Posted on 03/11/2009 8:32:28 AM PDT by WayneLusvardi
Something like the purges of the Kulaks during the Russian Bolshevik Revolution is about to happen to many of California's Central Valley farmers. Only in a Capitalist society like ours the government just adjudicates the de facto taking of your property only without additionally hanging you like Lenin did the Kulaks. But why are California's coastal cities not joining with agricultural water districts to appeal the court order which has blocked 85% of water deliveries through the California Aqueduct to both farmers and Southern California? Don't they both have something to lose?
For those who haven't been following what is happening, in 2007 Federal Judge Oliver Wanger, responding to a lawsuit by the Natural Resources Defense Council and Earthjustice, ordered an 85% reduction of water shipped through the pumps of the California Aqueduct to downstream farmers in the California Central Valley and to thirsty cities in Southern California. Judge Wanger's purported reason was to to protect the tiny Delta Smelt fish. But the science behind the court decision to reduce water deliveries to protect the Smelt was always flimsy.
The population of the Smelt has drastically declined during the natural drought of the last two years. Environmentalists blame the huge pumps on the California Aqueduct, natural predators such as the Striped Bass fish, and agricultural pollution for the problem.
But as recent research in the Egyptian Nile Delta shows, sewage and fertilizer helps fish populations thrive http://www.physorg.com/news151608461.html. And the Striped Bass fish spawn best in fresh bodies of water without salinity and without high or low amounts of organic matter (TDL's). Water quality improvements demanded by environmentalists may have both reduced salinity and altered organic content so as to inadvertently provide a spurt to the Striped Bass - the natural predator to the Smelt. Perhaps the water quality improvements to the Sacramento Delta in the past five years have affected the Smelt population. How's that proverb go?: "water that is too pure has no fish."
Under Judge Wanger's court order in California about one million acres of farmland will be fallowed this year. Agricultural communities like Mendota, Firebaugh and Huron may become like former Midwestern Rust Belt cities where the industry disappeared. Without reliable water, California central valley farmers could default on any outstanding agricultural loans and would be hung out to dry in the poor house of bankruptcy. Agricultural land values, which serve as collateral for any loans, would be decimated which could cause a meltdown of the agricultural finance system. Statewide there would be devastating impacts to the tax revenues from agriculture to an already over stressed State budget.
Concurrently, just about every city in Southern California is preparing to either adopt draconian water policing regulations on water consumption or increase water rates to discourage consumption due to the curtailment of imported water from Northern California. Water usage will have to drop 10% to 40% for urban Southern California to make it through the summer no matter if the recent two year natural drought ends. And that assumes that the Metropolitan Water District will also draw down its reserves in underground water banks dotted across central and southern California. Once those reserves are gone we will be looking at what we might call a Russian communist-style drought brought about by government rather than nature.
Farmers north of the Sacramento Delta have offered excess water to thirsty California cities this year due relieve the two-year old concurrent natural drought. Little good that would do because Judge Wanger's court order would stop any shipments of water through the Delta.
To stop the ruination of farmers two agricultural water districts, the Westlands Water District and the San Luis and Delta-Mendota Water Authority, have finally filed appeals to free up the water from Judge Wanger's ruling. But why aren't desperate urban water districts and cities also filing appeals or helping out central valley water districts in their court appeal? And why did these appeals take two years?
Is it just a coincidence that state Republicans recently caved and went along with a Democratic Party proposal to resolve the protracted California state budget deficit log-jam? And is it merely coincidental that now after two years court appeals have been initiated to free up water for Red county farmers? Is there some behind the scenes quid pro quo going on, to wit: "you want your water, you vote for our budget?" Now that the Democrats have their budget, subject to voter approval, perhaps the Coastal Blue County cities believe the water siege is over and there is no reason to join ag water districts in appealing the judicial blockade of water. All this smacks of conspiratorial thinking. But maybe it is just how the Great Game of Water Politics in California is played like a Russian chess game: check mate!
What other explanation could there be for why desperate cities and urban water districts haven't been helping agricultural water districts in appealing this disastrous water blockade? Even leftist California columnist Thomas D. Elias asks in a recent column: "why didn't anyone even try to overturn the ruling?" (see "Now It's Definitely a Man-Made Drought," March 10). Who knows what's really going on backstage, but things sure look awfully "fishy."
Which brings us back to the Russian Kulaks. The "Kulaks" were the property owners of Russia. They were the farmers who were the propertied classes. They were too preoccupied with making a living in 1917 to join forces with the White Russian forces during the Russian Civil War that followed the Bolshevik Revolution. So the Soviet forces prevailed and passed laws tightening the screws on the Kulak propertied class. By 1928, the Kulaks revolted whereupon Vladmir Lenin decreed that they should be hanged and their property seized.
A different kind of political war is being raged in Kulakafornia against the Red county farmers or Kulaks. The current California political civil war is between the Red agricultural counties and the Blue urban counties rather than the White Russians and the Red Bolsheviks. No one is being hung. But nonetheless ag land is about to be indirectly seized. Environmental lawsuit brinksmanship is about to decimate a large sector of Red county farming business.
We forget that in 1812 a contingent of Russians showed up along the California coastline at what now is called Fort Ross to establish a Russian colony. California's Russian River gets its name from this early Russian colony. After 1839 the Russians abandoned the Fort Ross colony. Little known to most modern Californians, however, the Russians have been back for quite a while and continue to wreak political havoc on its Kulak population.
Another reason we left Kali.
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You mean there are no sane people left in California who will ignore this whack-job, leftist judge and turn the water back on while politely telling him to go to hell? I guess not.
Kookafornia. Inhabited by burned out acid casualties from the 60’s.
Live Bait banned as an endangered species
Better yet...the blue part of the state should be a state of their own with San Fransicko as their capitol. Then let them beg for water, vegetables and fruit. NOT.
Today USA Today is headlining a RECORD BREAKING DROUGHT CONDITION throughout the United States.
It's as bad as it's gotten since records were first kept in 1885 ~ and undoubtedly as bad as most of the world droughts of the 1800s.
It's also as bad as or worse, than the drought that led up to the Dust Bowl ~'twarn't the farmers ploughing their fields wrong ~ it happened because there wasn't enough rain at the right time to keep anything alive, so it died and the dirt blew away. That's why you have wind blown loess East of the 100 degree line, and thin topsoils West of that line.
I've posted several pieces about the coming world drought on FreeRepublic over the last few months. This is a very real problem and millions of people are probably going to die from it. You should check on Argentina's drought news ~ I did last evening ~ it's drying up and blowing away. The cattle are being slaughtered and canned. There's probably not going to be much planted for this coming year. Same with many other areas of South America ~ which is one of the world's major breadbaskets!
South Africa is in the throes of the worst drought ever recorded, and they have a "history" running back to Vasco de Gama in the mid 1400s. Australia thinks wheat will improve this year ~ but not the prime stuff they usually export. Still, their cattle, sheep, hogs, and other food products are not expected to recover for years.
Europe is developing drought conditions in many places, as is Africa, and China.
Gonna' be real bad.
An it will get worse before it gets better!
Even Lower Canada is showing the first signs of drought with widespread winter kills of brown bats. The air in the caves where they live has been too dry and cold ~ and that gives an advantage to a brown bat killing fungus. Poor little critters are eaten alive while hanging from the ceilings and walls.
People think we are becoming like Stalinist Russia. That is wrong. A better example of what the USA may become is India and the “license Raj.” Their socialist Gov’t has sliced and diced their country into various groups and ethnicities that all need some kind of support or help - none of which reaches the common man. Their Gov’t is socialist and extremely bureacratic, and their courts, though based on Common Law, are a dictatorship of bureacracy in themselves. Politics, patronage (and therefore corruption) in their byzantine system is the key to getting anything done
Just imagine how much worse it’s gonna get when we finish draining all the aquifers. In the next 20 years or so when the Ogallala dries up, Texas, kansas, nebraska and oklahoma are screwed. There is just way too much demand, from people living/farming in the middle of the freakin’ desert.
You should look to Michigan directly E/SE from Green Bay however ~ it is already "abnormally dry".
Best bet for you is to trap that surplus show in place because you will need it later on.
In the long run it won’t matter. Remember, we are right at the precipice for another major glaciation ~ just like the last 20 ~ so that aquifer could very well get filled right back up.
The writing has been on the wall for a long time. Southern California has little natural water resources and unlimited population growth. Conservation edicts really don't fix the problem. The constant influx of illegals from Mexico increases the demand on resources and they have little interest in complying the legal demands for conservation.
Idaho water rights are tightly controlled. Construction isn't permitted unless the property owner controls sufficient water rights to supply the new development. Just this week, the water to a large number of farms was curtailed because a fish farm has senior water rights. It's not pretty, but it is orderly and objectively applied.
An old friend from San Diego currently operates a farm in Oklahoma. It has been so dry in his area that there is little grass for his cattle. He is also taking his animals to market before they starve.
What,in your view, needs to be done? The California Farm bureau has been sadly fighting this battle alone, for many years.
Just take a look at the world drought map down the page.
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