The complete inability to manage obvious problems: California Drought Edition

@ EmilianoZ

Pipelines from Oregon?
You don’t know Oregonian’s; that’s not going to happen. As far back as I can remember (more than 40 years), California has been trying to get Oregon’s water and its been fiercely resisted.
It’s akin to the Canadian’s fear of a water grab by America.
Your assertion that California has no water problem is tacitly absurd, unless yours is irony or sarcasm (which doesn’t often work well on the i-net).

Until a new generation comes of political age? Sorry, but exactly why would we expect that generation to be any better than the ones preceding it?

Despite the fact that we Gen-X’ers are on average worse off economically than the Baby Boomers, for example, the first members of our generation to achieve national political notoriety are if anything worse on average than those who preceded them. The steady political trajectory of the U.S. has been downward for the past 35 years (almost two full generations), and I see no evidence whatsoever that a generation RAISED expecting the instant gratification that comes with having a smartphone shall be our salvation.

The high price of water would have provided the great state of California with a powerful incentive to find a solution

That’s a lot of the problem. Californians have spent years building dams and other buffers, so that the populated areas still have yet to viscerally realize that there’s a problem. Water is still cheap. In Los Angeles, we keep hearing about a drought, and if we travel outside the city we can see the evidence, but back home the lawns are still green and the taps still run, at the same low, low price.

Last year, I visited the Getty Villa, a recreation of a Roman country home, with a large fountain and reflecting pool that’s central to the complex. It’s the only place in town where I’ve seen large water fixtures turned off and drained due to the drought.

I live in a middle income condo complex that’s built around fake streams and ponds, with mechanically circulated water, populated with koi and turtles. It’s also habitat to visiting ducks and egrets. As I type this, I’m listening to the pleasant white noise of water rushing over rocks, all circulated by pumps. This is all going on in California semi-desert. Everyone is aware there’s a drought, or so we’re told, but we have yet to see the bill for it.

There was a recent hand-wringing op-ed in the LA Times, warning us that we have about a year of water left. And so from time to time, the warnings have been sounding.

A lot of it is the fact that, even in the best of times, water is a complex issue in the west, with complex agreements, decades of legal precedents, and competing political entities to deal with – a real Gordian knot.

The public will swing around as rationing or market-pricing is finally instituted to deal with the problem. For now, it’s only the growers, and the small towns in the Central Valley who are feeling the pain, and that’s just not enough to overcome the political inertia to deal with a difficult problem.

I’ve been telling others, that I fully expect a Republican politician, with roots in a conservative stronghold, the Central Valley, who come forward and champion desalinization. As much as I enjoy living in a blue state, where GOP craziness is relatively marginalized, the hour is coming for this kind of upset to occur.

@alyosha, you obviously do not live in San Diego. In the last five years my water bill, with zero outdoor use since I live in a condo, has gone from $30 per month to $110+ per month. The association’s water bill, despite removing much of our turf and planting drought tolerant plants, has gone from $1300 per month to over $5000 per month.

San Diego was late to the rationing, but does have rationing now. I will confess the rationing is less restrictive that I think it should be, but the campaign by the city to restrict water use is very noisy.

Regarding the question of whether or not the next generation of leaders will be any better. Well, we can guarantee that they won’t be better if we don’t make sure the ideas for better solutions are around.

Milton Friedman and the neo-liberal operatives were very much correct: when a crisis hits, you can only prevail if you already have in place your ideas for the solution. Much to our horror, we have seen that this neo-liberal “shock doctrine” does, in fact, work.

Which is why Ian’s attempts to reformulate a moral, humanistic philosophy for political economy is so important.

My approach, of course, has been different: point to the founders of the American republic and emphasize those aspects of their philosophy for political economy we no longer follow, and, indeed, barely even tolerate today. For example, it was generally accepted through most of the first century of USA’s national existence that gross inequality of wealth and income was a danger to the experiment in self-government.

One reason I favor my approach is that, in the end, who you have to convince, above all, are the military and the police: a revolution only succeeds when the people in charge of suppressing dissent begin to refuse to do so. And I simply do not believe that you are going to convince American police and military that Marx or Mao or whoever is the answer. On the other hand, they just might be convinced that the original ideas of the American experiment in self-government have been trampled on and subverted by TPTB – including most especially the “vast right wing conspiracy” which has been funded and built up by the wealthy since their opposition to FDR and the New Deal.

A second reason I favor my approach is that the historical record is very clear that socialism, Marxism, communism, and so on DO NOT WORK. It pains and troubles me greatly to see, in reaction to Obama’s failure to deal with Wall Street since the crash of 2007-2008, a resurgence on the left of these failed ideologies. My guru here is Lawrence Goodwyn, the author of what is far and away the best history of the populist movement. What makes it the best? Goodwyn fully understood the Greenbacker critique of the U.S. financial and monetary systems that powered the extraordinary political success of the populists in the 1880s through 1910s. In a speech Goodwyn gave in December 1989, at a special event in St. Louis on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the populist People’s Party “Sub-Treasury Plan” for financial reform, Democratic Money: A Populist Perspective, after dissecting how TPTB have left no room for serious discussion of a truly democratic system of money, credit and exchange, Goodwyn observed:

There is another society in our time — what we call “the East,” what we sometimes call “actually existing socialism.” For about 40 years, since Stalin imposed this system on whole populations, an idea floated around in people’s heads over there, in “the East.” The idea was, “We will try to create some space where we can talk to each other and affect the world we live in. To do that, we’re going to have to combat the leading role of the Party. We’re going to have to find some way to get around the fact that all the social space in society is occupied by the Party.”

This idea would float around kitchen tables on the Baltic coast in the 1950s and 1960s. And workers in shipyards would say to each other, “We have got to create a trade union independent of the Party.” Now that is an unsanctioned idea. And they knew it was frightening even to say it out loud; you’d only say it around the kitchen table, around carefully selected brethren and sistren. And the idea would go away, because it was unsanctioned. But then there would be another horrible accident in the shipyard, another insane adjustment of work routines, and the idea’d come back, simply because it was the only idea that made any sense. “Work organized by the Party is insane, Poland is insane, our social life is insane. We’ve got to have a union free of the Party.”

Over 35 years of self-activity the world has not known about — any more than the world knew very much about how the Farmers’ Alliance organized Populism — they found out how to do it. And in 1980 they did it. There’s a certain logic in history every now and then. The single most experienced organizer in the shipyard in Gdansk, Poland, who spent 12 years organizing and brooding about a union free of the Party, who had gone to jail scores of times in the decade — learning each time a little bit more about how power worked in his society — the one single most credentialed worker with other workers based on his own activity, is Lech Walesa. There is every now and then a certain justification in history.

Because that movement existed, even though it was repressed by the government after 15 months, it sent a wave of hope across Eastern Europe. What Solidarnosc combatted, by its simple existence, was mass resignation. This resignation was the dominant political reality in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Poland until the shipyard workers of Gdansk became the nucleus of a mass movement, one of those rare moments in human history when people get back in touch with their own subjectivity. That is to say, they don’t lie in public. They say what they mean. And they try hard to say it clearly. They’re not trying to make a speech, they’re not trying to be an orator. They’re trying to be clear, like two people in a marriage struggling not to be political with each other but to be honest. One of those rare democratic moments when reality is projected.

Because Solidarity stayed alive during the years of martial law, and because a man named Brezhnev who put down Solidarity passed off the stage of history and another man named Gorbachev who would not put down Solidarity came on the stage of history, the leading role of the Party this very week is going into the dustbin of history all over Eastern Europe.

You especially need to read the speech if you are wondering what the Greenbacker critique is, the truly “American” response to concentrated economic and financial power. But the important thing for me is that after Goodwyn gave us an incredible educational tool in his history of USA populism, he then turned his attention to the Communist bloc of Central and Eastern Europe, and showed us that the same problems arose in both settings, and the same populist solutions prevailed, in Breaking the Barrier: The Rise of Solidarity in Poland.

Well, to be accurate, let’s modify that to “almost prevailed.” In the USA, the populist insurgency actually elected to office dozens of populists to the Congress, including a handful of Senators, and hundreds of state legislatures, and a few governors as well. Out of that we got the first regulations on railroads, on food production, on pharmaceuticals, the only state bank in USA (North Dakota), state and federal crop insurance, and other things. Even the Federal Reserve system was made possible by the populist insurgency, though it was not really their design. They wanted something very different, but it was the populist insurgency which generated the general clamor for reform of the financial and monetary systems after the panics of 1901 and 1907.

Instead of what they wanted, the populists got the monstrous Federal Reserve – even further removed from democratic control under the rubric of preserving the independence of the central bankers – because the populists’ core Greenbacker critique had been fatally devastated by their 1896 compromise with William Jennings Bryan’s position on silver coinage. This destruction of the populist movement during the 1896 campaign, by the way, is one of the most important case studies we should learn, and Goodwyn’s is really the only good history of it I know of.

The last great surge of populist success was the Non-Partisan League in North Dakota in the years just before World War One. Then, the ideologically weakened populist movement was pretty much eradicated by the anti-German hysteria deliberately whipped up during the war. Chris Hedges provides the history in the opening chapters of his book, Death of the Liberal Class.

But for me, the most important is the third reason. The socialists and communists who survived in USA, I believe, allowed to survive, because they were funded and controlled by what used to be called The Eastern Liberal Establishment. This is a point that many on the left get hysterical about. But the facts are detailed in Caroll Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time. And if you don’t want to take the time to wade through that massive tome, just take a look at Corliss Lamont, the major funder of American socialism in the 1960s, note who his father was, and don’t shy from doing the math of putting two and two together.

What about the European revolutions which overthrew the socialist states in the 1980s? The great promise and hope there was crushed by the adoption of Western neo-liberal capitalism. Which, not surprisingly, since it is funded and promoted by a bunch of rich pricks, ended up, when applied to Russia, Hungary, Romania, etc., creating a new oligarchy of rich pricks. And this should be an abject lesson for the left of the point I am making: when a crisis hits, you can only prevail if you already have in place your ideas for the solution. The crisis hit in Central and Eastern Europe, and the only ideas ready for use were those of Milton Friedman and the other amoral pigs of the Chicago School. There should be no wonder or shock at the results.

OK, socialism and communism may not be any better than capitalism in preventing the rise of a repressive, authoritarian political regime. But what about the “tool kit” of Marxist class analysis. Isn’t that valid, and even useful? Well, since you ask, I’ll answer: No. And I’ll even explain why.

Marx believed that classes were defined by income and ownership. While he engaged in some sociological speculation about how people change as incomes rise, he was mainly concerned with how the rich exploit the poor. The problem is, the really important class division in society is between producers and predators – the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen termed it – and there are a lot of producers that end up being included and condemned in Marx’s capitalist or owner class.

The implications are pretty damn important. Lenin’s and Stalin’s determination to annihilate the krulaks in Russia was one result. But the krulaks were the backbone of agricultural production: they were the producers. Oppressing and dispossessing the agricultural producers resulted inevitably in a catastrophic collapse of agricultural production. So you get the famines of the 1920s and 1930s, which, it should be noted, only made it easier for Western elites to portray the the Bolsheviks in the worst possible ways.

Marxist class analysis also is not much help when it comes to climate change, because all of Marx’s classes use energy. Just look at the sources of carbon in rich versus poor countries. What spews more carbon per economic activity: heating a home and cooking meals in a rich, Western country using electricity or even natural gas from the grid. or cutting down trees and burning them in a poor country?

We need $100 trillion in investments over the next two decades to entirely replace fossil fuels. Of what use is Marxist analysis in getting that done? But Veblen’s producer / predator analysis, that the major struggle in modern economies is the one between industry and business, is immensely valuable. Capitalists who want to build the 1.7 billion home solar power systems we need? Good – even if they are still capitalists. But, capitalists who want to stymie the move to renewables, like the Koch brothers, in order to continue profiting from fossil fuels? Or capitalists who want to identify and buy up emerging companies in renewables and add them to their already immense corporate empires, such as General Electric, and cartelize the industry? Bad.

Now, there are a lot of people on the left who try to avoid the opprobrium of an open embrace of socialism or communism, most often by arguing that the American republic was intended, from its very beginning, to be anti-democratic and tilted in favor of the owners of property. This, of course, is the analysis of Charles Beard in his Economic Interpretation of the Constitution. Since I’m already jabbing at many leftist sacred cows, I might as well jab at this one.

I wonder if these people have actually read Beard. In Beard’s Interpretation, there were two basic interest groups: “…the merchants, money lenders, security holders, manufacturers, shippers, capitalists, and financiers and their professional associates” comprised one group. The other was “… the non-slave-holding farmers and the debtors.” This grouping commits the very same error Marx does: not distinguishing adequately, as Veblen does, between producers and predators. It is simply too crippling a mistake to lump money lenders, security holders, and financiers in with manufacturers. I will also note here that Beard’s analysis of Alexander Hamilton is completely at odds with the way these people portray Hamilton.

And I’m absolutely certain those people who champion Beard’s analysis have never read Beard’s later work, The Economic Basis of Politics, which Beard himself considered more important because it addressed the great misconceptions that had arisen concerning his Economic Interpretation of the Constitution. To quote from the introduction to a 2002 republication of The Economic Basis of Politics, by Clyde Barrow:

…Beard (1945, 62) concludes that “modern equalitarian democracy, which reckons all heads as equal and alike, cuts sharply athwart the philosophy and practice of the past centuries.” These themes are
woven together in Beard’s claim that the central problem of contemporary political theory, as well as the motor of contemporary political development, is the contradiction between the ideals and institutions of political democracy and the reality of economic inequality (i.e., classes)…. The fact that neither capitalism nor communism had solved the problem of class conflict led Beard to the “grand conclusion” that it was Madison’s economic interpretation of history rather than Marx’s, that had withstood the greatest test of modern political history. Madison was correct to the extent that he identifies the problem of regulating class struggle, rather than eliminating it, as the central problem of political statesmanship and constitutional development, regardless of the mode of production or any particular distribution of wealth. There is no end to class struggle and, therefore, no end of history (or politics)….

Screw you, Francis Fukuyama, and your neo-liberal sugar-daddies.

As I argued a few days ago, the only power we have is the power of ideas. If you want the next generation to be better, give them better ideas.

If Sao Paulo is any indication, then things are looking bleak for California, short of stealing all the water west of the Mississippi and north of Seattle.

Sao Paulo has average 57 inches annual rainfall, compared to LA’s 12 inches. But human activity, like deforestation and failure to ration or generally plan for such things, has put them in a crisis ripe for Mad-Max style post-apocalypism.

When I was a Lower East Side squatter, I quickly learned that water was more important than electricity or even heat.

In Sao Paulo, thirsty citizens are wildcatting water wells. Open cisterns (think metal barrels) are breeding Dengue fever. People stink. Hydroelectricity is down because, no water. People are fighting over public tap water and bathing in the rain.

California will request a series of federal disaster declarations for the state. My guess is that they’ll get them. This will mean that the federal government will provide lots of money. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out politically, with Republicans who claim to be small government advocates having to sign on during a presidential election year.

To Tony Wikrent’s interesting, somewhat provocative comment, I would somewhat modify one sentence — I’d change “the historical record is very clear that socialism, Marxism, communism, and so on DO NOT WORK” to “the historical record is very clear that socialism, Marxism, communism, and capitalism DO NOT WORK.” Economic philosophy matters, but I’ve concluded that democracy matters more. However inefficient and benighted voters can act, they don’t vote to starve themselves or have themselves killed or enslaved. So if the Irish had had the vote, they would not have continued to export food for profit while massive numbers of people starved, despite the fact that it was very good capitalism. No need to rehash the issue of needless American deaths because our medical industry is capitalistic rather than that awful European socialism. Capitalism wins the intellectual battle only when it is regarded as a flexible system while other economic philosophies are regarded as the scriptural truth handed down by dead prophets. It’s like saying physics does not work because you can show that Isaac Newton was wrong on quantum mechanics.

From the linked article, 94% of Californians believe the drought is serious. I’m guessing, but I suspect that what a lot of people are feeling right now is stunned, and maybe hopeless. I think this is part of the problem. Some people don’t care, but that is always true, and given the environmental changes taking place on our planet, that pose is becoming increasingly insane and even uncool. There comes a point, inevitably, when the disconnect between, “everything is fine” and “we have to do something to survive”, becomes too much to handle. And then big changes (good ones, if we want) can happen. (X)

I took the first comment to be sarcastic. Didn’t everyone see it?

@Tony, I think we’re more in agreement than not. The point of the last two sentences in my comment above is that in general discussions, “capitalism” gets applied to a wide range of very different situations while “socialism” is applied to killing kulaks by the thousands. I think the use of this language acts to support the neoliberal propaganda point that “there is no alternative”.

What type or form of capitalism am I referring to? I don’t know the Linnaean taxonomy of capitalisms. I just use the term to refer to systems in which the state insures that power and privilege adheres to ownership of property rather than alternatives such as hereditary title or service to the state or people, and where accumulation of more property is a legitimate and privileged goal — i.e., profits over people, privatization of the commons, and the like.

In these terms, I see the failure to respond to the California drought situation as a problem of capitalism — which private property owners should give up their expectations of profit for the common good? How much should those who will benefit only indirectly from restrictions on business (agriculture, real estate, and the like) be required to provide subsidies so that government can insure that the property of the current well-to-do retains its value?

nihil obstet – indeed. We agree to agree!

It seems apparent to me that we’ve (and not recently) entered the Age of Resources.
Ukraine, Syria, S.E. Asia, Africa, and Russia itself, represent both resources and distractions from resource grabs.
Politics and political ideologies are mere distractions to divert attention from resource grabs. Either make outrageous trade treaties with us, or we’ll just take what “you” have; period. Looking back a decade and it’s obvious what all the shooting is about. It’s the Kansas City Shuffle: You look there and I go here; and there is always a body(s).
The U.S., Canada, England, and the EU couldn’t care less about their citizens; citizens are a useless expense and a total waste of resources. So, take away healthcare, pensions, rights, any form of social insurance and be done with them. Just make sure the citizen is highly taxed as well; the rest takes care of itself. Oh yes; and shoot pesky non-whites with impunity.