"I love Germany so much that I am glad there are two of them," the French novelist and Nobel laureateFrancois Mauriac commented acerbically during the Cold War. Investor Tim Draper loves California so much that he thinks there should be six of them.
Draper is one of Silicon Valley'ssuperstar venture capitalists,
an early funder of numerous high-tech enterprises, including, most
famously, Skype and Hotmail. He is also the prime mover behind the "Six Californias" initiative,
a proposal to partition the nation's most populous state into six
smaller ones. From north to south, those new states would be: Jefferson,
North California, Central California, Silicon Valley (including San
Francisco), West California (including Los Angeles), and South
California.
With 38 million people spread over such a vast and varied territory,
Draper argues, a monolithic California has grown ungovernable. The
state's population is more than six times as large as the average of the
other 49 states, and too many Californians feel estranged from a state
government in Sacramento that doesn't understand them or reflect their
interests. He is far from the first to say so. Plans to subdivide California have been put forward since the earliest days of statehood in 1850. In an 1859 plebiscite, voters approved by a landslide a proposal to split off Southern California into a separate state. (The measure died in Congress, which was in turmoil over the looming Civil War.)
Can Draper's six-state plan do better? It moved one step closer to
plausibility last month, when California's secretary of state gave backers the go-ahead
to begin collecting the necessary petition signatures to put "Six
Californias" on the ballot. If 808,000 signatures are submitted by July
14, the measure could go to voters in November.
Clearly, a six-way Golden State split is the longest of long shots,
and critics aplenty have already started blasting Draper's proposal. But
even many of the critics agree that California has become an unwieldy,
unmanageable mess.
"No other state contains within it such contradictory interests, cultures, economic and political geography,"writes Keith Naughton at PublicCEO,
a website that covers state and local California issues. "It has become
impossible to even remotely reconcile the array of opposing forces. The
only way to get anything done is to shove laws and regulations down a
lot of unwilling throats." In the Los Angeles Times, business
columnist Michael Hiltzik claims the economic fallout from the Six
Californias plan would be "horrific" — he's especially disturbed that
the proposed new state of Central California "would instantly become the
poorest state in the nation," while Silicon Valley, where Draper lives,
would be one of the wealthiest. Yet Hiltzik concedes that "Californians
have lost contact with their government as more budgeting and
administration [have] been upstreamed to Sacramento" and as state
policies have "taken decision-making for everything from pothole repair
to art and music classes out of the hands of the locals."
It's been a long time since an existing state was partitioned into
smaller states. It last happened in 1863, when 50 northwestern counties
of Virginia were renamed West Virginia and admitted as the 35th state.
More than 40 years earlier, Maine, which had been part of Massachusetts
since the 1650s, voted overwhelmingly for a divorce, and eventually
entered the union as a new state in 1820. In both cases, separation was
driven, then embraced, by communities and people who had grown alienated
from a state government dominated by interests they didn't share. West
Virginia's mountain people had chafed under Richmond's rule, and sharply
opposed the formation of the Confederacy. Mainers had long complained
that the Legislature in Boston — where Maine was underrepresented — was
not only too far away, but too willing to sacrifice their interests to
those of Massachusetts.
Maybe those chapters from 19th-century history have no relevance to
California today. Or maybe Draper is onto something that shouldn't be
dismissed too casually. Last September, in California's rural north,
Siskiyou County and Modoc County voted to pursue secession from
California and support the creation of a new State of Jefferson. Local
residents crowded the Siskiyou board of supervisors' chambers, and when a
speaker asked who in the audience favored the idea, the local paper reported, "nearly every hand in the room was raised."
Conventional wisdom says Draper's scheme hasn't got a chance. But
venture capitalists have a knack of seeing openings and opportunities
that most people miss. Would "Six Californias" would be an improvement
over the status quo? That's definitely a debate worth having.
While the East Coast and Midwest suffer through a cold and snow-heavy
winter, the people of California are in the midst of a drought — and a
particularly bad one, even for a state that has regular battles with
droughts over the course of my lifetime. Most people don’t recall this,
but those of us who grew up with gas rationing in the Golden State
during the energy crises of the 1970s also grew up with water rationing,
too — including odd/even days for watering lawns and gardens, and
request-only glasses of water in restaurants. Most of Southern
California would naturally be a desert if it wasn’t for water management
even in the best of years, and the Central Valley would never have
become an agricultural powerhouse without it.
Yesterday, Barack Obama came to California’s Central Valley to
declare that global warming is what has made the drought so difficult
for farmers there:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQzSycdHevU
Actually, the problem for Central Valley farmers is that their water
got taken from them by a federal judge, who put a baitfish ahead of
human beings. Central Valley’s water-management system was designed to
deal with droughts that last as long as five years, but the reservoirs
that held its lifeblood got emptied into the ocean to rescue the Delta
smelt. It began five years ago, and as Investors Business Daily reports, the locals remember it better than Obama does:
The one thing that will mitigate droughts in California —
a permanent feature of the state — is to restore the water flow from
California’s water-heavy north to farmers in the central and south.
That’s just what House Bill 3964, which passed by a 229-191 vote last
week, does. But Obama’s plan is not to get that worthy bill through the Senate
(where Democrats are holding it up) but to shovel pork to environmental
activists and their victims, insultingly offering out-of-work farmers a
“summer meal plan” in his package. “We are not interested in welfare; we want water,” Nunes told IBD
this week. He and his fellow legislator Valadao are both farmers who
represent the worst-hit regions of the Central Valley in Congress and
can only look at the president’s approach with disbelief.
“He’s not addressing the situation,” Valadao told us.
“They want to blame the drought for the lack of water, but they wasted water for the past five years,” said Nunes.
The two explain that California’s system of aqueducts and storage
tanks was designed long ago to take advantage of rain and mountain
runoff from wet years and store it for use in dry years.
But it’s now
inactive — by design. “California’s forefathers built a system (of
aqueducts and storage facilities) designed to withstand five years of
drought,” said Nunes.
“We have infrastructure dating from the 1960s for transporting water, but by the 1990s the policies had changed,” said Valadao.
Environmental special interests managed to dismantle the system by
diverting water meant for farms to pet projects, such as saving delta
smelt, a baitfish. That move forced the flushing of 3 million acre-feet
of water originally slated for the Central Valley into the ocean over
the past five years.
In fact, Obama threatened to veto a bill
that would have resolved this situation almost exactly two years ago.
Instead, Obama insisted that the environmentalists needed to keep
channeling water away from this rich agricultural resource and from the
farmers who had worked it for generations, thanks to their own
engineering genius at defeating droughts, to pour that water into the
Pacific Ocean instead.
This isn’t global warming. It’s what happens when you stop irrigating
land by purposefully taking water away. That buck stops at the podium
Obama used to blame Gaia and carbon for his own sins of commission and
omission.
What in the world is Barack Obama thinking? At a time when the United
States is facing the greatest water crisis that it has ever known, Obama
is allowing water from the Great Lakes to be drained, bottled and
shipped to China and other countries around the globe.
Right now, the Great Lakes hold approximately 21 percent of
the total supply of fresh water in the entire world. Considering the
fact that global water supplies are becoming extremely tight, that is an
invaluable resource. One recent UN report projected that two-thirds of the people in the world will be dealing with “water stress” and 1.8 billion people will
be facing “absolute water scarcity” by the year 2025. So why are we
allowing foreign corporations such as Nestle to make millions upon
millions of dollars pumping water out of the Great Lakes and selling it
overseas? Considering the massive worldwide water crisis that we know
is coming in the years ahead, shouldn’t we be doing everything that we
can to protect this precious natural resource?
Most Americans don’t realize this, but earlier this year water levels
in Lake Huron and Lake Michigan were at their lowest levels ever recorded. The following is from a recent article by Suzanne Eovaldi…
“Two of the Great Lakes have hit their lowest water
levels EVER RECORDED,” the US Army Corps of Engineers reported early
this year. Corps measurements taken in January of 2013 “show Lake Huron
and Lake Michigan have reached their lowest ebb since record keeping
began in 1918.” The chief watershed hydrology expert warns Americans
that “We’re in an extreme situation.”
So what is causing all of this? Well, of course most of the water
that leaves the Great Lakes is lost by evaporation. But the fact that
water is being steadily pumped out of the Great Lakes and sold overseas is certainly not helping matters…
“Plunging water levels are beyond anyone’s control,” says
another expert, James Weakley. But in one of our most popular posts,
last year we warned, “Lake Michigan water is being shipped by boat loads
over to China! By using a little known loophole in the 2006 Great Lakes
Compact, Obama minions are allowing Nestle Company to export precious
fresh water out of Lake Michigan to the tune of an estimated $500,000 to
$1.8 million per day profit.”
White House officials discussed the political ramifications of a possible default by a troubled solar energy company that received more than $500 million in federal loans, newly released emails show.
Emails released Thursday night show that Obama administration privately worried about the effect of a default by Solyndra Inc. on the president's re-election campaign.
"The optics of a Solyndra default will be bad," an official from the Office of Management and Budget wrote in a Jan. 31 email to a senior OMB official. "The timing will likely coincide with the 2012 campaign season heating up."
The email, released by the House Energy and Commerce Committee as part of its investigation into the Solyndra loan, showed that Obama administration officials were concerned about Solyndra's financial health even as they publicly declared the solar panel maker in good shape.
Solyndra, which received $528 million in federal loans under the stimulus law, declared bankruptcy late last month and laid off 1,100 workers.
The Silicon Valley company was the first renewable-energy company to receive a loan guarantee under the 2009 stimulus law, and the Obama administration frequently touted Solyndra as a model for its clean energy program. President Barack Obama visited the company's Fremont, Calif., headquarters last year.
Even as Obama praised the company's plans to hire more than 1,000 workers, warning signs were being sent from within the government and from outside analysts who questioned Solyndra's viability as a "going concern."
At least three reports by federal watchdogs over the past two years warned that the Energy Department had not fully developed the controls needed to manage the multibillion-dollar loan program that provided more the loan to Solyndra Inc., a now-bankrupt solar panel manufacturer.
Emails obtained by The Associated Press show that a White House official dismissed reports about Solyndra's gloomy future. An email from Greg Nelson, a White House official who had been involved in the planning of Obama's May 2010 trip to Solyndra's headquarters, to a Solyndra executive downplayed a July 2010 news story in a trade publication that criticized the company's financial health.
Redford is one of the main opponents of a plan by the Pacific Union College to build an eco-village in Angwin California. The college says it needs the funds because of a dire financial situation. The village is close to Redford’s vineyard in the Napa Valley. However whilst publicly opposing this development “to preserve the rural heritage” Redford has been quietly selling development lots in the Sundance Preserve for $2 million. These lots are intended for vacation homes close to Redford’s Sundance Ski Resort.
The double standard is revealed in a short film Robert Redford Hypocrite which has just been released.
Film director Ann McElhinney said the film is not criticising Redford for selling his property.
"It is great that in a recession Mr Redford can find so many buyers. I am delighted that those houses will be built, creating jobs and vitality in a remote area but it is shocking that Mr Redford would deny others similar opportunities to make a profit and create jobs."
The film’s co-director Phelim McAleer said the film was highlighting the double standards of so many celebrities and environmentalists. "This is just another example of environmental elites telling the rest of us how and where we must live and what we are not allowed to do, but thinking that those rules don’t apply to themselves. Robert Redford has shown himself to be a hypocrite - plain and simple," said McAleer.
The film - released on YouTube - also shows how Redford has campaigned against "dirty fuels" and wants to end the use of oil whilst promoting flying by doing lucrative voice overs for a series of United Airlines commercials.
"Again Robert Redford has shown he has an appalling double standard. The rest of us must stop flying because of the environment but these restrictions don’t apply to him. He is somehow different," said McElhinney.
Robert Redford Hypocrite was produced and directed by Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer. They previously produced Not Evil Just Wrong, a documentary which took a sceptical look at Global Warming hysteria. The duo also recently produced James Cameron Hypocrite which looks at the double standards of Avatar director James Cameron.
Student of Life, lover of God, Black, conservative Democrat, believer in self-responsibility, traditional values and morals, resident of New York City. Follow me on Twitter at @MrGreyGhost1.
Posts
