Character Assassination by Sound Bite

 
 
There are excellent political reasons for the witch-hunt in the south Valley against Lloyd Carter, arising from a comment taken out of context about farmworkers, for which Carter apologized, once he saw what the media did with it, immediately.
 
Carter is the premier water journalist of the San Joaquin Valley. He has been on the story since the Kesterson Wildlife Refuge disaster of 1983, when the world, largely due to his efforts, learned what concentrated amounts of heavy metals, particularly selenium, did to wildlife, cattle and people in and near the Merced County refuge. Among the people whose health was destroyed, were farmworkers. Lloyd Carter wrote that story, at great cost to his career as a newspaperman for the craven mainstream media.
 
Carter has been at the forefront of defining issues of environmental, social and economic justice for all Valley residents, especially farmworkers, for 30 years.
 
Last week, he made a statement that appeared to slam farmworkers in the congressional district of Jim Costa (Kern and Kings counties). With $971 million in farm subsidies, which does not include water and power subsidies, Costa’s district ranks second for crop subsidies in the state, yet is the poorest congressional district in the nation. He said farmworkers do not want their children to be farmworkers. He said the teenage pregnancy rate is about 30 percent, the high school dropout rate is higher and that there is a lot of gang activity in Costa’s district. He said there were a lot of illegal aliens in the district. Who would deny these facts, particularly from a journalist who has built a reputation for integrity, accuracy and truthfulness over a 30-year career?
 
Nobody who knows anything about the district denies them in private. The media is constantly providing examples. But, few people connect the dots in private, and even fewer connect them in public.
 
The unfortunate context of Carter’s events last week consists of three elements: fear, hypocrisy and propaganda.
 
We are afraid of drought because these irrigation systems are vastly over-committed and always have been. Yet, politicians and “local leaders” babble on as if California never had a drought before. It had a bad one around 1990 and a worse one in the mid-1970s. Everybody knows this, particularly agribusiness, farmworkers and Valley environmentalits. There is also great fear, available to anyone who speaks Spanish in this Valley, for Mexican drug-cartel labor trafficking. But, before the onslaught on border people, the Valley Hispanic leaders had already sold out to every interest they viewed as stronger than themselves – from the traffickers, the contractors, the farmers to the state and federal government. They are cowards, cobardes, and everyone also knows this, and says it (privately). 
 
We cannot tell the truth about agricultural water or farmworkers. We are all ‘people of lie’ on these issues. South Valley farmers and their water districts, led by Westlands, Friant Water Users Authority, Kern County Water District and other special interests, lie hysterically about both water and farmworkers. Their drain water is toxic, their water rights are junior to many upstream (mainly the exchange contractors’ riparian rights) and the majority of the farmworkers are illegal aliens. These truths must be denied. It is an article of faith to deny that the entire system of agriculture south of the Mendota Pool cannot be sustained without essential lies, lies Lloyd Carter built an exemplary journalism career exposing.
 
Westlands and Friant Water Users Authority, the largest, must politically sensitive and vulnerable to drought of all water districts in the nation, and its few, large-landholding, highly subsidized growers, have become, by necessity, the masters of propaganda on water issues.
 
Last week, an historic debate took place at CSU Fresno, hosted by the political science department because, as Judge Oliver Wanger, debate moderator, commented, the Fresno State Water Institute thought it was too controversial for them to host. The debate pitted three environmentalists against four representatives of ag water. Carter was the local environmentalist; Tom Birmingham, general manager of Westlands, was the principal representative for Big Water and agribusiness. Judge Wanger provided the legal context for 30 years of federal water cases in his court; Birmingham and Co. argued the case for Big Water; and Carter, flanked by Bill Jennings, founder of Stockton-based Delta Keepers, and Michael Jackson, the preeminent environmental water lawyer in Northern California, presented the case for the environment, wildlife species in danger of extinction due to Delta over-pumping, public health and safety issues, the livelihoods of fishing town on the coast and agriculture beyond the sacred precincts of Westlands, such as towns like Grayson on the San Joaquin River in Stanislaus County, which rely on river water. There was almost no print coverage of that debate. This was an example of the propaganda of omission. Whatever broadcast coverage of it that occurred was, by the magic of water-hysteria propaganda, obliterated by a gross lie: Carter, “the racist.”
 
This is a natural resources situation in which all eco-justice advocates would like to support agriculture, the basis of our Valley economy, but the propaganda of the hysterical whine of agribusiness becomes more absurd as the years wear on.
 
Carter isn’t a racist, never has been, never will be. Nor is it an issue of “national security” to exterminate Delta wildlife, fish species and public health and safety for subsidized cotton and pistachios in the Westlands Water District. Jim Costa’s congressional district is not the “bread basket of the world, “ unless you like bread made of cotton, pistachios, lettuce, almonds, cheap, half-built subdivisions, expressways, blueprints, Valley partnerships, oil or any of the other export commodities produced in the south San Joaquin Valley. We don’t do bread there. As Carter put it in the argument that ended the debate at Fresno State, “The grand experiment didn’t work. Retire the badlands of the south Valley.”
 
Birmingham retorted that Carter’s statement about water rights was “FALSE!” (Birmingham’s rhetoric is worthy of the Roman senate long after Cicero was murdered and the Republic was forgotten and only the rhetoric went on devoid of truth.) Birmingham cited the fact that the Del Puerto Water District, far upstream from Westlands, would also get no water this year from the Bureau of Reclamation. Carter was talking about the exchange contractors in the Central California Irrigation District around Los Banos, whose riparian rights derive from the Miller-Lux Ranch, would still get 75-percent of their allotment, despite the drought because of the seniority of the rights.
 
Carter won the debate hands down on logic, experience and truth. Everyone in the hall knew it.
 
We are ‘people of the lie.’ We prefer the false to the true. Carter’s apology was another mistake, an attempt to produce a sound bite to counteract a sound bite, but it was sincere, short and, unlike the Big Water/Big Ag propaganda, it was truthful.
 
The environmental community of the San Joaquin Valley supports farmworkers, clean, safe, healthy housing and working conditions for them, a livable, access to education, and the right to participation in government.
 
In California, droughts happen, water is over-committed, urban growth threatens ag water, if Congress doesn’t finally pass the San Joaquin Valley Settlement very shortly, the judge will rule to the detriment of farmers, fish are going extinct in the Delta from over-pumping, the west side of the south San Joaquin Valley is toxic alkali flats that should be fallowed for perpetuity after 40 years of destructive farming, and no place in California has ever treated farmworkers worse than the Valley. We all know this in private. Carter said it in public.
 
Civilized people don’t lynch a person for telling the truth, as Carter has done for decades at huge expense. The Valley is the cruelest place for farmworkers, natural resources, democracy and the truthful journalism upon which democracy depends. At the Fresno State debate, Carter upheld the modern position; Birmingham of Westlands argued for our degraded feudalism. Meanwhile, the wheels of propaganda rolled on.
 
You decide what kind of valley you want to live in. Lloyd Carter has done his best for three decades to present the alternative to the same old agrarian oligarchy of the 1930s, when the Farmers Associations took axe handles to striking American workers, and of the violent hysteria about farm-labor organization of the 1950s and 1960s.

When you hear the clatter of chains, it's wise to ask who's jerking them and why. A "national security zone" for agriculture in Kern and Kings counties would be the end of all possibility of labor organization, in case anybody's thinking of trying it again.