California

KamaAina

(78,249 posts) Mon Jun 6, 2016, 06:27 PM Jun 2016

California's drought: How Trump's blustering caricatured a genuine crisis (xpost from GD)

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-trump-westlands-20160606-snap-story.html

Of all the mistakes, misstatements, and assorted bloviations issuing from Donald Trump during the current Presidential campaign, surely one of the leading head-scratchers is his May 27 assertion to the effect that “there is no drought” in California.

Let’s consider a fuller quote from Trump’s appearance (see the video below):

“We’re going to solve your water problem—you have a water problem that is so insane, it is so ridiculous, where they’re taking the water and shoving it out to sea. And I just met with a lot of the farmers who are great people, and they're saying, we don’t even understand it….They have farms up here, and they don’t get water. I said, ‘Oh, that’s too bad. Is it a drought?' ‘No, we have plenty of water….We shove it out to sea.’….The environmentalists don’t know why. They’re trying to protect a certain kind of three-inch fish...My environmental standard is very simple. I want clean air and clean water.”

This was a typical Trump liturgy, in that he took an extremely complicated problem and caricatured it as a simple problem, easily solved. It was also typical in that, while masquerading as the people’s friend, he actually was parroting the position of vested interests—in this case, Central Valley growers and their water suppliers, especially the giant Westlands Water District, who have been grousing for years about their drought-related reduced allocations from the federal Central Valley Project. We can glean this from the fact that Trump’s meeting with farmers had been arranged by Johnny Amaral, a local political figure who is the deputy general manager of Westlands.

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Stupid Donnie

Dumbass Donnie