Fish or Families? The Congress Created Dust bowl….that was the question and the resulting controversy last year in California’s breadbasket. California’s Central Valley had their water forcibly cut off last year by courts and politicians deaf to the needs of citizens and farmers. Now mysteriously, two votes switch on Obama’s healthcare plan and miraculously, water flows in the ravaged desert.
The U.S. Department of Interior announced yesterday that it is increasing water allocations for the Central Valley of California, a region that depends on these water allocations to support local agriculture and jobs. The region has recently been starved for water and as a result unemployment has soared. Not surprisingly, Cardoza and Costa had a hand in the announcement:
With farmers fleeing the state, going bankrupt and with the unemployment rate in farming communities as high as 41 %, I have one question. If this was possible, why did the dems hold out earlier?
Last year when people were suffering and losing their jobs, rallies were held, letters were written, congressmen called…. EVERY effort was made to help those farmers, and every door closed firmly in their faces.
Now I’m grateful to see water finally flowing to the farmers, but honestly, I have to ask— What has changed? Why is water being made available now? Why this news after more than a year of suffering? Why this announcement now, within minutes of two key democrats switching their votes on healthcare? Was corruption the key?
Is democracy the price for water?
–Beetle Blogger
Sean Hannity’s “Fish or Families?” Update: The Valley Hope Forgot
No Water=No Jobs: March on Sacramento
July 1— Rally For Water! Stop the Congress Created Dust Bowl
California Courts Feeding Farmers to the Fish!
Dead and Dying–California’s Central Valley Dust Bowl
Those who want to know the latest outrage on the Central Valley water front, check this story from the American Spectator:
Emptying Reservoirs in the Middle of a Drought
By Max Schulz
ANYONE DOUBTING THAT OUR nation’s environmental and economic policies can get seriously out of whack from time to time need only look to the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. Located in California’s Central Valley, between the state’s capital city and Stockton, it is where the American, Mokelumne, Cosumnes, and Calaveras Rivers flow into the larger Sacramento and San Joaquin. It is also where the saddest agricultural saga since the Depression-era Dust Bowl is now playing, as the waters from those rivers flow beneath San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge and out to sea. As they flow unimpeded to the Pacific, those waters are also washing out to sea the livelihoods of tens of thousands of farm workers and agricultural business owners. It is an economic as well as human tragedy.
thisismarriage said,
March 18, 2010 at 8:50 pm
Clearly this wasn’t so much about saving the Delta Smelt and more about political corruption.