As I listened to California Governor, Jerry Brown on a Sunday morning talk show this past weekend, he confirmed that the ongoing water “crisis” has nothing to do with water, and everything to do with control.
Brown, who took unprecedented emergency action, gave viewers a glimpse of the massive government intrusion that’s coming.
“It’s requiring action and changes in behavior from the Oregon border all the way to the Mexican border,” Brown said of his mandate. “It affects lawns. It affects people’s–how long they stay in the shower, how businesses use water.”
With Brown, there’s always a method to his madness. All you have to do is listen to him.
“I can tell you, from California, climate change is not a hoax,” he said last Sunday on ABC’s This Week.“We’re dealing with it, and it’s damn serious.”
He’s laying the case for permanent government control over parts of our lives that for generations we considered private–all in the name of “global warming” or “climate change” or “unprecedented emergency” or whatever name they’ve given it this week.
If you’ve been paying attention to Governor Brown’s record, this isn’t the first industry that he’s decimated in the name of the environment.
First he empowered the California Air Resources Board (CARB) to wipe the small, independent trucker off the map in the name of clean air and ending Global Warming.
Turns out that the evidence about the level of diesel particulates that affect human health was dubious, and then completely disproven, but the regulations were passed and are now in effect regardles. Brown’s appointee, Chairman Mary Nichols, wasn’t going to let facts get in the way of a “good government” takeover.
Diesel trucks that in every way were compliant with every regulation, suddenly were out of compliance and required replacement. Big companies aggressively sought and won all the government grant money designed to ease the cost of upgrading from CARB. Small operators went under, with trucks that became unsellable in a market destroyed by Brown’s administration.
Absent a strong pool of competitors, transit prices have risen–affecting the cost of virtually every product we buy.
Shortly after bringing the truckers under control, CARB went after farmers, and then food processors, and then every industry that requires mass quantities of energy. It pulled them into the cap-and-trade web spun by AB 32 (signed into law by a GOP establishment governor named Arnold). All cap-and-trade did was drive businesses out of California and give the government an excuse to confiscate capital from productive businesses so that it could be used to fund the pet projects of politicians, most notably Jerry Brown’s high-speed rail boondoggle.
And here he goes again.
This time it’s the farmers who’ve lost the only reliable source of water–the state water project–and have taken to digging deeper and deeper wells, which has collapsed the water table and created an underground desert where aquifers once flowed. Some experts warn that the groundwater table, once lost will never recover and fully recharge.
Governor Jerry Brown is obsessed with his legacy, but the true legacy of Jerry Brown and his merry band of environmentalists will be derailing the state water project that Brown’s father, Governor Pat Brown championed—not building a train to nowhere—so that at the very moment the state experienced a severe drought, he could ride in and seize control.
After all, once the Hetch Hetchy watershed was complete, San Francisco and the Silicon Valley had all the water they could import to sustain their “green lifestyle.” Now, Jerry’s green dream has finally come to fruition.
In the name of global cooling—a hoax the radical Jerry Brown was selling as governor in the 1970’s (who could forget “The Next Ice Age” caption on the cover of Newsweek?)—which then became “global warming” and now, the catch-all, “climate change,” Governor Brown has grabbed hold of the “Holy Grail” of all enviro-extremists: seizing control over private property.
For decades, the eco-tryants have been trying to drive individuals off private property in rural areas, by using secret government slush funds that are laundered through innocuous-sounding, quasi-government programs to buy up farmland from desperate farmers crushed by an avalanche of government regulation, interference and of course, drought. The farmers have no idea the buyers are merely a front for a government-sponsored scorched-earth strategy to drive them off the farm and seize the “water rights,” to be sold to municipalities in the urbanized south.
When you control the water, you control the people—unless of course they own their own private property. Then they can tap the groundwater, and control their own destiny.
Buying the farmland was taking too long, even with the help of an unlikely ally—i.e. massive pools of Wall Street capital in a government-corporate cabal. So in August of last year, Gov. Brown signed a bill to grant the state control to regulate groundwater—in the event of an “emergency situation”. Ironic that “along came an emergency” so soon after the government had the green light to take over the most precious resource to a private property owner—groundwater.
It won’t be long before the government, in the name of an “unprecedented water emergency,” will be installing water meters on wellheads on private property, all the while humming that Rolling Stones classic, “Under My Thumb”.
It’s clear that Brown and his ilk don’t want to build out the infrastructure necessary to support the 50 million people who will call California home in a few short decades. They want everyone to be forced to live in a city in cramped stack-and-pack housing; ride bicycles, buses or a trains to work; and have “smart meters” so the government can control their water and energy uses with punitive fines. That’s SB 375 in a nutshell.
Why did Jerry Brown oppose rather than champion dam construction when it was needed most?
If Brown was such a great leader, why is Israel—not California—the global leader on desalinization technology?
How ironic that as the Sacramento Marxist Progressives—parading as Democrats—unveiled a 10-bill package that will guarantee an increase in the steady stream of millions of illegals per decade into California, they are still doing nothing to get the water flowing to meet the water needs of agriculture, which must feed the fastest-growing segment of the urban population—i.e. illegal immigrants.
If Brown had been building dams rather than stopping them in the name of a damned fish; if he’d used his political capital to cancel the high-speed rail and divert the money to water storage, conveyance and developing cheaper, leaner and meaner ways to desalt the ocean; and if he had agreed to cut the flow of illegal aliens by 25% by actually enforcing our immigration laws, rather than undermining them and creating “California-only” exceptions to every immigration law he doesn’t like; then more Californians would likely abide his demand for shorter showers, and be willing to make those and other sacrifices.
Natural disasters all have a season. Earthquakes are over in seconds or minutes, hurricanes in hours or days, droughts in months or years. The key is surviving them and making do, always planning to better weather the next.
But when the threat is government control, there is no natural end; once formed, a new government agency is the closest thing to eternal life on earth.
If more government is the solution to our problems in California—and Jerry Brown clearly thinks so—no amount of rainfall can fix that. Only a political tsunami, only a political uprising, a political revolution can right that wrong.
Let’s pray that both start in 2016.
Former Assemblyman Tim Donnelly is the host of TimDonnellyShow.com.
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