One Citizen Speaking: Dianne Feinstein: Oops I Did It Again? Reprint from One Citizen Speaking Blog

http://www.onecitizenspeaking.com/2009/04/dianne-feinstein-oops-i-did-it-again.html

April 22, 2009

DIANNE FEINSTEIN: OOPS I DID IT AGAIN?

There is no doubt in my mind that the democrats pander to their special interests and are infamous for nepotistic deals involving spouses, relatives and close friends.

So why should we be surprised when the Washington Times is reporting …

“Senator's husband cashes in on crisis”

“On the day the new Congress convened this year, Sen. Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation to route $25 billion in taxpayer money to a government agency that had just awarded her husband's real estate firm a lucrative contract to sell foreclosed properties at compensation rates higher than the industry norms.”

“Mrs. Feinstein's intervention on behalf of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was unusual: the California Democrat isn't a member of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs with jurisdiction over FDIC; and the agency is supposed to operate from money it raises from bank-paid insurance payments - not direct federal dollars.”

“Documents reviewed by The Washington Times show Mrs. Feinstein first offered Oct. 30 to help the FDIC secure money for its effort to stem the rise of home foreclosures. Her letter was sent just days before the agency determined that CB Richard Ellis Group (CBRE) - the commercial real estate firm that her husband Richard Blum heads as board chairman - had won the competitive bidding for a contract to sell foreclosed properties that FDIC had inherited from failed banks.”

“About the same time of the contract award, Mr. Blum's private investment firm reported to the Securities and Exchange Commission that it and related affiliates had purchased more than 10 million new shares in CBRE. The shares were purchased for the going price of $3.77; CBRE's stock closed Monday at $5.14.”

“Spokesmen for the FDIC, Mrs. Feinstein and Mr. Blum's firm told The Times that there was no connection between the legislation and the contract signed Nov. 13, and that the couple didn't even know about CBRE's business with FDIC until after it was awarded.”

“Senate ethics rules state that members must avoid conflicts of interest as well as "even the appearance of a conflict of interest." Some ethics analysts question whether Mrs. Feinstein ran afoul of the latter provision, creating the appearance that she was rewarding the agency that had just hired her husband's firm.”

Déjà vu all over again …

Apparently this is not the first time Senator Feinstein has been associated with suspicious dealings …

“Feinstein Resigns: Senator exits MILCON following Metro exposé”

“SEN. Dianne Feinstein has resigned from the Military Construction Appropriations subcommittee.”

“As previously and extensively reviewed in these pages, Feinstein was chairperson and ranking member of MILCON for six years, during which time she had a conflict of interest due to her husband Richard C. Blum's ownership of two major defense contractors, who were awarded billions of dollars for military construction projects approved by Feinstein.”

“As MILCON leader, Feinstein relished the details of military construction, even micromanaging one project at the level of its sewer design. She regularly took junkets to military bases around the world to inspect construction projects, some of which were contracted to her husband's companies, Perini Corp. and URS Corp.

“Perhaps she resigned from MILCON because she could not take the heat generated by Metro's expose of her ethics (which was partially funded by the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute). Or was her work on the subcommittee finished because Blum divested ownership of his military construction and advanced weapons manufacturing firms in late 2005?”

For a liberal left-wing democrat, it must have been extremely hard to constantly denounce the war that was supplying herself and her husband with a handsome lifestyle?

“Feinstein abandoned MILCON as her ethical problems were surfacing in the media, and as it was becoming clear that her subcommittee left grievously wounded veterans to rot while her family was profiting from the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. It turns out that Blum also holds large investments in companies that were selling medical equipment and supplies and real estate leases—often without the benefit of competitive bidding—to the Department of Veterans Affairs, even as the system of medical care for veterans collapsed on his wife's watch.”

Must have been tough railing against Halliburton, who was often the only contractor suitable to perform services, and no-bid contracts while her husband was doing the same thing?

“As of December 2006, according to SEC filings and www.fedspending.org, three corporations in which Blum's financial entities own a total of $1 billion in stock won considerable favor from the budgets of the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs:

Boston Scientific Corporation: $17.8 million for medical equipment and supplies; 85 percent of contracts awarded without benefit of competition.

Kinetic Concepts Inc.: $12 million, medical equipment and supplies; 28 percent noncompetitively awarded.

CB Richard Ellis: The Blum-controlled international real estate firm holds congressionally funded contracts to lease office space to the Department of Veterans Affairs. It also is involved in redeveloping military bases turned over to the private sector.”

I seem to remember something about Senator Feinstein and gold mining that I had heard when I was with my hunting buddies on a daytrip to the old ghost town at Bodie State Park.  And then I found this …

“On October 8, 1994 the biggest gold heist in history occurred, but this theft lacked the melodrama of a Jesse James holdup or the excitement of a Brink's truck robbery. Nary a word was reported by the media even though this thievery was committed in the light of day. The citizens that were being robbed tried to cry out for help but the lawmen wouldn't listen because unbeknownst to them they were helping the bandits gain their booty.”

“The 103rd Congress managed to accomplish more than a gang of train robbers could achieve in a lifetime when they approved the Desert Wilderness Protection Act. ‘Instead of voting on the Desert Wilderness Protection Act, Congress should be convening a criminal investigation,’ said Donald Fife, spokesman for the National Association of Mining Districts. Fife was commenting on recent information that indicates tens of billions of dollars in gold deposits and huge real estate swindles may be the motivating factors behind the act.”

“Sponsored by Senator Diane Feinstein, the Desert Wilderness Protection Act and it's companion bill known as the California Desert Protection Act create three new national parks and seventy-four new wilderness areas in the desert of California that would total 8 million acres (an area the size of Maryland). This will close this acreage to development, force out private owners within the protected area and close down mines and ranches. It would also expand the Death Valley and Joshua Tree national monuments and upgrade them to national parks. This is the largest wilderness land lockup since the 1980 Alaska Lands Act; largest ever in the lower 48 states. Senator Feinstein contends that the fragile ecosystem of the desert must be protected from development, but in reality the areas being placed into park and wilderness closures are not threatened.”

“In 1980, the California Desert Conservation Area Plan was enacted to protect the desert and it has been rigorously enforced by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. Furthermore, the designated acreage mentioned in this bill have largely been for sale at bargain prices for over 100 years with no takers because there is absolutely no water or any prospect of water for development. It seems that the real motivation for passage of this bill lies with the special interest groups that would benefit monetarily.”

“Through a complex series of land exchanges, Catellus Corp., a subsidiary of Santa Fe Pacific, would receive land that contains some of the richest gold deposits in the world. In exchange the public gets seventy-four widely scattered tracts of desert which have found no economic use in more than a century.

“Catellus owns over 400,000 acres of worthless land in the California Mojave Desert. This land was obtained by Santa Fe Pacific and its predecessor railroad companies as part of the ‘checkerboard’ railroad lands awarded for the building of the transcontinental railroad. Santa Fe transferred these lands which have been for sale for over 100 years, over to its subsidiary, Catellus Corp. In the land swap, Catellus Corp. will receive land from decommissioned military bases. One of the bases will be the Chocolate Mountain gunnery range. Unbeknownst to the public, inside the range is the world's richest gold rift zone. Geologists estimate that the gold contained in this zone is worth between $40 to $100 billion. These are surface gold deposits which are more profitable to mine than the one-mile deep gold deposits in South Africa.”

“In addition to controlling Catellus, Santa Fe owns and operates the Mesquite gold mine located on the Chocolate Mountain rift zone. The Mesquite gold mine is one of the top ten mines in the United States and has some of the most profitable gold deposits of any mine in the world. To the north is the Chocolate Mountain gunnery range. The Mesquite open pit gold mine literally stops at the fence that borders the gunnery range.”

According to mining engineers who work at the Mesquite mine, the main gold ore body is north of the fence inside the gunnery range. Engineers allege that in 1981 and 1982, Consolidated Goldfields, which owned the mine at the time, illegally drilled into the gunnery range area to determine the composition of the ore body. The samples proved to be of high quality. According to these same engineers, beginning in the mid-1980s, military helicopters brought high ranking military officers, Congressmen and Senators to the area to examine these large gold deposits. Congressman Bruce Vento (D-Minn.) was one of those who toured the area. Engineers allege that the purpose of these tours was to come up with a way to hand these gold deposits to Consolidated Goldfields. No legal mechanism was then available to transfer this land without alerting the public to the existence of the gold. But around the same time the California Desert bill was introduced into Congress by former Senator Alan Cranston.

The California Public Employees Retirement System, (CALPERS) is a nearly $80 billion pension fund whose investment clout is heavily influenced by California leadership which includes Sen. Diane Feinstein. Several years ago, CALPERS made a $400 million investment in Catellus. Shortly after CALPERS made its investment in Catellus, the value of the stock collapsed 82%.

“Dehnert Queen, a San Francisco businessman, filed a criminal complaint in regards to this investment to U.S. Attorney Michael J. Yamaguchi and Ms. Sylvia Scott of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Queen states, in his complaint that Sen. Feinstein ‘misrepresented facts to defraud a public corporation (CALPERS), abused power and conflicts of interest to defraud State and U.S. taxpayers. In early 1993, CALPERS doubled its investment in Catellus to 41 percent...Queen contends ‘that both former Senator Cranston and Senator Feinstein acted to sponsor the Desert Protection Act in order to preserve and protect the formal agreement that then Mayor Feinstein signed with Catellus to build the Mission Bay Project in 1984, updated in 1986 and shepherded same through the City's (San Francisco) departments and commissions.’"

“Ed White, who owns a family mining business in the area is one of many whose business will now be destroyed. ‘The Sierra Club was just used, in my opinion, by Feinstein's bankers friends and the railroad or their land company Catellus, to create the public perception that these lands are fragile and threatened by development,’ said White. ‘The truth appears to be just the opposite. The scattered railroad lands that could never be developed are to be consolidated into a single block of 226,000 acres so they can be developed by Chocolate Mountain Gunnery Range Land and Mining Development.’"

“It is alleged that JLB Realty Corp. based out of Chicago, is tied to Dick Blum, millionaire husband of Sen. Diane Feinstein and that JLB allegedly will stand to make a huge profit on this development. In the name of "re-wilding" millions of acres of desert, grave financial and environmental damage will occur once the land is closed to the public.”

<To read more on this fascinating story in context> 

The Apropos Observations of one James Bond (007) …

According to James Bond: once is happenstance, twice is coincidence and three times it is definitely enemy action.

While there is little chance of a democrat-controlled Senate Ethics Committee investigation or hearing, the situation does provide yet another example of an appearance of impropriety that should be investigated on behalf of the taxpaying public.

In any event, it is not all that surprising to learn that a left-leaning liberal anti-war democrat was personally profiting from our war efforts and involved with the mistreatment of soldiers by her committee’s inattention to detail.

There is but one solution …

-- steve

Research Links …

Washington Times - Senator's husband cashes in on crisis

News & Culture in CA | Dianne Feinstein resigns

Catellus Development: The Octopus Reborn

Hunters Point Shipyard Affair

“In January of 2005, Ethics Commission investigator Richard Mo met with complainants and over the next two years received over 500 pages of hard copy and email documentation compiled by the editors of the San Francisco Bay View with assistance from Lynne Brown, Michael Boyd, Francisco Da Costa, Kevin Williams and Roland Sheppard detailing the extensive history of corruption surrounding the shipyard transfer.”

“In February of 2005, U.S. Attorney Andrew Cheng received documentation of violations of federal law involving Rep. Pelosi and Sen. Feinstein, whose husband, Richard Blum, has a financial interest in Catellus Developers, the master developer for the UCSF Mission Bay Campus, Lennar Corp. and numerous Bayview Hunters Point community non-profits.”

“Feinstein resigned from a seat on the U.S. Senate Military Construction Appropriations Committee due to conflicts of interest complaints involving her husband and has been reportedly investigated by the FBI, according to a former writer for the San Francisco Bay Guardian.”

“Cheng, in subsequent communications, referred the Hunters Point Shipyard redevelopment investigation to the Ethics Commission, the City Attorney’s division of governmental integrity and the San Francisco Division of the FBI but took no action at the level of the U.S. Department of Justice.”

“In March of 2005 the City’s Sunshine Ordinance Task Force concluded that violations of the Sunshine Act occurred during the Board of Supervisors’ enactment of the 14 measures approving development on Parcel A.”

“In March of 2005 the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission acknowledged receipt of complaints documenting financial conflicts of interest involving City officials and contractors. No action was taken.”

“In January of 2007 Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi became speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Her first act was a failed attempt to install Rep. John Murtha as the House majority whip in exchange for his help in the transfer of shipyard Parcel A.”

Resnick NAS 1/26/10

http://cetehama.ucanr.edu/?blogstart=36&blogtag=Water&blogasset=6362

Delta environmental review underway at UC Davis

An independent panel appointed by the National Academy of Sciences is working this week at UC Davis to review Delta water allocations, according to yesterday's Sacramento Bee. The activity doesn't directly involve ANR scientists, but the implications for agriculture in California are huge.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein asked for the review in response to requests from San Joaquin Valley farmers, including Stewart Resnick, owner of Paramount Farms, according to the Bee. Resnick's Sept. 4 letter to Feinstein says "sloppy science" contributed to the new water and species protection rules.

Resnick and other farmers have sued and mounted public relations battles to avoid giving up water to help fish, the Bee reported.

Jeffrey Mount, a UC Davis geology professor, believes the academy was asked to get involved simply because "people of great influence" don't like the rules.

"It's not a wise use of the National Academy of Sciences, in my opinion," Mount was quoted in a Bee article published last week. "It will become a sideshow. We are setting a bad precedent that will stretch well beyond the Delta."

Perhaps to emphasize the political nature of the panel's review, Sacramento Bee reporter Matt Weiser pointed out in his story that conservative Democratic Congressman Jim Costa of Fresno was allotted 20 minutes to speak to the panel on Sunday but spoke for an hour. As a result, Mount, a nationally known expert on the Delta, was forced to squeeze his one-hour presentation into 30 minutes.

Costa told the panel the fish protections have harmed his constituents and are based on "flawed science."

Mount said he is concerned the NAS is not the right body to review the federal fish protections. NAS is a science entity, but the rules are somewhat political.

The panel will continue to meet in Davis through Thursday.

Posted on Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 10:17 AM

How Limousine Liberals, Water Oligarchs and Even Sean Hannity Are Hijacking Our Water Supply - Reprint Yasha Levine Alternet.org

How Limousine Liberals, Water Oligarchs and Even Sean Hannity Are Hijacking Our Water Supply

November 9, 2009 by Yasha Levine

http://www.alternet.org/story/144020/how_limousine_liberals%2C_water_oligarchs_and_even_sean_hannity_are_hijacking_our_water_supply?paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark

A group of water oligarchs in California have engineered a disastrous deregulation and privatization scheme. And they've pulled in hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars without causing much public outrage. The amount of power and control they wield over California's most precious resource, water, should shock and frighten us -- and it would, if more people were aware of it. But here is the scary thing: They are plotting to gain an even larger share of California's increasingly-scarce, over-tapped water supply, which will surely lead to shortages, higher prices and untold destruction to California's environment.  
California is in year three of a fairly nasty dry spell. And some very powerful forces are not letting this mini-crisis go to waste, fiercely lobbying Governor Schwarzenegger and Senator Dianne Feinstein, paying off corporate shills like Fox News' Sean Hannity and capitalizing on people's fear of drought to push a massive waterworks project that will pump more water, build more dams and keep sucking the state's rivers dry. The fearmongering schtick goes like this: California is on the brink of a water crisis of cataclysmic proportions, with a life-or-death struggle just around the corner, pitting small farmers who want to save their livelihood against big city elitists who care more about the environment than they do about American jobs. But in reality, this drought hysteria is nothing more than political theatrics, a scare tactic backed by big agribusiness to strong-arm California voters into building a multi-billion dollar system of dams and canals that would not really help small farmers -- of which there are very few anyway -- but would deliver more water to corporations, subsidize their landholdings, fuel real estate developmentand enable large-scale water privatization. At its core, it is a war waged for water by California's megarich on everyone else.  

The leader of these recent water privatization efforts in California is a Beverly Hills billionaire named Stewart Resnick. Stewart and his wife, Lynda Resnick, own Roll International Corporation, a private umbrella company that controls the flowers-by-wire company Teleflora, Fiji Water, Pom Wonderful, pesticide manufacturer Suterra and Paramount Agribusiness, the largest farming company in America and the largest pistachio and almond producer in the world. Roll Corp. was ranked #246 on Forbes' list of America's largest private companies in 2008 and had an estimated revenue of $1.98 billion in 2007. 

They are a limousine liberal power couple. Hyperactive in politics, business and philanthropy, the two raise huge amounts of cash for the Democratic party, donate to the arts, support education and hobnob with influential progressives like Arianna Huffington and the anti-global warming activist and producer of An Inconvenient Truth, Laurie David. Stewart Resnick gave over $350,000 to the Gray Davis campaign and various anti-recall groups between 2000 and 2003, a favor Governor Davis returned by appointing Resnick to co-chair his agriculture-water transition team. A shrewd businesswoman, Lynda is credited with single-handedly creating the pomegranate health fad to sell her Pom Wonderful and catapulted Fiji Water to its recent success, one that environmentalists love to hate as was recently documented inMother Jonesby Anna Lenzer. 

But there is a gaping hole in most accounts of the jet-set Baby Boomer couple: their company, Roll International, is one of the largest, if not the largest, private water brokers in America. Through a series of subsidiary companies and organizations, Roll International is able to convert California's water from a public, shared resource into a private asset that can be sold on the market to the highest bidder. 

It all comes down to Stewart Resnick's involvement in the creation of a powerful but little-known entity called the Kern County Water Bank -- an underground water storage facility at the center of a plan to bring deregulation to California's most important public utility: water. 

According to a 2003 Public Citizen report titled "Water Heist," the Kern County Water Bank is an underground reservoir in the hottest, driest, southernmost edge of the Central Valley with a capacity of 1 million acre-feet, enough to convert the entire state of Rhode Island into a swampland one-foot deep or supply the City of Los Angeles with water for 1.7 years. The water bank was envisioned in the late '80s by the Department of Water Resources as a safeguard against prolonged drought. During wet years, it would serve as a repository for excess water coming in from Northern California and the Sierras, and pumped out in dry years. California spent nearly a hundred million dollars to develop the underground reservoir and connect it to the state's public canals and aqueducts, but in 1995, California's Department of Water Resources suddenly, and without any public debate, transferred it to a handful of corporate interests. 

Here is how Los Angeles Times writer Mark Arax described it in 2003:

The story of how the state's largest water bank -- jump-started with $74 million in taxpayer money -- ended up as an integral piece of the private empire of Stewart Resnick begins with a lawsuit, or at least the threat of it.

A seven-year drought ending in the early 1990s pitted Southern California water contractors, such as the Metropolitan Water District, against agricultural contractors, such as the Kern County Water Agency. Each region made its case to the state, telling why it deserved to receive the water guaranteed by long-standing contracts. In the drought's worst years, urban users got 30% of the draw, while Kern farmers received less than 5%. (However, doesn't WWD's CVP contract specifically state it only gets excess water made available in excess or wet water years? Seems to me MWD should have insisted upon contractual enforcement in its senior water rights claim.)

In 1994, agricultural and urban interests threatened to sue the state for nondelivery. The main parties gathered in a closed-door meeting in Monterey to hash out a settlement. Public interest groups, environmentalists and smaller water contractors -- locked out of the meeting -- cried foul.

When it was over, the very flow of California water had been redirected.

Redirected, as in "privatized."

The details of the transfer are complicated and opaque, but, put simply, the State of California transformed a small number of corporate farmers into a de facto water oligarchy by signing over a massive water holding facility and the many billions of gallons of government-subsidized water that it could store. Arcane and trivial as it may seem, the transfer of the water bank circumvented the usual resale restrictions placed on subsidized water purchased from the state. After the water enters the Kern County Water Bank, it stops being a public resource that could otherwise be used to irrigate crops locally or sold on the free-market to the highest bidder. The transfer privatized water without actually needing to do so explicitly. 

But the secretive crew that met in Monterey did more than just privatize one underground water reservoir. California's water oligarchy hammered out a plan that put them at the controls of the state's water market and gave them the ability to create non-existent water out of thin air. 

The Monterey Amendments, as the revisions that emerged from the closed meetings came to be called, established a legal framework that, for the first time in history, made unregulated water commerce in California possible by creating the concept of "paper water," which could be traded, transferred, divvied up and put on the books as easily as money in the bank or collateral on a loan without anyone having to transfer a drop. It proved to be a blessing for land speculators during the housing boom that was just around the corner.

Every large real estate development in California has to prove that a secure water source will be available for the project decades into the future. It was a requirement that, until "paper water" came along, posed a serious hurdle to developers building low-income suburban paradises in the Southern California desert. Water is not a easy resource to come by in the West. Underground sources are being depleted at a record pace and the state's aqueduct system, which pumps rainwater and snow that melts hundreds of miles south, does not have the capacity to support both exponentially growing sprawl and massive farming operations out in the desert. Even if there were an abundance of virgin rivers to dam and redirect, the hundreds of millions of dollars such projects would cost would eat into the fat profit margins of real estate developers and bring suburban sprawl expansion to a crawl. The "paper water" market banished this pesky problem once and for all. From the mid-90s on, real estate developers could satisfy all their hydration needs by shopping for "paper water," meaning that they were able to satisfy planning regulations simply by convincing a city or county to purchase virtual water rights. They weren't securing a real water supply, or even transferring a single ounce. But it didn't matter as long as the water was on their books. 
Most urban dwellers would not be happy with the water even if it did arrive. Because private water storage facilities are not subject to public oversight, "paper water" merchants are not required to adhere to basic water quality requirements, or even to test it. Reports of polluted water being pumped out of private banks and contaminating clean water flowing in the aqueduct are rare only because no one cares to look. In 2008, water pumped out by one of the stakeholders in the Kern bank, Semitropic, had arsenic levels six times higher than federal EPA limits, which caused a plume of arsenic-tainted water to flow south down the state aqueduct towards Los Angeles County and surrounding districts, according to the Antelope Valley Press. (AND, Semitropic is the entity holding the permits for Delta Wetlands Project).

But development-crazed Southern California does not seem to care, and neither do the water merchants. Real estate development needed "paper water" as a person in a vegetative state needs their IV drip.

And so, with no warning and negligible media attention, the Monterey Agreements created the strange, new and unregulated "paper water" market, not unlike mortgage-backed securities and other exotic debt instruments dreamed up by Wall Street, if only because the "paper water" market trades in pure fantasy and is built on deception. For decades, California's water authorities have been in denial about the amount of water they can deliver to their customers. Contractually, the state is obligated to deliver 4 million acre-feet a year. (Los Angeles uses roughly 600,000 acre-feet a year). But in reality, the state can only deliver half the water it promises. Which means that half of the "paper water" being traded on the open market simply does not exist, and never has. And everyone who deals in water knows it, too. Naturally, this posed a problem. Why would anyone buy water that didn't exist?

The Monterey Amendments got around this problem by making a few legal alterations that made the state explicitly accountable for its original water contracts, regardless of whether there was water or not. This gave buyers the confidence to fuel real estate developments with non-existent water because the government was contractually obligated to bail them out, rain or shine. Where will the state get that water? Well, it could take it away from small farmers, rural communities and anyone else who is poor and politically unconnected. 
California's newly established "paper water" market was a speculator's wet dream. It was a scam opportunity too promising for the deregulation con artists at Enron to pass up. A few years after the Monterey Amendments, Enron apparently took a cue from the Kern bank, set up a water division, bought up a huge chunk of land in the Central Valley that sat atop a natural underground reservoir and started working on a water bank of their own. But Enron's snake oil brain trust was scheming on a bigger, more global level. Still in the grips of the Dot Com Bubble, Enron wanted to spark an Internet-based water trading revolution and launched a site that they hoped would become the etrade.com of H20. Called Azurix, it would function as an "exchange on the Internet for buying, selling, storing and transporting water in the West, hoping to make water a traded commodity much like natural gas or electricity," the Wall Street Journal wrote in 2000.

An e-water market where people could buy, sell, trade and speculate on water like any other tradeable commodity? It was the kind of delusional that only people in the grips of a speculative boom centered on the limitless possibilities of a technological revolution could believe in. To think that you could wake up in Shanghai, check out a few weather forecasts and purchase a few million gallons of California water, aiming to buy wet and sell dry -- a scam built on insane dreams. A few years later, Azurix went belly up. 
But while Enron's futuristic vision of water speculation may have come before its time, a more modest version of the water trade was thriving in the Golden State, and it apparently owed it all to one man: Stewart Resnick.   

Public Citizen's "Water Heist" report uncovered evidence that the Beverly Hills farmer was instrumental in the privatization of the Kern Water Bank. Not surprisingly, Resnick's Paramount Farms emerged with a majority stake in the venture. In fact, Resnick's farm empire controls the Kern Water Bank so thoroughly that it is not easy to discern where Paramount ends and the Kern Water Bank begins. The Kern Water Bank Authority, which administers the bank, is located in Paramount's corporate office building outside of Bakersfield, California.  

This has brought in massive profits to owners of the Kern bank at taxpayers' expense, and frequently involve nothing more than buying water at subsidized rates from the state, then turning around and selling it back to a different government agency for a tidy profit. 

Just as the Federal Reserve allows banks to borrow money from taxpayers so they can reap huge profits by lending it right back to the masses at a higher rate, the Kern bank allows a handful of corporate farmers to sell a public resource back to the public at markup. According to Public Citizen, in 2001, the Kern County Water Bank bought subsidized water from the State Water Project at $161 an acre-foot and flipped it back to the state's Environmental Water Account for $250 an acre-foot, making a cool $6.3 million for its owners -- just for having the right friends in the right places. 

The Environmental Water Account (EWA) was set up in 2000 by the state of California to protect salmon populations in the Sacramento Delta. In dry periods, when Delta water levels would drop below a critical level and pumping stations would start slurping up too many fish and grinding them into mush, the state would slow down pumping and supplement water deliveries by buying back water from whoever had any to spare. The plan looked good on paper, but it turned into a very expensive and useless failure -- but only for us and the fish. For members of the Kern County Water Bank, who raked in nearly $40 million dollars by reselling water to the EWA from 2001 to 2004, it worked out pretty well.

As majority stakeholder, Resnick took the lion's share of the profits. A recent investigation by the Contra Costa Times revealed that even as its fish populations teetered on the brink of extinction, California pumped "unprecedented amounts of water out of the Delta only to effectively buy some of it back at taxpayers expense." From 2000 to 2007, California spent $200 million on buying water for the EWA, of which Stewart Resnick's subsidiary companies skimmed 20 cents of every dollar for a total profit of $40 million in seven years. With such gracious help from taxpayers, it is no wonder the Resnicks were able to build such a successful business empire.

"For a program that was supposed to benefit the environment, it apparently did two things -- it didn't benefit the environment and it appears to have enriched private individuals using public money," said Jonas Minton, a water policy expert with the Planning and Conservation League, a California environmental advocacy group, as quoted by the Contra Costa Times. 

In a 2008 interview with the New Yorker, Stewart Resnick said he initially got into farming in 1978 as a hedge against inflation. Either he was feigning naivete, or he must have quickly realized that he stumbled upon the money-making opportunity of his life, one that helped grow Paramount Farms into an agribusiness empire.

While California's farming industry was steadily shedding land and farms all through the 90s, the Resnicks were expanding production and acreage, nearly doubling their cultivated land holdings just in the three years after the Monterey Agreements. 

But the profiteering off California's environment-friendly water program by Resnick and the rest of the Kern Water Bank crew is chump change compared to the  profits water merchants like him can make by selling paper water to real estate developers in the semi-desert wastelands of Southern California.

Take the deal that went down this summer between a farmer with a stake in the Kern bank and a McTractHome paradise in the Mojave Desert, 100 miles east of Los Angeles. For roughly $73 million, the Mojave Water Agency acquired permanent rights to 14,000 acre-feet of water pumped out of the Sacramento Delta and delivered via the State Aqueduct, enough water to flood an area the size of San Francisco six inches deep or hydrate up to 30,000 families for a whole year. 

The farmer selling the water was not really a "farmer" in the poor, homesteading, buck-toothed sense of the word, but a private Bay Area-based company called Sandridge Partners owned by the Vidovich family. In addition to running a lucrative cotton and almond growing operation in the heart of the Central Valley, the Vidoviches also control a small real estate empire in the Silicon Valley, building and managing estate developments: office complexes, condominiums, mobile home parks, hotels and shopping centers.

John Vidovich, the current patriarch of the family business, and his wife Lydia live in an $11.4 million Los Altos Hills home. Hilly, wooded and overlooking the bay just south of San Francisco, it's one of the ritziest places to live in Northern California and the 8th most expensive zip code in America. (The president of Resnick's Paramount Farms, Joseph MacIlvane, rubs shoulders with the Vidovich family, sharing a post on the board of directors of the Dudley Ranch Water District, a private water district that owns 9.62% the Kern bank, along with John Vidovich.) 

Despite -- or maybe because of -- the family's extreme wealth, Sandridge Partners is one of the top welfare queen-farmers in the country. In 2007, it received $1 million in federal farm subsidies, more than any other farmer that year, raking in an additional $6.8 million between 1995 and 2006, according to the Environmental Working Group. Known as "direct payments," the subsidies are made each year mostly to growers of corn, wheat, rice and cotton, with payout amounts based on past production, sometimes even regardless of whether the crops are still being grown.

But their $73-million water deal shows that farm subsidies aren't the only, or even the most, lucrative handout that has the Vidoviches living well. The money paid out via farm subsidies pale in comparison to the massive profits that can be reaped from simply reselling the heavily taxpayer subsidized water they receive from the state.

According one state water official, the Vidovich's $5,200 per acre-foot deal with the Mojave Water Agency was nearly double previous record price paid for water in California.

Just look at these profit margins: these days, Central Valley farmers buy water from California's Department of Water Resources for a heavily-subsidized $100 to $500 per acre-foot, while city slickers in San Francisco pay around $8,500 for the same water. With this kind of discount, Vidoviches could score a ten- to fifty-fold spread on their purchase-to-sale price. Even if they paid the maximum price of $500 per acre-foot, the water they sold to the Mojave Desert for $73 million would have only cost them $7 million. That's $66 million in pure profit, and all they have to do is let a couple of hundred acres of almond groves wither and let California taxpayers, their ritzy Los Altos Hills neighbors included, fill up their bank accounts. 
Shocking as this textbook example of transfer of wealth is, it is neither an isolated incident nor a freak loophole. It was the intended effect of the deregulation and privatization of water hashed in Monterey almost 15 years ago, which transformed water into a truly liquid asset that could be traded with ease on the market. (In 2002, the Sacramento Bee estimated that members of the Kern County Water Bank made at least $128 million from water sales to other cities and counties, which the paper admitted was an incomplete and low-ball figure.)

"Think of the Bank of America, the way it operates with dollars, that's the way we operate with water," said Jonathan Parker, general manager of the Kern Water Bank Authority. "What we do is provide a service. We store water at cost and then take water out of the ground, at cost. They pay us to provide that service in the least expensive manner." 

Parker was quoted in 2003. With all the bank bailouts that happened since then, the money-bank to water-bank analogy works even better. The Kern Water Bank shifts the cost for its water onto taxpayers and shifts all of the profits it makes by selling the water to itself. As it turns out, the money-making ideology of "nationalizing losses, privatizing profits" is no longer limited to Wall Street, and hasn't been for a long time. It's all part of the business plan for California's corporate farmers, and a glimpse into the future of California's water trade. 

This is the backdrop against which the hysterics and fearmongering of California's water debate are being played out. The drought has been getting increasing political and media attention in recent months. At the core of the discussions are plans for a multi-billion dollar Peripheral Canal, a huge aqueduct that would be constructed to bypass the dying Sacramento Delta and tap into fresh water further upstream with supposedly less harm. It sounds nice on paper. But in reality, the Peripheral Canal is a water privatization con that would move water over to Central Valley water bankers and balloon California’s already over-leveraged "paper water" market.

Governor Schwarzenegger has been trying to push the project through California's legislature for months, and has received ample support from both sides of the isle. In September, Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein backed the governor and badgered the Obama administration to step in and help California's struggling farmers, going as far as including a letter personally written by Stewart Resnick in one of her communiques. In it Resnick went after Obama officials for siding with environmental interests over those "struggling" farmers. That same month, second-rate FOX news anchor Sean Hannity jetted to Fresno to lead an AstroTurf campaign -- complete with paid Latino "protesters" and funded by the PR firm Burson-Marsteller, which has done work for a wide range of evil clients, from the tobacco industry to Blackwater to the junta in Argentina -- and push for exactly the same thing. Hannity isn't losing any sleep for backing Resnick's "liberal" agenda. The Peripheral Canal is backed by powerful corporate interests regardless of party affiliation.

Of course, the profit drive of corporate America is relentless. And we, the people, have short lives and short memories. And that’s the funny thing: this isn't even a new scam. "The Peripheral Canal had been a top priority of the water interests for forty years," wrote the late and much admired Marc Reisner in 1986 in his book Cadillac Desert, one of the most eye-opening and sweeping histories of water use in the American West. It was part of Governor Pat Brown's original master plan for the California Aqueduct, the baby he pushed through in 1960. His son, Jerry Brown tried to finish what his dad started when he took the governor's seat in the mid-late 70s. But Gov. Brown's attempt to get it passed collapsed amid a worsening economy and a wet year.

Reisner chronicles the infighting, corruption, fraud and blatant media manipulation of public opinion that took place when corporate interests launched an all-out, yet ultimately unsuccessful, blitz to convince the Californian people that apocalypse would be at hand if the Peripheral Canal was not built 25 years ago.

Now, three decades later California's legislature is trying to hammer out exactly the same plan, which is as much about opening up more farm land as it is about securing more paper water to fuel suburban sprawl in the desert. And the corporate powers-that-be are using the exact same strategy -- fear -- to convince California taxpayers to finance their personal wealth.

The Great Gold Heist & How Gun Grabber Feinstein Stole $100's of Billions in Gold Reprint

Originally written by Karen-lee Bixman 2/1999, reprinted by Video Rebel's Blog 12/31/12

(Comments by California Cornerstone and emphasis added)

How Gun Grabber Feinstein Stole $100s Of Billions In Gold

Posted on December 31, 2012by horse237

Diane Feinstein is Gun Grabber in Chief in the US Senate. We need to go on the offensive against her for her many acts of corruption. The alternative is unthinkable: We could go unarmed off that Fiscal Cliff into the Greatest Depression in 500 years with nationwide riots and martial law.

Senator Diane Feinstein: “The Modern Jesse James”

Congress should be convening a criminal investigation. On October 8, 1994, the biggest gold heist in history occurred, but this theft lacked the melodrama of a Jesse James’ holdup or the excitement of a Brink’s truck robbery. Nary a word was reported by the media even though this thievery was committed in the light of day. The citizens that were being robbed tried to cry out for help but the lawmen wouldn’t listen because unbeknownst to them, they were helping the bandits gain their booty.

The 103rd Congress managed to accommodate more than a gang of train robbers could achieve in a lifetime when they approved the Desert Wilderness Protection Act. “Instead of voting on the Desert Wilderness Protection Act, Congress should be convening a criminal investigation,” said Donald Fife, spokesman for the National Association of Mining Districts.

Fife was commenting on recent information that indicates tens of billions of dollars in gold deposits and huge real estate swindles may be the motivating factors behind the act.

Sponsored by Senator Diane Feinstein, the Desert Wilderness Protection Act and its companion bill known as the California Desert Protection Act created three new national parks and seventy- four new wilderness areas in the desert of California that total 8 million acres (an area the size of Maryland). This closes acreage to development, forces out private owners within the protected area and closes mines and ranches. It also expands the Death Valley and Joshua Tree national monuments and upgrades them to national parks.

This is the largest wilderness land lock-up since the 1980 Alaska Lands Act; largest ever in the lower 48 states.

Senator Feinstein contends that the fragile ecosystem of the desert must be protected from development, but in reality the areas being placed into park and wilderness closures are not threatened. In 1980, the California DesertConservation Area Plan was enacted to protect the desert and it has been rigorously enforced by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Furthermore, the designated acreage mentioned in this bill have largely been for sale at bargain prices for over 100 years with no takers because there is absolutely no water or any prospect of water for development.

It seems that the real motivation for passage of this bill lies with the special interest groups that would benefit monetarily.

Through a complex series of land exchanges, Catellus Corporation, a subsidiary of Santa Fe Pacific, will receive land that contains some of the richest gold deposits in the world. (At that time, owned or controlling partner was Richard C. Blum, Mr. Mzzz Feinsetin or Mutt to her Jeff.)

In exchange, the public gets seventy-four widely scattered tracts of desert which have found no economic use in more than a century. These properties will be maintained at public expense; Secretary of Interior Bruce Babbitt claims resources within the National Park Service are available for this to be accomplished. In actuality, Congressional figures show that the National Park Service currently faces a 37-year back-log in construction funding, a 250-year back-log for land acquisition, and a short-fall of $400 million for existing park operation and maintenance. (And 'They' want us to trust the National Park Service, the Federal Government and outsiders with a National Heritage Area designation.)  Catellus owns over 400,000 acres of worthless land in the California Mojave Desert.

This land was obtained by Santa Fe Pacific and its predecessor railroad companies as part of the “checkerboard” railroad lands awarded for the building of the transcontinental railroad. Santa Fe transferred these lands which have been for sale for over 100 years, over to its subsidiary, Catellus Corp. In the land swap, Catellus Corp. will receive land from decommissioned military bases. One of the bases will be the Chocolate Mountain gunnery range. Unbeknownst to the public, inside the range is the world’s richest gold rift zone. Geologists estimate that the gold contained in this zone is worth between $40 to $100 billion. These are surface gold deposits which are more profitable to mine than the one-mile deep gold deposits in South Africa.

In addition to controlling Catellus, Santa Fe owns and operates the Mesquite gold mine located on the Chocolate Mountain rift zone. The Mesquite gold mine is one of the top ten mines in the United States and has some of the most profitable gold deposits of any mine in the world. To the north is the Chocolate Mountain gunnery range. The Mesquite open pit gold mine literally stops at the fence that borders the gunnery range. (Yep...lock, stock and barrel.)

According to mining engineers who work at the Mesquite mine, the main gold ore body is north of the fence inside the gunnery range. Engineers allege that in 1981 and 1982, Consolidated Goldfields, which owned the mine at the time, illegally drilled into the gunnery range area to determine the composition of the ore body. The samples proved to be of high quality. According to these same engineers, beginning in the mid-1980s, military helicopters brought high ranking military officers, Congressmen and Senators to the area to examine these large gold deposits. Congressman Bruce Vento (D-Minn.) was one of several congressmen and senators who participated in these highly secretive trips. These same engineers state that the purpose of these tours was to come up with a way to hand these gold deposits to Consolidated Gold.

No legal mechanism was then available to transfer this land without alerting the public to the existence of the gold. Shortly after these tours began, the Sierra Club received large contributions earmarked toward the desert wilderness campaign. Not long after that, Senator Alan Cranston introduced the California Desert Protection Act into legislation.

In 1993, Santa Fe traded all of it’s coal mines for several Consolidated Goldfield mines, including the Mesquite. According to Donald Fife (spokesman for the National Association of Mining Districts), “This transaction effectively concealed a sales price that could have drawn attention to the real value of Mesquite mine and the riches north of the pit wall in the gunnery range.

If Catellus Corp. receives land from the Chocolate Mountain gunnery range, the Santa Fe would control the exclusive rights to mine the gold trend for nearly 50 miles to the north. This would bypass any possibility of any open appraisal of the gold deposits.

Senator Diane Feinstein used language in the original bill that specifically stated that Catellus Corp. should receive preferential treatment in the disbursement of original government properties. (Which she did the same thing in the NHA legislation, specifically calling out Catepillar, you guessed it, Dick owns controlling interest in Catepillar, too.

The National Association of Mining Districts voiced suspicions about continued back-room favoritism for Catellus, and as noted by the San Francisco Chronicle, Catellus has given $100,000 in political contributions to Senator Feinstein over the past four years. (Mind you, she was elected to the Senate in 1992...so she's only been on the job for one year at this time.)

Since evidence of the conspiracy emerged, rumors circulating the Beltway said that the Chocolate Mountain gunnery range could not be decommissioned because there was too much live ordnance on the ground. This, however, was not true. Millions of surrounding acres were in similar condition after George Patton and others trained their entire armies there between 1942 and 1945. In 1947 the entire region was made safe for civilian use. Furthermore, the decommissioning of Chocolate Mountain will be quite easy in comparison to the clearing of mine fields in Kuwait.

The original version of the bill, however, raised enough red flags in Congress that a few lawmakers, notably Rep. Michael Huffington (R-Calif.), got the Catellus provisions stricken.

The full House of Representatives then voted to grant the same exchange privileges to anybody whose land might be taken under the Desert Act.

“When that was made known,” remarked Rife, “opponents forced Feinstein to take it out of the bill. But Catellus, with all its land, still has more leverage for negotiations and acquiring the land it wants than any other private party in this whole deal.”

Additionally, Santa Fe has enormous political clout in California and Washington. In addition to having Senator Diane Feinstein as their champion in Washington, former California Governor George Deukmejian is one of the company’s directors. Under these circumstances, the Desert Wilderness Protection Act is the perfect vehicle to achieve this land exchange.

Santa Fe however, could actually obtain the bulk of the gold even before the Chocolate Mountain gunnery range is decommissioned.

A careful reading of the bill suggests that the map of the range was altered in July 1993, (Again, sound familiar??) to exclude a rectangular parcel along the south end of the range. This land comprises the immediate area north of the Mesquite gold mine and included the bulk of the gold deposits and can only be accessed through the private holdings of the Mesquite mine. Now that the bill has become law, a new map of the gunnery range will allow Mesquite to claim public land adjoining it that could hold a billion to several billion in gold.

A source presently employed at Santa Fe states that everyone at the company expects Santa Fe to be given this land. He further claims that Santa Fe is presently carrying out extensive exploration of these areas inside the gunnery range. This includes the drilling and the mapping of the gold deposits. These activities inside the gunnery range are illegal. Therefore, Santa Fe Pacific must have obtained permission from the Navy and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in order to carry out their present activities. It is unknown who granted permission for such activity on the part of the Navy, but it is known that no one in the BLM has the authority to grant such permission. The only individual allowed to grant such authority is Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt. 

Therefore, even with the Catellus provision stricken from the bill, the money would still be routed to the same beneficiaries.

The California Public Employees Retirement System, (CALPERS) is a nearly $80 billion pension fund whose investment clout is heavily influenced by California leadership which includes Sen. Diane Feinstein. Several years ago, CALPERS made a $400 million investment in Catellus. Shortly after CALPERS made its investment in Catellus, the value of the stock collapsed 82%. Dehnert Queen, a San Francisco businessman, filed a criminal complaint in regards to this investment to U.S. Attorney Michael J. Yamaguchi and Ms. Sylvia Scott of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

(Blum is currently one of the investment companies used by CalPERS...and they are losing $$ on very bad investments, Blum still gets his commissions and the public sees their annuity funds decimated to make up the loss, ala Carpenter's Health and Welfare Trust Fund in 2003, then the largest investment portfolio in the nation, I know...that's how my annuity was stolen in 2003, the bastard.)

Queen states, in his complaint, that Sen. Feinstein “misrepresented facts to defraud a public corporation (CALPERS), abused power and conflicts of interest to defraud State and U.S. taxpayers. In early 1993, CALPERS doubled its investment in Catellus to 41 percent…Queen contends “that both former Senator Cranston and Senator Feinstein acted to sponsor the Desert Protection Act in order to preserve and protect the formal agreement that then Mayor Feinstein signed with Catellus to build the Mission Bay Project in 1984, updated in 1986 and shepherded same through the City’s (San Francisco) departments and commissions.” (And y'all thought I was making all this up...I wouldn't drive on that new bridge if I had to.)

The land swap as purposed in The Wilderness Act “will generate the monetary value (approximately $500 million) necessary to execute Catellus’ large scale development project located throughout the Bay Area.”

According to public records, CALPERS investment in Catellus was through Bay Area Partnership, subsequently changed to Bay Area Real Estate Associates, which is itself comprised of JMB Realty and CALPERS. Efforts to determine all of the participants in the investors’ group behind JMB Realty and Bay Area Real Estate Associates so far have been unsuccessful, but at least some appear to have business ties with Senator Feinstein’s husband.

None-the-less, allegations continue that Senator Feinstein as well as California Speaker of the House Willie Brown and a wide variety of San Francisco special interest groups would therefore benefit financially.

More directly, does Diane Feinstein, as a former employee of the City of San Francisco, Willie Brown and other California politicians maintain a CALPERS retirement account? (Hmmmm, I didn't think about THAT one!)

Repeated requests to Senator Feinstein’s office for the disclosure or denial of any direct relationship between the senator and her husband and CALPERS, JMB Reality, Bay Area Real Estate Associates and Cattelus Development Corporation have been met with evasions and non-answers.

The land swap will give Catellus Corp. thousands of contiguous acres bordering the Salton Sea which lies west of the gunnery range. Developing the arid hills and cleaning up the polluted Salton Sea would require billions of acre-feet of water. By coincidence, the Coachella Canal runs right between the Salton Sea and the range, which is about 20 miles wide and 60 miles long. Developers with such a prize could readily bid water away from owners of irrigated farms in the Brawley and El Centro areas.

Ed White, who owns a family mining business in the area is one of many whose business will now be destroyed. “The Sierra Club was just used, in my opinion, by Feinstein’s bankers friends and the railroad or their land company Catellus, to create the public perception that these lands are fragile and threatened by development,” said White.

“The truth appears to be just the opposite. The scattered railroad lands that could never be developed are to be consolidated into a single block of 226,000 acres so they can be developed.

JMB Realty stands to make a huge profit on this development. In the name of “rewilding” millions of acres of desert, grave financial and environmental damage will occur once the land is closed to the public.

Ninety-seven the U.S. rare earth mineral production comes from the California desert. These minerals are used in high technology and are essential to the production of lasers, high-power magnets, super conductivity and pollution free cars. The United States will now be forced to obtain these minerals from foreign mineral cartels.

One hundred percent of the U.S. production of boron is from the California desert and this production which generates $500 million a year to the economy will now be lost.

Several pension and health insurance funds have large holdings in the area that now will be at risk. These include the AFL-CIO, United Steel Workers, and California State Teachers Pension Fund.

The Wilderness Act includes 140,000 acres of National Forest found unsuitable for wilderness by then California Senators Alan Cranston (D) and Pete Wilson (R) in the 1983 California National Forest Wilderness Act, including 12,500 acres of the Bighorn Mountain Wilderness in the San Bernardino National Forest that impact the AFL-CIO trust properties.

The greatest damage to union trust assets is the expansion of the Joshua Tree National Park by 234,000 acres to surround their Eagle Mountain Iron Mine on three sides with National Park Wilderness. This will prevent the mine from ever producing again.

The steel workers health and pension assets are the mines and highly mineralized lands acquired when the Kaiser Steel’s Fontana, California steel mill was forced into bankruptcy by overzealous environmental regulations and Japanese dumping of steel in the late 1970′s.

The 300,000 acres of Teachers Pension funds are the unsold state school sections that were given by the Federal government to the state more than 100 years ago. They have been for sale for 100 years and because there is no water they are not threatened with development.

Unlike the AFL-CIO pension and health insurance funds, the State Legislature and the State Lands Commission discouraged exploration on those lands for energy and mineral resources. Their mineral value is unknown, but it is not uncommon in that area that a single deposit of gold, silver, boron or other minerals could exceed several billion dollars in value.

The closure of the lands will generate a loss of 20,000 jobs and billions of dollars of economic activity will be lost annually. (Again, sound eerily familiar?)

Over two hundred homes and private businesses worth millions of dollars that will be taken and destroyed will result in claims, lawsuits and payments of 5th Amendment compensation. (Hauntingly familiary??)

One of the most insidious provisions of the act is the creation of “Reserved Federal Water Rights.” The Wilderness Act will reserve federal water rights for 74 desert wilderness acres and three new national parks totaling 8 million acres. (I did NOT know this, makes draining Northern California dry make more sense.) This will create a precedent, usurping state supremacy and local control of the Western States precious water rights. This will be the “camel’s nose under the tent” because, although the Wilderness Act applies only to the California desert, it gives special standing to the Federal government in the adjudication of any water rights where wilderness is involved. It could affect all neighboring states that share watershed with California: Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, even including all of the states that share the Colorado River.

The California Wildlife Federation and the Society for Bighorn Sheep have headed the opposition to the act because they say that thousands of animals will die now that the bill has been enacted. In this arid, rocky region private individuals developed and maintain water holes for the Bighorn Sheep and other wildlife: now they will be prohibited from doing so.

While the roots of this scandal herald back to the days of Senator Alan Cranston, it is obvious that the special interest groups in collusion with the government have systematically worked toward closing off mass acreage from public as well as private usage. (Nightmarish-ly familiar???)

The September 1993 issue of the Holcomb Balley Argonaut reported that a systematic plan of “manufactured wilderness” has been occurring in areas of California for years.

In August of 1991, a joint force made up of Forest Service and U.S. Military personnel entered a road leading to a historic cabin located in Horse-Thief Flats, California.

Within this hidden valley, where renegade Indians hid horses from pursuing California rancheros during the early 1800′s, was located the last historic miner’s cabin in the northeast San Bernadino Mountains.

Shortly after government personnel entered the valley, the area reverberated with a half dozen giant explosions. The Big Bear Ranger District personnel alleged that the Horse-Thief Flats area was used by marijuana growers. They claimed the historic cabin and road were blown up in several places by military experts under recent authorization to interdict drug traffic.

The explosives were carelessly handled. They apparently used old style detonating cord, normally not permitted in the forest and their fourth blast in the road sprayed fire out over several acres starting a wildland fire. This portion of the National Forest has been parched from the California drought. In historical times only a few wildland fires ever occurred.

Dave Fisher, who has the grazing lease adjoining Horse-Thief Flats, said, ” In my opinion, the real reason for this operation had more to do with ‘manufacturing wilderness’ for the desert bill than fighting crime.”

“They have quietly and systematically bulldozed or burned these structures for years,” says Ed White, member of the historic Lone Valley Mining District. “The real reason for use of military was eliminating all evidence of human occupation so the Sierra Club could reclaim the area as wilderness. Blowing up the orad is counter productive, now the marijuana growers have a secure place to farm”.

On October 7, 1994 at 2:00 a.m., Representative George Miller (D-Calif.), representing the East San Francisco Bay area, led the charge to ram the wilderness bill through the House where it was passed by a voice vote. The bill was passed despite a huge grass-roots mobilization which sent out a fax alert on the bill. One Congressman who received the alert distributed hundreds of copies on the floor of the house. This Congressman stated that the critical issue was the massive corruption surrounding the theft of the gold in the Chocolate Mountains.

The next day, Senator Malcolm Wallop (R-Wyo.) valiantly filibustered the Senate in an attempt to keep the bill from passing, but his efforts failed. As the Wilderness Bill was actively being filibustered, Secretary Babbitt was lobbying senators for their vote; he was ultimately ejected from the upper chamber.

The Alliance of America, a coalition of property rights groups, says that a criminal investigation should focus on the roles of corrupt politicians and environmental racketeers in the biggest gold heist in history.

If Jesse James were alive today, he’d realize that profit is gained not by robbing banks but by being a politician.”

This was written by Karen Bixman and originally appeared here:

http://www.uhuh.com/1calfraud/stacks/bixman.htm