Clinton’s Water Plan Runs Up Hill(ary) Towards Money”

“The Clinton plan states that: ‘“the United States has 17 national labs that work on energy, but not one that is focused exclusively on water.”

“In California, they say: ‘water runs uphill toward money.’ To that, now should be added the adage: ‘Water runs up-Hillary to money’.”

News flash: Hillary’s Western Water Plan would trickle up to elites.

On Sept. 18 the San Francisco Chronicle poured water on Donald Trump for having no water infrastructure plan at all other than his scoffing that “there was no California drought” (see “Clinton Plans While Trump Scoffs on Water, Environment”). Trump was right, but that is besides the point here.

Left out of the Chronicle article was that the benefits of Hillary Clinton’s “Western Water Partnership”plan, as part of her proposed $275 billion infrastructure funding and make-work jobs program, would flow mainly to high-level, planners, union labor, well-connected engineering firms and politicians.

Left out would be the private, non-union working class, migrant farm labor, small mutual water companies, the massive number of discouraged workers who are unemployed, small family farmers, small irrigation districts and groundwater districts, and rural communities without adequate water facilities that were the most stressed by the recent California dry spell from 2012 to 2015.

“Not One U.S. Lab Focused Exclusively on Water”

Probably the part of Clinton’s plan that most indicates it is a jobs program targeted for elites is the proposal to create a new Water Innovation Lab. Such a lab would:

develop cutting edge efficiency, treatment and reuse solutions” and “bring urban water managers, farmers, and tribes together with engineers, entrepreneurs, conservationists, and other stakeholders to practical and usable technologies and strategies that can be deployed by local water utilities, agricultural and industrial water users and environmental restoration projects across the country.

Peter Gleick, the infamous alleged criminal computer hacker and forger and head of the Pacific Institute water think tank in California, interviewed in the Chronicle’s article, would be a likely candidate for heading such a lab. Of course, Gleick praised Clinton’s proposal and denied that he had seen it before or was part of developing it.

The Clinton plan states that: “the United States has 17 national labs that work on energy, but not one that is focused exclusively on water”.

However, the Federal EPA already runs four water and environmental technology laboratories in Research Park, North Carolina (health effects); Cincinnati, Ohio (engineering); Corvallis, Oregon (ecology); and Las Vegas, Nevada (monitoring).

This is not to mention that in California Fresno State University runs an International Center for Water Technology; UCLA founded a Water Technology Research Center in 2005; the University of California has over 25 water research centers and institutes; the state college system has 12 water research centers; and private Stanford University two centers (Water in the West; Woods Institute for Global Freshwater).

Another Clean Water Innovation Development and Technology Transfer Laboratory is located at the University of Washington in Tacoma, Washington. The lab built “dirty and clean wet lab” rooms in 2014 to test building cooling, heating, hot water, and air exhaust systems having nothing to do with water. This lab was constructed with a $2,758,000 Washington State Department of Commerce grant. Beneficiaries included architects, engineers and academics. This was part of a larger $13.5 million program for Innovation Partnership Zones (IPZ’s) to foster economic growth by building a wine research center, biotech and waste management jobs incubators, investing in 5,000 wind machines and building a Salmon Toxicology Lab.

Other countries have also experimented with water technology laboratories. A “Water Innovation Lab” held in 2010 in Alberta, Canada, was apparently nothing more than a free vacation for the attendees. The lab sessions offered: “opportunities for playfulness and time in nature were key components in the overall design.”

Tourism Infrastructure Program?

Hillary has named her so-called infrastructure program “Hillary Clinton’s Plan for Conservation and Collaborative Stewardship of America’s Great Outdoors”. In other words, her program would not stimulate commerce and industry as much as it is targeted at enlarging the tourism industry in national parks, not building or repairing infrastructure to bring back manufacturing jobs to the U.S. Her jobs program is apparently targeted at creating public sector jobs and subsidizing renewable energy jobs in the private sector.

It would also create an endowment for national parks, euphemistically called a “trust fund”. Her plan would oppose privatizing any national parks or lands. It would fund renewable energy projects and suppress “fossil fuel ground leasing” that would compete with green power. The non-unionized private working class would end up snubbed once again. Few crumbs would be left for any constituency of the Republican Party or anyone else.

Fungibility

Another apparent goal of her infrastructure program is “fungibility” – meaning that federal funding for state and local projects would end up an indirect subsidy for underfunded government pension programs in Blue states and big Blue cities.

Among her list of programs, it would fund repair of 3,000 local city parks. Her water infrastructure program explicitly targets subsidizing the City of Los Angeles in fixing their infamous broken underground water mains that are underfunded because of the diversion of tax monies to lucrative pension programs.

In other words, state and municipal funded infrastructure construction and repair projects would be socialized to all U.S. taxpayers instead of based on a user-pays principle. And when everyone knows a government program is nothing but a hollow jobs program, boondoggles are likely.