Buying politicians or paying protection money: They’re one in the same

Some of the farmers who's water deliveries were eliminated last year have been regular contributors to the same politicians voting to cut those deliveries. © Todd Fitchette

There’s a common storyline in old gangster movies where the mob boss goes into someone’s store and tells the store owner that it would be a shame if something bad happened to him or his store. In this case of explicit implication, the store owner decides to “buy” the rather expensive protection services of the local mob boss. It might work, but it’s extortion nonetheless. Politicians play a similar game with their constituents, particularly those who represent groups of like-minded constituents.

Take for example the farm groups that consistently gives money to Democrats thinking that maybe someday these Democratic lawmakers might, kind of, maybe see things their way and stop writing laws that take their water, land and livelihoods. As much as the Supreme Court has ruled that political contributions are protected under the First Amendment as free speech, the case can be made that such donations to sitting politicians are nothing more than legalized extortion. If nothing else, these political donations do not generate the return on investment that the farmers would expect. So the question then becomes, why continue donating to and supporting these wasted causes?

It happens on a regular basis. Farmers contribute to many of the same politicians who then side with the environmental extortionists and further strip farmers and the rest of us of our private property rights and extort more money from us in the way of taxes, fees and levies. I’ve seen it happen with Dianne Feinstein, who claims to enjoy support from farmers, only later to reportedly threaten physical harm against the head of one prominent ag-based organization who also happens to be one of her constituents. Read the story “Breakdown” in High Country News for one such example.

This puzzled me when I used to work for one ag organization and was a reporter and editor covering the ag industry. I could never understand allegedly conservative farmers and ranchers donating richly to the coffers of folks like Feinstein and other Liberals. The line of defense was similar to the honest storekeeper who admits to his closest friend that he doesn’t like paying the mob, but if he doesn’t the cost to him, his family and his business would be worse.

I’ve written in the past on the national security implications such votes have. Farmers and ranchers in America not only provide the safest and best food and fiber produced anywhere in the world, but they contribute in a large way to our national sovereignty by making us agriculturally independent from the rest of the world.

California agriculture (and its larger American ag industry cousin) would do well to end this practice of voluntarily contributing to these criminals. While blackmail is an ugly word, what other word aptly describes the implied threat that if you don’t give to my campaign I’ll vote against your wishes, but then again when the time comes around to call on those favors, the politician suffers a lapse in short-term memory and still votes in favor of legislation that further restricts farming and ranching and adds one more nail to the coffin that will someday be eulogized as “American Agriculture.”

Farm water a national security issue

The ability to capture water to irrigate farms has always been a human consideration. Even with water storage facilities such as Shasta Lake and its 4.3 million acre feet of storage, water policy in California allows most of the water captured in storage facilities in California to flow out to sea unused by the agriculture which feeds and sustains the United States and much of the world. ©Todd Fitchette

I have long argued that our battle over water for agriculture has much larger ramifications than the economy of California’s Central Valley. The cheap and ready access to irrigation water is not only vital to for the existence of farms and families in California, it’s imperative if we’re going to remain a sovereign nation.

Discussions over water have become a crusade here in Central California. The reason it’s become such an issue (again) is because the bureaucrats who control the flow of irrigation water believe that protecting the Delta Smelt, a tiny fish with no commercial value, is more important than growing the crops we eat and export.

Farmers have long been innovators in many ways. In fact farmers from around the world will gather next week at the World Ag Expo in Tulare, CA to consider the purchase of new technologies that will further make them more efficient. They’ve had to be more efficient. Profit and loss margins tend to be thin in agricultural production, and in most cases are reliant on things out of control of farmers: the weather and world markets dictate whether farmers will even have a crop and what those crops will be worth once they’re harvested.

It doesn’t help when bureaucrats and do-gooders looking for a cause change the rules after the bets have been placed. You could rightly understand the outrage people would have in Las Vegas if the house called for the bets, and after the bets were placed, the house completely changed the rules in their favor and swept the table clean. That’s what happens on a regular basis as the federal government repeatedly violates the contract it has with farmers to provide water in the Central Valley. These failed water deliveries and cutbacks always happen after predictions of water are made and farmers have borrowed money from the banks to plant their crops. But lately farmers have stopped planting in California’s fertile Central Valley because the predictions of water deliveries have continued to drop to levels unsustainable for agricultural production.

Agriculture has always been the lifeblood of our nation. Even after the industrial revolution moved people off the farm and into the factories, we’ve been self-sufficient when it comes to our food production. What’s even more remarkable is that fewer and fewer people continue to produce more than enough food for the rest of us here in the United States.

Ours isn’t a problem of a lack of water in California, but a lack of water when and where we need it. Much more water falls on California each year through rain and snow than we’re able to store. The ability to collect more of that water and make it available for agricultural and urban uses doesn’t take any water away from the Delta. In reality, it would stabilize flows through the Delta by giving us the ability to slow the runoff and release it in a more controlled manner. There’s another phrase for this: it’s called flood control.

Before Shasta Dam was built, much of the Sacramento Valley was uninhabitable during certain times of the year. Now with facilities like Shasta and Keswick dams, we’ve not only allowed agriculture to flourish in the Sacramento Valley, but we’ve allowed for urban development as the flood plains became livable thanks to the ability to control the flow of water down the Sacramento River. As an added perk, we created a whole host of recreational opportunities for people.

While we could do well to increase the storage capacity of lakes Shasta, Keswick and Oroville, we need similar storage facilities along the west slopes of the southern and central Sierra — facilities that would collect and store water for farmers and cities alike. Water that could even be used to restore the San Joaquin River.

We can do what it takes to build the storage and conveyance systems necessary to provide ample water for agricultural production and urban uses, or we can let a very loud minority have its way and kill agriculture in California. If this happens, we’ll cede our agricultural self-sufficiency to other countries that likely won’t have the best interest of the United States at heart when we go begging for food.

It’s not the point, but if it works…

KMJ Radio’s Ray Appleton almost had another stroke, this time on the air, as he expressed his outraged over a San Francisco Chronicle article that accuses Central Valley Republicans of trying to “steal” Democrat voters by targeting Latinos in their efforts to get more water for agriculture.

While this might be a legitimate strategy of some political pundits, linking this issue to the fight over farm water here in the Valley is, as Mr. Appleton put it: “Fightin’ Words!”

The issue to restore water flows to Central Valley farms has been, in the classic sense of the term, a true bipartisan effort here in the Valley. It hasn’t mattered what political viewpoints people bring to the debate, the end has and remains water, and more of it for Central Valley agriculture. While Appleton (a Republican) and Rep. Devin Nunes (also a Republican) have taken up the cause to turn on the spigots to Valley farms, others such as Comedian Paul Rodriguez, a Democrat and Central Valley farmer, along with a host of other Democrat Latinos — many of them farmworkers — have literally stood beside and marched along with Republicans with one goal in mind: to restore water flows to Valley farms. The tough thing is that while politics has not been the object of this effort, the sad fact is that this issue must be played out in the political arena if water is going to flow once again to Central Valley farms.

One glaring irony in this issue has been the behind-the-scenes efforts of Democrat politicians, including Rep. Jim Costa, D-CA, to derail efforts for more water. Still that hasn’t deterred folks like the Latino Water Coalition and Appleton from pushing ahead.

While Appleton’s outrage is completely understandable and shared by many, the article by Chronicle Staff Writer Joe Garafoli does point out a very obvious fact: Democrat leaders could care less about the Latino population here in the Valley; Latinos, to the Democrats, are mere pawns in their effort to gain dictatorial control of California and the United States.

This seems more apparent to a growing number of Americans of all shades that the Democrats aren’t really out to help the little man as much as they’re out for their own power and their own gain at the expense of those they claim to support.

If Garofoli’s opinion comes true, then it’ll be the fault of local Democrats, including those claiming kinship with groups like the Latinos and Portuguese here in the Valley, who will wind up driving voters away from their cause and towards the Republicans.

Hannity part 5 of 5

Hannity part 4 of 5

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Thank you Sean Hannity Part 1 of 5

Fox News and the Sean Hannity show definitely put the Central Valley of California on the map with this show. Share it with your friends; talk about it around the water cooler then contact your elected representative and tell them that this kind of egregious behavior on the behalf of the federal government WILL NOT STAND.

Our livelihoods and our national sovereignty are at stake.

Farmers asked for more pay to irrigate

San Joaquin Valley farmers continue to be urged to cough up more money to lobby for what some call their contractual — LEGAL — rights.

West Side water users have regularly been promised water under contract with the Federal Government, only to be cut short year after year. I once heard someone compare it to a civil matter in which the party that broke the contract was sued for large sums of money. How is it the Federal Government can continually break a contract and not be held legally liable? Now with California facing a very real drought, farmers will idle land because the water is simply not there for them to use for irrigation.

The irony in this story is that farmers are being told they must pay to play, even though for years farmers have been privately and corporately giving to politicians and lobbying firms. The California Farm Bureau and others continue to throw money liberally at politicians of all political stripes, while individual farmers also continue to donate to political campaigns. Meanwhile, farmers continue to complain that they don’t have enough water and that politicians aren’t seeing things their way.

For those fiscally conservative farmers out there, why do you continue to pour money down a losing hole? In more succinct wording you are being blackmailed by your government and lobbyists to pony up money you and they know will not be fruitful.

The tone out of Washington and Sacramento on this and a myriad of issues is if only more money were spent on the problem, the problem would go away. No. The only thing going away is your money!

The loss of irrigation water for farmers affects many. Farmers can’t grow the crops, which provide them income; these crops aren’t available to consumers and must be replaced from somewhere else — in some cases from across our borders where food safety practices are woefully lacking. Moving our food production across international borders also dangers our national security and sovereignty.

The simple answer is more water storage.

Government-sanctioned drought continues…

Gov. Schwarzenegger’s disaster declaration for Central Valley farmers caught in California’s government-sanctioned drought may garner him a few kind words but the results of the political move won’t be what’s needed.
What’s needed is water, pure and simple.
According to an article in the Fresno Bee, Schwarzenegger paid a visit on Friday to western Fresno County, which arguably has been hardest hit as a result of federal regulator’s refusal to deliver water supplies, as promised under legal contract, to Central Valley farmers. The net result is bankrupt farmers, dried up and fallowed farmland, and unemployment approaching 50% in some Central Valley communities.
While farmers were quoted as being appreciative of Schwarzenegger’s visit and his promise for government assistance, these are merely papered-over attempts that will have no real or tangible impact on righting the wrongs that have led to these stories.
In one such move, the governor promises money to provide food to local governments and non-profit agencies. Recently in Mendota, a farming community in western Fresno County with nearly 50% unemployment, food basket donations ran out as hundreds of people lined up to get the hand-outs because they couldn’t work and therefore couldn’t pay for their own food. Many of these people are now homeless with entire families living out of their automobiles as summer approaches where daytime temperatures frequently exceed 100 degrees.
Where does the governor expect to get this food for all these people? Does it just “magically” appear at the local grocery store or food warehouse without first being grown in the very same fields that now sit fallow under this government-sanctioned drought? Somehow the irony must also be lost on the governor that air pollution regulators under his authority will be in a quandary when winds common to some of these valley regions kick up large dust storms and pollute the valley air.
It’s almost offensive to hear the governor tell reporters “they say the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and I think that is true.” Farmers and agricultural proponents have been screaming for years about the very real and very detrimental impacts that environmental regulators concerned only with fish populations and not human populations were going to have as they continued to squeeze water flows to some of the richest and most productive farmland on the planet. Certainly California Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Tulare, has been loud in his protests before the House of Representatives and anyone else who will listen, yet federal and state regulators continue to hide behind scientifically questionable biological opinions.
It’s so simple: turn on the water, which will allow farmers to produce the crops that feed the world, put thousands of people back to work, generate additional tax revenues as economic activity begins to return to these communities and eliminate the likelihood of turning Central California into a veritable dust bowl. It’s also a matter of national security and sovereignty.