Kesterson: a Microcosm of Government Corruption [2] by D.A. Tuma

Making up the rules as we go

While I had faith in the general wisdom of federal government programs, I was glad to help. Sixteen years after I joined federal civil service employment as a civil engineer, the federal government escalated its war on personal choice of medication by threatening random illegal-drug testing of personal drainage.

Any employer can set whatever terms of employment it wishes and potential employees are free to choose to accept or not. But if the terms of employment, including monitoring of drug law prohibition compliance, are to change for an established employer-employee relationship, such changes must have approval of both parties to be legitimate. The federal government didn't even ask for employee approval. Its unilateral action to start random drug testing of employees who had established long records of performance value indicated it cared more about numerical standards for drainage constituents than performance. Its unilateral action indicated it considered itself free of any obligation to honor any initial conditions of employment-pre-existing liberty. It presumed to make up its own rules for dealing with current relationships-trusts-as it went along.

The beast: leviathan

The federal government's arrogance to presume that we employees would give up our lifestyle of freedom from drainage monitoring to remain employed in civil service seemed more than just arbitrary, capricious, and punitive. Lots of people were going to be bothered so that a few would be intimidated into giving up their liberty to think in a state of mind of their own choice. Think about what else besides illegal drug use could be checked in a personal drainage sample. Pregnancy. How could a Republican Right-to-Life administration resist harassing women who tested positive for pregnancy? If instead of giving birth they later tested negative, would federal investigators look for evidence of criminal abortion?

I realized I was dealing with a political beast. A leviathan with no morality. It had been out of control for a long time. But that was why I worked for it. So I might be less likely a target for its aggression. My travels through Dixie led me to "public trust" parks and monuments dedicated to the memory of fallen soldiers who died in futile defense of succession. I witnessed the Bill of Rights denied by U.S. martial law in Oxford MS. On television I watched the years of military engagement in Viet Nam fall like petals plucked from a daisy. Fear of a mushroom cloud in the future of our children under a Goldwater administration turned us to the socialist solutions of LBJ's Great Society. But we didn't escape the threat of mutually assured destruction. We remained just a push button away, no more than fifteen minutes warning, from nuclear incineration for the next 26 years.

It wasn't our leviathan that won the cold war. In fact, it had no contingency plan for dealing with disaffected communists after the fall of the Soviet Union as if it never expected it to fall. We could still be in MAD deadlock if the Japanese hadn't breached Soviet security with consumer video and undeniable evidence of superior Western market prosperity. An evil empire needs no more reasoning capacity than required to ban alternative political literature to keep its people enslaved. For this we need no more evidence than the unending bogus denials of federal drug czars regarding the existence of reports and books detailing beneficial uses for cannabis.

When I saw a federal court reconsider renewal of CVP water supply contracts in repudiation of a prior congressional promise to let CVP contractors decide renewal, I saw the same amoral beast. When I saw EPA water quality enforcement care more about numerical standards for drainage constituents than comparative farm performance per endangered species impact in a global market, I saw the same beastly perversion of priorities.

Theft: conspiracy to defraud

When I saw the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) had unilaterally named Kesterson a "National Wildlife Refuge", then exclude reference to its contractual limits to Kesterson property access for wildlife management, I saw theft of government property. When I saw Service game law enforcement officers had claimed ill-fated hatchlings in a dedicated drain-water facility were a violation of the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act, a protection for total bird species populations, I saw conspiracy to defraud.

Some fantastic virtue-a drug-free society, an unimpacted fish and wildlife habitat, a selenium toxicosis free world-is elevated as a holy grail for new government enforced crusades that trample prior contracts, property rights, freedom from unwarranted search, and freedom from self-incrimination. I see us consumers being hoaxed-being enslaved to pay for the glory of whatever special interest group has seized federal government control of "public trust" law enforcement guns.

In 1989 I accepted an offer to transfer to Sacramento to provide technical oversight of Kesterson research and mitigation of CVP San Luis Unit farm drainage impacts. Not impacts on people, because there were none. Not impacts on adult wildlife, because there were practically none in the total context of mortality by natural causes and hunting. Not impacts on fledgling waterfowl, because there were practically none in the total context of mortality by predation, disease, and other natural hazards to nestlings. But impacts to hatchlings and embryos laid by hens that had opportunistically fed on bugs in a "public trust" dedicated drainage holding tank. A tank not infested with undesirable wildlife, but with corrupt Service management and staff looking for an excuse to take CVP water from farms.

The federal government was out of control, and I was challenged to maintain integrity for it, as my employer, and myself.

I was screwed. We all have been screwed by environmental socialism's conquest of our federal government. If we ever had a perspective that a kind and gentle government is going to save us and Mother Nature from being raped and plundered by rich, greedy, and huge corporations, we probably got it like a social disease by not practicing safe intercourse. Safe talk. Vigilant skepticism to protect our minds against contagious socialist delusions of communist grandeur.

The baby boomers: they are a-changing

Those of us born after solders returned from World War II are called baby boomers. My parents gave me a head start on this large demographic group, but my cultural perspective is heavily influenced by commercial appeals to baby boomers. The radio and television industry of the past forty years has catered to what baby boomers want for entertainment. I listened and liked most of what I saw had commercial success. I had trouble liking disco.

But I like diversity. I like to be able to choose my preferences for entertainment. And I find those who also appreciate diversity to be good company. Freedom to associate with people of our own choice is a wonderful liberty. It can not be forced.

So even though most baby boomers have not yet retired, I feel their pain. I remember what it was like to have to work to make a living. I feel I can speak for those still obliged to work. As we baby boomers approach retirement and watch our tax deferred investments grow in mutual funds, we learn how it feels to be owners of "rich, greedy, and huge" corporations. We learn who pays for government pork: retirees who saved their wages for investment, forgoing youthful extravagance for old age security in capital assets. We learn we've been paying for pork with taxes ever since we started working. And we learn that those who receive pork, are taking it by government force from taxpayers and property owners.

We baby boomers just might find it to everybody's advantage to reassess who, in fact, are the "rich, greedy, and huge". We might find the irresponsible, mendacious, and government-welfare entitled to be conveniently disadvantaged beggars, expecting more than they give. To be self-appointed pirates, and self-authorized decision-makers for the expenditure of government plunder. To be, in fact, "rich" in freedom from libel damages, "greedy" for easier access to subsidized "public trust" property, and a "huge" out-of-control consumption of our common weal.

We baby boomers are growing as a voting block and growing more influential as our investments grow. Will politically active and rich baby boomers look at socialist corporation bashing and see the misguided disrespect for private property rights we learned in socialist public schools? Or will socialist bad faith in consumer decision-making capacity-which keeps us in a feeding frenzy over common "public trust" government loot-keep on relentlessly expanding government command and control over our lives? Just because it's been this way for a hundred years doesn't mean we will be forever stupid.

Market eventually delivers what we want

Our market demand for good music eventually identified and honored the artists who brought us what we want. We consumers have richly rewarded the artists who brought us swing, jazz, rock and roll, reggae, and-after many years of racial discrimination by radio and recording industry consumers-blues. Sad feelings of lost love, lost opportunity, but determination to carry on despite adversity are lonesome themes on our basic struggle to find freedom. Despite payola, our market eventually got us the good music we want. Despite pork-barrel politics, our market will eventually get us the good government we want.

Recognizing value, recognizing fraud

The presumption that market supplied consumers can not learn to appreciate value for what they buy is the bad faith of kings in the decisions of their peasants. It is the bad faith of communists in the decisions of their proletariat. It is the bad faith of Al Gore and his cadre of environmental experts in the decisions we consumers make.

After a hundred years of German socialism dominating Western government schemes of wealth reallocation-paying the uncooperative with loot raided from the pockets of the cooperative-classic liberal tolerance for personal freedom - inalienable rights (life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, religion, trade, egress, drainage, and whatever else cannot be separated from a person), and alienable rights (property that can be separated from a person) - is gaining recognition as our society throws off its chains of government thought control and votes Libertarian. Not because of slick, payola promises of pork. But because we are getting smart, recognizing value when we see it, and learning to recognize the fraud in business wars over big government handouts of special favors.

Business subsidies

Those businesses which use the government's monopoly on legitimate violence to force us to buy their products and services are not just uncooperative. Government enforcement is the biggest terrorist group in our society. The threat of government enforcement is usually enough to terrorize us into doing whatever a government agent tells us. Those are real guns carried by government law enforcement. Businesses that use government enforcement are racketeers using taxpayer funded goons.

When businesses-like the white-water tourist industry or the duck hunting service industry-lobby legislators for government subsidies, protection, or prohibition of a competitive product or service - like in-stream flood water storage, a.k.a. reservoirs and the structures that hold back the reservoirs, dams - what do we expect them to say? Probably the same things we read in their literature. And their literature draws upon the arguments of others documented in past literature. So we can trace current environmental ideology back through recent word-smiths, like Edward Abby, Aldo Leopold, and John Muir, to Theocritus, inventor of the pastoral poem in the third century B.C. to understand environmental business arguments for government subsidies.

Environmental ideology

According to P.J. O'Rourke, All the Trouble in the World, 1994, Theocritus lived for a while on the Aegean island of Cos, where various cultural institutions had grown up around the medical school founded there in the fifth century B.C. by Hippocrates.

Cos was, in effect, a college town. Like many of us who went to college in a cute place, Theocritus had fond memories of amusing locals, of young love in wholesale quantities, of long, gabbing walks in the woods with friends, and of how idyllic everything looks when you're supposed to be in chem lab. Hence:

Ah, sweetly lows the calf,
And sweetly the heifer,
Sweetly sounds the goatherd with his pipe,
And sweetly also I!

-"Idyll IX"

Whether this altered mental state was induced by a pipe played for melody or smoked for cannabis buzz is anybody's guess. It really doesn't matter. We like to feel good. That is not in dispute. The issue is how we decide who decides what we want. How we decide: force or tolerance. Who decides: government socialists or property owners.

Lobbyists for government favors can be expected to draw upon all arguments they can find to support their case. Whatever works. The competition's product is evil-it kills rivers and everything natural. Their own business is good for the country, birds, fish, rivers, canyons, wetlands, and anything else unable to express its opinion in a polling booth, like unborn future generations.

So while we consumers are forced to limit our choices, pay more for less in return, advocates for more government command and control of our lives tell us "It is good for us." Is this better than robbery? Most robbers don't bother to tell their victims some fanciful story about how life is going to be better. Government subsidies come with fascinating, entertaining, mesmerizing, and sometimes horrifying stories-deformed bird embryos in a wildlife refuge-to capture our consent.

Idiot abuse: slavery: death

Forced entertainment is no fun. It's a scam for those suckered into paying taxes while consumer choice is forcefully limited. It's a good scam for kings and communists. For unconcerned peasants and proletariat it's one step up from child abuse. It's idiot abuse. For concerned peasants and proletariat, it's slavery. I think I'm not the idiot I once was. I may still be an idiot compared to what I will be. But what I will be, for sure, sooner or later, is dead. If fetuses are unborn babies, I must be an undead corpse.

Patrick Henry, I've been told, exclaimed "Give me liberty or give me death!" I'd give him liberty. No problem. And the kind of people who have come to live in our country so they and their progeny, all of us, can live in liberty are the kind of people who share Patrick Henry's passion for freedom. I think we really want liberty so much, we will do whatever it takes to get it. I think we are so glad to live in this country that cherishes individual freedom, we are proud to think of ourselves as patriots. We are proud to think we are protecting the ideas of liberty. And if we have to, we'll proudly defend liberty with our own private property-our own individual powers of persuasion, our voluntary participation in organized political resistance to usurpation and tyranny, and our own guns.

But if I am wrong, and the defense of liberty is just left to drift away as government takes more command and control of our property and market, we slouch not toward a place once called Gomorra. It's gone. But its infamy lives on. Kesterson is gone too. As a place. But as a human tragedy, its demented morality is supporting more and more government programs, forcing us to serve its perverted presumption of what is good and what is bad at the expense of our liberty.

Demented Kesterson morality

What is good, according to Kesterson morality, is environmental protection and restoration, outdoor recreation, clean water in wild rivers, and wetlands for fish and wildlife. No mention of human trust other than guaranteed protection for wildlife and wilderness.

What is bad is greedy corporations. Especially agri-business, with its subsidized water supply from dams and poisonous drainage from irrigated fields. As if agriculture is some whimsical waste of human energy, not the critical transformer of solar energy to food and fiber that feeds and insulates human energy. As if the world would be a better place without people. As if the whole world, including the San Joaquin Valley desert, had no room for people.

No matter how little a desert land or ocean may be used by other species, there is not a drop of flood water that can be spared elsewhere to divert and irrigate desert land for human food and homes. Nor is there any human drainage that be assimilated in any region of the ocean.

The human tragedy is how much this demented morality has blinded our society's capacity to keep itself free from government slavery.

If you don't believe it, look at what Kesterson believers hold up as their undeniable proof of environmental disaster: photographs of horribly deformed bird embryos. That's it. No mention of who has the right to choose whether or not deformed embryos are a problem on their own property and what to do about it. The human tragedy is that so many of us are letting our eyes be dazzled with images, letting our minds be filled with fear, letting our civil honor for equally honorable people be dissipated on opportunistic wildlife, while we work like draft animals to pull the loads of our government empowered masters.

Central Valley Project Improvement Act, Title 34, Public Law 102-575: scam

Why should I care? Because Kesterson believers are running the federal government. I know. I read about politicians pandering to environmentalists in newspapers and journals. I see environmental battle tracts, specifically Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert, 1986, animated on public television, programming voters to support Rep. George Miller, California congressional district 7, in his political war against San Joaquin Valley farms in the name of protecting bird embryos. I read government environmental assessments that refer to Miller's sponsored Central Valley Project Improvement Act (CVPIA), Public Law 102-575, Title 34, with no remorse. And I know we are being hoaxed.

Photographs are nothing but arrangements of light that reflect a moment in time for a specific place. They say nothing about how things change before and after the time of exposure or what else was going on outside the image. Without independently checking the context of these photographs, we have no basis to believe anything that anyone may say about them, especially government officials with the power to force environmental protection compliance.

Environmental protection does not have to be forced. We do not have to be forced to clean up after ourselves. We all volunteer to do what we choose. Like those of us who are proud to defend our country militarily, many of us are proud to protect our environment from pollution. Lots of us do our share to keep our public lands and right-of-ways free of litter. But voluntary action doesn't include paying taxes hidden from us in raised prices on groceries to cover the CVPIA taxes on power and water paid by Central Valley farms and farm commodity industries.

Dedicated purpose

Before construction, CVP bought water rights from then existing holders of State issued licenses to divert water from the State's streams and rivers. All water bought by the CVP was dedicated by congress for CVP's authorized purpose. This dedication of purpose has clearly defined limits on its use. Limits of use that are as clear as the ownership of any property. Limits of use that are as clear as the dedicated purpose for any National Park or Wild and Scenic River. Limits as clear as the intent of purpose for the federal government specified in its Constitution.

Socialists and communists

Here is the crux of our tragedy. We know how ineffective pledges by our elected representatives have been in the past century to defend the Constitution, to keep our federal government limited to its authorized purpose. The Constitution is only a paper barrier against tyranny. It is a contract that is only as good as the people who pledge their sacred honor to defend it.

The congressional authorization for the purposes of the CVP has been no less assaulted and abused as the Constitution by those who refuse to honor contracts. By those who refuse to honor dedicated purpose specified by contracts. By those who refuse to honor the choice of purpose made by the authority which purchased ownership of property. By those who refuse to honor property rights. And we should recognize those who refuse to honor property rights as socialists and communists.

Socialists would take decision-making authority from private property owners and give it to elite government experts to manage resources from the vantage of a central government that presumes an all-knowing awareness of God's creation. Government experts less arrogant than Al Gore in professing divine awareness may still claim to be informed by "science". But as we have seen in political arguments about proper government response to rising atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, socialists mistakenly equate "science" to majority opinion of "scientists". As if we get to vote for our choice of reality.

Environmental socialism has infected political decision-making in all governments. It dominates many government policies and threatens to sacrifice American liberty to a single world government like the United Nations.

In his book Earth in the Balance, 1992, then Senator Al Gore laid out his battle plan for global conquest of consumer choice, a new world order of central government planning. If central planning consequences are found to bring unintended harm, would socialists relinquish their decision-making authority? No way. They have "adaptive management". They will adapt the central management plan in any way that does not involve returning property to private ownership.

Communists would decide what and how much to take from people according their ability, what and how much to give to people according to their need. And the abilities and needs get reappraised according to the whims of whoever remains in command. Communism has no exit plan. And with the advent of environmental socialism, communists no longer reallocate resources to just people.

Property acquired by the federal government for specific authorized purposes, like CVP water rights and real estate, has been taken by environmental socialists and given to communist reallocation of resources to fish, wildlife, wetlands, rivers, deltas, and water quality standards and objectives. Like successful waterfowl reproduction in any pond, no matter what its owner - even if the owner is the federal government - may have previously dedicated as the primary purpose of that property in the authorization for its purchase. A purpose as incompatible as drain-water storage may be to successful waterfowl reproduction.

Part 2