Eco-Watch – by The April 1 snowpack assessment in California, which set an all-time record for lowest snowpack levels in the state’s history, finally spurred Governor Brown’s office to issue an executive order to residents and non-agricultural businesses to cut water use by 25 percent in the first mandatory statewide reduction in the state’s history.
But some groups have been exempted from the water restrictions, specifically big agriculture, which uses about 80 percent of California’s water, and oil companies. Democracy Now! discussed on their show today the new mandates and the implications of exempting some of the biggest water users in the state.
Food & Water Watch California is one of the groups critical of Governor Brown for failing to cap water usage by oil companies and corporate farms, which grow water-intensive crops like almonds and pistachios, most of which are exported out of state or overseas, reports Nermeen Shaikh of Democracy Now! “In the midst of a severe drought, the governor continues to allow corporate farms and oil interests to deplete and pollute our precious groundwater resources,” says Adam Scow of Food & Water Watch California.
Shaikh and fellow reporter, Amy Goodman, then turn to Mark Hertsgaard, author of a new book, Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth, and whose latest story is “How Growers Gamed California’s Drought.” Hertsgaard, an expert on big agriculture and the drought in California, discusses how the price of water is far too low and how we’re still wasting far too much water. “If we priced [water] properly, which means a little bit higher, there’s enormous strides California could be taking with water efficiency,” says Hertsgaard. “We could essentially wipe out the effects of the drought.”
But right now we have billionaire farmers like Stewart Resnick bragging about record profits and record production in water-intensive crops like pistachios, almonds and alfalfa, while poorer communities where farmworkers live “don’t have water coming out of their taps anymore,” says Hertsgaard.
Watch the full clip here:
http://ecowatch.com/2015/04/02/california-exempts-big-oil-big-ag/
A corporation/collective exercising superior right over the individual. Impossible, if the Bill of Rights is the law.
No group of individuals can borrow from the right of an individual as no individual can borrow from the mind of another individual, as we are each and every one of us different and completely individual, as evidenced by finger prints, iris scans, and DNA. Any one man or woman is equal to all the men and women in a corporation and the corporation cannot act as a single entity on any par with a natural being assuming to collect power to gain superior right. How many individuals are having their share of the water seized without due process of the law wherein the common law a corporation cannot be a being? To be lawful, each and every member of the corporation would have to sue each and every other Californian American national and prove to a jury their just cause for taking, hence seizing the individual’s property and they would have to do it in as many cases as it took to address the rights of all the other Californian American nationals.
There is no law.
We already have the wine grape growers sucking the wells dry. People are hooking up hoses to their neighbors house in some areas, because their wells have gone dry, just so they can continue to live on their properties.
Now the grape vineyards are getting special dispensations? It’s all about the $$$ I guess.
. . .
Pure and utter proof that we are living in the Corporate States of America. Think this is bad, this is just the start of TPP. If they get that passed, this will be the norm all over.
When the water stops, the property value goes to near zero.
After the Corporations buy up the farm land, the water will again flow freely
Bingo!