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New website features 12 minute expose on Canal falsehoods

by Robert Johnson

July 6, 2009 -- I am pleased to introduce you to Californians against the Canal.  The URL is www.StopCanal.org.  Please take a moment to watch the video and pass it around to everyone you know.  My goal with this site is to help all the other groups in this fight to get the truth out and dispel the lies and misrepresentations.  You will see that the video is hard hitting.  The site will also be hard hitting.  I am working on a major page right now, where, in addition to making case against the canal, I reach out to those in the San Joaquin Valley communities to join us to find some common ground.  I try to explain that many of them have been misled terribly, to the point where they feel water has literally been taken from them.  I try to feel their pain; and I try to persuade them to feel ours…
 
In the site, I make several references to CSPA and Restore the Delta, two organizations that have done much to advance my understanding of the issues, and to invite me into this advocacy consortium.  I hope this is viewed as a collaborative effort.  I appreciate all that each of you has done to advocate for our communities and fisheries. 
 
Note that the site is still under construction, but I could not wait any longer to launch it.  Please feel free to contact me with feedback.  I will be at the capital around 8-8:30am and will call many of you later.  God Bless!
 
My press announcement for tomorrow:
We are here because we seek to introduce solutions that will provide water for California’s people, farms and fish.  Solutions that are far less costly, far more effective, and far more timely, and will provide enough water for our present and future needs.
 
The Peripheral Canal and Sites / Temperance Flat Dams will cost over $40 billion, including interest è and not provide a DROP of water. 
 
How can state legislators allow this secretive, hugely expensive bond measure to be jammed through without rigorous debate exploring the alternatives;  Alternatives that will provide over 10 million acre feet of water for the state – more water than has ever been exported from NorCal! 
 
Make no mistake: This crisis is the direct result of powerful lobbying of state and federal officials – and improper staffing of critical agencies, where senior leaders at the BOR and DWR have come from positions with the water contractors, which breeds conflicts of interest.  Because of this arrangement, the state and federal project operators allowed more water to be exported than was legally possible.
 
Land that should not have been cultivated (because it lacked water rights), was planted with permanent crops, based on expectation of continued – illegal – increased levels of exports.  A handful of corporate agribusinesses allowed this to happen – with full knowledge that in low water years water exports LEGALLY would be cut.  Yet now they have orchestrated a highly effective PR campaign to make Californians believe that radical environmentalists are putting a 3 inch fish before people, farms and jobs, when in truth, we are farmers, fishermen, boaters, small business owners and concerned citizens who are fighting to save our communities. 
 
This is about a hydraulic billionaire’s cabal that has clearly jr water rights but seeks to bypass age-old laws to get – and profit – from a larger and more reliable water racket.  This is about water profiteering or “pumping water for cash from the delta,” which is the title of a recent investigative series by CC times reporter Mike Taugher.
 
California has seen what happens when we allow critical public infrastructure to be controlled in a manner that allows conflicts of interest and windfall profit.  Remember Enron scandal from energy deregulation?  This bond measure is following same path.