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Lynda and Stewart Resnick, the wealthy landowners I mentioned in Friday’s column – the couple who are irrigating desert land in Lost Hills – made the Los Angeles Times yesterday. In an op-ed column entitled “The Fate of the Salmon Is a Grim Indicator of Our Future,” author James Pogue notes that immense power is wielded in Sacramento by large agribusiness interests and their lobbyists. He mentions the Resnicks specifically as “the Beverly Hills-based planter billionaires” and notes that they “have donated more than $350,000 to Governor [Gavin] Newsome since 2018.” The following instructive paragraph immediately follows the mention of the Resnicks:
For too long, water issues in California have been framed as “farmers vs. fish,” a choice between saving endangered fish species and saving jobs in California’s agricultural sector, which consumes 80% of water deliveries and produces about 3% of the state’s gross domestic product. But this false choice obscures the fact that water deliveries to rich farmers have all but destroyed California’s well-regulated salmon fishing industry, which until recently provided well-paying jobs on over 30,000 boats plying the waters of Northern California. And it obscures the fact that farmers in areas like the Sacramento Delta need natural freshwater flows, to flush out rising salinity in the water table caused by infiltrating seawater from the San Francisco Bay, among myriad other reasons.As my brother David so graphically noted years ago: “Money talks and bull**** walks.”
[You can read Pogue’s whole column here.]
| Copyright © 2021 by William Silveira |
Unfortunately, the rich of the world are not seeing how they use their money to destroy the world for the rest of us. It's everywhere from development in Florida destroying the sea grass fields for the manatees to the rivers in the west destroying not only animal life--and I include kit foxes with salmon here--but tribal culture as well.
ReplyDeleteWe don't learn as long as we wordship the rich.
I read once 50 billion dollars would rid the world of hunger. We have enough people on the planet now who can donate a billion without breaking a nail, but, no, a great big pond is more important.
Water in California -
ReplyDeleteWe have less water today than we had yesterday.
Tomorrow we will have less water than we have today.
Plan accordingly.
William I could not fathom-excuse the pun-how ag can outweigh fishing to that extent, but the numbers show that perhaps $1.3 billion or .007% of CA state revenue is due to salmon fishing, so yes, money talks. The 3% ag revenue of CA's current budget is about $5 billion, so there's your answer. Wasting that much water for rich people's snack food like almonds is a massive humanitarian crime, and unfortunately a conspiracy about three levels deeper than most voters ever think. $5 billion out of $167 billion may not sound like much, but then, politicians are cheap these days.
ReplyDelete