April 22, 2025 • 42 mins
With the LA wildfires of January 2025 still fresh in Californians' minds, a number of little considered issues popped up. Not least of which is, where does the water to fight fires come from? Wait… someone owns the water?! This episode is about the privatization of utilities and how we got here.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
A media We's so, y'all's your favorite cousin.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
I just came over. You feel me, y'all don't have.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
No cousins that just kind of pop up, just be
at the house like like a ninety sitcom where you
don't knock on the door, you just be walking in.
That wasn't my life, mainly because most of the cousins
on my mother's side lived on the other side of
the country, and then my cousin's on my father's side,
since we lived in gang infested areas, you didn't just
(00:30):
pop up. That was just not the safest thing to do.
But I'm doing that at your house. And you know
what happens when you have cousins come over. Well, now,
a small percentage of y'all are black, but a lot
of percentages y'all grew up poor, which means that you
got whoopings just.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Like we did.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
So you know, usually when your cousin comes over, somebody's
getting We all somebody getting in trouble, and it's usually
you because you're supposed to know better. I never got
more spankings then when my cousins came over, because we
would just get into stuff. And then since I'm the
one that lived there, and I was cutting up in
(01:11):
front of company.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
I ended up getting into most trouble.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Anyway, this isn't where I'm working out trauma, although it
is called it can happen here podcasts, So I feel
like we all collectively working out trauma of being Americans.
And lastly, on the rambling preamble, I got a dog. Now, well,
my daughter got a dog. And to all the parents
that listen, you know when your child gets a pet,
who's pet that actually is? So I find myself doing
(01:37):
a lot more chores than I signed up for. But
it's a pug, and it keeps trying to eat the
cat's food.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Therefore it's got liquid doodoo. And I'm not a fan
of that.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
And since I get to work in my pajamas because
I'm just recording podcasts and rap music back here, seems
to fall on me to scoop up this liquid doodoo.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
But that's only when she eats the cat's food. Stupid dog,
eat your own food.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Anyway, I'm here to talk about something that you can
do nothing about. All right, y'all ready here we go,
a brother like me who bleeds Los Angeles. You cut
me open and Pacific Ocean salt water comes out. You
poke my lungs and smog pours out of me. I
could work for the Tourist Department of Los Angeles. I
(02:29):
love this city at an unhealthy level. There are things
about this place that is absolute trash. Don't get me wrong,
there is a lot wrong with this city. With this place,
the ground shakes up under us. We've been such a
(02:50):
horrible steward as to how to take care of this land.
I'm gonna include myself, even though I am not the
invasive colonizer. But there are really only nine native trees
to California, two of which are not the palm tree
or the eucalyptus. The plants that are here naturally are
(03:13):
drought resistant and fire resistant.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
They don't burn that easy.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
The ones that burn up real quick are the sycamores
and the palm trees.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
And if you may have noticed, Los Angeles hit a
bit of a dry spell recently and had quite the disaster.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
Now, I'm slowly backing that thing up into what we're
gonna talk about right now, which you should probably know
if you have already read the show title when you
clicked play. But I'm gonna back that thing up into it.
California catches fire every year in some location. Now, my mother,
(03:51):
you know, Mama prop she worked thirty years for the
La County Fire Department, you know, in the city of Westkovina.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
Because almost six two sixer and I have vivid.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
Memories of the different firemen, fire chiefs. I think I
talked about this in the La on Fire episode. Block
is literally Hot on the Hood politics show, which hopefully
you guys are supporting and listening to also.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
But even my boy Chris.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
Who's you know, firefighter, you know, been fighting the fires
out here. Everybody knew that one day this day would
come and that let's just say, all of the bureaucratic
failures had not happened. If the water was as full
as possible, the fire hydrants were fine, if everything was
(04:42):
the budget, if everything was done perfectly, this was going
to happen.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
This day was going to come. That it's a perfect storm.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
We were had a specific type of drought, lack of rain,
the Santa Ana winds, and then a fire sparking, and
that fire sparking in a densely populated urban area. It
was every fireman I knew was like, yeah, one day
it's gonna happen. And like I said in the last episode, yeah,
like you know, we could find ourselves a time machine
(05:14):
and practice the indigenous practices.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
Oh.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Actually, as a small little beacon alike, there's an area
Alta Dina that was actually given back to the Tongla
tribe many years back. There was a first like actual
land back given back to the tribe and they started
taking care of the land the way that their elders
and ancestors did. And guess what, that area didn't burn
anyway in the midst of this disaster that we were
(05:41):
having a desperate, desperate man who I completely understand is desperation.
On Tuesday night on January seventh, while the fires were
just rumbling through the palisades, a man named Keith Posserman,
who's the co founder of a real estate investment firm,
(06:03):
desperately took to Twitter and said, does anyone have access
to private firefighters to protect our home? Need to act
fast here all neighbors houses burning, will pay any amount.
There was another click of Rick Caruso, who almost in
(06:23):
a multiverse situation, is our mayor, a billionaire developer who
owns the grove on the West Side. Just that if
you ever watched TMZ, whenever somebody's walking out of a place,
it's probably at the grove and was a you know,
real estate magnate. Anyway, there are videos of him driving
(06:47):
through an area that he had with his private security
and private firefighters where it's smoke billowing all around the place,
but his situation was fine. Why because he had private firefighters.
They shaved this shopping center, but he tried to unsuccessfully
save nearby homes as well, which reminded everybody about the
(07:07):
time that Kanye and Kim tweeted about their house being
saved by firefighters.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
And which made people be like, wait a minute, you
can buy a fire department, man, What the hell is this?
What type of shit? Man? What we over here arguing
over firefidrants.
Speaker 3 (07:30):
And tanks running low and somebody just paid them where
they get the water from? How the hell you can
just Oh my god, what the hell.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
Water you using, nigga, that's not your water? And what
you gonna do? Are you gonna help out the neighbors?
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Okay, so if I buy fire department five apartment, show
up from my house, but the neighbor's house is burned,
you just gonna leave a neighbors house, you gonna tell
them to.
Speaker 3 (07:59):
Call the city's fire department. What the hell is happening?
How does this shit work? Is there any other way
rich people can be evil? What is happening right now?
Speaker 1 (08:10):
Which is basically what happened and how most of the
regulars felt. So this episode is not just about private
fire departments, because that would not be a very interesting
full episode. It's about the question that private fire departments
bring up, which is like nigga, whose water is that?
Speaker 2 (08:32):
Wait a minute, who owns the water? Is the water
private too?
Speaker 1 (08:36):
And if the water's private too, what else of my
utilities are private? And this is what I mean by
there is nothing you can do about it.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Now.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
If there is any of you that are built like
Robert and Magpie, then maybe you ain't gotta worry about this.
Maybe you could dig your own well and find the groundwater. However,
there are things called water land rights, which I will
talk about into this.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
So even if.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
You move off the grid to live on a mountain,
you find somewhere in the backwoods, you know fou Aca
is away from Magpie wherever the hell Magpie live, and
you dig to find some water, somebody owned that water.
It already happened here, y'all. Let's go all right, this
may or may not be a shock to y'all. I
know in the first the block is literally hot episode
(09:28):
I did way way, way way back when I first
joined when kuols On Media first launch, when I first
joined the team, my first episodes. It was one of
those things where it's like the thought has probably never
crossed your mind, and and some of it's like sitting
I'm talking to y'all who pay bills. Some of this
stuff is sitting right up under your nose, Like Southern California.
(09:48):
Edison is one of our power companies. But then there's
PG and E. This isn't the city of Los Angeles
providing this, That's a company. In the same way that
your internet from a company. What makes you think your
power don't come from a company. And if your power
come from a company and an internet come from a company,
why wouldn't your water come from a company? I like, well,
(10:10):
I don't know what would make you think that that's
just a city municipality? Well, because duh, because water fall
from the sky. What the shit? So what I'm paying
for you to pump it through the through the dog
on pipes. For me, I understand that that's a service,
But what the hell of my taxes for you somebody
(10:32):
like I don't know if you noticed, you can own
the rain. So the water that fell inside the lake,
somebody bought the lake. This is the episode that I'm
going to tell y'all. Right now, so your utilities, most
likely your city has sold your water and your sewage
processing to a private company. And the bills that you're
paying your water bill is not going to the city
(10:56):
for the service you are receiving. It is paying the
company back the money that the company paid your city.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
To get this gig.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
Let me back up here first, let me cover the
private fire departments. Now here's the thing. Private fire departments
usually are hired by insurance companies. So what they do
a lot of time is like prevention. They'll come in
here and you know, clear out shrub, make sure that
your house is not like set up for failure.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
You know.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
In California, I mean, people always talk about our strict
laws and building codes and it's like, well, nigga, do
you see why every time you got a bureaucratic law,
like there might be a historical evidence as to why
we need that, one of which is my nigga.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
California ain't got a lot of water.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
So if you gonna build a house, you can't just
have dry shrubbery up around your house. Why because you
just basically put a some matches just around your house.
So yes, bam, like that's why you can't do that.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
Why you not allowed to have a lot of trash
in your house? Nigga?
Speaker 1 (12:11):
What I mean, what the hell you think? Because this
shit'll catch on fire. So these private companies, private fire
companies usually come through and again they hire body insurance
companies normally to come and clear shrubbery, make sure that
your lint, your dryer is uh cleared out, make sure
your HVAC is good. And usually they got their own
(12:33):
little tank, right, So they come in with their own
little tank of water that's stay private water that basically
they bring in their bottle water.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
You know what I'm saying. Why the rest of us
is using.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Tap right, But eventually that little tank go run out,
you feel me, And then at that point you got
to tap into the fire hydrant. Right now, What most
of these companies will say is like the guys were
not monsters, dude, Like, if the neighborhood is on fire,
of course we're going to help. What are you, like,
what are you talking about? Which I truly believe for
(13:02):
this reason. If I'm paying to protect this house, but
the neighbor's house is on fire, that probably means that
the neighbor's house is going to cause my house to
catch on fire. So of course it would be in
my best interest to help put that one out. According
to the New York Times, they reported that, yeah, good,
forty five percent of all firefighters working in the United
(13:23):
States today are employed privately. Right now, a lot of
those are like wildlife suppression. Now, there's such thing as
called the National Wildlife Suppression Association, which represents more than
like three hundred private firefighting groups, and a lot of
them work more as like government contractors, right, as far
(13:43):
as like again supplement for like wildfires, right and like
I said, the others are hired by private companies.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
Yo, and peak.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
This like a little two person private firefighting crew with
a small vehicle, I mean it could cost like three
granded day. Like a large crew of like twenty firefighters
and four trucks can run ten thousand dollars a day.
This is according to Brian Weelock, the vice president of
the Gray Back Forestry. It's a private firefighting company in Oregon.
(14:16):
But most of the time, like I said, these people
don't really work directly with homeowners. But that's not what's
the interesting part of this story to me. The interesting
part of this story to me is the reality of
the utilities that we live in. Now, let me go
(14:42):
ahead and run off some statistics to you. I just
want to go ahead and add to the dystopia that
we live in because we need to say, we need
to change the name of this show too.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
It has happened here.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
I'm gonna link all this data to.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
The show notes. Now you're ready for this.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
Water and wastewater service privatization follows broader trends. More than
forty percent of drinking water systems nationwide are private regulated
utility systems. Of the sixty percent of the systems owned
by local governments. Privatization by contracting of operations management has
grown rapidly since two thousand and one. Nationwide, the privatization
(15:26):
of water wastewater grew by thirteen percent after growing eighty
four percent over the decade.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
In the nineteen nineties.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
Right, So what that means is almost half of y'all
are paying a private company for your water. Now, let's
make some distinctions here between public utilities and private utilities,
and you.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
Know what are we even talking about?
Speaker 1 (15:49):
So public utilities are owned and operated by your local,
state and federal governments on behalf of the citizens and
customers in that area. So up, public utility would be
your municipal water, sewage, sanitation services, like if you have
a public electricity providers, government government ran public transit systems,
(16:11):
state owned telecommunication companies, public utilities right now, listen, here's
where it's interesting. Have to balance serving the public interest
while remaining financially sustainable since they are not profit driven.
Any revenue earned is invested back into maintaining the infrastructure
(16:31):
of the operations, which seems like a big old dug.
We're not here to make money. This is not our
money making interest. This is living, right, It's a utility. Like,
it's just I'm not trying to make money off it.
I'm trying to keep the lights on, right, But as
we know, it costs to do those things, so the
(16:54):
temptation becomes easy to be like, how do I offload
this cost right and make sure that this service is there, because,
as you know, oftentimes public utilities don't be very good.
You know what I'm saying. Flint still ain't got fresh
water right now. Altadena is in a situation where they
(17:17):
was like, look, don't even boil the water, like whatever
coming out of your tap is just not good.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
Boiling is not good enough. Like, do not drink this water?
Speaker 1 (17:28):
Right is the situation that they in and it's like,
we're where the money at, Like, how are we going
to fix this?
Speaker 2 (17:34):
Now? That's a public utility.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
Now, private utility is utilities obviously owned and operated by
private companies. So that would be an investored owned electricity
company like a private telecommunication, private owned oil gas and pipelines,
and private owned waste management companies. Now, their goal, because
(17:57):
it's a company, is still to make profit for their
shaitareholders while also delivering reliable service. Now, they argument their
defense would be, if we don't give you a good product,
we won't have customers. So it is in our best
interests for our own money to give you a best service. However,
are you seeing the truck size hole in their logic?
Speaker 2 (18:20):
Nigga, we don't have a choice.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
Do you have a choice as to what water company
provides the water to your house? Who go run the sewer?
I don't have an option anyway. So the key differences
are very obvious.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
Right. One is the ownership and motives.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
Like publicly owned utilities serve the public interests rather than
pursue profits. Right, private owned utilities are there for their
investors in the maximize returns.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
Regulation and pricing.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
Public utilities are regulated by the government apported commissions that
oversee pricing. Private utilities are also regulated, but usually more
flexible in their rate setting, because what the hell you
gonna do? Get you a called a water company, be like,
I ain't paying this bill. They gonna be like, ool,
no problem. Service areas most publics utility service customers are
(19:07):
within municipal boundaries. Investor owned utilities often are defined by
regional monopolies with little overlap or competition with customers. Listen,
if you ever moved into an apartment and you was like, y'all,
I'm trying to, like, you know, install cable, and they
was like, or your Internet. It was like, oh, it's
(19:29):
at and t over here. I was like, oh, but
I have spectrum. They're like Spectrum don't serve this area.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
Nigga.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
It's the Internet, it's the air, it's wires, this polls
I'm not allowed to. U can't come over here because
it's a private company. Now I'm in a situation where
AT and T knock on my door every day and
being like, yo, we laying fiber optics. You know we
lay we laying new pipes down here, up under you,
up under your street.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
We can move faster than Spectrum.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
I done ditch them both, and then Spectrum still email
me every day s Bectrum sent somebody was like, we
heard you left Spectrum. We're trying to figure out why.
I'm like nigga because I don't want to use either
of y'all, but we're the area you serve. When I
first moved into the house that I'm in now, like
I made an account on Edison and they were like, oh, nigga,
(20:19):
Edison don't serve here. You had SoCal Gas And I
was like, who the hell is so cal Gas? They
was like that's who's who else gonna give me the gap?
Speaker 2 (20:29):
I don't have no options. Oh, I got to live
in LA.
Speaker 1 (20:32):
This is who serves LA infrastructure spending with public utilities,
they might find it easier to raise funds for long
term capital projects and maintain infrastructure proactively, while privately owned
businesses and utilities answered to shareholders seeking returns, which impact
investment decisions. Meaning, if I'm like, Yo, somebody gotta clean
(20:56):
this sewer pipe because this water ain't good in this neighborhood,
it would be whove the City of Los Angeles to
fix this, and it would be easy for them because
I am a Los Angeles resident. This is a public utility.
If I have private water, they might be like, oh,
how much.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
Money that's that neighborhood give us?
Speaker 1 (21:15):
You know, if we fix the water up there in
Palace verd aids you know what I'm saying, Like, we
got to talk to them because they know, I mean,
they kind of give us the breads, so they're not
incentivized necessarily to fix my infrastructure.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
Right, and then the customer service focus right.
Speaker 1 (21:30):
Public utilities often focus more on customer satisfaction and addressing
community complaints, while private entities have profit motives. I mean,
I don't know what else I need to explain to y'all. Right, now,
let me show you how this works and what the
allure is for a public city council to make this decision.
(21:53):
Are y'all here to more perfect union? It's another one
of those podcast folks that just got more money than us.
They able to produce things that we had bread, We
would produce it anyway. They did one about investor own
water companies and how they lobby to give them the
contract to run their sewage and water, right.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
And it's a super dope stuff. It's a super dope study.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
It's a good, like focused study to show like as
sort of an example of how it can happen anywhere.
And they focused this one study on this city in Pennsylvania, right.
And here's the ill part about all of this is
that how would you know this is happening?
Speaker 2 (22:35):
I mean, are you really looking at the logo on
your water bill? I mean.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
No, you just like looking at the costs, right and
hoping that it don't be that much. Now again, if
you've written it, if you're rent in an apartment, I
don't know what utilities you gotta cover.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
Right, Let's say you are written in an apartment.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
You know what I'm saying, Like a lot of times,
Joe utilities, It's like it's like they cover water and gas,
you cover electricity and internet and then whatever it is.
I'm not thinking about who the company is. I'm just
like paying the bill. But if one day your bill triple,
I mean, who do you call you like, I haven't
used more water. I don't understand why it costs more.
(23:14):
Now you might call the city the city like, oh,
we don't even run the water no more.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
And that's exactly what happened.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
So in twenty twenty in New Garden, Pennsylvania, they sold
their water to get this, I go up Pennsylvania Jerks,
a subsidiary of Essential Utilities, they sold their water for
thirty million dollars. And just for you to get a
grasp on how much money can be made by doing this.
(23:41):
If you a company, that company made two point zero
five billion dollars in twenty twenty three. And essentially, if
you the city, the city runs up, you are you
having all kinds of problems. You got people not paying
bills on time, you got all these different you know,
all this stuff, you got to hire the worker, you
got to do all this stuff. And this company runs
up and was like, yo, we'll take all this off
(24:02):
your hands.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
Not only will we take it off your hands. We'll
pay you for it.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
So to the city and they saying, look, I do
a better job than y'all do. Why because this is
all we do. You got all this other stuff you
got to take care. We gonna only take care of
the water. Look, we'll give you thirty million dollars for it.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
That's free money. And you ain't got to worry about it.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
All you gotta do when people call complaining about they
water is just say please hold and transfer it to us.
You ain't got nothing to worry about it. And the
city say, okay, that sounds good. Now are you going
you're gonna change your prices? It's like, why would we
change our prices. We won't need to change our price.
Matter of fact, we can probably charge less because we
ain't got the same things y'all got, well, at least
(24:41):
for the first few years. Kind Of like the phone
bill when they're like, oh, you sign up for this
much money a month for the first three months, or
your cable for the first first two years, and then
one day your cable bill come in and it's just
psycho and you like, I don't know why the hell
this costs so much more, And they're like oh yeah,
the contract was for this long and then after that
it went back to regular price. That's essentially what's happening.
(25:03):
That's why I was like, if your water bill go crazy,
who you're gonna call? Like what you're gonna say?
Speaker 2 (25:07):
Like? Uh?
Speaker 1 (25:08):
They could just be like, yeah, it just costs more now.
So for the city, the city is like, look, it's
free money. We could put this money into other stuff
we've been trying to work on, and y'all gonna get
a better situation. And again, no one looks at the
logo on their bill. So the utilities industries, right a
few years ago, I think in twenty sixteen, got this
(25:30):
law passed that made cities want to sell it. It's
called the fair Market Value laws. One example is in
Pennsylvania was Act twelve, which was in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
And the concern is cities feel like they.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
Can't keep up with dunt dunt dun environmental laws and
keep up with city growth. Cities are growing so fast,
so many people are moving in. We're destroying the earth
at a particular exponential rate, and the government wants us
to not destroy the planet.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Ho home, So I got all.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
These laws I got, he just you know, he is
a hat of the money for it.
Speaker 2 (26:11):
He is out of the money for it at the time.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
So when you're evaluating how much this utility would be worth,
you can include, because of Act twelve in Pennsylvania, the
median income, the expected repairs and future revenue, which means
it makes that water worth way much more. Right, And
(26:36):
a lot of times when you selling this, when you
selling this disutility, the price tag what these people be
paying you be six times the city's budget.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
So think about this. I'm just trying to make this
real for you.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
Let's just say somebody comes in and says I'll buy
your car.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
You say, word for how much?
Speaker 1 (27:01):
And they say, I tell you what, I'll pay you
your year's salary for this car. The fam you gonna add,
I add another car in there for that. You know
what I'm saying? Hey, you know, throwing another six months
for the stalary, I'll make you some dinner.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
Like it's it's kind of a no brainer. You like,
you our entire year's budget just for the water? No brainer?
But who pays the company? Nigga?
Speaker 1 (27:34):
You you paying the company? What do I mean by that?
The company cuts cuts the city at check? Now the
company gotta make their money back. How they make their
money back? Nigga, your bills? What did you like? What
is you saying? Of course they gonna make their money
back now again, they're incentivized to make that money back
as fast as possible, which means they're not gonna spend
(27:56):
more than they added. Already spent thirty million dollars to
get the thing. But then they'll promise to like fix
their systems, their promise like you sold the city saying
I'm gonna be able to spend some time to upgrade
and do all this difference. And they don't have an
upgrade nothing, because it's kind of a no brainer.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
This is easy money to them.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
In Philly, there's this area called the Chester Water Authority
that went straight up bankrupt, so like the city's water
authority just went bankrupt. So they was like, yo, we
gotta sell it. They got offered four hundred and ten
million dollars. Well the city did, and the city says, nigga,
Chester Water Authority, you ain't got the right to sell
(28:35):
because you are not a company.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
You are part of the City of Philadelphia.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
Chester Water Authority is like, my jig, I mean, what
the hell you want us to do?
Speaker 1 (28:46):
How does this stuff become legal? Well, like the same
way any others dick come legal. They just you lobby
candidates all the time. And the only way to stop
this is you got to sign up to some sort
of city council news led us something to be able
to walk up in there and.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
Protest the shit. Nigga, good luck.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
Now let's talk about specifically California. All right, I bring
up specifically California because of all this stuff about the fire,
hydrants and water issues that we had recently. Remember that
(29:28):
the water that water's Los Angeles comes from the north right,
It comes from right up under Sacramento through the California
Aqueduct that was put together by this man named maulhulland.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
So the mulhulland passed mulhulland drive.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
That was all based on this man that made Los
Angeles be possible because he just went up there just
like any other colonizing, was like I buy your water,
and they was like water ain't for sale.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
He was like, yeah it is, and went over their
heads and bought the water.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
Built a whole basically like when you was a kid
at the beach and you dig a little thing in
the sand to make the water go a certain way.
That's basically what he did through the middle of California
to bring water to Los Angeles. Now, Los Angeles did
have one river. That was the San Gabril River that
starts in the top of the San Gabriel Foothills and
comes into what we call the La River, which is paved,
(30:24):
which there is a movement to unpave that because that
would probably help us with a lot of climate issues.
But either way, that was an actual river. It was
enough to support the native tribes here because it wasn't
that many people here, and they had sense enough to
not plant plants that need the water that they ain't got.
They wasn't trying to build a city in the area.
They ain't supposed to be a city. Nigga, Have you
(30:45):
ever been to Las Vegas. There should not be a
city there. Y'all ever been to the Inland Empire? There
should not be that many humans there, according to the Earth,
unless you pump water over there.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
The natives were fine.
Speaker 3 (30:59):
The indigenous communities figured out how to live in the
shit for thousands of years.
Speaker 2 (31:04):
But uh, you know, we had to do our thing. Now,
some vocabulary.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
California got a thing called senior water rights, which means
whoever got there first gets the water, Like basically, it's
my land, I licted right. But they only got them
rights when it started from the gold Rush. So they
was like, well, who was there first? Was this white man?
Not the people that already lived there, but these white men.
So if you happen to have a farm, you know
(31:30):
up near North Fresno, if your family been there longer
than somebody else's family, then that water is yours, right,
that's senior water rights. And then there's junior water rights,
which is like the second person. So whatever water you
don't use, they get to use right now. Why that
is specifically important for California, especially the Central Valley, is
(31:51):
because Cali provides everybody's produce.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
I mean, for the rest of the country.
Speaker 1 (31:57):
The vast majority of the fruits, vegetab nuts, and lagoons
that you eat come from California.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
We gotta have water.
Speaker 3 (32:04):
It would be hoof of rest of America to make
sure that Calli got water.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
So those are water rights.
Speaker 1 (32:10):
Now the water that gets pumped down into our fire hydrants.
Here's the situation, like that had to do a water pressure.
Now you could refer to the block is literally hot
episode where I go into detail as to what happened
with that.
Speaker 2 (32:24):
But there was this whole thing.
Speaker 1 (32:26):
About the water being owned by some billionaires. Now I
would love to run with that one, but the fact is,
that's just not true.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
It's not that simple. Let me go ahead in fact
check that.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
So the wonderful code which is who they were talking about,
it's Steward and Linda Resnik. They do have a majority
steak in a water bank that can store up to
one point five million acres, right, which is close to
five hundred billion gallons of water. But the realness is
that's like a tiny fraction of the water capacity of California.
(33:03):
California's groundwater basins combined can hold more than five hundred
and sixty six times as much water, with a storage
capacity of eight hundred and fifty million to one point
three billion acres of feet across the California Department of
Water Sources. The state's surface resources hold more than forty
million acres on top of that, So there's two types
(33:29):
of water here.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
There's surface water and there's groundwater.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
Groundwater obviously that's stuff that you would dig in for
a well, that's a whole other thing, right now, it
is true this family owns brands is like wonderful pistachios,
Fiji water wonderful, land halos wonderful halos, and palm wonderful.
And that's a you know, I don't know if you're
in a pomegranate juice, but if that's your thing. But anyway,
(33:54):
let me quote from politiffect. The water the residents use
get stored underground initially before or the water that is
delivered to the roots of Resinic's pistachios, almonds, pomegranate courts
specifically is stored in the Kerrent Water Bank that is
the most valuable water resource in the region and critical
to America's fresh flood supplies. The water bank which is
(34:16):
watch This the bank itself a public private partnership with
the Resnic's owned fifty seven percent of the steak is
thirty two square mile recharge basin, which looks like floodlands
from the street that essentially stores again the one point
five million acre feet of water five hundred billion gallons.
Thes storage arrangement is very controversial, right They've been banking
(34:41):
on the water by using public and private dollars to
corral public resource. Because of their water rights and their wealth,
they are insulating themselves from this type of drought, which,
of course that's what rich do, right. This is what
Chas Miller says, the director Environmental Analysis at Pomona College.
(35:02):
Private capital has no problem with the drought, while the
rest of us are looking at deep social divides. Somebody
bought the water, but water isn't the only thing. Like
I said that somebody else owes you know. According to
Publicpower dot Org, utilities that were sold since nineteen eighty
(35:24):
have ranged dramatically in size. Although many had a small
number of customers at the time of the sale, with
the median of fewer than six hundred customers, less than
thirty percent of utilities sold had more than a thousand
customers at the time of sale. Right, so back then
it was a small amount of people.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
Right.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
Watch this, Only five public power utilities with ten thousand
or more customers have sold, right, and four of those
five sales occurred were approved since twenty fifteen. Now the
law or just sale of such electric department was the
city of Murphysboro, Tennessee, which had about sixty eight thousand
(36:06):
customers and when it's sold to the Middle Tennessee Electric
Membership Cooperative in twenty twenty. Other utilities substantial size include
those serving the cities of Vero Beach, Anchorage, Alaska, Eagle Mountain, Utah,
and all together we are talking about eight hundred thousand
citizens today have their electricity. Private sales have occurred in
(36:32):
twenty six states, and almost all of Kansas was sold,
and it was sold in the nineteen eighties. Now why
even make an episode on this? And it's because of
this last thing. Corporate cities. Now, of course, company towns
(36:53):
is as old as companies are. You know, you had
trained things and stuff like that, you know, where like
a company moves in and it just it just made
sense for the company to make sure that they were
providing housing and you know, saloons and stuff like that
for the people that you know, lived in their area.
Speaker 2 (37:12):
It just made sense.
Speaker 1 (37:13):
That was just it was just good business, right, you
wanted to attract more people to stay in this area.
If you've ever been in northwest Arkansas city called Bentonville,
it's actually very dope to be in. But it is
the headquarters for Walmart. So if you're gonna work in
corporate Walmart. You gotta live in Bentonville. Now, the city's
(37:33):
dope is that a corporate town? Not in what I'm
talking about. It is a company that said we're gonna
dump a kajillion dollars to make this city as dope
as possible. That's one thing I am talking about, a
brand duh making a city.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
I wish I was making this up.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
Google Got One's working on a community called North Bay
Shore in Mountain View, California. I'll have seven thousand housing units,
and another called Middlefield Park that'll have two thousand units.
Meta is building Willow Village dubbed Zucktown in Menlo Park, California,
(38:14):
and they'll have seventeen hundred housing units, a hotel, and
plenty of retail. Disney is developing a fourteen hundred thousand
units across eighty acres in Kissamee, Florida, right near.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
Walt Disney World.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
Elon Musk is building his city called in snail Brook
outside of Austin, Texas for employees of his constellations of startups,
including SpaceX, Tesla, and Boeing.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
But the most ambitious is California.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Forever It's supposed to be Silicon Valley two point zero.
It's this group ran by the former Golden Sax trader
Jane Samark and is backed by investors like the Lincoln
co founder Reed hofsman Chris Dixon, and this philanthropist named
Loreene Powell. And it plans to create this new city
in Solano County, sixty miles north of San Bernardino, with
(39:11):
tens of thousands of homes, large solar energy orchards, with
a million new trees, and one hundred thousand acres of
new park space. And they hope to build this community
will generate thousands of jobs in a wockable Paris or
West Village in New York.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
And there was this.
Speaker 1 (39:31):
Reporting of this unknown group that was coming up in
just like just buying farmland. It was called Flannery Associates.
And for years nobody had any idea who these people were.
They purchased fifty two thousand acres, spent eight hundred million dollars,
paying five times a market rate, and.
Speaker 2 (39:51):
Nobody knew who they were.
Speaker 3 (39:53):
This little po dunk town people selling their little farms.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
It's because these billionaires building a city.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
Now, I am telling you all this ultimately to introduce
you to Curtis Yarvin, who is probably going to be.
Speaker 2 (40:09):
A future bastard pod person.
Speaker 1 (40:12):
Or either way, one of these shows is going to
cover this man, because this man, in a lot of ways,
is the patient zero, the contagion number one of these
new Republicans, this new conservatism, this new extremist that's been
(40:33):
kind of been trying to tell everybody, here's why it's
so poisonous. He's like, because not only is democracy dead,
democracy being dead, and whatever you think you have now
ain't a democracy, to which all of us would be like, nigga, Yes,
that's why it's so dangerous because I'd be like yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:51):
He's like, the system's failing you, and I'm like amen.
Speaker 1 (40:54):
So his solution is a monarchy, but.
Speaker 2 (40:58):
He mean a monarchy like a CEO.
Speaker 1 (41:01):
So this man says if the country was ran like
a tech company, everything would be cool, we would all
be better. And his example of that is he would say, Okay,
look at that laptop you use it.
Speaker 2 (41:14):
Look at that phone you got.
Speaker 1 (41:16):
Do you think you would have got to that phone,
to that laptop, the quality of that laptop you had
if it was done by the City of California's Tech
Municipal Department.
Speaker 2 (41:27):
He's like, nigga, no, you got that because.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
Of Steve Jobs. That's why you got that phone. Because
that nigga was like, look, this is what we're doing.
This is how we're doing it. He would argued that
Roosevelt over the New Deal. He was a tech bro.
He ran his mug like a tech startup. He was like, look, nigga,
this is what we're doing. We building freeways. I don't
care what y'all say. We building freeways. He's like, if
the country was ran like a tech company, then maybe
(41:52):
this country would work better. And he's like, in newsflash,
whatever the hell you think you got now ain't working anyway.
We might as well is lean into it. All I'm
saying is I don't know what I'm saying, fam, it
could happen here. So this is your favorite cousin swooping
in and signing off ruining another thing for you.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
Don't catch me at the hood of politics.
Speaker 1 (42:18):
Pop.
Speaker 2 (42:22):
It could happen here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
now find sources for it could happen here. Listen directly
in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
A media We's so, y'all's your favorite cousin.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
I just came over. You feel me, y'all don't have.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
No cousins that just kind of pop up, just be
at the house like like a ninety sitcom where you
don't knock on the door, you just be walking in.
That wasn't my life, mainly because most of the cousins
on my mother's side lived on the other side of
the country, and then my cousin's on my father's side,
since we lived in gang infested areas, you didn't just
(00:30):
pop up. That was just not the safest thing to do.
But I'm doing that at your house. And you know
what happens when you have cousins come over. Well, now,
a small percentage of y'all are black, but a lot
of percentages y'all grew up poor, which means that you
got whoopings just.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Like we did.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
So you know, usually when your cousin comes over, somebody's
getting We all somebody getting in trouble, and it's usually
you because you're supposed to know better. I never got
more spankings then when my cousins came over, because we
would just get into stuff. And then since I'm the
one that lived there, and I was cutting up in
(01:11):
front of company.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
I ended up getting into most trouble.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Anyway, this isn't where I'm working out trauma, although it
is called it can happen here podcasts, So I feel
like we all collectively working out trauma of being Americans.
And lastly, on the rambling preamble, I got a dog. Now, well,
my daughter got a dog. And to all the parents
that listen, you know when your child gets a pet,
who's pet that actually is? So I find myself doing
(01:37):
a lot more chores than I signed up for. But
it's a pug, and it keeps trying to eat the
cat's food.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Therefore it's got liquid doodoo. And I'm not a fan
of that.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
And since I get to work in my pajamas because
I'm just recording podcasts and rap music back here, seems
to fall on me to scoop up this liquid doodoo.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
But that's only when she eats the cat's food. Stupid dog,
eat your own food.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Anyway, I'm here to talk about something that you can
do nothing about. All right, y'all ready here we go,
a brother like me who bleeds Los Angeles. You cut
me open and Pacific Ocean salt water comes out. You
poke my lungs and smog pours out of me. I
could work for the Tourist Department of Los Angeles. I
(02:29):
love this city at an unhealthy level. There are things
about this place that is absolute trash. Don't get me wrong,
there is a lot wrong with this city. With this place,
the ground shakes up under us. We've been such a
(02:50):
horrible steward as to how to take care of this land.
I'm gonna include myself, even though I am not the
invasive colonizer. But there are really only nine native trees
to California, two of which are not the palm tree
or the eucalyptus. The plants that are here naturally are
(03:13):
drought resistant and fire resistant.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
They don't burn that easy.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
The ones that burn up real quick are the sycamores
and the palm trees.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
And if you may have noticed, Los Angeles hit a
bit of a dry spell recently and had quite the disaster.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
Now, I'm slowly backing that thing up into what we're
gonna talk about right now, which you should probably know
if you have already read the show title when you
clicked play. But I'm gonna back that thing up into it.
California catches fire every year in some location. Now, my mother,
(03:51):
you know, Mama prop she worked thirty years for the
La County Fire Department, you know, in the city of Westkovina.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
Because almost six two sixer and I have vivid.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
Memories of the different firemen, fire chiefs. I think I
talked about this in the La on Fire episode. Block
is literally Hot on the Hood politics show, which hopefully
you guys are supporting and listening to also.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
But even my boy Chris.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
Who's you know, firefighter, you know, been fighting the fires
out here. Everybody knew that one day this day would
come and that let's just say, all of the bureaucratic
failures had not happened. If the water was as full
as possible, the fire hydrants were fine, if everything was
(04:42):
the budget, if everything was done perfectly, this was going
to happen.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
This day was going to come. That it's a perfect storm.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
We were had a specific type of drought, lack of rain,
the Santa Ana winds, and then a fire sparking, and
that fire sparking in a densely populated urban area. It
was every fireman I knew was like, yeah, one day
it's gonna happen. And like I said in the last episode, yeah,
like you know, we could find ourselves a time machine
(05:14):
and practice the indigenous practices.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
Oh.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Actually, as a small little beacon alike, there's an area
Alta Dina that was actually given back to the Tongla
tribe many years back. There was a first like actual
land back given back to the tribe and they started
taking care of the land the way that their elders
and ancestors did. And guess what, that area didn't burn
anyway in the midst of this disaster that we were
(05:41):
having a desperate, desperate man who I completely understand is desperation.
On Tuesday night on January seventh, while the fires were
just rumbling through the palisades, a man named Keith Posserman,
who's the co founder of a real estate investment firm,
(06:03):
desperately took to Twitter and said, does anyone have access
to private firefighters to protect our home? Need to act
fast here all neighbors houses burning, will pay any amount.
There was another click of Rick Caruso, who almost in
(06:23):
a multiverse situation, is our mayor, a billionaire developer who
owns the grove on the West Side. Just that if
you ever watched TMZ, whenever somebody's walking out of a place,
it's probably at the grove and was a you know,
real estate magnate. Anyway, there are videos of him driving
(06:47):
through an area that he had with his private security
and private firefighters where it's smoke billowing all around the place,
but his situation was fine. Why because he had private firefighters.
They shaved this shopping center, but he tried to unsuccessfully
save nearby homes as well, which reminded everybody about the
(07:07):
time that Kanye and Kim tweeted about their house being
saved by firefighters.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
And which made people be like, wait a minute, you
can buy a fire department, man, What the hell is this?
What type of shit? Man? What we over here arguing
over firefidrants.
Speaker 3 (07:30):
And tanks running low and somebody just paid them where
they get the water from? How the hell you can
just Oh my god, what the hell.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
Water you using, nigga, that's not your water? And what
you gonna do? Are you gonna help out the neighbors?
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Okay, so if I buy fire department five apartment, show
up from my house, but the neighbor's house is burned,
you just gonna leave a neighbors house, you gonna tell
them to.
Speaker 3 (07:59):
Call the city's fire department. What the hell is happening?
How does this shit work? Is there any other way
rich people can be evil? What is happening right now?
Speaker 1 (08:10):
Which is basically what happened and how most of the
regulars felt. So this episode is not just about private
fire departments, because that would not be a very interesting
full episode. It's about the question that private fire departments
bring up, which is like nigga, whose water is that?
Speaker 2 (08:32):
Wait a minute, who owns the water? Is the water
private too?
Speaker 1 (08:36):
And if the water's private too, what else of my
utilities are private? And this is what I mean by
there is nothing you can do about it.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Now.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
If there is any of you that are built like
Robert and Magpie, then maybe you ain't gotta worry about this.
Maybe you could dig your own well and find the groundwater. However,
there are things called water land rights, which I will
talk about into this.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
So even if.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
You move off the grid to live on a mountain,
you find somewhere in the backwoods, you know fou Aca
is away from Magpie wherever the hell Magpie live, and
you dig to find some water, somebody owned that water.
It already happened here, y'all. Let's go all right, this
may or may not be a shock to y'all. I
know in the first the block is literally hot episode
(09:28):
I did way way, way way back when I first
joined when kuols On Media first launch, when I first
joined the team, my first episodes. It was one of
those things where it's like the thought has probably never
crossed your mind, and and some of it's like sitting
I'm talking to y'all who pay bills. Some of this
stuff is sitting right up under your nose, Like Southern California.
(09:48):
Edison is one of our power companies. But then there's
PG and E. This isn't the city of Los Angeles
providing this, That's a company. In the same way that
your internet from a company. What makes you think your
power don't come from a company. And if your power
come from a company and an internet come from a company,
why wouldn't your water come from a company? I like, well,
(10:10):
I don't know what would make you think that that's
just a city municipality? Well, because duh, because water fall
from the sky. What the shit? So what I'm paying
for you to pump it through the through the dog
on pipes. For me, I understand that that's a service,
But what the hell of my taxes for you somebody
(10:32):
like I don't know if you noticed, you can own
the rain. So the water that fell inside the lake,
somebody bought the lake. This is the episode that I'm
going to tell y'all. Right now, so your utilities, most
likely your city has sold your water and your sewage
processing to a private company. And the bills that you're
paying your water bill is not going to the city
(10:56):
for the service you are receiving. It is paying the
company back the money that the company paid your city.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
To get this gig.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
Let me back up here first, let me cover the
private fire departments. Now here's the thing. Private fire departments
usually are hired by insurance companies. So what they do
a lot of time is like prevention. They'll come in
here and you know, clear out shrub, make sure that
your house is not like set up for failure.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
You know.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
In California, I mean, people always talk about our strict
laws and building codes and it's like, well, nigga, do
you see why every time you got a bureaucratic law,
like there might be a historical evidence as to why
we need that, one of which is my nigga.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
California ain't got a lot of water.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
So if you gonna build a house, you can't just
have dry shrubbery up around your house. Why because you
just basically put a some matches just around your house.
So yes, bam, like that's why you can't do that.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
Why you not allowed to have a lot of trash
in your house? Nigga?
Speaker 1 (12:11):
What I mean, what the hell you think? Because this
shit'll catch on fire. So these private companies, private fire
companies usually come through and again they hire body insurance
companies normally to come and clear shrubbery, make sure that
your lint, your dryer is uh cleared out, make sure
your HVAC is good. And usually they got their own
(12:33):
little tank, right, So they come in with their own
little tank of water that's stay private water that basically
they bring in their bottle water.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
You know what I'm saying. Why the rest of us
is using.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Tap right, But eventually that little tank go run out,
you feel me, And then at that point you got
to tap into the fire hydrant. Right now, What most
of these companies will say is like the guys were
not monsters, dude, Like, if the neighborhood is on fire,
of course we're going to help. What are you, like,
what are you talking about? Which I truly believe for
(13:02):
this reason. If I'm paying to protect this house, but
the neighbor's house is on fire, that probably means that
the neighbor's house is going to cause my house to
catch on fire. So of course it would be in
my best interest to help put that one out. According
to the New York Times, they reported that, yeah, good,
forty five percent of all firefighters working in the United
(13:23):
States today are employed privately. Right now, a lot of
those are like wildlife suppression. Now, there's such thing as
called the National Wildlife Suppression Association, which represents more than
like three hundred private firefighting groups, and a lot of
them work more as like government contractors, right, as far
(13:43):
as like again supplement for like wildfires, right and like
I said, the others are hired by private companies.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
Yo, and peak.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
This like a little two person private firefighting crew with
a small vehicle, I mean it could cost like three
granded day. Like a large crew of like twenty firefighters
and four trucks can run ten thousand dollars a day.
This is according to Brian Weelock, the vice president of
the Gray Back Forestry. It's a private firefighting company in Oregon.
(14:16):
But most of the time, like I said, these people
don't really work directly with homeowners. But that's not what's
the interesting part of this story to me. The interesting
part of this story to me is the reality of
the utilities that we live in. Now, let me go
(14:42):
ahead and run off some statistics to you. I just
want to go ahead and add to the dystopia that
we live in because we need to say, we need
to change the name of this show too.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
It has happened here.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
I'm gonna link all this data to.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
The show notes. Now you're ready for this.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
Water and wastewater service privatization follows broader trends. More than
forty percent of drinking water systems nationwide are private regulated
utility systems. Of the sixty percent of the systems owned
by local governments. Privatization by contracting of operations management has
grown rapidly since two thousand and one. Nationwide, the privatization
(15:26):
of water wastewater grew by thirteen percent after growing eighty
four percent over the decade.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
In the nineteen nineties.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
Right, So what that means is almost half of y'all
are paying a private company for your water. Now, let's
make some distinctions here between public utilities and private utilities,
and you.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
Know what are we even talking about?
Speaker 1 (15:49):
So public utilities are owned and operated by your local,
state and federal governments on behalf of the citizens and
customers in that area. So up, public utility would be
your municipal water, sewage, sanitation services, like if you have
a public electricity providers, government government ran public transit systems,
(16:11):
state owned telecommunication companies, public utilities right now, listen, here's
where it's interesting. Have to balance serving the public interest
while remaining financially sustainable since they are not profit driven.
Any revenue earned is invested back into maintaining the infrastructure
(16:31):
of the operations, which seems like a big old dug.
We're not here to make money. This is not our
money making interest. This is living, right, It's a utility. Like,
it's just I'm not trying to make money off it.
I'm trying to keep the lights on, right, But as
we know, it costs to do those things, so the
(16:54):
temptation becomes easy to be like, how do I offload
this cost right and make sure that this service is there, because,
as you know, oftentimes public utilities don't be very good.
You know what I'm saying. Flint still ain't got fresh
water right now. Altadena is in a situation where they
(17:17):
was like, look, don't even boil the water, like whatever
coming out of your tap is just not good.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
Boiling is not good enough. Like, do not drink this water?
Speaker 1 (17:28):
Right is the situation that they in and it's like,
we're where the money at, Like, how are we going
to fix this?
Speaker 2 (17:34):
Now? That's a public utility.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
Now, private utility is utilities obviously owned and operated by
private companies. So that would be an investored owned electricity
company like a private telecommunication, private owned oil gas and pipelines,
and private owned waste management companies. Now, their goal, because
(17:57):
it's a company, is still to make profit for their
shaitareholders while also delivering reliable service. Now, they argument their
defense would be, if we don't give you a good product,
we won't have customers. So it is in our best
interests for our own money to give you a best service. However,
are you seeing the truck size hole in their logic?
Speaker 2 (18:20):
Nigga, we don't have a choice.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
Do you have a choice as to what water company
provides the water to your house? Who go run the sewer?
I don't have an option anyway. So the key differences
are very obvious.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
Right. One is the ownership and motives.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
Like publicly owned utilities serve the public interests rather than
pursue profits. Right, private owned utilities are there for their
investors in the maximize returns.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
Regulation and pricing.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
Public utilities are regulated by the government apported commissions that
oversee pricing. Private utilities are also regulated, but usually more
flexible in their rate setting, because what the hell you
gonna do? Get you a called a water company, be like,
I ain't paying this bill. They gonna be like, ool,
no problem. Service areas most publics utility service customers are
(19:07):
within municipal boundaries. Investor owned utilities often are defined by
regional monopolies with little overlap or competition with customers. Listen,
if you ever moved into an apartment and you was like, y'all,
I'm trying to, like, you know, install cable, and they
was like, or your Internet. It was like, oh, it's
(19:29):
at and t over here. I was like, oh, but
I have spectrum. They're like Spectrum don't serve this area.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
Nigga.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
It's the Internet, it's the air, it's wires, this polls
I'm not allowed to. U can't come over here because
it's a private company. Now I'm in a situation where
AT and T knock on my door every day and
being like, yo, we laying fiber optics. You know we
lay we laying new pipes down here, up under you,
up under your street.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
We can move faster than Spectrum.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
I done ditch them both, and then Spectrum still email
me every day s Bectrum sent somebody was like, we
heard you left Spectrum. We're trying to figure out why.
I'm like nigga because I don't want to use either
of y'all, but we're the area you serve. When I
first moved into the house that I'm in now, like
I made an account on Edison and they were like, oh, nigga,
(20:19):
Edison don't serve here. You had SoCal Gas And I
was like, who the hell is so cal Gas? They
was like that's who's who else gonna give me the gap?
Speaker 2 (20:29):
I don't have no options. Oh, I got to live
in LA.
Speaker 1 (20:32):
This is who serves LA infrastructure spending with public utilities,
they might find it easier to raise funds for long
term capital projects and maintain infrastructure proactively, while privately owned
businesses and utilities answered to shareholders seeking returns, which impact
investment decisions. Meaning, if I'm like, Yo, somebody gotta clean
(20:56):
this sewer pipe because this water ain't good in this neighborhood,
it would be whove the City of Los Angeles to
fix this, and it would be easy for them because
I am a Los Angeles resident. This is a public utility.
If I have private water, they might be like, oh,
how much.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
Money that's that neighborhood give us?
Speaker 1 (21:15):
You know, if we fix the water up there in
Palace verd aids you know what I'm saying, Like, we
got to talk to them because they know, I mean,
they kind of give us the breads, so they're not
incentivized necessarily to fix my infrastructure.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
Right, and then the customer service focus right.
Speaker 1 (21:30):
Public utilities often focus more on customer satisfaction and addressing
community complaints, while private entities have profit motives. I mean,
I don't know what else I need to explain to y'all. Right, now,
let me show you how this works and what the
allure is for a public city council to make this decision.
(21:53):
Are y'all here to more perfect union? It's another one
of those podcast folks that just got more money than us.
They able to produce things that we had bread, We
would produce it anyway. They did one about investor own
water companies and how they lobby to give them the
contract to run their sewage and water, right.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
And it's a super dope stuff. It's a super dope study.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
It's a good, like focused study to show like as
sort of an example of how it can happen anywhere.
And they focused this one study on this city in Pennsylvania, right.
And here's the ill part about all of this is
that how would you know this is happening?
Speaker 2 (22:35):
I mean, are you really looking at the logo on
your water bill? I mean.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
No, you just like looking at the costs, right and
hoping that it don't be that much. Now again, if
you've written it, if you're rent in an apartment, I
don't know what utilities you gotta cover.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
Right, Let's say you are written in an apartment.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
You know what I'm saying, Like a lot of times,
Joe utilities, It's like it's like they cover water and gas,
you cover electricity and internet and then whatever it is.
I'm not thinking about who the company is. I'm just
like paying the bill. But if one day your bill triple,
I mean, who do you call you like, I haven't
used more water. I don't understand why it costs more.
(23:14):
Now you might call the city the city like, oh,
we don't even run the water no more.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
And that's exactly what happened.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
So in twenty twenty in New Garden, Pennsylvania, they sold
their water to get this, I go up Pennsylvania Jerks,
a subsidiary of Essential Utilities, they sold their water for
thirty million dollars. And just for you to get a
grasp on how much money can be made by doing this.
(23:41):
If you a company, that company made two point zero
five billion dollars in twenty twenty three. And essentially, if
you the city, the city runs up, you are you
having all kinds of problems. You got people not paying
bills on time, you got all these different you know,
all this stuff, you got to hire the worker, you
got to do all this stuff. And this company runs
up and was like, yo, we'll take all this off
(24:02):
your hands.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
Not only will we take it off your hands. We'll
pay you for it.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
So to the city and they saying, look, I do
a better job than y'all do. Why because this is
all we do. You got all this other stuff you
got to take care. We gonna only take care of
the water. Look, we'll give you thirty million dollars for it.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
That's free money. And you ain't got to worry about it.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
All you gotta do when people call complaining about they
water is just say please hold and transfer it to us.
You ain't got nothing to worry about it. And the
city say, okay, that sounds good. Now are you going
you're gonna change your prices? It's like, why would we
change our prices. We won't need to change our price.
Matter of fact, we can probably charge less because we
ain't got the same things y'all got, well, at least
(24:41):
for the first few years. Kind Of like the phone
bill when they're like, oh, you sign up for this
much money a month for the first three months, or
your cable for the first first two years, and then
one day your cable bill come in and it's just
psycho and you like, I don't know why the hell
this costs so much more, And they're like oh yeah,
the contract was for this long and then after that
it went back to regular price. That's essentially what's happening.
(25:03):
That's why I was like, if your water bill go crazy,
who you're gonna call? Like what you're gonna say?
Speaker 2 (25:07):
Like? Uh?
Speaker 1 (25:08):
They could just be like, yeah, it just costs more now.
So for the city, the city is like, look, it's
free money. We could put this money into other stuff
we've been trying to work on, and y'all gonna get
a better situation. And again, no one looks at the
logo on their bill. So the utilities industries, right a
few years ago, I think in twenty sixteen, got this
(25:30):
law passed that made cities want to sell it. It's
called the fair Market Value laws. One example is in
Pennsylvania was Act twelve, which was in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
And the concern is cities feel like they.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
Can't keep up with dunt dunt dun environmental laws and
keep up with city growth. Cities are growing so fast,
so many people are moving in. We're destroying the earth
at a particular exponential rate, and the government wants us
to not destroy the planet.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Ho home, So I got all.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
These laws I got, he just you know, he is
a hat of the money for it.
Speaker 2 (26:11):
He is out of the money for it at the time.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
So when you're evaluating how much this utility would be worth,
you can include, because of Act twelve in Pennsylvania, the
median income, the expected repairs and future revenue, which means
it makes that water worth way much more. Right, And
(26:36):
a lot of times when you selling this, when you
selling this disutility, the price tag what these people be
paying you be six times the city's budget.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
So think about this. I'm just trying to make this
real for you.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
Let's just say somebody comes in and says I'll buy
your car.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
You say, word for how much?
Speaker 1 (27:01):
And they say, I tell you what, I'll pay you
your year's salary for this car. The fam you gonna add,
I add another car in there for that. You know
what I'm saying? Hey, you know, throwing another six months
for the stalary, I'll make you some dinner.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
Like it's it's kind of a no brainer. You like,
you our entire year's budget just for the water? No brainer?
But who pays the company? Nigga?
Speaker 1 (27:34):
You you paying the company? What do I mean by that?
The company cuts cuts the city at check? Now the
company gotta make their money back. How they make their
money back? Nigga, your bills? What did you like? What
is you saying? Of course they gonna make their money
back now again, they're incentivized to make that money back
as fast as possible, which means they're not gonna spend
(27:56):
more than they added. Already spent thirty million dollars to
get the thing. But then they'll promise to like fix
their systems, their promise like you sold the city saying
I'm gonna be able to spend some time to upgrade
and do all this difference. And they don't have an
upgrade nothing, because it's kind of a no brainer.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
This is easy money to them.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
In Philly, there's this area called the Chester Water Authority
that went straight up bankrupt, so like the city's water
authority just went bankrupt. So they was like, yo, we
gotta sell it. They got offered four hundred and ten
million dollars. Well the city did, and the city says, nigga,
Chester Water Authority, you ain't got the right to sell
(28:35):
because you are not a company.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
You are part of the City of Philadelphia.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
Chester Water Authority is like, my jig, I mean, what
the hell you want us to do?
Speaker 1 (28:46):
How does this stuff become legal? Well, like the same
way any others dick come legal. They just you lobby
candidates all the time. And the only way to stop
this is you got to sign up to some sort
of city council news led us something to be able
to walk up in there and.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
Protest the shit. Nigga, good luck.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
Now let's talk about specifically California. All right, I bring
up specifically California because of all this stuff about the fire,
hydrants and water issues that we had recently. Remember that
(29:28):
the water that water's Los Angeles comes from the north right,
It comes from right up under Sacramento through the California
Aqueduct that was put together by this man named maulhulland.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
So the mulhulland passed mulhulland drive.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
That was all based on this man that made Los
Angeles be possible because he just went up there just
like any other colonizing, was like I buy your water,
and they was like water ain't for sale.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
He was like, yeah it is, and went over their
heads and bought the water.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
Built a whole basically like when you was a kid
at the beach and you dig a little thing in
the sand to make the water go a certain way.
That's basically what he did through the middle of California
to bring water to Los Angeles. Now, Los Angeles did
have one river. That was the San Gabril River that
starts in the top of the San Gabriel Foothills and
comes into what we call the La River, which is paved,
(30:24):
which there is a movement to unpave that because that
would probably help us with a lot of climate issues.
But either way, that was an actual river. It was
enough to support the native tribes here because it wasn't
that many people here, and they had sense enough to
not plant plants that need the water that they ain't got.
They wasn't trying to build a city in the area.
They ain't supposed to be a city. Nigga, Have you
(30:45):
ever been to Las Vegas. There should not be a
city there. Y'all ever been to the Inland Empire? There
should not be that many humans there, according to the Earth,
unless you pump water over there.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
The natives were fine.
Speaker 3 (30:59):
The indigenous communities figured out how to live in the
shit for thousands of years.
Speaker 2 (31:04):
But uh, you know, we had to do our thing. Now,
some vocabulary.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
California got a thing called senior water rights, which means
whoever got there first gets the water, Like basically, it's
my land, I licted right. But they only got them
rights when it started from the gold Rush. So they
was like, well, who was there first? Was this white man?
Not the people that already lived there, but these white men.
So if you happen to have a farm, you know
(31:30):
up near North Fresno, if your family been there longer
than somebody else's family, then that water is yours, right,
that's senior water rights. And then there's junior water rights,
which is like the second person. So whatever water you
don't use, they get to use right now. Why that
is specifically important for California, especially the Central Valley, is
(31:51):
because Cali provides everybody's produce.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
I mean, for the rest of the country.
Speaker 1 (31:57):
The vast majority of the fruits, vegetab nuts, and lagoons
that you eat come from California.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
We gotta have water.
Speaker 3 (32:04):
It would be hoof of rest of America to make
sure that Calli got water.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
So those are water rights.
Speaker 1 (32:10):
Now the water that gets pumped down into our fire hydrants.
Here's the situation, like that had to do a water pressure.
Now you could refer to the block is literally hot
episode where I go into detail as to what happened
with that.
Speaker 2 (32:24):
But there was this whole thing.
Speaker 1 (32:26):
About the water being owned by some billionaires. Now I
would love to run with that one, but the fact is,
that's just not true.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
It's not that simple. Let me go ahead in fact
check that.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
So the wonderful code which is who they were talking about,
it's Steward and Linda Resnik. They do have a majority
steak in a water bank that can store up to
one point five million acres, right, which is close to
five hundred billion gallons of water. But the realness is
that's like a tiny fraction of the water capacity of California.
(33:03):
California's groundwater basins combined can hold more than five hundred
and sixty six times as much water, with a storage
capacity of eight hundred and fifty million to one point
three billion acres of feet across the California Department of
Water Sources. The state's surface resources hold more than forty
million acres on top of that, So there's two types
(33:29):
of water here.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
There's surface water and there's groundwater.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
Groundwater obviously that's stuff that you would dig in for
a well, that's a whole other thing, right now, it
is true this family owns brands is like wonderful pistachios,
Fiji water wonderful, land halos wonderful halos, and palm wonderful.
And that's a you know, I don't know if you're
in a pomegranate juice, but if that's your thing. But anyway,
(33:54):
let me quote from politiffect. The water the residents use
get stored underground initially before or the water that is
delivered to the roots of Resinic's pistachios, almonds, pomegranate courts
specifically is stored in the Kerrent Water Bank that is
the most valuable water resource in the region and critical
to America's fresh flood supplies. The water bank which is
(34:16):
watch This the bank itself a public private partnership with
the Resnic's owned fifty seven percent of the steak is
thirty two square mile recharge basin, which looks like floodlands
from the street that essentially stores again the one point
five million acre feet of water five hundred billion gallons.
Thes storage arrangement is very controversial, right They've been banking
(34:41):
on the water by using public and private dollars to
corral public resource. Because of their water rights and their wealth,
they are insulating themselves from this type of drought, which,
of course that's what rich do, right. This is what
Chas Miller says, the director Environmental Analysis at Pomona College.
(35:02):
Private capital has no problem with the drought, while the
rest of us are looking at deep social divides. Somebody
bought the water, but water isn't the only thing. Like
I said that somebody else owes you know. According to
Publicpower dot Org, utilities that were sold since nineteen eighty
(35:24):
have ranged dramatically in size. Although many had a small
number of customers at the time of the sale, with
the median of fewer than six hundred customers, less than
thirty percent of utilities sold had more than a thousand
customers at the time of sale. Right, so back then
it was a small amount of people.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
Right.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
Watch this, Only five public power utilities with ten thousand
or more customers have sold, right, and four of those
five sales occurred were approved since twenty fifteen. Now the
law or just sale of such electric department was the
city of Murphysboro, Tennessee, which had about sixty eight thousand
(36:06):
customers and when it's sold to the Middle Tennessee Electric
Membership Cooperative in twenty twenty. Other utilities substantial size include
those serving the cities of Vero Beach, Anchorage, Alaska, Eagle Mountain, Utah,
and all together we are talking about eight hundred thousand
citizens today have their electricity. Private sales have occurred in
(36:32):
twenty six states, and almost all of Kansas was sold,
and it was sold in the nineteen eighties. Now why
even make an episode on this? And it's because of
this last thing. Corporate cities. Now, of course, company towns
(36:53):
is as old as companies are. You know, you had
trained things and stuff like that, you know, where like
a company moves in and it just it just made
sense for the company to make sure that they were
providing housing and you know, saloons and stuff like that
for the people that you know, lived in their area.
Speaker 2 (37:12):
It just made sense.
Speaker 1 (37:13):
That was just it was just good business, right, you
wanted to attract more people to stay in this area.
If you've ever been in northwest Arkansas city called Bentonville,
it's actually very dope to be in. But it is
the headquarters for Walmart. So if you're gonna work in
corporate Walmart. You gotta live in Bentonville. Now, the city's
(37:33):
dope is that a corporate town? Not in what I'm
talking about. It is a company that said we're gonna
dump a kajillion dollars to make this city as dope
as possible. That's one thing I am talking about, a
brand duh making a city.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
I wish I was making this up.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
Google Got One's working on a community called North Bay
Shore in Mountain View, California. I'll have seven thousand housing units,
and another called Middlefield Park that'll have two thousand units.
Meta is building Willow Village dubbed Zucktown in Menlo Park, California,
(38:14):
and they'll have seventeen hundred housing units, a hotel, and
plenty of retail. Disney is developing a fourteen hundred thousand
units across eighty acres in Kissamee, Florida, right near.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
Walt Disney World.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
Elon Musk is building his city called in snail Brook
outside of Austin, Texas for employees of his constellations of startups,
including SpaceX, Tesla, and Boeing.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
But the most ambitious is California.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Forever It's supposed to be Silicon Valley two point zero.
It's this group ran by the former Golden Sax trader
Jane Samark and is backed by investors like the Lincoln
co founder Reed hofsman Chris Dixon, and this philanthropist named
Loreene Powell. And it plans to create this new city
in Solano County, sixty miles north of San Bernardino, with
(39:11):
tens of thousands of homes, large solar energy orchards, with
a million new trees, and one hundred thousand acres of
new park space. And they hope to build this community
will generate thousands of jobs in a wockable Paris or
West Village in New York.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
And there was this.
Speaker 1 (39:31):
Reporting of this unknown group that was coming up in
just like just buying farmland. It was called Flannery Associates.
And for years nobody had any idea who these people were.
They purchased fifty two thousand acres, spent eight hundred million dollars,
paying five times a market rate, and.
Speaker 2 (39:51):
Nobody knew who they were.
Speaker 3 (39:53):
This little po dunk town people selling their little farms.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
It's because these billionaires building a city.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
Now, I am telling you all this ultimately to introduce
you to Curtis Yarvin, who is probably going to be.
Speaker 2 (40:09):
A future bastard pod person.
Speaker 1 (40:12):
Or either way, one of these shows is going to
cover this man, because this man, in a lot of ways,
is the patient zero, the contagion number one of these
new Republicans, this new conservatism, this new extremist that's been
(40:33):
kind of been trying to tell everybody, here's why it's
so poisonous. He's like, because not only is democracy dead,
democracy being dead, and whatever you think you have now
ain't a democracy, to which all of us would be like, nigga, Yes,
that's why it's so dangerous because I'd be like yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:51):
He's like, the system's failing you, and I'm like amen.
Speaker 1 (40:54):
So his solution is a monarchy, but.
Speaker 2 (40:58):
He mean a monarchy like a CEO.
Speaker 1 (41:01):
So this man says if the country was ran like
a tech company, everything would be cool, we would all
be better. And his example of that is he would say, Okay,
look at that laptop you use it.
Speaker 2 (41:14):
Look at that phone you got.
Speaker 1 (41:16):
Do you think you would have got to that phone,
to that laptop, the quality of that laptop you had
if it was done by the City of California's Tech
Municipal Department.
Speaker 2 (41:27):
He's like, nigga, no, you got that because.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
Of Steve Jobs. That's why you got that phone. Because
that nigga was like, look, this is what we're doing.
This is how we're doing it. He would argued that
Roosevelt over the New Deal. He was a tech bro.
He ran his mug like a tech startup. He was like, look, nigga,
this is what we're doing. We building freeways. I don't
care what y'all say. We building freeways. He's like, if
the country was ran like a tech company, then maybe
(41:52):
this country would work better. And he's like, in newsflash,
whatever the hell you think you got now ain't working anyway.
We might as well is lean into it. All I'm
saying is I don't know what I'm saying, fam, it
could happen here. So this is your favorite cousin swooping
in and signing off ruining another thing for you.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
Don't catch me at the hood of politics.
Speaker 1 (42:18):
Pop.
Speaker 2 (42:22):
It could happen here is a production of cool Zone Media.
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Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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