How taxpayers got tricked into making farmers-like Chevron-richer

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"The roster of arowers who (Part one of a series)

Water, air, and the soil in which we grow our food are resources that support all the species of the earth, and all their generations throughout time. Without them, there can be no life. So we tend to view these resources as our birthright, with access deniable to no one.

Yet under the current social order, these resources are treated as commoditieswhich one privileged class of people control and profit from. And if they find it "cost-effective" to dispose of waste in such a way that the water, air, or soil is polluted for everyone else, they are "free" to do so.

This is one of a series of articles I am writing, which will appear in Socialist Action during the next few months. Throughout the series, I will refer to the water, air, and soil collectively as the environment.

And the social order we live under, which adjudicates the environment in the way I just described, I will refer to as capitalism. In a capitalist society, everything is produced and managed, not to satisfy human needs, but in order to turn a profit for the few who are in power.

I hope to demonstrate three things in this series:

1) It is because of the capitalist system that even our environmental birthrights— water, air, and soil-are turned into commodities to be sold back to us at a profit.

2) It is because of the logic of capitalism that the environment has become so polluted; therefore, none of the solutions proposed within the context of capitalism will accomplish much.

3) The environment can only be cleaned up when society comes under the control of those of us who work for a living and do not have an investment in capitalism. I will be referring to those who work for a living, the majority of people, as the working class.

Water for Sale

Let's begin by looking at an example of how the environment has been appropriated under capitalism— the case of water usage in California.

California has an economy richer than all but five nations in the world. It is dominated by a $15 billion agriculture industry. This industry was built on two things: First, the ability to move water from where it is (in the mountains and rivers) to where it isn't (in the Central Valley and southern deserts). And second, on the ability to accomplish these gargantuan feats at the expense of taxpayers.

Ten of California's reservoirs store enough water to supply drinking water to all of the state's inhabitants. What do you suppose the other 1190 reservoirs and dams are for? Agriculture uses 85 percent of all the water consumed in the state.

In order to create wealth from agriculture for the growers, two huge water projects were developed by the capitalists and paid for by the working class through taxes. Both created huge diversions of water from its natural course, threatening the ecology of the San Francisco Bay and delta. This bay/delta is an area that functions as a wildlife habitat for crabs, clams, fish, birds, and other aquatic life. It is also a drinking water source in its own right.

The first of the water diversion projects was the Central Valley Project. It was passed by the state legislature in 1933, and then administered by the Bureau of Reclamation. This project enabled dams and reservoirs to be built using public funds, and the water to be distributed to growers.

They passed a few restrictions to make it look like it would benefit the small farmer. For example, growers had to live on the land and could not own more than 320 acres per married couple. However, the LOOKS LIKE A GOOD HARVEST AFTER ALL...

4921153 roster of growers benefited from the to the state treasury.

What do you suppose he planned to do with the money—give it to the public schools? Of course not. Brown succeeded in getting the state to allot the tidelands oil money for the state water project. This amounted to an annual interest-free loan of $25 million, repayable "whenever." It was an open-ended deal that would continue as long as the oil was being extracted.

Brown himself later admitted that "it was another subsidy to the big farmers." But the "big farmers" who benefited from the water subsidy were the same oil companies who had speculative land holdings in southern California, worth nothing unless they were irrigated.

To quote Marc Reisner again, "In exchange for a modest extraction taxquickly offset by the billions they would make on the easily accessible oil-they would have their barren, worthless acreages in the San Joaquin Valley turned opalescent green. And they would get the growth, and the cars, and the freeways, that would increase the demand for and the cost of the oil!" (Not to mention profits.)

Who are these "good ole farmboys"?

I mentioned earlier that the beneficiaries of the Central Valley Water Project were corporate growers. The same holds true for the state water project. The California Institute for Rural Studies reported that in Kern County, although half of the farms receiving project water had small holdings of 160 acres or less, two-thirds of all the acreage irrigated by the project was owned by only eight companies. Guess who they were?

The largest "farmer" was Chevron USA,