We’re Not All Equal When It Comes to Water

Rich Californians balk at limits: ‘We’re not all equal when it comes to water’

By Rob Kuznia June 13

RANCHO SANTA FE, CALIF. — Drought or no drought, Steve Yuhas resents the idea that it is somehow shameful to be a water hog. If you can pay for it, he argues, you should get your water.

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 fumed recently on social media. “We pay significant property taxes based on where we live,” he added in an interview. “And, no, we’re not all equal when it comes to water.”

Yuhas lives in the ultra-wealthy enclave of Rancho Santa Fe, a bucolic Southern California hamlet of ranches, gated communities and country clubs that guzzles five times more water per capita than the statewide average. In April, after Gov. Jerry Brown (D) called for a 25 percent reduction in water use, consumption in Rancho Santa Fe went up by 9 percent.

But a moment of truth is at hand for Yuhas and his neighbors, and all of California will be watching: On July 1, for the first time in its 92-year history, Rancho Santa Fe will be subject to water rationing.

Plenty of detail in the piece at the Washington Post, but you get the idea.  The truly scary thing to me is this line: 'If you can pay for it, he argues, you should get your water.'  And by implication, if you can't pay...  Which is a very real concern for the future.  A future in which large business-interests are already looking to privatise water-supplies.

There is no commons in that future, the future that seems inevitable with our economic extremism, and the changing climate that we continue to wish away.  There are only those who have, and those who have not.  And if the have-nots don't have enough to drink, so be it.  If they have to starve, so be it.  If they can't breathe the air anymore, too bad.  Shoulda pulled yerself up by your bootstraps, to become one of the monied elites.

Which reminds me of this recent story:

The multi-billionaire owner of luxury jewellery Cartier has said that the thought of the poor rising up and overthrowing the rich keeps him awake at night.

Speaking at a summit in Monaco, Johann Rupert said he fears that a poor uprising will mean the middle classes won't want to buy luxury goods in the future for fear of exposing their wealth.

The fashion tycoon was came up with the scenario as a bizarre way in which to make a point about social inequality in the world.

According to Bloomberg, he said he had been reading about changes in labour technology, as well as recent Oxfam figures suggesting the top one per cent of the global population now owns more wealth than the other 99 per cent.

He asked: 'How is society going to cope with structural unemployment and the envy, hatred and the social warfare?

'We are destroying the middle classes at this stage and it will affect us. It's unfair. So that's what keeps me awake at night.'

He also expressed concern that robots are replacing workers, suggesting that artificial intelligence will fuel mass unemployment.  

South African Rupert is estimated to have amassed a fortune of around $7.5 billion from brands including Cartier, Chloe and Vacheron Constantin.

Fear of the poor is what gave us the New Deal in the United States and the Social Democratic consensus of the post-war era in Western Europe.  But the elites have learned since then, and presumably are hoping that the populations today are sufficiently cowed by the powers that can be ranged against them by the government not to rise up.  After all, in today's order, they can just label anyone who questions authority a 'terrorist', at which point they can be disappeared, or even simply executed at the whim of the government.  And if the poor or the disaffected in general were to rise up en masse ?  Time for the machine-guns I suppose.