George M. Johnson (84:35)
Because this is all we do. You got all this other stuff you got to take care of. We go, only take care of the water. Look, we'll give you $30 million for it. That's free money. And you ain't got to worry about it. All you got to do when people call complaining about their water is just say, please hold and transfer to. To us. You ain't got nothing to worry about. And the city say, okay, that sounds good. Now are you going? You gonna change your prices? It's like, why would we change our prices? We don't need to change our price. Matter of fact, we could probably charge less because we ain't got the same things y'all got. Well, at least for the first few years. Kind of like the phone bill when they like, oh, you sign up for this much money a month for the first three months or your cable for the first two years, and then, then one day your cable bill come in and it's just psycho. And you like, I Don't know why the hell this cost so much more. And they're like, oh yeah, the contract was for this long. And then after that it went back to regular price. That's essentially what's happening. That's why I was like, if your water bill go crazy, who you going to call? Like what you going to say? Like they could just be like, yeah, it just costs more now. So for the city, you, the city is like, look, it's free money. We could put this money into other stuff we've been trying to work on and y'all going to get a better situation. And again, no one looks at the logo on their bill. So the utilities industries, right. A few years ago, I think in 2016 got this law passed that made cities want to sell it. It's called the fair market value laws. One example is in Pennsylvania was Act 12, which was in 2016. And the concern is cities feel like they can't keep up with dun dun dun environmental laws and keep up with city growth. Cities are growing so fast, so many people are moving in. We're destroying the earth at a particular exponential rate and the government wants us to not destroy the planet. Ho hum. So I got all these laws, I gotta. We just, yeah, we just don't have the money for it. We just don't have the money for it. Who have the time? So when you're evaluating how much this utility would be worth, you can include because of Act 12 in Pennsylvania, the median income, the expected repairs and future revenue, which means it makes that water worth way much more. Right. And a lot of times when you selling this, when you selling this, this utility, the price tag, what these people be paying you be six times the city's budget. So think about this. I just trying to make this real for you. Let's just say somebody comes in and says I'll buy your car. You say word for how much? And they say I tell you what, I'll pay you your year's salary for this car. The fam you gonna add, I add another car in there for that. You know what I'm saying? Hey, you know, throwing, throwing another six months worth of salary. I'll make you some dinner. Like it's, it's kind of a no brainer. You like you our entire year's budget just for the water. No brainer. But who pays the company? You, you paying the company. What do I mean by that? The company cuts, cuts the city a check now the company got to make their money back. How they make their money back? Yo bills what is you, like, what is you saying? Of course they gonna make their money back. Now, again, they're incentivized to make that money back as fast as possible, which means they not gonna spend more than they had already spent $30 million to get the thing. But then they'll promise to like, fix their systems. Their promise. Like you, you, you, I, you sold the city, saying I'm gonna be able to spend some time to upgrade and do all this different. They don't ever upgrade nothing because it's kind of a no brainer. This is easy money to them. In Philly, there's this area called the Chester Water Authority that went straight up bankrupt. So like the, the city's water authority just went bankrupt. So they was like, y'all, we gotta sell it. They got offered $410 million. Well, the city did. And the city says, chester Water Authority, you ain't got the right to sell because you are not a company. You are part of the city of Philadelphia. Chester Water Authority is like, my g. I mean, what the hell you want us to do? How does this stuff become legal? Well, like, same way any other stick come legal. They just. You lobby candidates all the time. Time. And the only way to stop this is you got to sign up to some sort of city council newsletter or something to be able to walk up in there and protest the shit. Nigga, good luck. Now, let's talk about specifically California. All right, I bring up specifically California because of all this stuff about the fire hydrants and water issues that we had recently. Remember that the water that waters Los Angeles comes from the north, right? It comes from right up under Sacramento through the California Aqueduct that was put together by this man named Mulholland. So the Mulholland Pass, Mulholland Drive, that was all based on this man that made Los Angeles be possible because he just went up there just like any other colonizer and was like, I buy your water. And they was like, water ain't for sale. He was like, yeah, it is. And went over their heads and bought the water, built a whole. Basically. Like when you was a kid at the beach and you dig a little thing in the sand to make the water go a certain way. That's basically what he did through the middle of California to bring water to Los Angeles. Now, Los Angeles did have one river, was the San Gabriel river that starts in the top of the San Gabriel foothills and comes into what we call the LA river, which is paved, which. There is a movement to unpave that because that would probably help us With a lot of climate issues. But either way, that was an actual river. It was enough to support the native tribes here because it wasn't that many people here, and they had sense enough to not plant plants that need the water that they ain't got. They wasn't trying to build a city in the area that ain't supposed to be a city. Nigga, have you ever been to Las Vegas? Vegas, There should not be a city there. Y'all ever been to the Inland Empire? There should not be that many humans there, according to the Earth, unless you pump water over there. The natives were fine. The indigenous communities figured out how to live in this shit for thousands of years. But, you know, we had to do our thing now, some vocabulary. California got a thing called senior water rights, which means whoever got there first gets the water. Like, basically, it's my land. Dilicted, right? But they only got them rights when it started from the Gold Rush. So they was like, well, who was there first was this white man. Not the people that already lived there, but these white men. So if you happen to have a farm, you know, up near north Fresno, if your family been there longer than somebody else's family, then that water is yours, right? That's senior water rights. And then there's junior water rights, which is like the second person. So whatever water you don't use, they get to use, right? Now, why that is specifically important for California, especially the Central Valley, is because Cali provides everybody's produce. I mean, for the rest of the country, the vast majority of the fruits, vegetables, nuts, and legumes that you eat come from California. We got to have water. It would behoove the rest of America to make sure that Cali got water. Water. So those are water rights. Now, the water that gets pumped down into our fire hydrants. Here's the situation. Like, that had to do a water pressure. Now, you could refer to the block is literally hot episode where I go into detail as to what happened with that. But there was this whole thing about the water being owned by some billionaires. Now, I would love to run with that one, but the fact is that's just not true. It's not that simple. Let me go ahead and fact check that. So the wonderful co, which is who they were talking about, it's Steward and Linda Resnick. They do have a majority stake in a water bank that can store up to 1.5 million acres, right? Which is close to 500 billion gallons of water. But the realness is that's like a tiny fraction of the water capacity of of California. California's groundwater basins combined can hold more than 566 times as much water with a storage capacity of 850 million to 1.3 billion acres of feet across the California department of Water sources. The state's surface resources hold more than 40 million acres on top of that. So. So there's two types of water here. There's surface water and there's groundwater. Groundwater, obviously that's the stuff that you would dig in for. Well, that's a whole other thing. Right now it is true. This family owns brands as like Wonderful Pistachios, Fiji Water, Wonderful Land Halos Wonderful Halos and Palm Wonderful. And that's a. You know, I don't know if you're into pomegranate juice, but if that's your thing. But anyway, let me quote from PolitiFact. The water the Resnicks use gets stored underground initially before the water is delivered to the roots of Resniks, pistachios, almonds, pomegranate orchards. Specifically, it's stored in the Kern Water bank. That is the most valuable water resource in the region and critical to America's fresh food supplies. The water bank, which is. Watch this. The bank itself, a public private partnership with The Resnicks own 57% of its stake is 32 square mile recharge basin, which looks like floodlands from the street that essentially stores again the 1.5 million acre feet of water, 500 billion gallons. The Resnick storage arrangement is very controversial, right? They've been banking on the water by using public and private dollars to corral public resource. Because of their water rights and their waste wealth, they are insulating themselves from this type of drought, which of course, that's what rich do, right? This is what Chaz Miller says, the director of environmental analysis at Pomona College Private Capital has no problem with the drought, while the rest of us are looking at deep social divides. Somebody bought the water, but water isn't the only thing, like I said, that somebody else owes, you know. According to publicpower.org utilities that were sold since 1980 have ranged dramatically in size, although many had a small number of customers at the time of the sale, with the median of fewer than 600 customers. Less than 30% of utilities sold had more than a thousand customers at the time of sale, right? So back then it was a small amount of customers. People, right? Watch this. Only five public power utilities with 10,000 or more customers have sold, right? And four of those five sales occurred were approved since 2015. Now the largest sale of such electric department was the city of Murfreesboro, Tennessee which had about 68,000 customers. And when it sold sold to the Middle Tennessee Electric membership cooperative in 2020. Other utilities substantial size include those serving the cities of Vero Beach, Anchorage, Alaska, Eagle Mountain, Utah. And altogether we are talking about 800,000 citizens today have their electricity. Private sales have occurred in 26 states and, and almost all of Kansas was sold and it was sold in the 1980s. Now why even make an episode on this? And it's because of this last thing corporate cities. Now of course company towns is as old as companies are. You know you had train things and stuff like that, you know where like a company moves in and it just, it just made sense for the company to make sure that they were providing housing and you know, saloons and stuff like that for the people that you know, lived in their area. That it just made sense. That was just, it was just good business, right? You wanted to attract more people to stay in this area. If you've ever been in northwest Arkansas city called Bentonville, it's actually very dope to be in, but it is the headquarters for Walmart. So if you're gonna work in corporate Walmart, you gotta live in Benton. Now the city's dope. Is that a corporate town? It's not in what I'm talking about. It is a company that said we are going to dump a kajillion dollars to make this city as dope as possible. That's one thing I am talking about a brand making a city. I wish I was making this up. Google got one. It's working on a community called North Bayshore in Mountain View, California that'll have 7,000 housing units and another called Middlefield park that'll have 2,000 units. Meta is building Willow Village dubbed Zucktown in Menlo Park, California and they'll have 1700 housing units, a hotel and plenty of retail. Disney is developing a 1400 housing units across 80 acres in Kissimmee, Florida, right near Walt Disney World. Elon Musk is building his city called in Snail Brook outside of Austin, Texas for employees of his constellations of startups including SpaceX, Tesla and Boeing. But the most ambitious is California Forever. It's supposed to be Silicon Valley 2.0. It's this group ran by the former Goldman Sachs trader trader Jane Simarck and is backed by investors like the LinkedIn co founder Reid Hoffman, Chris Dixon and this philanthropist named Lorene Powell. And it plans to create this new city In Solano County, 60 miles north of San Bernardino, with tens of thousands of homes, large solar energy orchards with a million new trees and a hundred thousand acres of new park space. And they hope to build this community will generate thousands of jobs in a walking, walkable Paris or West Village in New York. And there was this reporting of this unknown group that was coming up and just like just buying farmland. It was called Flannery Associates. And for years, nobody had any idea who these people were. They purchased 52,000 acres, spent $800 million, paying five times the market rate. And nobody knew who they were. This little podunk town, people selling their little farms. And it's because these billionaires is building a city. Now, I am telling you all this ultimately to introduce you to Curtis Yarvin, who is probably going to be a future bastard pod person. Or either way, one of these shows is going to cover this man. Because this man, in a lot of ways ways, is the patient zero, the contagion number one of these new Republicans, this new conservatism, this new extremist that's been kind of been trying to tell everybody, here's why it's so poisonous. He's like, because not only is democracy dead, democracy been dead. And whatever you think you have now ain't a democracy. To which all of us would be like, nigga, yes. That's why it's so dangerous. Because I'd be like, yeah. He's like, the system's failing you. And I'm like, amen. So his solution is a monarchy. But he mean a monarchy like a CEO. So this man says, if the country was ran like a tech company, everything would be cool. We would all be better. And his example of that is, is he would say, okay, look at that laptop you using. Look at that phone you got. Do you think you would have got to that phone, to that laptop, the quality of that laptop you had if it was done by the City of California's Tech Municipal Department? He's like, nigga, no. You got that because of Steve Jobs. That's why you got that phone. Cause that nigga was like, look, this is what we doing. This how we doing it. He would argue that that Roosevelt over the New Deal. He was a tech bro. He ran his mug like a tech startup. He was like, look, nigga, this what we doing. We building freeways. I don't care what y'all say. We building freeways. He's like, if the country was ran like a tech company, then maybe this country would work better. And he's like, and newsflash whatever the hell you think you got now ain't working anyway. We might as well just lean into it. All I'm saying is, is. I don't know what I'm saying it, fam. It could happen here. So this is your favorite cousin swooping in and signing off, ruining another thing for you. Don't catch me at the hood politics pop.
