Restore the Delta revealed this week that Phil Isenberg, chairman of the Delta Vision group - the supposedly objective group that recommended the Peripheral Canal - lobbies for a Southern California water district.

 

In other words, the man tasked with finding a solution to the destruction of the Delta works for an agency that benefits from the destruction of the Delta.

 

That agency would be the Irvine Ranch Water District, which supplies Delta water to 330,000 residents of Irvine and other Orange County residents.

 

Irvine Ranch paid Isenberg's firm $224,000 between 2007 and 2009, reported Restore the Delta. A nice piece of reporting, exposing a clear conflict of interest.

 

Isenberg responded by saying his lobbying for the past 13 years is public information on the Legislative Counsel's Web site and the water district's, too.

 

"I just told all of them, 'Look, I'm not working for you during the life of this project (the Blue Ribbon Task force) on Delta issues.' And I didn't.'"

 

He also commented, "I think realistically the folks concerned with this didn't like our recommendations" for a "dual conveyance," a peripheral canal and continuing to send water through the Delta.

 

That's true, Phil. We didn't.

 

Nevertheless, despite our transparent disgruntlement, we'll still point out judges in similar situations recuse themselves. To avoid even the appearance of impropriety.

 

Observers have long accepted that California water politics are compromised. What stuns is how far beyond compromised the status quo has gone.

 

This latest revelation is just the tip of the Isenberg.

 

The water package took subversion of the political process beyond special interests' usual inordinate influence into a second California Disneyland of fabricated reality.

 

They mayor of Mendota blubbers that his wretched village suffers 40 percent unemployment because of water cutbacks made in order to save a piddling bait fish, and this falsehood becomes more real than verifiable data.

 

In truth, Mendota had 32 percent unemployment in 2000. This place was not a Santa's workshop of full employment. One economic report after another attributes most of Mendota's current woes to the economic slump of the housing collapse.

 

But no. Activist court rulings based on mistaken science by elitist Ph.Ds thrust a swamp minnow ahead of people in a tragic case of big government run amok.

 

Just ask Fox News. No, don't. Much of the media is compromised. Fox has an indisputable conservative aversion to the government regulation necessary to save the Delta.

 

The crazy canards it broadcast stood in part because many print outlets up and down the Valley, which traditionally did most of the digging, and debunked myths, are downsizing.

 

So we better turn to think tanks, private, nonprofit organizations dedicated to independent, nonpartisan research, right?

 

 

Wrong. A key report endorsing the peripheral canal issued by The Public Policy Institute of California was partially funded by Bechtel. Bechtel, builder of big government infrastructure projects.

OK, our last stand: environmental groups. Greenies, sworn to protect Mother Earth. They won't compromise.

 

 

Or will they? Numerous leading environmental groups received big money from the Resources Legacy Fund, a Hewlitt-Packard funded nonprofit. The RLF does good work but seems to have decided the solution to the state's water problem is a canal.

 

The Nature Conservancy? Check, endorsed the canal. Environmental Defense Fund? Check. The Ocean Conservancy? Check. Big checks. To the tune of hundreds of thousands.

 

 

There's even a south Valley astroturf group that blames Stockton for the whole state water crisis.

 

Water for All, "a statewide coalition of Latino leaders," accuses Stockton and other Delta cities of ruining the Delta by discharging municipal sewage and treatment chemicals.

 

The group is almost certainly funded by south Valley water users who don't want the public to know the truth: Not satisfied with killing the Delta, their corporations are externalizing the cost of water, pollution and environmental degradation onto the public.

 

 

What they are doing goes beyond inordinate political influence. They are plundering a public asset at immense profit and suckering the public into paying for it through something akin to Imagineering.