...Take the Steyer brothers, who pledge some of their many hundreds of millions to stop fracking, natural gas use, pipelines, etc., and yet whose firms made much of their billions financing coal plants in the former Third World. Then there is the multimillionaire Rep. Nancy Pelosi praising the idea of de facto open borders from one of her many tony homes. Sen. Barbara Boxer has usually opposed finishing the second and third phase infrastructure of the various state and federal water projects — and then moved to Rancho Mirage, a desert retreat for largely white (90% plus) multimillionaires, whose beautiful artificial lakes and numerous golf courses are not predicated on its 3-4 inches of rain per year, but instead on multibillion-dollar infrastructure that allows water diversions from the Colorado River.
Diversity is a popular coastal concept — for others. The three most powerful elected federal representatives of a state (Senator Barbara Boxer, Senator Dianne Feinstein and former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi) with the largest percentage of Latino residents, with the greatest number of residents under the poverty line and with the largest percentage of residents on welfare are three Bay Area liberal multimillionaire women in their seventies. In current liberal parlance, that is a demographic hardly reflective of their constituents’ ethnic, gender, age, class, or geographical diversity.
The same habits characterize education....
◼ Zero percent water - Alan Heathcock/Medium with Photographs by Matt Black
The drought is now killing off century-old California farms. People here don’t blame the weather gods for not bringing rain — they blame the rest of us for not giving a damn.
...Andy Vidak, cherry farmer and senator for the 16th district, piggybacks Yarbro’s passion, and for the next 20 minutes goes deeply and conspiratorially political. He educates me on a long series of decisions made by a “small percentage of politicians who also hold the most power” in collaboration with radical environmentalists who have worked to destroy the farmers of the Central Valley. “This is perfect politics,” Vidak says. “The perfect war. This valley is conservative.” He contends big-city liberals are aware they can save the salmon, don the hero’s crown for environmentalists, all while eliminating conservative political opposition.
I respectfully suggest that one of the most productive agricultural valleys in the world couldn’t possibly be sacrificed in the name of politics — there’s a population base, functioning towns.
“No,” Vidak counters. “People in New York or Boise, Idaho, don’t care where their produce comes from.” The valley of farmers could go away, and so long as the product came from elsewhere no one would care.
He tells me a story of a local food bank. It was mid-summer and the men in line would be working if so much land wasn’t left unfarmed due to the water crisis. If that wasn’t bad enough, he noticed the food bank was handing out cans of carrots grown in China.
“Carrots from China,” Vidak says. “All while we have two of the largest carrot growers in the world down here. That’s just wrong.”
