How Millionaires Buy Up Farmland And Hoard All Our Water

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/books/how-millionaires-buy-farmland-and-hoard-all-our-water



I grew up in southern California, in a part of the country hit by the nation’s worst dust storms, deadly storms full of heavy metals that blow from dry Owens Lake. Studies have shown that I will not live as long as others because of this. I have accepted this, while at the same time hoping that these studies are wrong. Where I grew up, the city of Los Angeles diverted water away from Owens Lake, slowly draining it starting in 1913. It took more than ten years for the lake to dry up and turn into a toxic dust bowl, when naturally occurring heavy metals like aluminum and cadmium that had concentrated in the salt lake over centuries became airborne. This dust has been shown to cause cancer and respiratory failure, among other ailments. I grew up experiencing water inequity in my own body.

So when I saw Sean Hannity on Fox News broadcasting from another California valley allegedly drained of its water, I must admit I became curious. In September 2009, Hannity broadcast from Huron, California, in a weeklong special titled “The Valley Hope Forgot.” He was broadcasting from the poorest congressional district in the nation, in California’s San Joaquin Valley. According to the 2009 U.S. Census, 39 percent of Huron’s close to eight thousand residents live below the poverty line. It is a migrant labor town, a cotton-picker town, and is 98.6 percent Latino/a. Huron has no medical services, no high school, and no voting booth during elections, because most of the residents are undocumented. Some 80 percent of Huron residents have not finished high school, and children who are born there have more birth defects than children anywhere else in the country—most likely due to pesticide exposure. One resident of Huron said she shut the windows when the wind blew. “What good is the wind?” she asked. “It’s all poison.” The water quality is no better, ranking 490 out of 502 cities in California, with fecal coliform bacteria, E. coli, and nitrates found in dangerous levels. The water system is built and run by Tri-City Engineering and owned by a former manager of Bechtel.

I could certainly see why Hannity would call it “The Valley Hope Forgot.” Ironically, these were not the problems that Hannity had come to discuss. According to Fox News, Huron had only one problem: “environmental extremists” had turned off the water to save a “two-inch fish” in the Bay Area. According to Hannity, both the winter-run Chinook salmon and the delta smelt had been listed as endangered species in 1994, an event that wreaked havoc on local farms. It had been determined that water pumped for farming in the San Joaquin Valley was destroying the fishes’ habitat up north. In an area known simply as “the Delta,” an ecologically unique inland estuary exists between San Francisco and Sacramento. Through this Delta, much of the state’s water supply passes, as do its endangered fish species. It turned out they were all competing for water.

Of course, the farmers were not happy about the endangered species listing. From a stage draped in American flags, Hannity reported that in order to save the delta smelt, pumps that had once brought water from the San Francisco Delta area to the San Joaquin Valley had been shut down. Behind him, a rally of thousands periodically cheered, “Turn on the pumps!” They carried American flags or signs that read, “Stop Eco-Tyranny.” They wore identical baseball hats. But what surprised me most was that it looked like at least 90 percent of them were white. Hannity said they were “family farmers.” It was surreal.

[yellowwoodII]

1. A "Farmer" Is Not What Remember

When we think of farmers, we think of the hard-working guys out plowing their fields and tending to their livestock. This is no longer the case. Farmers now have become monopolies. Many farmers never even live on the farm. The livestock are grown in factory farm conditions. The fields are planted with one crop, like corn, and they are over-treated with pesticides and herbicides. These eventually do, of course, drain into our water supplies.

[RiverLover]

3. Its pretty bad what we've allowed the majority of farmland to become.

And the corn & soy surplus gets sold to foreign countries. And the govt SUBSIDIZES this, rather than subsidizing healthy vegetables & fruits. Most people don't know that vegetables other than corn & soy account for around 5% of crops grown in the US and are designated as "specialty crops."

No wonder the US is fat.

[RiverLover]

2. A podcast TAKES DOWN that Fox BS broadcast. You can listen to it here~

http://deconstructingdinner.ichannel.ca/california-drought-fox-news/

They were seriously pissed up in Canada...

[alcina]

7. Thank you for that link.

I hadn't listened to this show before. What a great resource! Of course, having to listen to the Fox segments was not at all pleasant to say the least.

[RiverLover]

8. haha! Truth! It was painful.

And you're welcome. I'm so glad you listened to it. They are very interesting(mostly) & informative podcasts. They stopped doing them so frequently, but I'm still making my way through all of them so I don't mind so much.

[Starry Messenger]

4. That explains all of those bullshit signs on i5

[riversedge]

5. I really wish our media would go after these type of vital issues on

a daily basis. Over and over!

[daleanime]

6. K&R....