Monday, June 15, 2015

Sputnik — California’s Super Wealthy Refuse to Cut Water: ‘No, We’re Not All Equal’

Residents of extremely wealthy suburbs in Southern California are claiming that there is a “war on suburbia,” and that they are being “drought-shamed” for their wasteful habits. They believe that if they can afford it, the water should be theirs, and all theirs.
California Farmers to Cut Water Use Voluntarily Amid Severe DroughtA resident of Rancho Santa Fe, an ultra wealthy community that uses five times the statewide average of water, believes that water is not a basic human right to be shared and preserved for all to use, but rather a commodity similar to gas.
People “should not be forced to live on property with brown lawns, golf on brown courses or apologize for wanting their gardens to be beautiful,” Yuhas wrote on social media.

“We pay significant property taxes based on where we live,” he told the Washington Post. “And, no, we’re not all equal when it comes to water.”....
Wait, it gets even better.
“I call it the war on suburbia,” Brett Barbre of Yorba City, another wealthy community facing the same rationing, told the Washington Post.
Barbre then took it even further, telling the newspaper that “They’ll have to pry it from my cold, dead hands,” referring to his gardening hose and explaining that the water restrictions are infringing on his freedoms.
Sending America's message to the world. "Because neoliberalism."

Sputnik
California’s Super Wealthy Refuse to Cut Water: ‘No, We’re Not All Equal’

4 comments:

Ryan Harris said...

It seems like it is always pampered college students or upper middle classes who feel entitled AND have the time and money to fight the power. They should use civil disobedience and nimby acts of resistance to pressure Democrats and their conservative impractical policies that aren't based on data, science, logic or anything besides their superstitions and ideology.

NeilW said...

This is the attitude of the Latte Set. We're rich and we expect poor people to be grateful for the scraps off our table.

They need a poor and dispossessed set of people so that they can patronise them with their charity, which is how they maintain their social standing within their own circle.

Don't solve the problem, contain it so it makes me look good.

The Right and the Left are the same really. Two different roads to the same coffee shop.

Ryan Harris said...

The Dems create scarcity in all essential government services like utilities, housing & land which drives up prices and forces the poor & undesirable to move to red states. California doesn't even build enough houses for their children to inhabit much less for the immigrants so the prices rise. Same story with water. They have a belief that efficiency can solve the scarcity problems. Not that living under stairwells or in closets in old houses doesn't have a certain charm in the frugality and engineering challenges. But when you look at it from a different angle, a house in san francisco that used to be affordable to a clerk is now far too expensive. The clerk can't even afford the closet converted to living quarters. So no matter how the economists slice it with their soaring productivity numbers on the west coast, the same person performing the same function can no longer afford the same real standard of living as 120 years ago. The economist will stutter and come up with justifications but the fact is that less housing of lower quality is produced at a greater cost... but but but people now have apps and mobile phones and they can buy clothes and uber. Progress, California style.

Ignacio said...

We really need worldwide pushed for "inflation taxes" on the rich. The suckers consume and create way bigger share of the worldwide inflation starving the rest of wealth. Tax them to oblivion if they go above their fair share of inflation creation.