A region that once fed the world now resembles the average third world country filled with misery and poverty affecting the entire US.
The Delta smelt ruling impacts "the water supply for more than half of the state of California" according to California Judge Wanger. (12/15/10, para. 6).
- Two GOP congressmen begged legislators to turn the water back on in California (9/22/09), but Senator Feinstein likened giving water back to suffering farmers to the US being attacked at Pearl Harbor.
12/30/10, "California’s Central Valley: Zimbabwe West?," Hot Air, Ed Morrissey
"Until recently, California’s Central Valley was one of the nation’s most productive agricultural regions. Not only did it feed itself, the state of California, and the entire country, it also produced exports to other nations. That kind of enterprise employed a lot of people in Central California, from farm hands to wholesalers, and created a high standard of living.
That continued right up to the moment that the federal government got more concerned over- the Delta smelt, a small, inedible fish,
- than feeding people.
- a government-initiated agricultural disaster on the same order as Zimbabwe today or Ukraine in the 1930s....
It isn’t just Fresno, although it appears to have taken the worst of the crisis. Besides Fresno, four other Central Valley cities got listed in the bottom ten of MarketWatch’s 2010 survey on the worst places to do business in the US. Fresno came in dead last at 102 on the list.
The collapse has another element to it for Californians as well. The state has a huge budget shortfall, currently estimated around $26 billion, and
- cannot afford to expand safety-net programs to help the Central Valley.
One reason the budget hole is so large is because of the lack of revenue from normally-robust agricultural production in that region. Instead of being a net revenue producer, the Central Valley threatens to become a sinkhole of welfare spending that
- will and an economy that would normally rank among the top 10 in the world if considered as a nation unto itself.
This is entirely the result of federal government intervention in agriculture, which might be understandable if it was intended to help agriculture. Instead,
- it comes as a hostile act to both the people of the region
- and Americans as a whole.
Thanks to the collapse of the Central Valley, food prices will increase as we have to import more from countries with much less strict" hygiene and safety standards. "The starvation that has begun...is a national embarrassment, and a moral outrage."...
- Reference: 11/19/2009, "Congressional Water Report- KMPH Fox 26 Central San Joaquin Valley News Source, by Rich Rodriguez
- Reference: 9/22/09, "Senate rejects measure to turn California water on," Washington Times, Amanda Carter
- Reference: 10/9/09, "Environmental lawsuits rake in billions for lawyers," by Jake Putnam
- 12/15/10, "Judge says Delta pumping rules, meant to protect fish, are too restrictive," Contra Costa Times by Mike Taugher
12/14/10, "Doug Obegi a staff attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council who worked on the case...
predicted changes ordered by Wanger would not allow state and federal water projects to return to the record-breaking pumping levels they reached from 2000 to 2007.
- It is possible, Obegi said, that the rewrite might even result in
- tighter restrictions."...
- (We got rid of Mike Castle. One down. ed.)
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