Should we ring the doorbell?
- Hello?
- Uh, yeah. Hi.
My name is Yasha Levine.
I'm a co-director of a documentary
about water in California.
Uh-huh.
Um, I'm wondering
if I can get
in touch with Lynda Resnick in some
in some capacity here
to ask her about the water
and the drought
and some of her work in Lost Hills.
I've been trying to get in touch
with her through her company,
but I've had no success there,
so I'm just...
- Okay, hold on for a moment.
- Sure.
Hello.
How's it going?
How are you?
Sorry, I can't hear you.
Can we ask you just to stop filming?
Um, he wants you to stop filming.
Um, I...I was trying to...
I was talking to a young lady.
It keeps cutting out, so I was
trying to ask her how
I can get
in touch with Lynda Resnick.
Because we're making a documentary
about water in California.
I was trying to get
in touch with her.
The best person to talk to is
a corporate officer.
- Okay.
- Do you have a number?
I can give you the...
Behind these gates is one of
the biggest mansions
in Beverly Hills.
The people
who live here aren't movie stars
or Hollywood moguls.
They're farmers.
The biggest in California.
They're the ones who make those crazy
pistachio ads.
Pistachio.
What am I doing here
outside their house?
That's a long story.
So let me back up.
My name's Yasha Levine.
I was born in the Soviet Union,
in Leningrad.
My parents always hated
the Soviet system.
They wanted to get us out any way
they could.
After spending time in refugee camps
in Europe,
we ended up in San Francisco.
Arriving here as an immigrant kid
after living in Russia,
what I remember most was
a sense of abundance.
I grew up thinking California was
a paradise.
It wasn't until years later,
when I started working
as a journalist,
that my ideas
about this place started to change.
In 2009, I was chasing down a story
that took me to
the edge of California.
Victorville, a suburb way out
in the middle of nowhere
in the Mojave Desert.
During the real estate boom years,
Victorville was one of
the fastest growing cities
in America - a desolate,
endless sprawl of some of
the cheapest homes
that money could buy.
It was right
after the 2008 Wall Street crash.
It felt like a zombie
apocalypse had swept through town.
I had moved there to investigate
the housing bubble,
but I stumbled on another
strange story.
Victorville had expanded
so fast during
the boom that it ran out of water.
To keep feeding the growth,
the city turned to
a shadowy private market.
It was buying water
from a wealthy farmer
who lived hundreds of miles away,
all the way north in Silicon Valley.
The deals were worth millions
and they were being
funnelled through
a privately owned water bank.
As I dug into the details,
I realised this was much bigger than
just Victorville.
It turned out that a small group
of powerful families
had seized control
of California's water supply.
Even weirder was that the whole
thing was being driven by
a pair of high society billionaires
from Beverly Hills.
They made their money
off pistachios.
But what really made
them stand out was
that they owned more
water than anyone else on
the planet.
Maybe it's because I moved here
as a kid,
but I still had
an idealised view of California.
This wasn't supposed to be
the kind of place
where a pair
of billionaires could buy
up the water supply.
# I love you, California. #
So I roped in a filmmaker friend,
and we set out to tell their story.
When we started filming,
California was in the middle
of its worst drought in history.
There were fires
in the Hollywood Hills.
It hadn't been this dry in over
a thousand years.
We figured the best way to tell
the story was to take a road trip.
So we packed up the car
and headed north out of Los Angeles.
When you think about wealth
in California,
you think Silicon Valley
and Hollywood.
No one thinks about
the Central Valley.
Flat and desolate landscape carved
up into never-ending farms
and feedlots.
It's a part
of California no one wants to visit,
much less pay any real attention to.
And that suits the people
who own everything out
here just fine.
After about two hours on the road,
we pulled off the main highway
and headed for the west side of
the valley.
From the road,
this place looks like nothing,
but we're actually driving through
the largest farm in America.
Even with a drone, you can
only capture small sections of it.
It covers an area ten times
the size of Manhattan,
mostly with almonds and pistachios.
And the whole thing belongs
to just two people -
Stewart and Lynda Resnick.
If you see them out in public,
it's probably going
to be on the red carpet in LA.
There's a whole
wing with their name on it at
the city's art museum.
They're billionaires
many times over.
They live in the biggest,
ritziest mansion on
Sunset Boulevard,
famous for its celebrity parties.
Driving around this dusty backwater,
you have to wonder,
how did two Beverly Hills types end
up out here
as America's biggest farmers?
Well, it's actually a love story
that goes back 50 years.
Stewart came to California
from New Jersey.
He says he grew up poor.
That's the way I worked my way
through college
was cleaning windows
and park La Brea Towers.
He managed to flip
a janitorial business he started
in college for millions of dollars.
Then he opened
up a private security firm
and quickly built it into
the largest in LA.
He had 3000 armed agents
and a former
chief of police on his payroll.
In the 1970s, his company
was running security
at LA's main airport.
It was all going great right
up until his guards
got busted smuggling blocks
of pure heroin.
The FBI said the company was linked
to organised crime.
None of the charges
ever stuck to Stewart
but he has hinted in interviews
that he grew up around the mob.
Lynda was born in Philly,
but she grew up in Hollywood.
Her father was
a movie producer famous
for making a 1950s cult hit,
The Blob.
Every one of
you watching this screen,
look out! The most horrifying
monster menace ever
conceived will be oozing
into this theatre.
(people screaming)
On our fifth date,
I confessed to Stewart
that I once xeroxed
some top secret papers.
He didn't believe me,
but he did believe me months later
when the FBI came to the house
armed with
a subpoena to appear before
the grand jury the next morning.
In the 60s, Lynda hung out
in radical circles.
I owned an 812 copier
that Daniel Ellsberg used to copy
the Pentagon Papers.
She likes to talk
up her counterculture cred,
but really, she was always more of
a marketing person.
She started her own agency at
the age of 19,
Lynda Limited.
That's how she
and Stewart first got together.
Well, we met because I had
an advertising agency
and I was pitching his account,
so to speak. He didn't give me
the account,
but he sure gave me the business.
- (people laughing)
- Um...
After they got married,
with Stewart's money,
they started buying up companies.
The sorts of places Lynda could juice
up with her marketing skills.
Mostly trinkets and tacky gifts.
They got into
farming almost by accident,
first buying up land
as a hedge against inflation
in the 1970s.
As they were picking up land,
they also picked up another company,
Paramount Farms.
And just like that,
they were
in the agriculture business.
The wagons came in a rush then,
as the lure of gold drew them
with promise
of great and sudden wealth.
Farming in California
goes right back to the gold rush.
It was a land grab and a
free-for-all.
California's first big cattle baron,
Henry Miller,
built an empire the length of
the state,
in large part
by using corrupt courts and fraud.
Even a century ago,
farm families had mansions
in San Francisco and Oakland.
They lived like a new aristocracy,
socialising among themselves
and intermarrying.
Farmers owned banks and railroads.
They sat on
the boards of major corporations.
It's always been a conservative
and almost exclusively Anglo world.
For generations, these farmers
had mostly kept
to themselves, operating
in the background.
That is, until the Resnicks arrived.
Rubies in the Orchard
will show you how
to discover the intrinsic rubies
in your metaphorical orchard,
in your business, your cause,
and even if the brand is you.
The thing that set the Resnicks
apart was Lynda's background
in marketing.
They took whatever crops
were growing on their land
and turned them into
high-end products.
Stewart was very much
into this pomegranate idea.
I wrote these letters on
a piece of paper and I said,
here's the name of your product.
And that
was like divine intervention.
Their first big hit was
a pomegranate juice.
They used their L.A. connections
to get celebrity
endorsements, and the
product took off.
- Yes.
- So we fill our 1.5oz of vodka.
Yeah!
They hit upon a formula
that was actually pretty simple.
Take a dull snack food and launch it
with a huge ad campaign.
# Gangnam style. #
# Crack, crack, crack
Crackin' Gangnam style. #
# Gangnam style. #
Before the Resnicks,
people barely ate these things
in America.
Now they're in every supermarket.
Folks, evidently,
sales of pistachios
have not skyrocketed
in the last 30 seconds, due to
a lack of branding.
Well, let's take care of that.
Pistachio.
Pistachio. Wait for it.
Pistachio.
The marketing
was such a hit, it triggered a boom.
Farmers all over
the valley followed their lead
and planted pistachios.
You know, it's just luck
and privilege that I'm,
I'm able to do this.
As they went from multi-millionaires
to billionaires,
the Resnicks climbed
the social ladder.
I realised that is my obligation
as a human being on this planet,
to give back as much as I can.
So... Um...
They brought all their products
under one brand
and called it The Wonderful Company.
We believe
that we can do well by doing good.
They started to market their company
and themselves
as a new way of doing business.
We started
in a little town called Lost Hills.
2500 people, 41% of
the households work for our company,
one of our companies, out there
in the valley.
They like to highlight their work
in Lost Hills,
a small, impoverished town populated
mostly by the company's own workers.
I was contacted by Lynda.
You could tell at the beginning of
the phone call she was ready
to change the Central Valley.
She wanted to change
the quality of life in Lost Hills.
I had reached a moment
in my life where...
I had to give back
in a meaningful way.
I did not name the town.
But I couldn't have picked a more
cinematic name than Lost Hills,
because it's so much fun to say
that Lost Hills has been found.
The town is way out
in the western edge of the valley,
north of the company's fields.
Besides a truck stop off
the highway,
it's miles away from anywhere.
As you drive in from the south,
the place doesn't look so bad.
There's a nicely
renovated promenade leading
up to a park in the centre of town.
We were meeting
a local health worker
who had agreed to show us around.
Yeah, and you
can almost even see it on
the map now.
It wasn't long before someone from
the company turned up wanting
to know what was going on.
I'm Dr Rosanna Esparza.
Who are you?
- Oh, nice to meet you.
- Nice to meet you.
We have community meetings here
all the time.
She was here for a number of years.
Do you mind if we not film this?
Do you have permission?
Because this is a commercial
documentary you're making.
Do you have permission from
the county to be out here?
- Mm-hm.
- Do you mind if I see the permits?
Do you have a card?
If you take
a deeper look around this town,
it's clear why the company
gets nervous
about people with cameras.
Once you get off the main drag
the place looks nothing
like their corporate PR.
There's no infrastructure here.
So, there's no bank,
there's no libraries, um,
there's no pharmacy.
I could go on and on
and list everything that there's not.
Rosanna grew up out here
in California.
After she got her PhD, she came back
to work in the community.
Hello.
- Do people know you around here?
- No. Not really.
I mean, I come to do
the health surveys,
and I come
and I ask people to participate
in our monthly meetings.
Trying to familiarise them with me.
Do you drink the water here?
Out of the faucet?
Yeah.
And you don't think it tastes funny
or anything?
- I drink soda.
- Drink soda only?
What's your favourite soda?
Dr Pepper.
Tambien. You drink water too.
The Central Valley is one
of the poorest places in America.
And Lost Hills is poor, even by
the standards of the Central Valley.
There really is nothing here.
The town centre is just
the intersection
of two busy highways.
If you drive past the spruced up
promenade, you hit an oil field
and a refinery.
It was the site of one of the biggest
oil blow-outs in history.
The giant gas fire
that took two weeks to put out.
The fumes from the oil refinery add
to air quality problems here.
Number three. This one, we're getting
a lot of benzene.
Benzene and ethylbenzene.
40 years she's lived here.
We have someone else joining us.
- Always a headache.
- What do they spray from?
Airplane? Or how...?
As we talk to more people, we found
that the other big issue here is
that the tap water is undrinkable.
People said it rotted their pipes
and gave their children
skin problems.
Anything the water touched built
up a weird chemical residue.
The problem began a few years back
when the town started using
a new system to treat unsafe levels
of arsenic in the water.
Do you remember
when you were younger
that people drank from the tap?
Yeah. I used to drink tap water.
When did it change?
- When?
- Yeah.
Probably about maybe
like five years ago.
I mean, people still do it,
but it's just their choice,
you know?
The day we came through,
Rosanna was helping
residents take their complaints to
the local water board.
Give you a breakdown of it.
It's your responsibility.
- You just came in and told us.
- I did.
- It disagrees with what our...
- Of course it disagrees with you.
- It's not of course.
- Of course it disagrees.
- We would like to see if it does.
- This is your report.
We're looking to see
if you're accurate
in your reading of it.
I am telling you,
you cannot have this...
He's telling you just
the opposite.
You cannot have disinfectants
in your water without
there being some type of build-up.
Well, any disinfectant in our water,
the government is requiring us
to put it in.
And why is that?
The government
is telling us to do that.
Why are your disinfectant levels
as high as they are?
Apparently they're not.
- Apparently they are.
- Well...
Because that's what's
causing your overall problem.
I don't think you can make
that statement.
No, but thank you very much.
We're going to look into that.
We'll, we'll pull that report out
and see if it's accurate,
what you're saying.
The meetings were being run from
the floor by an out-of-town lawyer.
No one wanted
to acknowledge there was a problem.
But you could see it
in The Wonderful Company's park.
Even the playground
they built right across
the road got taken out by
the corrosive water.
All the cosmetic improvements
in Lost Hills made for great PR.
But for the underlying problems,
nothing really changed.
If anything, Lost Hills was run more
like an old company town.
Farms in
the area were making billions
for The Wonderful Company,
but there was no real local wealth.
All the money was sucked out
to Beverly Hills.
To add to the cruel irony,
when you leave town, you drive over
an aqueduct full of water fresh from
the mountains.
But it's not piped
in for towns like Lost Hills.
Often called the Golden State,
the real gold of California is not
the yellow metal out of the earth.
Infinitely more valuable is
the clean,
fresh water that falls from the sky,
for fresh water is the white gold of
the great Central Valley.
In California, most of
the water comes from the north.
It falls as snow in the mountains.
In spring, the snow melts,
swelling the rivers.
Under the natural pattern,
for much of the year, the valley was
a floodplain teeming with life.
But by summer it was bone dry.
Early farmers built dams and levees,
but the technology
for managing water
was relatively simple.
Unless you owned land near a river,
there was no year round supply.
The invention of
the centrifugal pump changed
all that.
Farmers spread out into
the driest parts of the state.
For the first time,
California became
the breadbasket of America.
However, continued pumping without
replenishment of
the underground reservoir is known
as mining water.
The water they were
pumping had been collecting
underground for thousands of years.
They drained it within
a matter of decades.
Millions of acres
and a million people
in this valley depend on
a supply of fresh water.
California's big farmers needed
a new source of water
to keep expanding.
Lucky for them, the government came
in to bail them out.
Under the New Deal, a massive
public programme
of dam building began.
A colossal dam will be built,
rising higher than
the Washington Monument.
The highest overflow type of dam
in the world.
Plenty of water falls
and flows, but in the wrong places.
Within just a few decades,
every major
and minor river was dammed,
with water diverted
into concrete canals
that crisscrossed the state.
Precise water control
is vital in operating an aqueduct.
California's rivers were turned into
a technological system,
a computer controlled environment
where water could be turned on
or off,
moved hundreds
of miles at the push of a button.
It was the biggest network
of aqueducts in the world.
History will bear out
how we fulfilled our obligations to
the future.
Not an easy task
in a world strained by many things.
The population of this arid land
has doubled since 1950.
Now shows signs of tripling.
The development of these dams
and aqueducts was always sold
as being necessary
for California's growing population.
But in reality, only a fraction of
the water were mated to the cities.
Most of it went to
a small clique of corporate farmers
who grew crops for export.
Over the course of the century,
the Central Valley was
converted from
a lush natural habitat into
a high-tech agricultural wasteland.
These days, it's a dumping ground
for all the things that the rest of
the state would rather keep out
of sight.
The place is littered
with oil wells,
prisons and garbage pits.
It's an inhospitable dead zone.
Driving around it feels more
like one of
Elon Musk's Mars colonies than any
sort of farm.
It's not really what you imagine
when you think of California,
with its green image
and organic produce.
We were following Rosanna
as she did environmental work
around the valley.
She set up a small event overlooking
an oil field to raise awareness
about water pollution.
We're not trying
to shut anybody down.
We're trying to bring awareness
and education to the community.
We arrived just as she was
being swamped
by oil industry people.
- Would you like some information?
- I got it.
Oh, okay.
California has decided
that fracking can be done safely.
- OK? And...
- The report, sir, did not say...
It's very clear about that.
It's very clear about that.
So let's just be clear.
- It's been done safely for 60 years.
- That's right.
- It's...
- Show me the dead bodies, lady.
Yeah.
Show me the dead bodies.
Put a name on it.
Would you like some information,
sir,
so you can be more clear
in your facts?
I... Nothing I like better than
reading drivel and lies.
Thank you very much.
Thanks for coming out
too. I appreciate it.
Don't be so upset.
When anybody like you wants
to run my life, I get upset.
You are being aggressive in your
language.
- We're trying to...
- And she's not interrupting.
- Or she could be...
- That's your right.
I have a right to be
an environmentalist.
Yeah, you can be as stupid
as you want.
And, and you have that privilege.
You guys could move out of the way
and let us have an opportunity.
We didn't get your guys's way,
so that'd be great.
Thank you.
Colombia and Venezuela.
We're talking about countries
that we fight billion-dollar cocaine
wars with.
OK? We're talking about countries
that suppress women and gays.
And every time you stop
an oil project here,
you are supporting that.
And I know
that you don't believe that,
but that is exactly
what is happening.
Oil is
the other big industry out here.
In most places,
it's been around longer
than farming.
When the Resnicks were first buying
up land,
a lot of it came
from oil companies - Mobil
and Chevron.
Their farms sit right on top of
an active oil field.
You can see oil derricks everywhere.
Some of them right
in the middle of orchards.
All this drilled out land
was going cheap back in the 1970s.
Now it's where The Wonderful
Company grows its healthy snacks.
What I'm checking here,
I always check these
almonds right here,
because here they had
the big drilling mud pit.
And when these almonds get
a little bigger
and the roots go
a little deeper,
they're going to be
in this waste
from drilling these wells,
which is buried right here.
But I'm waiting to see...
Are you telling me that he grew
carrots and potatoes right in the...
Yeah. Right here.
...waste earth that they're digging
up from the oil well?
They were dumping everything into
these pits because
nobody's watching.
It's all buried right here.
They were caught doing that
because I took a video of them.
This is Tom Frantz,
a local almond farmer.
He's showing us where he caught
a company dumping fracking waste
in the middle of an orchard.
There was no cleanup order.
Every one of these wells you see had
a pit like that where
that stuff is buried
now, just under the surface.
Tom's a rare character
for these parts.
There aren't many people here
who speak out about
the oil industry.
They drain it down into this first
pond right here,
and there's a lot of oil
in there still.
So then they take water
from underneath. The oil's on top.
When it rains up in here,
that gully's...
It's like a flash flood.
And all this
contamination gets washed
all the way down to Poso Creek.
We don't know
what toxic chemicals might be
in this wastewater.
We know it's very salty.
We know there's still oil in it.
Oil companies dump their wastewater
in isolated spots
all over the valley.
It mostly just sits
there leaching into the ground.
It's expensive to get rid of it.
It's always been a problem
for the industry.
Tom took us to a larger set of pools
run by Chevron.
As we drove up, we could smell
the petroleum wafting in the air.
These pits didn't look quite
as foul as some of the smaller ones.
That's because Chevron was preparing
the water for farm use.
The filtration, we understand,
is some walnut shells
about 8 to 10 miles
upstream of here,
where the water is coming by,
by pipeline.
You see the crud floating, that's...
several hundred thousand
gallons per minute.
Letting it flow like this by gravity
to some farmers
who are desperate for water
is really a money-saving enterprise
for Chevron.
For the last 20 years,
Chevron has been dumping
its wastewater into
irrigation canals, and bizarrely,
marketing the whole thing
as a recycling initiative.
Most oil fields
produce water
as a by-product or a waste product.
Chevron and
the Kern River field takes
that water,
conditions it
and brings it into agricultural use.
I've always felt that we could feed
the world
if they would allow us enough water.
They do care. Chevron has stepped
up to the plate not just with words,
but with actions.
And we're really happy they're here.
We wanted to see
who was using this water.
So we traced the canal all
the way down to a pumping station.
All around us were orchards owned by
The Wonderful Company.
Not only
were there farms right on top of
an oil field,
it turned out they were
using oil wastewater
to irrigate their crops.
News about this got out just
as we were filming,
and it blew up as a minor scandal.
Don't pollute our fruit!
Don't pollute our fruit!
People protested at
the company's headquarters,
but they brushed it off
and insisted it was
all perfectly safe.
Don't pollute our fruit!
The story eventually
disappeared into the news cycle.
Once you know how things
work out here,
it's not that surprising
that farmers would be irrigating
with oil waste.
You can see
the promise of this place.
It's a vast expanse of land,
perfect for farming.
The only thing holding back business
is access to
a steady supply of water.
No-one's paying attention
to what you do out here,
so you grow with
whatever you can get.
The thing about pistachios, it takes
a lot of water to grow them.
By the time they make it to harvest,
every pound of pistachios
has used over 1,000 gallons.
And the trees need a constant supply
of water to survive.
If you hit a dry year,
you have to rip out your orchard
and start again.
The Resnicks learned this
the hard way
back in the 1980s.
California was hit by
a major drought
and the state
simply cut off their supply.
This happened just
as their new ag business
was taking off.
They realised how dependent they
were on government supplied water.
By the 1970s,
California's water system was
so heavily built out,
the state started running out
of rivers to dam.
So they looked
for other ways to store water.
South of the Resnicks' fields,
just off the highway,
you can find one of those projects.
It's a giant
natural aquifer developed into
a water bank.
In wet years, water from
the aqueducts
and local rivers is pumped here
and stored underground.
It can hold enough water
to supply Los Angeles for a year.
It was intended to protect cities
in the event of a drought.
But for the Resnicks, the bank was
a prime target.
In the 90s,
they lobbied to privatise it.
It all happened in a backroom deal,
and they got it
for basically nothing.
At the same time, they rewrote
the rules for water in California,
allowing it
to be sold on open markets
like any other commodity.
That water deal that I came across
in Victorville,
the one that got me started
on this whole story,
it came from here.
Controlling the bank allowed them
to expand their orchards on
a massive scale.
As they expanded, the amount
of water they controlled also grew.
Today, their farms use more
water than California's
biggest cities.
In a single year,
enough to supply San Francisco
for a decade.
These days, the Resnicks' stake
in the water bank alone
is worth around $1 billion.
From the water bank,
we drove up north.
After a few hours, we arrived
at a place known as The Delta.
It's where California's
biggest rivers meet
before they flow out into
the San Francisco Bay.
Compared to the south, it's green
and full of life.
A patchwork of rivers
and small farms.
All the water
that feeds California's aqueducts
is pumped out of here.
What used to be
a free-flowing river estuary is now
a heavily managed network of canals.
The salmon
and steelhead come on their way
to ancestral spawning grounds.
The migrants, guided by a rack
that blocks the river,
ascend the fish ladder which leads
to a holding pond.
As they modified the rivers,
all sorts of high tech systems
were put in place to help the fish,
but it doesn't take a genius
to see they were doomed to fail.
In specially refrigerated
and aerated trucks,
the fingerlings are
hauled downstream
and released a safe distance from
the intake.
Since the aqueducts were built
in the 1970s,
fish populations have dropped
to near zero.
The whole area is on the verge of
a mass extinction.
Even in parts of The Delta
that have been preserved,
there is an eerie calm.
Just a generation ago,
people talked about flocks
of birds that blacked out the sky.
It used to be one of
the best fishing spots
in the country.
Now it's basically a dead zone.
Despite of all the problems,
there's a long standing plan
to expand the aqueducts.
Two giant tunnels
that would grab one of
the rivers feeding The Delta
and funnel it directly south.
Environmental groups here said
the Resnicks were behind
a new effort to push
the tunnels through.
Stewart Resnick
through Paramount Farms created
a group called Californians
for Water Security.
They are the marketing umbrella
for the Delta tunnels project to
the rest of the state. Basically,
what they did was they put together
a coalition
of special money interests
to do focus group messaging on how
to sell the tunnels to people.
As well as a big PR campaign,
the Resnicks called in favours from
a senator to try
and bury reports on
the project's environmental impacts.
The thing is, the less fresh water
we have flowing through The Delta,
the more ocean water creeps in.
The whole area gets turned into
a dead, salty marsh.
Trying to get you some
really good ones here in the shade.
Jerry's family has been farming here
for generations.
When we were younger,
we used to carry
a salt shaker around with us
in our pickup all the time.
We get hungry, just stop and get
a couple.
We're in a struggle now
for a commodity that's short,
and it's water.
And either they win and we go broke,
or we win,
and they have to contract
the size of these operations.
Trouble, they take our water away,
we're done.
Because they're still going to get
what little water
or much water as they can.
They'll still be able to grow
with it.
But if we end up with water that's
ten times saltier than
it is now,
we can't grow this kind of crop
down here.
When somebody's down there
who can call up the senator on
the phone and say,
we need more water down here,
and then the senator calls
up the bureau and says,
what can you do to get more water
down there?
Send me four tickets to your $25,000
a plate fundraiser.
That's true.
- You've never been invited?
- No. Not yet.
You know, those guys
you're talking about,
Paramount Farms and Resnick,
Paramount Farms sounds like farms,
but there's...people
aren't farmers.
They're in it for the scalping
what they can now,
and 2 or 3 generations from now,
they could care less.
You know, that's the way it is.
This is pretty much family farming
up here in Northern California.
It's not the first time
in California's history
that a small farming
region got screwed over
for its water.
The whole story is a straight
rerun of California's
most infamous water heist.
If you drive up into
the Sierra Nevada mountains
and follow the river down,
you'll find the Owens Valley.
At the turn of the last century,
there was a big, pristine lake here.
Today, it's completely drained.
A toxic stain on the landscape.
In the early 1900s, the population
of Los Angeles was exploding,
doubling every couple of years.
There was plenty of land,
but the developers needed water.
They set their sights on
the Owens Valley
and lobbied to fund construction of
the L.A. aqueduct.
Today, the Owens River winds through
barren, abandoned farmland.
Its water owned
by suburbs hundreds of miles away.
The Owens Valley was drained
to feed LA's suburban sprawl.
Now The Wonderful Company is trying
to destroy
the biggest river estuary on
the west coast of America,
all to feed a snack food bubble.
We wanted to get the Resnicks,
or at least someone
from their company, on camera
to answer some questions.
Yeah. Hi. How's it going?
Um, my name is Yasha Levine.
I'm a co-director of a documentary
about water in California.
I've been trying to get
in touch with someone from
The Wonderful Company.
We had been putting out calls
and emails for months,
Just got redirected.
Since we were back in LA,
we decided to try just turning
up at their office.
You ready?
- Hey, how's it going?
- Who's this guy?
- Oh, he's just the operator.
- I'm just...
We're making a documentary
about water in California.
And so, uh, just trying to get
in touch with The Wonderful Company.
What I suggest is you go online
and get the information
for the person you need to talk to.
- Yeah.
- And make an appointment,
and then they would know.
Yeah. Unfortunately,
I've been trying to do that for
the past couple of weeks, and, uh...
Uh, it's pretty much impossible
to get in touch with them.
- Um...
- That's the process.
We can't do anything for you.
But this is their building,
right?
Yeah. This is the building.
Yeah.
And so you can't...
There's nothing you can...
No one you can call down from...
If you have
a card, I can pass information on.
Short of trying to get arrested
in some kind of stunt,
we weren't going
to get any closer than this.
The reality is
that unless you're doing
a puff piece,
there's no way to get
to these people.
Hello, I'm Lynda Resnick,
and today we're talking about making
a difference.
There's endless interviews
where they talk about
their marketing
and their philanthropy.
My passion today is giving back.
And,
um, I think the thing
that excites me
the most is the philanthropy
that we do.
But no one ever gets to ask them
about how they managed
to grab enough water
to supply this whole city.
It's hard to fully grasp
what private control
of California's water
supply really means.
But when we travel to
a small town hit hard by
the drought,
we found a version of
the bigger story playing out
in a local level.
East Porterville is a small town on
the east side of the valley,
in the foothills of
the Sierra Nevada mountains.
As the drought peaked all over town,
the wells went dry.
People were living off
makeshift tanks
for bathing and cleaning.
We met up with Donna, a local
who was organising deliveries
of donated bottled water.
It was a miserable situation.
A lot of people barely
had any support.
So this is the water
that you have to work...
that you have to work with.
This is...this is
the house water.
- Mm-hm.
- Instead of the tap.
I don't want to do nothing
because I don't have water
and just... I want to leave.
I don't want to clean.
How can I clean my house?
- How?
- Yeah.
With this, or...
Water.
Do you have a knife
or something that you get the, um,
thing open?
Open this.
You have something to stick it?
I know I have to have a knife
to open it up.
- Oh, you are...
- Can I help you out?
Get a couple more in there.
As we did the rounds with Donna,
we saw how many people
were affected.
Over a thousand homes
had lost access to running water.
Like I said,
she's the oldest member
of our out-of-water club.
She has been my angel,
I swear to God.
She... I don't know
what I would have done without her.
Yeah. When did you run out of water?
Well, I was real upset
because I've never been alone,
you know,
without anything like that.
And it was hard, you know.
But she came right in and
and did it.
Most of all,
taking a bath every night.
I miss that terribly.
So...
And then having to wash my hair once
a week.
I watched her struggle so much.
She was always so sweet
and she kept trying to keep
all her trees and her plants alive
and a lot of them died.
And one day I came with over
a quarter...
Oh my God. She was crying.
She said she was watching
everything she had die, and...
We were all kind
of going through it at that time.
How are you, big mean boy?
Hi.
All sorts of people
have been cut off.
For a while,
the story was all over the news.
It was covered like
a natural disaster.
Like the only reason
for the shortage of water was
the drought.
But after we spent
a few weeks hanging around town,
a whole other side to
the story emerged.
Are you talking about the dam
of Lake Success or something?
No, no.
It's a dam that when you cross
the river below the park, below
the park, there is a bridge.
And as soon as you cross the bridge,
you can see the water right there
running through the river.
But about 600
or 800ft below there is
a company that established
themselves as, uh...
I don't know. Water
belongs to everybody.
What does the company do?
They dam the water and they pump it,
and they...pump it
up to the fields up to the south.
I see, so it's, uh,
it's for agriculture.
It's for agriculture. Yes.
Upstream, the river that fed
the town's wells was running.
There you have it.
What do you think it is?
But the water disappeared
after it passed through
some private land.
- Why does no one talk about it?
- Why? Because they are afraid.
- Money.
- Money. Money.
Mm. That's what it is.
They don't want to reveal a scam.
They don't want to put
themselves in danger.
Actually, if they k*ll me,
they do...they do me a favour.
I'm dying already,
so what the heck.
You know? This is totally wrong.
This is totally wrong.
Sure enough, just a mile downstream,
everything was bone dry.
As we filmed,
another local showed up.
He wanted to blow
the whistle on his ex-boss.
But I'm getting tired
of seeing their staff,
and I've been wanting
to see somebody with a camera.
I saw you when I was driving this.
I turned around and came back.
- Rod Hudson, right?
- Yes, sir.
I was the oversight
for Rosedale Water Company
all the way up until June of 2015.
They just voted me out.
He's got a pond back there.
He put a pump on the river in 1998
and started pulling water out of
that river
and putting it into his pond
to supply these guys with water.
The whole story was mixed up in
a divorce and a local feud,
but Rod said he could show us
the secret dam on the river.
- I can take you down there.
- Uh-huh?
- Is that going to...
- And I have share.
I'm a shareholder with the company,
so I have a right to go down there.
But I can't be around my wife
because we're going through
a divorce overall.
- I see.
- You know. Mitch Brown.
I'm gonna drive down here with you
and show you this.
Okay, but be careful. You know,
we don't want you
to violate your restraining order.
This company here
is Rosedale Water Company,
which Mr. Brown's
a vice president of.
And they're pumping 800 gallons
a minute right here on this site.
Plus, there's a pump line
right over there.
Goes across the river.
And those three pumps over there,
they're pumping 300 gallons
a minute.
They're allowed 675 gallons
a minute out of
all four of those pumps.
So they're illegally pumping water.
You'll see the dam.
It's all overgrown.
But he built a dam over there,
and you can get
a real good picture from that way.
He's built a dam and made
the water go over
that way, to where it gets closer
to his property.
Over the pumping here. The ill*gal
pumping that you're seeing here?
- It's directly affecting the wells?
- Yes.
So why is
that not being talked about?
Because money.
American greed. Thank you.
From the air, you could see
that orchards
and a rock
plant were pulling water from
the river,
hoarding it in a giant pond.
As we asked around,
other locals backed up the story.
- He gave me a donation.
- Okay.
That's, that's nice of him.
Yeah, that's what I thought,
too.
There's some people
that say he diverted...
he's diverting water from
the river.
Cement works.
According to Rod, there was
a sort of old boys network in town.
The newspaper, the cops, Mitch, they
were all buddies.
We tried to get ahold of Mitch,
but figured we'd have about
as much luck getting him on camera
as we had with the Resnicks.
He's out of town today?
We're...
It's an independent documentary
about, uh, water in California and
the drought in California.
It's an independent documentary,
so we're not making it
for any TV news station
or anything like that.
To our surprise,
after a couple of days of calling,
someone got back to us with
a direct number.
- Hello?
- Hello, this is Mitch.
Hey, Mitch. How's it going?
This is Yasha Levine.
- Hey. How are you?
- Hey. Thank...
Yarsh?
It's, uh... Yeah. I mean,
- Yash, you can go Yash.
I mean, it's Yasha is the full name.
It's a Russian name.
Yeah, it's... I was born in Russia.
Mitch said he was happy
to give us his side of the story.
As well as the rock plant,
he had orchards,
a ranch, and was
a major local landlord.
He even had his fingers
in the waste management business.
We arranged to meet him
as he started to work
for the day at the crack of dawn.
Nelson. Stevo.
How are you guys doing?
What are these logos on your...
uh, on your shirt?
Is that... is that have to do with
the, uh...
Oh, this is just
a team roping shirt I got.
It's one of the ones
I won in, uh, in,
uh, Reno roping, up in Reno here
a few years back.
This is an 09 shirt. Just...
- Roping cattle?
- Yeah. Steer... Team roping.
You know, we'll probably get
in trouble
for not wearing my hardhat
in the plant.
- You know? Don't show this part.
- (laughs)
You can see all the water
that funnels
down to the two sand screws.
That goes back out the back,
and we'll head back over to
the silt pond
and show you
where that water circulates from,
and show you how we keep it
in a closed loop system here.
As he told it, the plant had
a sort of recycling system
for the water it used.
We have several wells.
I think that we...we probably
replenish our own wells just
because it's such a sand
and gravel area,
and our wells are very shallow here.
We keep a lot of people busy,
and so we need water to do that.
And without the water we're going
to...we're going
to send 50, 60 people home without
a job.
I even forget
what they call these
but these are old trees
that my grandfather
probably planted here in the 1930s.
These trees are probably 60 years
old.
Some of these. But...
That's a... that is a good...
- Yeah. Well, these are...
- These are great.
- So. Yeah.
- Thank you.
There's your orange juice
for the morning.
- Exactly.
- That'll keep you nice and strong.
Thank you. All right.
We own
all of this country over here.
We own from there about
three miles I own clear over
to the back side of the lake.
- Wow.
- I own...
So my mom and dad,
when I was a kid, we owned,
we... I planted,
I helped my grandfather
and my dad plant every one of
these trees.
According to Mitch, Rod was
an old friend
who had gone off the rails.
What can I tell you?
I mean, I've known him ever
since we've been kids, and...
and, uh,
in the last five years,
he has chosen the path of drugs
and...and alcohol and gotten away
from the church.
He's gotten away from everything
that has any value in life, family,
everything.
He's gotten away from that.
The board took his, uh...
what, his position away from him,
and gave it to his wife
because the wife could manage that.
And Sandy still manages it.
And she is a great gal,
does her job,
but with Rod's addiction
and... He just has gone off
the deep end.
Had a couple of people, um,
say that,
you know, there's, like a dam
up here,
uh, like a secret dam that's being
sort of used to hold the water back,
and that's
why it's not reaching the,
the lower parts of the river
and recharging the aquifers.
That is incorrect for sure,
because I border most of the river
all the way down.
I probably own a, you know,
half a mile's worth of river frontage
down through here.
- There's no secret dam?
- No, there's no secret dam.
When we came back later
to sh**t more footage of the dam,
the whole area had been dug out
and the water was flowing again.
When we phoned Mitch about it,
he spun a story about
a digger stolen from his plant
and warned us about Rod,
saying he was a wife beater.
But trying to pin down who really
had rights to this river water,
and how much, was no easy task.
Upstream from all this, there's
a much bigger dam for the town.
And as far as the people
running it were concerned,
this water was almost entirely owned
by private companies.
Mitch had explained
the same thing to us.
When people, you know, built the dam,
there were people that paid to build
the dam.
Because of the expense
that they had to forego
they got to, in fact, store water
and they could use it
when they needed it.
But the first water users are,
you know,
obviously upstream.
And then it flows downstream
to the lesser, lesser shares.
As far
as local businesses were concerned,
the river was more like
an irrigation ditch
for transferring water
to different owners.
If some of that water was trickling
down into residential wells,
well, those people were lucky,
but they had no real legal claim
to it.
The people who run this system
are good at making it sound
like it's all totally above board.
It's all about who's upriver
and who developed their claim first.
We saw that there was
a Native American
tribe further upstream from the dam,
so we drove up to ask them
about their water rights.
They stole it.
They didn't buy nothing.
They stole it. Just like...
Just like if you left $1,000 sitting
on your seat of your car
and it was...I walked up to it
and your car wasn't locked,
and I seen it, and I took
that money straight up.
Stole it.
That's what I'm talking about.
Back in the 1930s, an official
who said they were acting on
the tribe's behalf signed away
all their rights to the river.
They've been fighting
to get them back ever since.
The people
in East Porterville never questioned
who had rights to the river
before their wells went dry.
But as soon as there was a shortage,
it became clear
who really had control.
The big farmers
and landowners here took
what they needed,
even if that meant cutting off water
to thousands of people.
You could see this all over
the valley.
As the drought raged
and people
in cities had to cut back on water,
farmers were putting
in new plantings of almonds
and pistachios.
Everywhere you looked,
there were new trees going in.
Thousands and thousands of acres.
Drought or no drought,
some farmers had plenty of water
and they were always expanding.
The last stop on our trip was
the American
Pistachio Growers Convention
down in Palm Springs.
# Every time it rains, it rains
# Pennies from heaven
# Don't you know each cloud contains
# Pennies from heaven?
# You'll find your fortune on... #
The funny thing is I see an awful
lot of water around here
and I'd really like to know
what their deal is.
Ha!
We didn't really know
what to expect here,
but along with water,
to our surprise,
they started talking about
the industry's rivalry with Iran.
The Iranian packaging that
we've seen,
do we think it's more
sophisticated than ours?
And my answer to that would be no,
not at all.
Based on my observation.
As a result of the negotiation on
the Iran nuclear deal,
Iranian pistachios will
now be allowed into the US.
One of the most bizarre things
about California's pistachio
industry is that it was borne out
of America's meddling
in the Middle East.
I want to go
all the way back to 1979,
when Iranian students
took our embassy officials hostage.
After the Iranian Revolution,
the US-backed monarch
was thrown out.
American hostages were taken,
and the US retaliated
by blocking trade with Iran.
Historically, Iran has always been
the world's biggest exporter
of pistachios,
but the embargo
allowed California's tiny industry
to get a global foothold.
And after several decades
of continued hostility
and sanctions,
the US industry grew
from being almost nonexistent
to number one in the world.
A lot of pistachio farmers we had
met on our trip
were familiar with the history.
Okay, back in the
days when the Shah was still there
and we had open trade with Iran
for pistachios,
all of our pistachios came
from there.
I don't...I don't even know
if we grew any here.
When the Shah was kicked out
and we broke relations
and stopped importing,
uh, pistachios from there,
and we were kind of...took on,
took on the challenge
of growing pistachios.
Even to this day, farmers are aware
that improving relations
with Iran would be bad for business.
The Iran embargo was they can't
sell their fruit
to anybody else but Iran. OK?
And they can't go over to the Saudis
or anybody else
because we put
the embargoes on them,
and that was hurting them.
But now with this new...this
president that we got now,
he's...he's just screwing the pooch.
We have Arabs that live around here.
We have Arabs that take care of...
that own pistachio orchards.
Well, how do you feel?
You know,
does the Muslim bother you?
Seeing the reactions
of these small time farmers,
we couldn't help but wonder
what the Resnicks were doing.
Their company alone was bigger than
the rest of the industry combined.
And they've been very open
about their competition with Iran.
When we dug into some records,
we found
that they were giving millions to
all sorts of lobby groups,
slush funds
that channel money into pushing
for sanctions
and pumping out anti-Iran
propaganda.
They also made big donations
to California Republicans
who are hawkish on Iran.
What is Iran doing
around the world?
Well, they're funding terrorism.
The Iranian state is
the largest funding mechanism
as a nation state
of terrorism around the globe.
More surprisingly, they were on
the board
of several major think tanks,
including the Washington Institute
for Near East Policy.
They've been on the board for over
a decade.
It's an organisation
that badly wants w*r with Iran.
I frankly think
that crisis initiation
is really tough,
and it's very hard for me to see how
the United States
president can get us to w*r
with Iran.
One can combine other means
of pressure with sanctions.
I mentioned
that expl*si*n on August 17th.
We could step up the pressure.
I mean, look, people,
Iranian submarines periodically
go down.
Someday,
one of them might not come up.
Who would know why?
When you look through
the Washington Institute's members,
it's like a who's who
of familiar faces from the Iraq w*r.
All of us do know each
other rather well,
and I see some good friends
in the audience.
And I'm proud to say your former
deputy director,
John Hannah,
is now my assistant
for national security affairs.
And you can't have him back yet.
Thank you. Please sit down. Please.
Please. Please.
I, uh, I'm sorry, I just...
I'm sorry. I wasn't prepared.
I was just, uh...
You caught me in the middle
of flipping through
my Iraq w*r scrapbook.
Many of us are convinced
that S*ddam Hussein
will acquire nuclear
weapons fairly soon.
There is no doubt that he is
amassing them
to use against our friends,
against our allies, and against us.
When the speech was over,
there was not a dry eye
in the house,
nor an uncrapped pair of pants
in America.
It's kind of weird watching these
old Colbert clips now.
Stephen, isn't he brilliant?
You think I'm kidding. Anyway...
I follow her everywhere with that.
I have no pride. Anyway...
Stephen's fantastic,
and I guess it takes a nut to sell
a nut.
What do you think?
The whole time the Resnicks had
Stephen Colbert as their brand
mascot,
they've been in bed with
the neoconservative crowd lobbying
for w*r.
The secret to world peace
is pistachios.
Dennis Rodman does it
because he's nuts.
Wonderful Pistachios.
Get crackin'.
In a long line of wealthy farmers
to plunder the Central Valley,
the Resnicks aren't anything new.
The liberal social politics,
the flashy marketing,
they're just
the modern flavour of something
as old as America itself.
Farming here isn't so different from
the historic booms in gold and oil.
It's an extraction industry,
but the resource that's being mined
to depletion is water.
It might make sense if the food
they were growing was necessary
for survival,
but it's mostly crops for export.
Nuts, where the entire demand
was created by marketing.
These companies don't care
if they suck the rivers
completely dry or if they're
lobbying for w*r.
Nothing matters but the quest
for endless growth.
It's like
the Blob, mindlessly expanding,
swallowing everything in its path.
Looking at this bizarre,
bleak landscape
in the Central Valley,
it's what the planet would look like
if it was terraformed to meet
the needs of billionaires.
All of nature turned into
a commodity optimised
for wealth extraction.
A dystopian future right
in front of our eyes.
# ..is home sweet home to me. #
My family fled
the Soviet Union right
as the whole thing was
crashing down.
My story should have been about
a young man being saved from
a grim fate.
But here too,
even if you try to ignore it
all, the cracks are showing.
I realised that my family escaped
one failed system
only for us to arrive at another,
and this time there
isn't any alternative
or another place to run.
It's times like these that make
what we do even more important.
Many of you have asked from time
to time why Stewart and I do
what we do.
Why do we care
so much about giving back?
Let me show you my recent
art project to help explain.
I took a virtual class
in Memento Mori.
It was an art class
where you make things,
mementos, to remind you
that eventually you're going to die.
There are pistachios
and bottles of wine,
halos and little Fiji water bottles
and tiny pomegranates.
All the things that have helped make
my life, our lives,
truly wonderful.
The important part
is what's written at the bottom.
Hearses don't have luggage racks.
But in these times of social unrest
and agitation,
there is more need than ever,
and I believe you can do more
for the common good.
And you don't, you're committing
a sin.
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Pistachio Wars (2024)
Moderators: Maskath3, sidolanters, GabrielAlejo2341