WHO RUNS CALIFORNIA?
Degnan, Joseph P.
Who Runs California? by JAMES P. DEGNAN T and monopoly, in the words of Winston Churchill, is "the mother of all monopoly." It is also the mother of economic and political power, and nowhere in...
...Senator Douglas, along with Senators Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin and Wayne Morse of Oregon, will try this year—as they did last, when Congress, over their objections, approved $10 million toward the half-billion-dollar project—to persuade Congress not to appropriate any more funds for the San Luis and Westlands Projects until the nation has been assured that the money will not be spent to perpetuate and enrich land monopolists and speculators...
...It's the big growers," the farmer continued, "the ones that need thousands of workers, who want to keep wages depressed and the labor market flooded...
...Supreme Court upheld the excess acreage provision as a "Federal protection guaranteeing that great public expenditures will not go in disproportionate share to a few but will be used for the greatest good of the greatest number...
...Referring to non-enforcement of the Reclamation Law in the area of these projects, Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois said: "This is one of the greatest land steals ever attempted in the history of this nation...
...The...
...Bureau of Reclamation records show that thirty-six landowners hold most of the irrigable land...
...In California," reported Joseph Alsop in a column entitled, "And the Rich Get Richer," the "luckier irrigation farmers are currently paying (as a result of Federal water subsidies) $2.50 per acre foot of water, whereas the city of Los Angeles will shortly be paying no less than $63 per acre foot...
...we only need a few extra workers to help us, and paying them decent wages isn't much of a problem...
...Ironically, the water which perpetuates the empires of the land monopolists flows to them as the result of a law designed specifically to break up and to prevent land monopoly—the Reclamation Act of 1902, an act which enabled Congress to spend Federal funds to "make the desert bloom," to irrigate the desert lands of the West so that these lands would be available to small farmers, so that "farm boys could have their own farms . . . and wouldn't be driven into the already overcrowded cities to seek employment," and so that the democratic system of family farms developed under the Homestead Act of 1862 in the Midwest could be developed in the Far West...
...The reason...
...The same is true of the other major California land monopolists...
...We live on our land and work it ourselves...
...His only practical protection lies in the Secretary of the Interior and the Justice Department...
...There is no better way to guarantee that these acres will remain open space or agricultural lands, and to prevent these lands from being turned into urban sprawl than for the government, exercising its rights under the Reclamation Act, to purchase these lands at prices—to cite an AFL-CIO proposal—"which would reflect the value of the lands without the addition of Federally subsidized water...
...government, for $3.50 per acre foot...
...In 1958 the U.S...
...These projects, according to William Reich, associate editor of the California Farm Reporter, represent "a giveaway rivaling Teapot Dome . . . with water rather than oil involved...
...Well, if you're for the strikers," I asked, "why don't you bargain with them...
...In fact, he has been a great help to the land monopolists in getting more Federal waters for them...
...Father James Vizzard, S.J., spokesman for the National Catholic Rural Life Conference in the nation's capital, estimates that it costs the U.S...
...Acquisition of these lands would enable the government to fight the rural war on poverty by opening up the 900,000 California acres to settlement by family farmers...
...It is not enforced in Southern California, nor on the San Luis (Westlands) Project in California's San Joaquin Valley, nor in California's Sacramento Valley...
...But if the Secretary of the Interior does not demand that the anti-monopoly, anti-speculation provisions of the Reclamation Act be enforced, then the taxpayer is for all practical purposes going to be bilked...
...Schenley pumps in the water it uses but it is available in the ground because the surrounding acres are irrigated with Federal water...
...Reagan, like practically every other Republican running for high office in California before him, has gone on record as opposing enforcement of the anti-speculation and anti-monopoly provisions of the law...
...So obvious and outrageous has been the breaking of the law in Imperial Valley that even the present Department of Interior—which under Secretary Stewart L. Udall is not noted for zealously enforcing Reclamation Law—has issued, through its solicitor, Frank Barry, a ruling stating that the Reclamation Law should be enforced in the Imperial Valley...
...The power of California's land monopolists—the huge landowners such as Southern Pacific Railroad, Kern County Land, Standard Oil Company, the DiGiorgio Corporation, Schenley Industries, the Irvine Company, and the Tejon Ranch—came home to me last fall when, shortly after the grape strike in Delano, California, had begun, I interviewed a number of the owners of small grape farms in the Delano area...
...Take, for instance, Kern County Land—a corporation possessing 1,800,000 acres of land and assets of close to $215 million— and California Packing Corporation (Del Monte Products)—an organization with corporate assets of nearly $400 million...
...It is also the mother of economic and political power, and nowhere in the United States is this more vividly demonstrated than in California...
...The farmers in the Coachella Valley overwhelmingly voted in favor of signing recordable contracts and, in general, of abiding by the anti-monopoly, anti-speculation features of the law...
...Among them are Kern County Land, DiGiorgio Corporation, Standard Oil Company, Tejon Ranch, and Southern Pacific Railroad...
...The AFL-CIO estimates that in California alone there are more than 900,000 acres of Federally-irrigated land held in violation of the excess acreage provision of the Reclamation Act...
...What Reich means is that the Interior Department is spending a half billion dollars on the valley to irrigate an area in which seventy per cent of the land, according to the Reclamation Law, is ineligible to receive water...
...Typical of the land monopolists' contempt for the Reclamation Law is their flouting, for decades, of the excess acreage provision of the law in California's Imperial Valley—a violation which has meant immense profits for the monopolists at the taxpayer's expense...
...If Congress doesn't do something about enforcing the Reclamation Law," says Father Vizzard, a chief foe of the land and water monopolists, "the people who have traditionally championed reclamation projects are going to become the major enemies of reclamation projects...
...Often condemned by the giant landowners of the area for being "welfare bums," the farm workers, speaking through their newspaper, El Malcriado, have called the government's gift of subsidized water to excess landholders the "biggest welfare program of all...
...Board has traditionally been friendly to the big landowners...
...In the early 1950's, the union journal reports, DiGiorgio Corporation, to get Federal water from the Central Valley Project, finally signed a recordable contract...
...According to Henry Anderson, "Kern County Land gets water for as little as $2 an acre foot, while domestic users in the East Bay Municipal Utility District pay the equivalent of $87 per acre foot...
...Every one of these owners was for the strikers, and a few were even quietly helping them...
...Why don't you recognize their union [the National Farm Workers Association] ?" "If I recognized that union," one of the farmers replied, "I'd find myself without a loan for next year's crop...
...Although the giveaway on the Westlands and San Luis Projects is one of the biggest scandals in American history, it is not even an issue in the coming gubernatorial race between the reactionary Republican Ronald Reagan and Democratic incumbent Governor Edmund "Pat" Brown...
...Both of these giants share common directorates with, among other powerful interests: Crocker-Anglo National Bank, Bank of California, Wells Fargo Bank, Pacific Gas and Electric, and Pacific Telephone and Telegraph...
...As yet, however, the law has not been enforced and it probably won't be...
...Paul Taylor, former consultant to the Bureau of Reclamation, professor emeritus of economics at the University of California at Berkeley, and probably the nation's leading authority on land tenure and agricultural water policies...
...The Irvine Company in Southern California, for example, one of the land monopolies that has profited immensely by non-enforcement of the Reclamation Law, has developed communities on 93,000 of its acres, contributing to the Los Angeles suburban slums—"slurbs...
...If an owner wants water for more than 160 acres, he can get that water by signing a contract agreeing to sell the acres in excess of 160 within a period of time to be determined by the Secretary of the Interior (usually ten years) and at a price not inflated by the availability of the cheap, subsidized water...
...Here Cesar Chavez and his National Farm Workers Association, who have already captured the imagination of the nation and of some members of Congress, along with various urban allies, are demanding enforcement of the Reclamation Law...
...In California's Central Valley—the nation's greatest reclamation project—the Treasury pours out the public's money and gives away the public domain in water What protection has the taxpayer from being bilked of his tax dollars by the land monopolists...
...When it came time for the Coachella Valley to get water the Secretary of the Interior was Harold Ickes, a champion of the Reclamation Law—not Wilbur, a friend of the monopolists...
...Political realists generally agree that nothing much is going to change in the land barons' empire of the Imperial Valley...
...Most of the acres in these irrigation projects belong to the land monopolists...
...This transaction meant that DiGiorgio, instead of paying $14 per acre foot for canal water, got the water, courtesy of the U.S...
...Just as the taxpayer was the main financier of the outrageous bra-cero program—a program which, by importing foreign labor chiefly for the benefit of the huge growers, kept Americans out of work and on relief ¦—so, also, the taxpayer has financed and continues to finance the vast empires of the land monopolists...
...Besides Barry's overturning of the Wilbur ruling, a further telling rebuttal to the argument of the Imperial Valley land barons is that in California's Coachella Valley, an area that gets its water from exactly the same facilities as does the Imperial Valley, the Reclamation Law is strictly enforced...
...How is this possible...
...How...
...It's to their financial advantage, just as the bracero program was...
...The reason is that the state's private landowners, the ones who control most of California's natural resources, open spaces, forests, and agricultural lands, are making enormous profits by either converting their lands into urban developments or by selling their lands to urban developers...
...Theoretically it is possible for the taxpayer to sue the Department of the Interior and/or the Bureau of Reclamation for not doing their job or protecting his interests, but it has been pointed out many times by legal authorities that bringing such a suit to Federal court is extremely difficult...
...Such prices would be most reasonable indeed...
...It should be noted also that Congress has always voted for enforcing, without modification, the anti-speculation and anti-monopoly provisions of the law...
...the monopolists fume...
...But these provisions have not been and are not being enforced...
...An illustration of this marketing dominance was given recently by an AFL-CIO official in San Francisco: "DiGiorgio," the official explained, "controls ninety-three per cent of Met Food Corporation, which means, in simple terms, that if the small grape grower wants an Eastern market then he had better play along with DiGiorgio...
...The monopolists' argument for non-enforcement is embarrassingly weak...
...To have bought this land," commented El Malcriado, "The small farmer would have had to come up with $160,000 cash...
...Consider the ties between the DiGiorgio Corporation, the largest grower and distributor of grapes and tree fruits in the world, with net assets in excess of $65 million and with net profits last year of more than $2.5 million, and the Bank of America, California's largest bank and an institution which last year financed nearly half of California's agricultural production...
...The acreage limitation has never been enforced...
...In a relationship rare even in the JAMES P. DEGNAN, director of the creative writing and literary criticism programs at Santa Clara University, has contributed non-fiction and fiction to The Atlantic, The Commonweal, The Saturday Review, and The Nation...
...An examination of the relationship between California's land monopolists—of landowners like the DiGiorgio Corporation, whose wrath the small farmer so feared —and the rest of the California power structure—the banks and utility corporations, for instance—provides an answer...
...This would be a step toward the system of family farms that Theodore Roosevelt and the other early champions of the Reclamation Act intended, but which for so long has been thwarted by land monopolists in California and other parts of the Far West...
...To prevent Federal funds from being spent to perpetuate land and water monopolists, to see to it, in Theodore Roosevelt's words, that "every dollar [spent on reclamation] is spent to build up the small man of the West and prevent the big man, East or West, coming in and monopolizing the water and land," President Roosevelt had the excess acreage provision written into the Reclamation Act...
...Although Barry has declared a ruling made in 1933 by the then lame duck Secretary of Interior, Ray Lyman Wilbur—a ruling stating that the 160 acre limitation did not apply to Imperial Valley—to be "completely without legal foundation" (Wilbur made the ruling without the advice or consent of his Department's solicitor), the Imperial Valley land barons are using the Wilbur ruling as the basis for their argument...
...And it is likely that the DiGiorgio Corporation is on the verge of converting many of its richly-subsidized agricultural lands into urban development and huge profits...
...Today these are being destroyed with incredible speed and replaced by urban sprawl, by asphalt and concrete, by hideous housing tracts, and shopping centers and freeways...
...We are going to insist that either the law be strictly enforced or Federal reclamation projects be completely stopped...
...The land monopolists are part of a coalition that controls not only the banks and the utility companies so vital to the small farmer but the very market on which he must sell...
...Presently, Chavez and his NFWA, in concert with the AFL-CIO, the National Grange, the California Democratic Council, the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, and various other groups, are fighting to compel the government to enforce strictly the Reclamation Law on the new San Luis and Westlands Projects being constructed in the San Joaquin Valley...
...An effective means of halting this destruction of California is for the Federal government to purchase the lands which are threatened by urbanization —the lands from which the speculators, in violation of the Reclamation Law, are making immense profits...
...Champions of the Reclamation Law in California predict that it is going to take the Justice Department a long time "to make sure"—maybe until a new Administration is in office...
...El Malcriado points out examples of violations of Reclamation Law by the big landowners near Delano, such as DiGiorgio and Schenley...
...government about $1,000, beyond what the government recovers, to irrigate a single acre of the semi-desert lands of California...
...Jesse Tapp, the Board's president, is also chairman of the board of the Bank of America...
...It is not only expensive but, because the plaintiff has to show that his interests have been "specifically affected by the allegedly illegal official action," when "he brings his action as a representative of the general public," observed the Harvard Law Review, he has trouble obtaining standing in court...
...Reclamation Law has been ignored in the Salt River Valley of Arizona for fifty years," says Dr...
...California is aptly described as "California, Going, Going...
...Ickes gave Coachella Valley landholders the choice that every Secretary of Interior ought to give them in all areas to be served by Federal waters: Either obey the anti-speculation and anti-monopoly provisions of the Reclamation Law or do without the water for illegally-held acres...
...But did DiGiorgio abide by the terms of the contract...
...Members of the group are just waking up to the fact that in the Reclamation Law they have a strong weapon for guaranteeing conservation of what is left of California's fast-vanishing countryside and open spaces, of her irreplaceable agricultural lands, of her disappearing forests, and of her streams and mountains...
...According to El Malcriado and other sources, such as the California Farm Reporter, it did not...
...The rest of the men agreed...
...Thus, contrary to the Reclamation Law, the Interior Department let DiGiorgio get away with putting the land up for sale at an inflated price definitely attributable to the gift of Federal water...
...It is not only the farm worker and the small farmer who are victims of the land monopolists...
...And where would he borrow that— from the DiGiorgio controlled banks...
...Besides the interlocking directorates with the Bank of America, DiGiorgio also shares directorates with such powerful state and national organizations as Pacific Gas and Electric, Pacific Telephone and Telegraph, Bank of California, Firemen's Fund Insurance, and the Union Oil Company...
...Threatened by these corporate Goli-aths, it is little wonder that the small farmer is intimidated...
...Federal purchase was proposed in the Coolidge Administration in the Fact Finder Report of 1924, and recommended by the Veterans of Foreign Wars in 1947...
...As a result, land reclamation in California and in other Western states has perpetuated rather than destroyed land monopoly and strengthened rather than weakened the land monopolists and the land speculators...
...There is hope, however, that further gigantic water giveaways may be stopped in the Westlands Water District of California's Central Valley Project—the area of the famous Delano grape strike...
...Southern Pacific alone owns 150,000 acres in the area...
...After all," one of the farm owners explained, "for us, there's no labor problem because we're farmers, not absentee land speculators like the DiGiorgios and the Schenley people [the biggest grape growers in the Delano area...
...This states that water from a Federally-financed project cannot be delivered to lands in single ownership that exceed 160 acres...
...why start enforcing it now...
...it is the taxpayer as well, in California and all over America...
...When, almost fifteen years later, DiGiorgio was finally forced to abide by the recordable contract and put the excess lands up for sale, DiGiorgio offered the land at such an inflated price that hardly anyone, let alone the small farmers for whom the government intended it, could purchase it...
...The answer is by giving the monopolists hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Federally-financed water, water which does not legally belong to the monopolists...
...Recently, land monopolists led by the land-speculating Irvine Company persuaded the California State Board of Agriculture to oppose publicly enforcement of the Reclamation Law in the Imperial Valley...
...Considering that as long ago as the 1930's Federal water projects turned California desert land bought for $5 an acre into land worth $1,000 and more an acre, it is easy to see why Roosevelt's anti-monopoly excess acreage provision, and his anti-speculation or recordable contract provision for the sale of excess land were basic to the family farm concept of the Reclamation Act...
...As for Schenley, El Malcriado points out that for almost twenty years Schenley has been receiving free Federal water, water largely responsible for Schen-ley's huge profits, without even having to sign a recordable contract...
...Little help for champions of Reclamation Law is likely to come from the state level...
...And Brown, once a champion of Reclamation Law, has, since being elected governor in 1958, apparently changed his mind about the need for strict enforcement...
...Nevertheless, Assistant Attorney General Edwin L. Weisl Jr., speaking for the Justice Department about enforcement in the Imperial Valley, said on April 19 of this year, "We want to be sure of all legal premises, and the probable economic effect before we institute any action...
...world of higher capitalism," writes Henry Anderson, editor of the journal, Farm Labor, "DiGiorgio and the Bank of America share no fewer than four directors in common...
...The one significant group in California which may well cause trouble for politicians who are indifferent toward enforcement consists of California's ardent conservationists...
Vol. 30 • September 1966 • No. 9
