When the Media Says “Experts” They Mean Paid Corporate Shills (part 13)
Michael Connor, head of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Civil Works program, and Ken Salazar, who was the former secretary of the interior under Obama and Biden’s ambassador to Mexico, both worked for Water Asset Management (WAM) before being appointed to their respective offices. The former was paid $1.8 million to speak to investors, at the behest of Water Asset Management, on water rights issues. Both worked alongside each other at WilmerHale and Conor was also the deputy secretary of interior under the same admin that Salazar was the secretary of interior.
Yet Another form of Land Speculation Arises
WAM is a land speculator buying up farmland and other parcels with water rights, which they believe to be a trillion-dollar market opportunity, and selling the water rights to farmers and cities desperate for water. They’ve taken the ancient tradition of monopolizing natural resources they didn’t create and charging others a premium to use them (i.e. rent seeking) and placed it into a 21st century derivative market model. WAM has bought up so much land in the southwest that they are now the largest landowner in the grand valley between Colorado and Utah. Other hedge funds like Greenstone have purchased Arizona farmland with water rights and sold them back to small towns for a handsome 57% margin. As mentioned previously in this space, Bill Gates also got an early start in the game buying up 422 square miles of farmland across the country, likely with the same intention of holding it as a speculation asset. Like traditional real estate speculation, it is inevitable that some people will be priced out of the water market. WAM is not alone in this new form of land speculation.
Problem, Reaction, Solution
It should not need to be mentioned that you probably shouldn’t build cities in the desert but if you do it shouldn’t be in a manner that uses land in the most lavish and wasteful manner such as building communities zoned for detached single family homes that require traffic congestion as a rule because they are separated from stores, schools, offices and warehouses by highways. Single family zoning is the most expensive housing policy choice requiring higher per capita maintenance costs for infrastructure and public services that are not adequately covered by property taxes, so they require more sprawl, with federal and state grant money, to offset the costs of older development: rinse and repeat. When you do this is areas with particularly low water tables you will inevitably run face first into water shortages.
Einstein once observed about the problem of nuclear proliferation that a ‘new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move towards higher levels.’ Similarly, you cannot solve a problem created by land speculation with more land speculation. A new type of thinking is in order, one that doesn’t revolve around individuals and businesses monopolizing the earth and charging the dispossessed a rent for permission to use it but one in which the monopolists pay rent to people they dispossessed.
Originally posted on Quora July 13, 2023