[GPSCC-chat] The Looming Water Disaster That Could Destroy California, and Enrich Its Billionaire Farmers

[Carol Brouillet]

<http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18374>http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18374 


The Looming Water Disaster That Could Destroy 
California, and Enrich Its Billionaire Farmers

by Yasha Levine

There's an impending disaster in the 
Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, and a handful of 
wealthy farmers seem to like it that way.

  "That, in your own backyard there, is the 
scariest place after New Orleans.” 
­<http://articles.sfgate.com/2006-02-23/bay-area/17283602_1_professor-robert-bea-levees-new-orleans/2>Geologist 
Nicholas Pinder's description of the precarious 
situation in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River 
Delta after the hurricane Katrina disaster.

Imagine the devastating flooding of Hurricane 
Katrina multiplied by epic sandstorms, drought 
and economic collapse of the Dust Bowl. Now 
picture it happening an hour east of Apple's 
headquarters in Silicon Valley and spreading all 
the way down to the Mexican border. It's not as 
far-fetched as you think. A routine 6.7-magnitude 
earthquake would be enough to set it off, 
liquefying the decrepit levee system that walls 
off California's main source of drinking water 
from the Pacific Ocean and triggering a deadly 
flood that would submerge roads, destroy homes, 
wipe out thousands of acres of farmland, snuff 
out countless lives and possibly cut over 20 
million Californians off from their water supply for a year or more.

California's politicians have known about this 
looming catastrophe for decades. They also have 
had the power to neutralize the threat. But no 
one has done anything to prevent it.

Just like the oligarchs who used the shock of 
Hurricane Katrina's destruction to tear down 
public housing, privatize public schools and 
pillage the city's poorest, California's most 
powerful business interests have positioned 
themselves to profit from this disaster. A 
handful of billionaire farmers and real estate 
developers are in line to pull off the most 
brazen water heist in American history, seizing 
control over much of Northern California's water 
supplies to do what they have always wanted: turn 
water, a shared public resource, into a private 
asset that can be traded on the open market.

At the center of this epic water grab is the 
Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, a Yosemite-sized 
patchwork of waterways and farmland an hour east 
of Oakland that sits atop California's single 
largest water source. Formed by the confluence of 
state's two largest rivers as they flow out to 
the San Francisco Bay, more than half of all 
rainfall and snowmelt drains through the Delta, 
supplying two-thirds of California with water and 
irrigating most of the state's farmland. The 
Delta's agricultural, fishing and tourism 
industries produce up $5 billion in combined 
economic output a year, and the region remains 
one of California's last holdouts of small and 
family farms. It is also home to the most 
dangerous flood control system in America.

"Now we realize it may be the single most at-risk 
piece of property in the United States," John 
Radke, a professor at UC Berkeley's Department of 
City and Regional Planning, 
<http://www.emergencymgmt.com/infrastructure/Prevent-Next-Katrina.html?page=3&amp;>told 
Emergency 
Management<http://www.emergencymgmt.com/infrastructure/Prevent-Next-Katrina.html?page=3&amp;>magazine. 
"If you had a catastrophic event there and you 
can't get things built, you won't just have 
people unable to go across a bridge, you'll have 
people without drinking water -- 22 million of them."

A 
<http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/nov2005/cali-n30.shtml>simulation 
carried out by state water officials in 2005 
showed that a 6.7 magnitude earthquake could 
cause multiple levee breeches that would suck 
salt water in from the San Francisco Bay and shut 
down the pumps and aqueducts that move drinking 
water to two-thirds of California's population. 
The California Department of Water and Power 
estimates that it would take $40 billion and 1.5 
years to get the water pumping again. Aside from 
the potential damage to the state's water 
supplies, the levees protect 400,000 people, 
520,000 acres of farmland, three state highways, 
railroad lines and natural gas and electric 
transmission facilities, which adds up to a total 
of $50 billion worth of property. Meanwhile, the 
United States Geological Service estimates 
a<http://earthquake.usgs.gov/regional/nca/ucerf/> 
62 percent probability such an earthquake will 
hit the San Francisco Bay Area sometime in the next 28 years.

With Southern California depending on Delta water 
for over half of its total supply, you don't need 
to be a municipal planner to realize how hairy the situation could get.

"Los Angeles' aqueducts, viewed through 
telescopes from space, have given astronauts 
pause. If the contrived flow of water should 
somehow just stop, California's economy, which 
was worth about a trillion dollars as the new 
millennium dawned, would implode like a neutron 
star," wrote water historian Marc Reisner in his 
unfinished book, A Dangerous Place, describing a potential Delta catastrophe.

Yet one group that might be anticipating this 
disaster is a tiny cabal of billionaire farmers 
from the Westlands Water District, an irrigated 
farming region spanning 1,000 square miles of 
some of the hottest, most arid land in the San 
Joaquin Valley between Fresno and Bakersfield. 
"With crops worth $1 billion a year, this one 
district produces more than some whole states," 
writes Mark Grossi of the Fresno Bee. The farmers 
in the district make up a secretive old boys' 
network that has used its wealth and power to 
divert rivers, empty lakes, plunder taxpayers' 
wealth, privatize water and defy California's 
constitution. Many of them trace their roots back 
to the landholdings of America's most notorious 
industrialist vampires: the Union Pacific 
Railroad octopus, John D. Rockefeller's Standard 
Oil and the family of Los Angeles Times' 
publisher Harry Chandler. The 19th century robber 
barons might be dead, but their degenerate 
grandchildren are still following in their 
footsteps. And they've been keeping themselves busy.

In the 1960s, after Westlands' farmers thoroughly 
tapped out their own groundwater supplies, 
<http://www.westlandswater.org/wwd/aboutwwd/history.asp?title=History>the 
irrigation district successfully lobbied the 
federal government for its very own branch of the 
Central Valley Project aqueduct, which would suck 
water out of the Delta and 
<http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/67/CVPSouthernCanalsUSBR.jpg>transport 
it roughly 100 miles south. Westlands still 
hasn't paid back the roughly 
<http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jan/18/local/me-briefs18.S6>$500 
million it owes the federal government for 
building the aqueduct, and it's not 
<http://www.badlandsjournal.com/2007-08-25/00348>clear if it ever will .

More recently, with George W. Bush in the White 
House, Westlands farmers pulled a few strings 
and<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/03/national/03water.html?pagewanted=all> 
installed their former lobbyist, 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/03/national/03water.html?pagewanted=all>Jason 
Peltier, into a spot in the Interior Department, 
<http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=XqxAAAAAIBAJ&sjid=TiEGAAAAIBAJ&dq=jason%20peltier%20westlands&pg=6095%2C7297870>where 
he would oversee water contracts -- exactly the 
kind Westlands depended on for its wealth. Not 
surprisingly, in 2005, the district farmers were 
able to double their annual maximum allotment of 
federally-subsidized water, despite a reduction 
in the number of acres they farmed. Today, they 
have a contract for more water than would be used 
by all the people who live in Los Angeles, San 
Francisco, San Diego, Riverside and San 
Bernardino combined, paying roughly $50 million 
for at $0.5 to $1 billion worth of water a year, 
<http://www.ewg.org/reports/westlands>according 
to the Environmental Working Group.

By some estimates, every dollar of revenue from 
Westlands' farms is 
<https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.ggu.edu/lawlibrary/environmental_law_journal/eljvol3/attachment/Carter.pdf>funded 
by 75 cents' worth of water subsidies alone.
Who gets all that liquid capital? Farmers like 
Stuart Woolf, a typical specimen of a Westlands 
welfare queen. The Woolf family operates the 
"<http://articles.latimes.com/2004/dec/15/local/me-subsidize15>biggest 
farming operation in Fresno County," 
<http://archive.ewg.org/reports/Watersubsidies/execsumm.php>receiving 
$4.2 million annually in subsidized water -- 
enough to supply a city of 150,000 people -- and 
Stuart Woolf alone got roughly $8 million in 
federal crop subsidies over the past decade. Yet, 
he recently appeared on 60 Minutes, pretending to 
be 
a<http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6027412n> 
struggling farmer who's dying of thirst because 
government regulations enacted by big city 
elitists to protect some worthless little fish 
are cutting into his water supplies. In 2008, he 
did what any small farmer would do to defend his 
livelihood: he 
<http://www.fresnobee.com/2008/08/11/790543/maybe-cows-just-need-a-cold-shower.html>threatened 
a congressional subcommittee that he'd move his 
family's farm holdings to Portugal, Spain, Turkey 
and even China if the feds didn't give him more taxpayer-subsidized water.

But for all the money taxpayers have sunk into 
keeping Westlands farmers rich and in business, 
they don't get much back. Not only does the 
irrigation district contribute a pitiful 0.5% to 
California's gross state product, but it also 
occupies the poorest congressional district in 
America, 
<https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.ggu.edu/lawlibrary/environmental_law_journal/eljvol3/attachment/Carter.pdf>according 
to a 2009 report by Lloyd G. Carter, a veteran 
UPI reporter who has covered California's farming 
industry for three decades, which details the 
history of Westlands. The district is rife with 
poverty, illiteracy, teen pregnancies, and a high 
incidence of birth defects caused by all sorts of 
toxic agricultural pollution. There's not a 
single school within its 1,000-square mile 
borders because its farmers only care about one 
thing: keeping themselves rich at other people's expense.

But for all their power, there it still something 
that keeps Westlands farmers up at night.

"If you don't have water, this land is not worth 
anything," Erik Hansen, another Westlands farmer 
who received over $13 million in federal crop and 
water subsidies over the past decade, told a 
<http://www.hanfordsentinel.com/articles/2009/10/17/news/doc4ad758147fd5c189808404.txt>Central 
Valley newspaper.

Westlands may have managed to secure 
mind-boggling amounts of water from the federal 
government, but these contracts are far from 
secure. Unlike farmers in the Delta region, who 
are located right next to their water source, 
Westlands growers are dependent on a aqueduct 
system that ships their water from about 100 
miles away. That means they are last in the water 
line and first to be affected by any water 
shortages: too may straws dipped into a shrinking 
supply upstream creates the very real possibility 
that Westlands and their oligarch buddies might 
wake up to a bone dry aqueduct, while Delta 
farmers would be playing the slip 'n slide.

And that drives Westlands up the wall. Not only 
do Delta farmers, who are poorer and less 
politically connected, have first dibs on Delta 
water, but they also sit on a whole lot of 
untapped available fresh water. By conservative 
estimates, at least $5 billion worth of water 
flows through the Delta every year. Much of it is 
captured for local consumption and shipment 
south, but about half of the 
<http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:FW1hwF5l28YJ:water.usgs.gov/lookup/get%3Ffs00500/+http://ca.water.usgs.gov/archive/reports/fs00500/fs00500.pdf&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESiAXAdxWXLjVc_0b2d8WfbdJdPWPmEOornmxvS_gS7KGH9emo32j3ikHUpfkVUpUVg-QGuTkbcpmTT4DAp2nCAigWgjeqajVpuKf9DWzZmqAbH-AjdAlCmr1Kr-p1FKwonCiG3l&sig=AHIEtbSoymyOBk6vZf012PMqxZFJiTCd5g>water 
is allowed to flow out into the San Francisco Bay 
unexploited. In water lingo, it's called 
"environmental outflow" and it is required to 
keep the Delta's ecosystem healthy and protect 
its farmland. The exact volume of water budgeted 
for environmental outflow has been tempered by 
lawsuits and is regulated by environmental protection laws.

To Westlands and their billionaire buddies, this 
represents a blatant waste of a perfectly good 
resource and provides a textbook example of the 
inefficiency that creeps in when regulation 
hinders free-market forces. They look at the 
Delta the same way a condominium developer looks 
at a run-down housing project occupying prime 
inner-city real estate: an underutilized resource 
that needs to be razed and privatized. The 
Delta's small-time farmers are the only thing 
standing in their way, and its crumbling levees 
are the perfect excuse to get them out.

The Delicate Delta

On June 3, 2004, without warning and for no 
apparent reason, a 300-ft. 
<http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=YCcPAAAAIBAJ&sjid=eIUDAAAAIBAJ&dq=levee%20failure%20delta%20california%20jones&pg=3659%2C570555>crack 
opened up in a levee protecting 12,000 acres of 
Delta farmland, where 15 landowners grew alfalfa, 
corn, asparagus, tomatoes and wheat. The water 
surged into the island at a walk's pace as people 
rushed to rescue equipment, evacuate workers and 
save harvested crops. Within the next two days, 
an area half the size of San Francisco was 
submerged under 10 feet of water, causing $100 
million in damage. This was not an isolated 
incident; there have been 160 levee breeches over the past 100 years.

The levees have been a constant problem since the 
19th century, when failed prospectors moved to 
the Delta after the Gold Rush, drained chunks of 
marshlands, buffered them with earthen levees and 
turned the region into the most productive 
agricultural area in California. Over time, the 
pressures on the levees have only increased, as 
farming has slowly eroded the rich, fluffy peat 
soil of the Delta and sunk its land deeper and 
deeper below sea level. And while the rate has 
slowed down considerably, Delta farmland has by 
now been turned into a series of inverted islands 
-- holes, really -- that sit as much as 30 feet 
below sea level. The only thing keeping them from 
being inundated with salt water from nearby San 
Francisco Bay is a chaotic flood control system 
that spans over 1,000 miles of levees, many of 
which are little more than reinforced mounds of 
dirt that were piled up by 
<http://www.theschoolbell.com/history/early/laborers.html>Chinese 
laborers 100 years ago. Hundreds of miles of 
levees aren't up to state and federal code, and 
many experts believe that the levees are woefully 
outdated, unstable and primed for catastrophic 
failure. They could be liquefied by an 
earthquake, eroded from the inside by undetected 
water seepage or simply overwhelmed during heavy flooding.

The problem has been known for decades, and the 
estimated cost of fixing the levees is not 
particularly high -- 
<http://www.allbusiness.com/government/government-bodies-offices-legislative/12853392-1.html>between 
$1 and $5 billion -- but the issue just never 
figured high on the political agenda. California 
saw a whole legion of governors -- Jerry Brown, 
Pete Wilson, Gray Davis and now Schwarzenegger -- 
cycle through without giving it much attention.

"The state has never taken any responsibility for 
having a flood management program in the San 
Joaquin River system and has not exercised the 
same responsibilities that it is by law required 
to exercise in the Sacramento system and the 
North Delta," Alex Hildebrand, a Delta farmer, 
<http://www.cfbf.org/agalert/AgAlertStory.cfm?ID=657&ck=B4288D9C0EC0A1841B3B3728321E7088>told 
California's Farm Bureau Federation, a non-profit 
that promotes the state's agricultural interests, 
a year after Hurricane Katrina.

The Delta may still enjoy some the most fertile 
soil in America and remains a highly prosperous 
agricultural region, producing about $500 million 
worth of crops annually, but as one of 
California's last holdouts of small and family 
farms, the region has never had very much 
political clout. And that has been the region's 
biggest weakness, more so than even its levees.

While powerful Central Valley farmers have been 
enjoying billions of dollars' worth of dams, 
aqueducts and all sorts of other subsidized 
goodies, the Delta has been surviving on the most 
meager of funds, barely having enough for 
rudimentary and critical levee repairs. 
Throughout the 80s, the Delta got 1/10th of the 
funds Westlands received in water subsidies 
alone. And the situation is not any better today. 
California's recent budget crisis has all but cut 
off funding for levee repair 
projects,<http://www.sacbee.com/2009/07/03/1997436/state-budget-crisis-scuttles-delta.html> 
wrote the Sacramento Bee 
<http://www.sacbee.com/2009/07/03/1997436/state-budget-crisis-scuttles-delta.html>in 
2009. "As a result, almost no levee repairs are 
getting done in the Delta this year. One levee 
engineer told The Bee as much as 15 miles of 
levee repairs have been stalled. Any of these 
levee segments could become the next failure that 
plunges the state into an even more desperate 
water crisis." The funding freeze has left an 
additional 100 miles of levees and 60 Delta 
islands hanging in the balance. Local officials 
say that they won't have the money to perform 
preventative maintenance for at least the next two years.

"I sympathize, but at this point in time the 
funding is not available because of the dire 
situation we are in," Mike Mirmazaheri, who 
manages the Delta levees program for California's 
Department of Water Resources, told 
the<http://www.sacbee.com/2009/07/03/1997436/state-budget-crisis-scuttles-delta.html> 
Sacramento Bee. But it is hard to pin the blame 
on the economy. Because while the Golden State 
turns out its pockets and makes a sad face when 
it comes to Delta funding, money never seems to 
be a problem when it comes to bankrolling 
projects that benefit billionaire farmers of the Central Valley.

And that begs the question: Why does California 
let the most critical component of its water delivery system deteriorate?

The Peripheral Canal

It's all about the Peripheral Canal, a massive, 
multi-billion dollar aqueduct that would bypass 
the Delta region altogether and tap into the 
Sacramento-San Joaquin River further upstream, 
essentially allowing corporate farmers and 
Southern California's real estate tycoons to cut 
to the front of the Delta water line and have 
direct access to Northern California's water. Any 
major levee repairs would squelch one of the main 
reasons -- water safety -- being used to justify 
the construction of the aqueduct, which would 
cost up to $40 billion and require the use of 
eminent domain to clear the path for its 
<http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/07/01/18605005.php>50-mile 
run up north from 
<http://www.lodinews.com/news_photos_09/peripheral_canal_090217.jpg>pumping 
stations at the southern end of the Delta to the southern border of Sacramento.

The Peripheral Canal is more than just about 
cutting Delta farmers out of the game and taking 
their water. It is part of a bigger, more 
long-term strategy by a handful of farmers and 
urban water districts to lay down infrastructure 
that would enable the creation of a full-fledged 
"water market" that would allow them to acquire 
and sell Northern California's water to the 
highest bidder, like any other commodity.

Southern California been trying to pull this scam 
off for decades. The last time was in the late 
70s and early 80s, when Governor Jerry Brown 
tried to push the Peripheral Canal through for 
his Southern California real estate buddies. But 
the plan failed after wealthy Central Valley 
farmers threw their support behind a coalition of 
environmentalists and Northern California water 
districts to defeat the project. It's not that 
the billionaire farmers were against the the 
Peripheral canal -- they simply feared that 
Southern California real estate developers were 
trying to pull a fast one on them and cut them out of the water racket.

Now, three decades later, the two parties have 
appeared to come to terms everyone could agree 
on. The details are opaque, but word out on the 
street among Delta water activists is that the 
deal comes down to this: Westlands and their 
billionaire farmer buddies will team up with 
Southern California real estate developers if all 
water transfers from the Delta first go through 
them. That way, the farmers would become the de 
facto middlemen in California's water market, 
harvesting subsidized water from the Delta at 
below-market cost, storing it in their vast 
underground water reservoirs and then flipping it 
to Southern California cities and suburbs for a 
massive profit. This has been a dream of 
California's water interests, and exactly the 
future that Enron was working towards when it set 
up its<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azurix> own 
water trading company in California at the height of the dot-com bubble.

California's water oligarchy has been doing this 
on a small scale for years, according to a 2005 
Public Citizen's report called 
"<http://www.citizen.org/pressroom/pressroomredirect.cfm?ID=2077>Water 
for the People":

The immense pull of the Southern California's 
population, economy and property values has 
already created the most complex and farthest 
reaching system of aqueducts and canals in the 
United States. Now Southern California water 
managers are using that plumbing to pull in water 
from the farmers and agribusinesses across the 
state who have themselves benefited from decades 
of water subsidies. Some call this water 
marketing: Southern California tax and ratepayers 
making payments to some of the largest 
agribusinesses in the state, many owned by LA 
businessmen, for water that supposedly belongs to 
the public in the first place.

With the Peripheral Canal, they'd be able to do 
it bigger, better and more "efficiently."

To pull it off, California's politicians and 
their billionaire backers have seemingly upped 
the ante from their last Peripheral Canal push in 
the 80s, using all the fear-mongering they could 
muster. And if anything could scare California 
into paying for a multibillion dollar aqueduct, 
then the real and present danger of the state 
suddenly losing most of its water supply is it.

"This is a blatant attempt to steal Northern 
California's water," Lloyd G. Carter told me over the telephone.

Does that mean billionaire farmers and Southern 
California real estate developers have been 
actively plotting to destroy the Delta?

While there might be no direct evidence of a 
conspiracy, looking at the successful water 
deregulation and privatization schemes pushed 
through behind closed doors by wealthy corporate 
farmers in the past two decades, the idea does 
not seem very outlandish or even improbable. 
Besides, this wouldn't be the first time a group 
of powerful Californians pulled off a sneaky 
water grab, including destroying a poor 
agricultural region hundreds of miles away in 
order to feed urban growth and moneyed interests.

For instance, take Los Angeles' 
<http://articles.latimes.com/2009/may/16/local/me-dwp-owens16>turn-of-the-last-century 
water plunder from the Owens Valley, located 250 
miles away in the Sierra Nevadas. In what must be 
the most famous water heist in American history 
(and the inspiration for the movie Chinatown), 
L.A.'s founding fathers -- including Los Angeles 
Times owners Gray Otis and Harry Chandler -- 
engineered a monstrous swindle that ripped off 
just about everyone in Southern California in 
order to make themselves unbelievably rich off of 
real estate speculation. Not only did they scam 
locals farmers, turn a beautiful mountain valley 
into a desert wasteland and fake a drought back 
in L.A. to convince the population that building 
an aqueduct to siphon off Owens Valley water was 
a matter of life and death worthy of issuing a 
pricey bond, but they secretly sent the plundered 
Owens Valley water -- not to Los Angeles, which 
was supposed to be dying of drought -- but to 
nearby San Fernando Valley, where a group of 
insiders had bought up worthless, dry farmland on 
the sly, knowing full well that a whole lot of 
water was about to be coming their way. The scam 
made a handful of people mind-bogglingly rich, 
and it was decades before anyone got wise to the full story of what happened.

You could see plenty of shady, conspiratorial 
forces at work after Governor Arnold 
Schwarzenegger convened 
the<http://deltavision.ca.gov/DeltaVisionBlueRibbon.shtml> 
Delta Vision Blue Ribbon Task Force in 2006. On 
paper, the task force was created to come up with 
a solution to the Delta's levee problems. In 
reality, it was a thinly veiled PR job tasked 
with finding a way to sell the Peripheral Canal 
to an unsuspecting public. Its members 
represented the real estate industry, Southern 
California's urban interests, wealthy corporate 
farmers from the Central Valley, real estate 
developers, construction companies and just 
anyone else who stood to profit from a massive 
diversion of Northern California water. The only 
group not represented were the people who 
actually lived, worked and farmed in the Delta. 
Not surprisingly, the prevailing attitude of the 
committee was that the Delta was a dangerous, 
polluted stink-hole not worth saving.

"Colonize the Delta," is what Barbara 
Barrigan-Parrilla, campaign director for Restore 
the Delta, a grassroots organization representing 
the Delta's interests, told me locals call the 
solutions coming out of the governor's Delta 
Vision task force. Its only purpose was to find a 
palatable way to push through the Peripheral 
Canal. "I was shocked at the open hostility 
towards the Delta by Central Valley farmers." 
Describing a task force meeting she attended in 
Los Angeles in 2006, she said the people running 
the show were not keen on discussing the 
possibility of major levee repairs and 
modifications. About the only thing its delegates 
were interested in discussing was how much it 
would take to buy out all the Delta landowners so 
they'd quit their bitching and turn over their water rights.

To help the task force move along, all sorts of 
powerful interests came out of the woodwork, 
helping shape public opinion and influence policy decisions.

Central Valley farmers set up and bankrolled 
various astroturf organizations, mobilizing them 
with one goal in mind: to make the Delta appear 
doomed and harmful to California, while selling 
the Peripheral Canal as California's only route 
to water salvation. One of the groups, 
<http://www.sustainabledelta.com/>Coalition for a 
Sustainable Delta, was set up by high-ranking 
employees of Paramount Farms, the massive 
agribusiness owned Beverly Hills billionaire 
Stewart Resnick, the brain behind a recent 
<http://www.alternet.org/story/144020/how_limousine_liberals,_water_oligarchs_and_even_sean_hannity_are_hijacking_our_water_supply/>water 
privatization scheme. Another group was run out 
of an Orange County real estate PR, which counted 
at least one large Westlands farmers as its 
client. A third, called the Latino Water 
Coalition, was not only heavily promoted by 
third-rate Fox News correspondent Sean Hannity, 
but was set up and 
<http://www.capitolweekly.net/article.php?xid=ybopgxc5lelik7>run 
with taxpayer money and blessed by the Gov. Schwarzenegger himself.

Reports and simulations put out by California's 
water officials suddenly started pimping the 
Delta's levee threat for all that it was worth, 
prompting accusations from Delta politicians that 
Sacramento was exaggerating the danger to help 
push through the Peripheral Canal. A politician 
from Stockton called the whole thing a 
"<http://m.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090603/A_NEWS14/906030314&template=wapart>manufactured 
crisis."

In 2008, the 
<http://www.ppic.org/main/home.asp>Public Policy 
Institute of California (PPIC), a pro-billionaire 
think tank working out of UC Davis, came out with 
a secret weapon that shocked and awed Delta 
farmers and helped seal the deal for a Peripheral 
Canal. According to the PPIC, the Delta was 
beyond repair and that the best way to save it 
was to preemptively drown it -- give it a 
dignified Kevorkian, if you will -- and build the 
Peripheral Canal. It was exactly the kind of 
science-based boost Schwarzenegger's task force 
desperately needed to add credibility to its 
Peripheral Canal plans -- even Westlands' general 
manager began to quote it at length.

The report came under fire for its extreme bias 
against the Delta. Critics charged that it blew 
the Delta's problems out of proportion, 
downplayed the cost of the aqueduct and 
overestimated the cost and difficulty of levee 
upgrades. Even more disturbing was the way it 
elevated the needs of rich corporate farmers in 
the Central Valley above those of smaller family 
farms up north. To Delta farmers, this was an 
outright declaration of war upon their lands and 
livelihoods. "I feel like a lamb surrounded by 
wolves, and every time you turn to deal with one, 
another one is nipping at you," 
<http://articles.sfgate.com/2009-01-02/news/17196288_1_tyler-island-levees-sacramento-san-joaquin-river-delta>a 
Delta farmer told 
the<http://articles.sfgate.com/2009-01-02/news/17196288_1_tyler-island-levees-sacramento-san-joaquin-river-delta> 
San Francisco Chronicle. "This isn't just a 
wilderness out there," 
<http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090923/A_NEWS/909230313>another 
farmer told 
the<http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090923/A_NEWS/909230313> 
Stockton Record. "There are people. Farmers."

It 
<http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/12/04/18631390.php>was 
probably a coincidence that the think tank was 
being bankrolled by the Bechtel family, which not 
only owns the the largest engineering company in 
America but is also a huge proponent of water 
privatization. Bechtel would not only benefit 
from the construction of a massive canal -- as it 
is precisely one of the few companies in the US 
able to handle these kinds of projects -- but 
from a major levee breech as well, as it did in 
New Orleans when the company was awarded a few 
million dollars' worth of no-bid contracts to build temporary housing.

Whatever the case, in November 2009, 
Schwarzenegger signed off on a massive $11.3 
billion water reform package aimed at improving 
and reforming California's aqueducts that will 
hit voting booths in the upcoming November 2010 
mid-term elections. Aside from deregulating 
California's water market even more and removing 
all groundwater pumping limits, the measure 
contains cryptic language outlining 
the<http://articles.latimes.com/2009/aug/05/local/me-water5>creation<http://articles.latimes.com/2009/aug/05/local/me-water5> 
of a special new commission, the Delta 
Stewardship Council, that would do an end-run 
around the democratic process, giving it the 
extraordinary power to authorize massive water 
projects like the Peripheral Canal without 
requiring a referendum by voters. With this kind 
of language in place, California's water 
oligarchs could do dirty privatization chicken 
dance all on their own, without needing to dupe 
the state's voters. And that's a good thing, 
because democracy has never sat well with America's billionaire class.

"It was awful, incredibly awful. I've never seen 
anything like this," California state Senator 
Lois Wolk, who represents the heart of the Delta 
region,<http://m.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091117/A_NEWS/911170317&template=wapart> 
told the 
<http://m.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091117/A_NEWS/911170317&template=wapart>Stockton 
Record, adding that Los Angeles' Metropolitan 
Water District and Westlands wrote the bond 
measure "in private meetings, and then it emerged in the middle of the night."

It is far from certain whether voters will fall 
for the scam come November, but one thing is 
clear: unlike previous times, the fear-mongering 
involved in this push for the Peripheral Canal is 
not just about PR and media manipulation. The 
doom scenario is a very real possibility, and 
that is what makes it so sinister. Because 
nothing would get the Peripheral Canal built 
faster -- and satisfy California's water 
oligarchy more -- than a massive levee failure in 
the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

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