Propaganda
speaker
390 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Propaganda’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
California got a thing called senior water rights, which means whoever got there first gets the water. Like, basically, it's my land. I licked it. 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 lagoons 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. 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 Stewart 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 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 there's two types of water here. There's surface water and there's groundwater.
Groundwater, obviously, that's stuff that you would dig in for a well. That's a whole other thing, right? Now, it is true, this family owns brands 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 Resnick's use gets stored underground initially before the water is delivered to the roots of Resnick's pistachios, almonds, pomegranate, and 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 Resnick's own 57% of its stake, is 32 square mile recharge basin, which looks like flood lands from the street. that essentially stores, again, the 1.5 million acre feet of water, 500 billion gallons. The Resnick's 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 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 a median of fewer than 600 customers. Less than 30% of utilities sold had more than 1,000 customers at the time of sale, right? So... Back then, it was a small amount of 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 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 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 had train things and stuff like that where a company moves in and it just made sense for the company to make sure that they were providing housing and 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 going to work in corporate Walmart, you got to live in Bentonville. Now the city's dope. Is that a corporate town? It's not, not, not in what I'm talking about.
It is a company that said, we're 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 Bay Shore 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 Zuck Town in Menlo Park, California. And they'll have 1,700 housing units, a hotel, and plenty of retail. Disney is developing 1,400 housing units across 80 acres in Kissimmee, Florida, right near Walt Disney World. Elon Musk is building his city called Zuck.
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 Golden Sacks trader, Jane Simark, 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.
Showing 81–100 of 390 · page 5 of 20
← Previous
Next →