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