You often hear right-wingers claim that government intervention in the economy is flawed because, in part, “government picks winners and losers.” Supposedly, the market ought to do that alone, though I’ve never known any example in history of a market that existed without a government to manage and police it.
So it’s no small irony that when Sean Hannity took his show to the Central Valley to try and paint the outright Depression there as the cause of liberal environmentalists stealing water from poor farmers, Hannity himself got hit by an advocate of the fishermen who have been hammered by wasteful government water policies. David Neiwert at Crooks and Liars offers the video:
Still, Hannity was more interested in demagoguing than in producing an accurate portrait of the situation, let alone helping find a resolution. He blamed the high unemployment rate in the San Joaquin Valley on the lack of water for farmers, and blamed that solely on the delta smelt lawsuits.
Near the end of the show, he had on his usual Intended Liberal Victim, for whom he could reserve such deep journalistic questions as “And I just want to know: How did you get your priorities so screwed up in life? What happened to you?”
But the Intended Victim, a fellow named Zeke Grader of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, actually bit back, pointing out how callous and indifferent Hannity was toward the plight of the people on the coast who have traditionally made their livings by fishing salmon, both commercially and recreationally.
Neiwert also goes on to add that Bush-era water policy, from the decisions early in the administration by Bush and Cheney to restrict water releases in the Klamath basin to help southern Oregon farmers (and resulting in one of the largest salmon kills in West Coast history) to agreeing to export more water from the Delta at the expense of fisheries.
As I’ve written about here at Calitics, the water problems in the Delta and the Valley are caused by contracts written during wet years to ensure greater delivery of supplies to unsustainable land use policies in the southern San Joaquin Valley and in Southern California. The water crisis we face is not just analogous to, but fundamentally related to, the housing bubble and its collapse. Water managers wrote checks mother nature could not cash – just as the housing bubble collapsed when borrowers were unable to service the debts, the water bubble collapsed when Mother Nature was unable to provide the water to “pay” the contracts written under the Bush administration.
The Valley is experiencing the effects of both the housing crisis and the water crisis. But the solution should not be, as Hannity demands, cramming down Monterey fishermen to refloat a Modesto or a Moreno Valley bubble.
Hannity wants to use government policy to not only pick winners and losers, but to do so in the most reckless method possible. His preferred solution would ensure the death of the salmon fishery and further ecosystem collapse. And it would simply create another bubble in the Valley where jobs would be based on an unsustainably high use of water, something that is particularly reckless in the face of global warming and the declining rate of precipitation.
Farmworkers and fishermen have more in common than conservatives would have them believe. They both need sustainable water policy to survive. And that is in turn in the best interests of all Californians.
Let’s hope more fishermen and farmworkers stand up to Hannity’s cheap demagoguery. He doesn’t have the Valley’s best interests in mind.
And not the first time he got slapped down for lying. See http://www
Not that I think it will stop him, or others, from telling tall tales without substantiation. It is, after all, what Faux Noise does. But it does my heart good to see people standing up to them.
I have a proposal: Folks who have the time and stomach for it should watch the most offensive shows on Faux with the sound off. I’m not that cruel! Make note of all the advertisers. Then post it far and wide. Why just go after Beck? The advertisers just switch to another show. Let’s really ramp up the pressure to stop the lies. Murdoch will not willingly lose too much money for too long if there’s a big enough backlash against all the lies.
“So long and thanks for all the fish”
Grader did a credible job–he has far more patience with Hannity than I would–but I still think a full on boycott is what’s necessary.
The illegal Latino laborers he regularly accuses of trying to mile his country dry? The Faux Noise equivalent of Regan’s welfare queens? Now he’s all out for them? Don’t make me laugh!
Hannity is, as he always is, out to make trouble. Out to make ratings. And out to serve his corporate masters like every good Republican soldier.
Hannity cares as much for farmworkers and small farmers as I care for poison oak.
My name is Robert Johnson, and I am helping as a democratic activist fight the Hydraulic Billionaire's Cabal that is funding this astroturf campaign. I have shot a few videos and have a website dedicated to the cause of progressive water policy and opposition to Peripheral Canal (via the rushed Delta Water Solutions bills). My site is Californians against the Canal or URL: http://www.StopCanal.org.
So Sean Hannity, the Latino Water Coalition, “the water for all” and all of this is just masterful theator produced by Burson Marsteller, the PR Firm from Hell per Rachel Maddow. I have worked with fine organizations trying to fight through this MATRIX to get the truth out. Organizations like Lloyd C. Carter, Restorethedelta.org, CalSport.org (California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, which is run by DEMS) and many others.
We do not have the funds to mount such an effective PR campaign of deception. A 2 inch fish? PLEASE!
The entire SF Bay-Delta ecosystem is collapsing, including Herring, Dungeness Crab, Steelhead, Salmon, Killer Wales – you name it. Seals are now floating to shore starving, and though seals and sea lions were not listed in the June 4th Biological Opinion, it is pretty obvious that with less baitfish and salmon, they – like the southern resident Orca population are HUNGRY!
Robert C – Congratulations on having the courage to write this diary. You are correct in asserting the parralels between the real estate bubble and the water-farming bubble. This is absolutely the case. I need to do a major blog post about the:
1. Unsustainability of Agricultural expansion in the southern Central Valley region – particularly the west side of the San Joaquin Valley from Bakersfield to Los Banos
2.. The water privatization racket that has been building up to where we are now, and the Cabal's mad attempts to enlargen the racket and enhance its reliability. This is vis a vis a 15,000 cubic foot per second Peripheral Canal and twisted legislation that elevates this region's junior water rights and provides plumbing to circumvent the Endangered Species Act.
Know this: the San Joaquin Valley region drastically over drafted the region's vast ground water aquifers in the early 1900s. Then an already established Corporate Ag, which was pushing out small farms and building empires in the 1920s, convinced the federal Government during the Great Depression to fund the nations largest public works project, the Central Valley Project, to bring them water in order to re-charge the ground water tables. But NOPE – they got the extra surface water and instead, just expanded total acreage under production.
This story gets real deep, but the bottom line is: the region just keeps expanding the Ag base beyonhd their means. A recent USGS study shows the region has drawn down a net 60 million acre feet of water – a PERMANENT NET REDUCTION – from 1960 to 2003. THIS HUGE GROUND WATER OVERDRAFT WHILE SURFACE DELIVERIES VIA THE STATE AND FEDERAL WATER PROJECTS HAVE BEEN PUMPING THEM RECORD AMOUNTS OF WATER!!!
60 million acre feet of water is enough to supply every Californian (35 million) for 8 YEARS! It is a 400 foot drop in the water table under the vast Tulare basin.
Robert Cruickshank – You are onto something.
Just like between 2002 and 2007, lack of regulation in financial sector led to lending standards that allowed an orgy of cheap money (debt) to flow to the us consumer, which like oxygen inflamed housing prices and gave us economic growth that was doomed to collapse – where someone with a 550 credit score could buy a $600,000 home with no prior ownership and no money down; or how someone with a 680 score could by a $1.5 million home with similar terms (and I am not even getting into Wall Street's CDOs or Swaps, etc) — THE AGRICULTURAL EXPANSION I THE SAN JOAQUIN BASIN IS ON BORROWED WATER AND CANNOT BE SUSTAINED.
WHAT'S WORSE: THE REGION, INCLUDING FRESNO, KING, MADERA, KERN COUNTIES, IS THE POOREST IN THE UNITED STATES!!!!!!!! PEOPLE – THE REGION IS ALSO AMONG THE LARGEST RECIPIENTS OF CROP SUBSIDIES, RECIEVES WATER AND POWER SUBSIDIES THAT ARE TOO HUGE TO BELIEVE, YET IT IS THE POOREST PER CAPITA IN THE US – POORER THAN APPALACHIA. Talk about lack of Return on Investment!
AND WHERE WAS THE LATINO WATER COALITION OR THE WESTLANDS WATER DISTRICT OR STUART RESNICK'S PARAMOUNT FARM OR KERN COUNTY WATER AUTHORITY TO SUPPORT THE FARMWORKERS IN THEIR PLEA FOR THE BETTER WORKING CONDITIONS? WHERE WERE THESE FOLKS ON SB 789 A FEW WEEKS AGO. ==> HAVE A LOOK AT ASSEMBLY MEMBER JARED HUFFMAN FLAMING THESE PEOPLE FOR THEIR HYPOCRISY ON MY BLOG HERE: http://www.stopcanal.org/node/63
Robert Johnson, Jr.; StopCanalorg
aka Morpheus
But in fact he would have driven 4 hours to get there from Fort Bragg, an area too remote to have a television studio.