swamps now, while southern Californians are forced to ration.

Sure, we have a lack of snow right now, and we are in a drought.  The result of a natural drought, however, should not be what it is.  We, as a State, have been unable to properly prepare for these natural drought conditions largely because of a political class of liberal left progressives unwilling to save during a rainy day because of lawsuit-driven environmentalism, a political agenda that puts money in the hands of those environmentalists (rather than money into our water problem), and a political agenda that wants to create more government control and more statism while bowing in submission to United Nation mandates.

Oh, did I forget that part?  Yeah, much of the statist drive is associated with the concept of "Sustainable Development," a United Nation's mandate that was never ratified by the United States Senate from a United Nations Resolution called "Agenda 21."  The ultimate goal?  Turn the Earth back over to its natural condition, stack and pack humanity into geographically small population centers, and resort to population reduction if necessary - all of which must be administered by a ruling elite that knows what's best for you more than you do as an individual.

You know, because "men must be forced to be free."

-- Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary

Jerry Brown Showers California with More Government - Breitbart

Jerry Brown battles Calif. water crisis created by his father, Gov. Pat Brown - Washington Post

California's Drought Damage Caused by Bad Policy - YouTube

Committee Takes Bipartisan Vote to Pass Plan to End Man-Made California Drought, Create Jobs and Ensure Food Security - House Committee on Natural Resources

The Man-Made California Drought - House Committee on Natural Resources

Jean Jacques Rousseau's General Will - Political Pistachio

The government-imposed California Dust Bowl - Net Right Daily

California's Green Drought - Wall Street Journal

California Government is the Big Water Management Problem - Science 2.0

Water: United Nations Sustainable Development - Citizens Against Agenda 21