This Episode of #PlanetMoney About California Farming and Water is a #MustListen but it Made Me Really Angry

I love podcasts but have a hard time catching up with them. Sometimes I find myself weeks or months behind after not listening for a while, so this podcast was posted back on July 22, 2015. Listen to it here or read the transcript.

This episode of PLANET MONEY, an always entertaining money-covering podcast often covers the topic of economics in a very approachable way. The reporters on the NPR-produced podcast come across as balanced, well-educated people. Which is great, but sometimes they come across as too balanced. Sometimes, there simply aren’t even two sides to a story.

 In a nutshell (preemptive pun not intended), this episode is about how pistachio farmers in California are dealing with the huge drought. Specifically, it deals with how nut farmers, are among the only entities in California that are able to dig far enough down to reach receding water levels that are now out of reach for the wells of some California residents. One reporter asked a water scientist where things were headed in this area of California and he referred to the Mad Max movies.

 Yikes.

The episode goes on to explain why farmers are still planting nut trees during this crazy drought despite a gallon of water being required to grow a single pistachio. Turns out, it’s the drought. See, the drought is making nuts scarce so the price is going up and so that makes farmers want to plant more trees so they can sell more nuts while the price is high. It makes good financial sense, right? Except, California is running out of water thanks to a historically bad drought… and because of farmers who are planting more nut trees. See, agriculture is pretty much the biggest drinker of water. But hey, you know, economics.

Maybe there’s something more important than economics? Not according to the NPR reporters who work on PLANET MONEY.

Things are even worse than the Wallstreet Journal Says...

Now, I'm just an artist-type guy who loves scifi, tech, history and blogging, and I'm not a fan of doing the "Told You So" dance, but man, if I haven't been calling this shit for years. Our economy has been slowly sinking until the last year or so when it dropped off a cliff.

Some folks are saying there are signs that things are beginning to look up.

That's just what folks want us to think so we won't panic. Think of it like a man with terminal cancer being told that he's got 6 months to live instead of the 3 weeks he really has, just because the doctor doesn't want to freak him out.

So are things getting better? Make no mistake, they are not.

I'm not even looking that closely to what is actually going on and I'm seeing signs of further drops in our economy. In fact, mere days after writing my post about California functioning as a canary in the world's economic mine shaft I came across an editorial at WSJ.com entitled "The Economy Is Even Worse Than You Think by Mort Zuckerman that says, in part, the following:

The recent unemployment numbers have undermined confidence that we might be nearing the bottom of the recession. What we can see on the surface is disconcerting enough, but the inside numbers are just as bad.

That's the funny thing about unemployment numbers. They only reflect claims on unemployment benefits. Pretending these numbers actually represent the accurate number of unemployed suggests that our system is perfect at employing almost all of us.

Well, it's not.

A good number of people who get on benefits run out of them before they find jobs and many folks who lose their jobs aren't eligible for unemployment in the first place. What does this mean? Just Google for "tent cities" and see what you find.

Just last week, there was a police crackdown on a tent city in Harlem just minutes from where I am typing this.

Just this past Saturday, NYC hiked up it's sales tax from 8.5% to 8.875%. You can imagine how that will help all those homeless people that were kicked out of their tent city the other day. Of course, it could be worse--they could be homeless in Los Angeles, my former home-city, where sales tax is now 9.75%. In fact, most of California's sales tax either matches or beats NYC's. Remember how I called California the canary in the economic mine shaft?

Yeah.

You may be starting to understand why I've been doing so much work with my puppet friend, Jay ThePal, lately.

The reality of the American economy is not a pleasant thing to face.

Since absolutely no one is talking about any drastic solutions to help the poor (which, let's face it, is most of the US) I think it's all too safe to assume this descent will continue, dragging what is left of the middle class with it.

I understand that higher taxes are needed to help pay for programs and new jobs and so on, but without any new value-creation, here in the US, we're just hamsters on a wheel. Thanks to endless inflation, outsourcing and corporate profit-taking, the US is probably at it's most valueless.

I won't even bring up how our money is losing value by the second and how the Earth is running out of cheap oil almost as quickly...

California is a Giant Canary in Earth's Economic Mine Shaft

Important Notice, originally uploaded by shindohd.

The picture attached to this post was taken by fellow-blogger (shindotv.com ) and socnetizen, @ShindoTV. It depicts a screen on an ATM that is warning that Wells Fargo, one of the bigger banks California, won't be accepting IOUs issued by that state's government.

See California is going through massive, MASSIVE economic troubles. The thing that's bugging me is that aside from Shindo's post about California's IOUs being rejected, I haven't come across any other blog posts or news articles covering the fall of the fifth-largest economy in the world.

That IS what's happening and no one really seems to care.

Here's part of the comment I left on ShindoTV.com:

...I think the current economic situation in my former home state should be sending shockwaves through the rest of the country and even the rest of the planet. California is the 5th biggest economy in the world. When the government of the 5th biggest economy of the world can’t afford to pay its employees, this says something bad, not only about the state of California’s economy but of everyone else’s economies, too.

Sure, California's economy is really just a subset of the US economy as a whole, but it's a HUGE subset and when it drops, so does the US economy (even if no one is paying note of it).

So, what's my point? That we've still got a long way to go before we are out of this economic mess and the sooner we realize this, the better, since further denial will just prolong it.

California's economic mess predates the greater US economy's mess. They were struggling since before the "Governator" even took over and they are still struggling. As long as the government that runs the fifth largest economy in the world struggles, so will the rest of the world.

Just my ¥2. I could be wrong, but I haven't been, so far, and I've been talking about our economy crashing and bleeding out for years now.

Believe me--I really want to be wrong. (Been saying that for years, too!)

Original image here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/shindotv/3722990774/

Labor Day 2006 Pics From Joshua Tree, California!

FINALLY!! Pics from our overnight trip to Joshua Tree--HUZZAH!

The below are just a sampling. Click any of them to check out the rest of my pics!


OK, these first few pics were taken as I waited for my bus to come the Saturday before we left for JT.


The last couple pics obviously were snapped at The World's Largest Dinosaurs "attraction" which you can find on the 10 (interstate highway 10, for anyone outside of SoCal). They're two giant man-made dinos with a museum in one and a gift shop in the other. In an ironic twist the attraction is run by creationists. Seriously, they have little flyers you can take with you from the gift shop that advertize the theory that dinosaurs lived side-by-side with man because the earth is only 7000 years old (I think--I'm an Atheist, so don't expect precision facts on Christianity from me). Don't believe me? Check out WorldsBiggestDinosaurs.Com and see for yourself...

For the record, I have nothing against people believing whatever they want (just so long as they don't use those beliefs to abridge rights or cause pain)--I just don't understand why people would want to believe certain things.