Jerry’s Folly: Turning California Brown to Appease the Greens

Jerry Brown at Sierra Snow Pack (Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press)
Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press

Instead of building dams, reservoirs and fighting to preserve every drop of water he can for Californians, Jerry Brown has chosen to waste his political capital on a train that no one wants, which California can’t afford–and he’s stealing people’s land and closing down businesses in order to do it. And now, finally in his fifth year as governor, he finally decides to act on the drought—and, in quintessential Jerry Brown style, he blames those who have nothing to do with creating the crisis and threatens to penalize them if they don’t comply.

Remind you of how he dealt with Sacramento’s addiction to overspending?  Right—he blamed us, raised our taxes and threatened to cut our kids’ favorite programs in our schools if we didn’t comply and vote to raise our own taxes again.

In case you missed the news, Gov. Jerry Brown has decided that in spite of his unwillingness to act, you are the problem, so he’s declared a state of emergency in order to grant government even more sweeping control over your life.

Never forget the mantra of the guru of leftists like Brown, or Rahm Emanuel, in the Saul Alinksy tradition: never let a good crisis go to waste, and if you don’t have one, create one.

So in response to Jerry Brown’s massive mismanagement of our most precious natural resource—water—the governor has ordered you to conserve 25% or there will be hell to pay.  Mandatory conservation or you will face fines or even have your water cut off.

Not dams, not water storage, not desalinization and God forbid, not cutting off those damned fish, who require us to flush millions of acre feet out to sea.  It’s you who needs to change.

Jerry Brown wants to turn California brown again.

No more green lawns, no more long showers, heck–you better not even brush your teeth or flush the toilet but once a week, just to be safe.  The government wants you to cut your water usage and presumably your water bill by 1/4.

Funny how the politicians couldn’t cut their spending by 10%, let alone 25%, but they demand you do what they could not.

Even though you are paying for the water and may not use much water to begin with—Jerry woke up this morning, realized there was a crisis, and leapt into action.  He’s decided it’s all your fault.

And now that he’s allowed it to get this bad, he knows that everyone will tacitly accept more government involvement in their lives. Right on schedule, the government is only too happy to expand it’s reach in your life, which will now include timing your showers.

What’s Jerry gonna do?  Put a video camera in our bathrooms and spy on us like the NSA ,or some pimple-faced kid in an 80’s adolescent-angst movie?

If you’re not out in 5 minutes, are the “water police” going to break down your shower door, turn off your shower and drag you in for questioning?

Why such drastic action after doing nothing to fight the enviro-fascists at EPA? Why didn’t he petition President Obama to loosen the Endangered Species Act rules so that he could stave off the environmental devastation caused by farmers forced to siphon off the groundwater in order to survive?

If you look at what the governor of the most powerful agricultural state in the union has done to protect that critical industry, the answer is simple.

Nothing.

Sure, he signed a water bond, but he hasn’t used his considerable clout to do anything meaningful.  Instead of fast-tracking the construction of critically-needed dams, and immediately diverting excess water from running off to the ocean and using it to fill up our lakes and reservoirs for storage, he’s done nothing in his five years despite the fact that Democrats have had absolute control over every aspect of state government for all that time.

Under the environmentalists’ thumb, Brown’s been content to allow our rivers to run at full flow to the ocean so that fish can enjoy themselves while farmers are dying–wasting enough water every year to irrigate millions of acres of now decimated farmland, and provide enough water for millions of urban households.

In short, he’s pretended to do something–while actually making matters worse.

In August of 2014, he signed a bill granting government unprecedented control over the groundwater on your private property.  Two weeks later, he signed the water bond so that your children and your children’s children can pay billions upon billions for about $2.7 billion worth of water storage.  What happened to the rest of the money?  Well, about $4.4 billion went to payoffs for the environmental extremists and the politicians who created this crisis.

You’d think if the crisis was as bad as Jerry Brown makes it out to be, he’d have acted long before now.  Instead, he wants all of us to pay for his failure to act.

You might remember that when the water bond was first proposed, I was the lone “no” vote.  Later, when it came back for a 2nd vote, Brown scrambled to get a Democrat–Wes Chesboro–to join me in opposing the pork-ridden, too-little, too late-excuse-for-a-water infrastructure-bond. He did that to prevent me from writing the opposing argument in the ballot pamphlet delivered to every voter in the state. Instead of my hard-hitting critique, Brown succeeded in getting someone farther left than himself to make a weak, ineffectual appeal.

All this adds up to one conclusion. The failure to act by the most powerful governor in the most significant agricultural in the world, was not an oversight–it was intentional.

By declaring a state of emergency, the governor can take what he’s described as “unprecedented” action. Mandatory rationing is just the beginning.

Mark my words. Rather than canceling or putting the High-Speed Rail project on hold—which any rational person would do if this crisis were as bad as he states—and harness the energy of some of the most talented and gifted people in the world to do what Californians do best– build what we need, dams, conveyance, desalinization plants, faster, better and cheaper than anyone else could even dream–Governor Jerry Brown has perpetuated a natural drought into a man-made disaster.

Someday this will come to be known as Jerry’s Folly, but for now, it falls to each of us to pressure the government to do what it is supposed to do—to build infrastructure and roads—and butt out of our showers, keep off our lawns and for the love of Pete, keep its hands out of our wallets.

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