The Resnicks bought this land from Mobil and Chevron decades ago, and transformed the oil-stained desert into lush farmland filled with hundreds of miles of leafy green almond and pistachio orchards. The trees are planted with space-age precision—a perfect grid as far as the eye can see, whose countless rows recede endlessly in the horizon. At the center of it all is a giant factory with rows and rows of gleaming metallic silos where the company preps, packages and distributes its foodstuffs.
The scale of their farm numbs the mind. It’s a small self-sufficient settlement and includes its own small airport—how else do you expect Oligarch Valley farmers to get around? And this piece of farmland is only one small part of a diversified global agribusiness operation that brings in nearly $3 billion in revenue a year.
But here’s the fun part: the continued economic viability of this piece of Oligarch Valley depends on Iran being kept in a state of a permanent economic blockade.
It depends on it so much that the Resnicks have joined forces with raving neocons and hardcore right-wingers, funding thinktanks and lobbyists that hype the Iranian threat and push all out war.
I stumbled onto Stewart and Lynda Resnick almost as soon as
I started investigating California’s billionaire-dominated public water system. The Oligarch Valley family that had made an easy $74 million selling water to the desert subprime suburb of Victorville was closely connected to the Resnicks.
Both families owned shares of the Kern County Water Bank, a natural aquifer at the southernmost edge of the Central Valley that had been converted into a privatized water-storage facility.
The water bank was designed by California’s Department of Water Resources to function as an emergency reservoir. In wet years, it would collect excess water shipped down the California Aqueduct from Northern California and hold enough water to keep Los Angeles hydrated nearly two years in case of prolonged drought. The water bank was supposed to serve as a last-line defense to protect urban users. But in 1995 California water bureaucrats tweaked a couple of arcane water regulations and handed the water bank over to a small clique of Oligarch Valley landlords.
Once water entered the water bank, it stopped being a public resource. From that point, the owner could sell it to the highest bidder. “This means they become middlemen making profits on state-supplied water,”
reported Redding’s paper Record Searchlight. “If they choose to, they can dry up vast areas of productive agriculture and ship the water to municipalities south of the Tehachapi range.”
Stewart Resnick
masterminded the scheme, and emerged with a majority stake in the new Kern County Water Bank. In fact, the Resnicks dominated and controlled the water bank so thoroughly that it’s become a de facto extension of their private agribusiness.
Resnick’s scheme did more than privatize a single piece of public infrastructure. It created a novel legal framework that gave Oligarch Valley famers the power to
create non-existent water out of thin air. Resnick created “paper water.”
