LOS ANGELES—Remember the movie Chinatown?
That 1974 epic starring Jack Nicholson told how politics and greed, mixed with more than a little violence, led to a fortunate few early in the last century seizing control of the Los Angeles water supply at the time when the city was starting the sudden and phenomenal growth that has made it the nation’s second largest.
“People are gonna be mad when they find out they’re paying for water they’re not gonna get,” an undercover source tells the Nicholson character in one of the movie’s key scenes.
Which pretty much sums up the situation Angelenos—and, indirectly, the rest of us—now face: Despite spending millions of taxpayer dollars over decades to construct one of the world’s most-extensive infrastructure projects to transfer water from naturally rainy Northern California to naturally parched Southern California, there’s not enough available water to fight the monster fires now ravaging L.A.
The lack of the water needed to provide fire hydrants that provide water rather than fail has nothing to do with Mayor Karen Bass, as the new York Times and much of the corporate media claims but has much to do with corporate greed instead.
And climate change only makes things worse, scientists report. It’s fueling the out-of-control winds that have made The City of Angels a flaming hell on earth.
The fires have left federal, state and local Fire Fighters dazed, frustrated, short-staffed and exhausted, at least 23 people dead so far and sent billions of dollars’ worth of homes and businesses literally up in smoke.
The only things missing now that were in the movie are its violence, the ultimate identity of some of the biggest beneficiaries–Corporate farmers and, Greenpeace says, fossil fuel firms—and the downwind impact as dangerous smoke from the monster fires drifts eastward over the continental U.S.
Campaign contributions, made possible by corporate greed, have something to do with the fires, or, more particularly, the lack of water to fight them.
For one thing, the cash answers the old Latin question: “Cui bono? Who benefits?”
The answer, according to A More Perfect Union documentary, “How this billionaire couple stole California’s water supply,” is corporate farmers of California’s Central Valley, led by one politically powerful couple, Stewart and Lynda Resnick, who funneled favors and campaign contributions to their favorite Golden State politicians, especially the late Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
In return, agribusiness growers got federal funding for millions of dollars’ worth of water projects—projects which benefit their growing operations at the expense of Los Angeles residents who see their homes and businesses burning up.
The story begins decades ago. That’s what Chinatown was about. But it accelerates with a closed-door deal 31 years ago between construction companies, state “regulators” and the big growers of California’s Central Valley to control the lion’s share of the water.
The deal: Water, paid for by the public, goes first to the growers, then to federally built reservoirs and then—maybe—to everybody else. Before the deal, the cities of Southern California had first call on the water, A More Perfect Union reported.
Taxpayers pay again
But now, when the water runs dry in the South, taxpayers pay again as their municipal water systems must pay the private firms to import needed water. And municipal water rates rise. And when the cities can’t import water, or when the current seven-year drought leaves reservoirs at record lows and fire hydrants run dry, L.A. burns.
Republican Gov. Pete Wilson didn’t know about the backroom deal an Internet research check shows. The state legislature didn’t know. Taxpayers—and California then was a “purple state” heading for blue thanks to Wilson-GOP anti-Hispanic racism– didn’t know.
The Resnicks’ private company controls at least 60 percent of the water flowing south from the Central Valley, and specifically from its biggest water producer and “storage tank” built to hold water in reserve for times of drought and fire, the Kern County Water District, A More Perfect Union’s film said.
The California Water Resources Board put overall water usage figures statewide at 54 percent for agriculture and five percent for the cities of the South. Northern California has enough water, for now.
Campaign contributions prod California politicians into doing the growers’ will and feeding their corporate greed. As chair of a relevant Senate subcommittee, Feinstein kept funneling federal cash for water projects, the infamous pork barrel, which the Resnicks and other corporate farmers sought.
Feinstein didn’t take campaign cash from the Resnicks, records show, though she was often a guest at their vacation home. She may not have needed it. Her last available financial disclosure, seven years ago, on OpenSecrets.org, showed the already wealthy ex-San Francisco supervisor had a net worth of $87.8 million.
Other politicians, most of them Democrats, did receive Resnick campaign cash. The Resnicks’ biggest single donation to politicians last year, OpenSecrets.org said, was to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
That campaign finance committee for House Democrats got a $289,100 check last May Day. And last February, the Resnicks gave $25,000 to the “Newsom’s Ballot Measure Committee,” established by backers of Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom to weigh in on ballot initiatives. More on Newsom below.
The others got less than $5,000 each. They include Sens. Jackie Rosen, D-Nev., and John Hickenlooper, D-Colo., and Reps. Jimmy Panetta, D-Calif., and David Valadao, R-Calif. What water for L.A. doesn’t come from Northern California, groundwater, or Sierra Nevada Mountains snowpack comes from the Colorado River. And Nevada—read “Las Vegas”—and Colorado have shares of it, too.
Panetta and Valadao have more direct interests. Their districts include some big specialty farm areas, for berries and those pistachios, south of Monterey Bay and in the Central Valley. Valadao is one of two remaining House Republicans, out of ten overall, still in office who voted for Donald Trump’s impeachment four years ago—a position popular in deep-blue California.
First Feinstein, and then other California politicians are pushing another big project, called The Delta Tunnel, to divert even more water from the San Joaquin River delta—whose water feeds Oakland, San Francisco and the Bay Area in Northern California–to the farms.
When a critical study challenged the need for and environmental impact of the tunnel, Feinstein convinced Congress to fund a $750,000 rerun. It came to the same conclusion, and the project is stalled.
Despite a protest letter
That’s despite a protest letter to the Bureau of Reclamation from Valadao and the state’s other Republican U.S. representatives. Written just around Labor Day, the lawmakers said the environmental impact statement for all California water projects was too heavily weighted towards the environment and species preservation and not enough towards irrigation.
No mention of wildfires.
The L.A. wildfires are also a political football on Capitol Hill. Last year, then-Republican nominee Donald Trump threatened, if elected, to withhold federal firefighting aid from California unless Newsom knuckled under and changed California fire and water policy in unspecified ways.
On January 12 TV talk shows, Vice-President-elect JD Vance, still an Ohio Republican senator, denied his boss, Trump, would commit any such punishment. Trump, Vance said, “cares about all Americans.”
Trump’s own actions during congressional consideration eight years ago of the Trump-GOP tax cut for corporations and the rich contradict Vance’s statement—which may bode ill for finding enough water, and paying for it, to fight the L.A. fires.
Then, Trump singled out “blue states,” including California, for punishment. And now, a Trump follower, Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso, R-Wyom., wants to attach unspecified conditions to firefighting aid for California.
“I expect that there will be strings attached to money that is ultimately approved, and it has to do with being ready the next time, because this was a gross failure this time,” Barrasso told Face The Nation. “In addition to the tragedy on the ground, you’re also seeing gross mismanagement in California by elected officials.”
As for Newsom, California Water Views reported that at the end of this year’s legislative session, he signed all but one water-related bill lawmakers sent him. But that one, SB366, would have given the public—and workers—a voice in state water decisions.
“SB366 is designed to modify the contents of the California Water Plan while making new findings,” Water Views reported. The top one: “Requiring the Department of Water Resources (DWR) to expand the membership of the plan’s advisory committee to include tribes, labor, and environmental justice parties.”
SB366 also would have mandated the agency to “discuss water recharge” of reservoirs, “conveyance”—in other words, transportation—and “the following water needs: Environmental, urban sector, and agricultural.” Plus the “costs and benefits” of any water project the agency recommends.
Meanwhile, the same Central Valley agribusiness growers whose corporate greed has siphoned off needed water from Los Angeles also employ—and exploit—migrant workers, domestic and foreign, documented or not, to the growers’ benefit from the water monopoly.
“Farmworkers are exempt from most minimum wage and hour guarantees found in the federal Fair Labor Standards Act and state employment laws,” a foundation study the United Farm Workers commissioned more than a decade ago reports.
Withhold even mandatory pay
The same growers who benefit from their California water monopoly withhold even state-mandated overtime pay or mandatory breaks for rest or meals,” and laws protecting the workers, most of whom make the federal minimum wage, aren’t enforced.
The growers also use other thousands of dollars, A More Perfect Union reports, to safeguard their U.S. pistachio monopoly in particular by lobbying to continue federal bans on imports of better-quality pistachios from Iran. So consumers pay in higher pistachio prices, because there’s no competition. The plot’s the same as in Chinatown. So are the victims—consumers.
“They’ve bought entire departments, which produce studies showing how water systems should be managed,” documentary narrator J.T. Chapman says of the Resnicks. “This leads to even more state and federal dollars to be used to fix up what the Resnicks already profit off of.
“This is bad for California even in a capitalistic sense…Their giant monocrops siphon important water and kill pollinators. They subsidize charter schools in company towns which train children to be farmworkers. And, of course like any company of this size they exploit their farmworkers.”
Water, the documentary concludes, should be a public good under public control.
The role of climate change is where Greenpeace says a separate group of greedy corporate barons are responsible for the spreading disaster: Fossil fuel companies.
“Communities in California are paying the ultimate price while corporations rake in record profits,” says Greenpeace California climate specialist Zach Norris.
“Every year, the state spends billions on wildfire recovery, while the insurance market teeters on the edge of collapse as private insurers face skyrocketing damages from fires and other climate disasters. It’s time for the corporations responsible for this destruction to be held accountable and pay for their mess.
“That’s why California is considering a new bill,” the Polluter Pays Climate Superfund, “that would help pay for wildfire and other damages by making the biggest corporate polluters—the ones responsible for the climate crisis—fund recovery efforts.” It “would require these companies to pay for the damage their fossil fuel emissions have caused, providing critical resources for communities impacted by extreme weather events like these.
But that bill has yet to reach Newsom’s desk.
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