(With expanded coverage of all the Western States)
by Patrick Ruckert
www.californiadroughtupdate.org/20230622-California-Water-and-Infrastructure-Report.pdf
A Note to Readers
This week’s report begins with the U.S. Drought Monitor, and is immediately followed by some excellent graphics demonstrating that the drought in California is gone, for now.
The graphics show the level of the major reservoirs in the state to be full, or nearly so. A separate post compares Lake Oroville in the years 2021 to as it is at present.
Full reservoirs or not, the environmentalist bias that flows from Sacramento bureaucrats never takes a break. New laws are being pushed in the legislature to give the Water Board increased powers to restrict water deliveries to agriculture, despite the more than century long and State Constitutional laws that protect historic water rights. Two articles highlight the now ongoing battle.
On the Colorado River, the Bureaus of Reclamation, continuing its bureaucratic foot dragging, makes more of the same announcement, that “A public process started Thursday to reshape the way Colorado River water is distributed, with federal officials promising to collect comments about updating and enacting rules in 2027 to continue providing hydropower, drinking water and irrigation to farms, cities and tribes in seven Western U.S. states and Mexico.”
To conclude our “news section’ this week we have, “Just In Time For Fire Season,” the “Biden Announces By 2025 All Wildfires Must Be Electric.”
Our Feature this week in an article by my associate Robert Ingraham that gets at the heart of the policies that are required to create, once again in our nation, the economic and financial policies to ensure that not only the necessary infrastructure the nation requires can be built, but it can be done rapidly, as for example, President Franklin D. Roosevelt did beginning in 1933. FDR did kick the money changers out of our temples and built the most magnificent array of water infrastructure that still serves us today.
The article, “The Promise and the Limitations of the New ‘American System Faction,” discusses two recent books from conservatives that polemicize against the last decades of “free trade and “free markets,” and outline flawed policies that purport to return the United State to the American System established by Alexander Hamilton, and revived by Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.
To quote a few sentences from Robert’s article:
“I will say right off the bat that Hell to Pay: How the Suppression of Wages Is Destroying America is a very useful and valuable book, certainly Lind’s best published work to date. It covers a lot of ground, yet it is singular—almost laser-like—in focus. Lind’s subject is the suppression of wages in the United States and the catastrophic effect this has had on American families and the culture of the nation.
“Lind begins the book with an 1871 quotation from Abraham Lincoln’s friend Frederick Douglass. I include a short portion of that quotation here:’
“Cheap Labor is a phrase that has no cheering music for the masses. Those who demand it, and seek to acquire it, have but little sympathy with common humanity. It is the cry of the few against the many.’”
