WATER AND POWER
President Trump appeared on “60 Minutes” last week.
The interview with Lesley Stahl was predictably confrontational.
At one point, Stahl asked Trump whether or not he felt he’d been fair in mocking now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s sexual assault accuser Dr. Christine Blasey Ford.
In classic Trump fashion, when pressed, he replied, “We won. It doesn’t matter.”
So the ends apparently justify the means, as much now as they ever did.
With that as a backdrop, I want to talk about William Kahrl’s seminal 1982 book, “Water and Power,” a history of the Owens Valley’s exploitation by the City of Los Angeles.
The book is still in print, published by the University of California.
But first, I want to start with what I knew about the subject prior to reading the book, because I realize that 99.7% of the people who live in the Eastern Sierra probably don’t have exhaustive knowledge of this history.
Heck, in a recent Sheet Survey, just one out of eight people interviewed could even identify who Bob Woodward is.
My general impression (and I moved to the Eastside in 2001) was that L.A. had bought up a whole bunch of water rights from unsuspecting local residents. By the time the locals figured out what was going on, it was too late to fight the L.A. takeover.
There is a kernel of truth to this, but it represents about 15% of the story.
The following is from Kahrl’s book.
