George Miller is foisting the setup for his globalist buddies in the real estate business to get cheap water for the cities they're going to build. This will work just like BART did in the Bay Area. You can bet that the first farmers to feel the heat will be those with a site for a potential insta-city near a station for the "maglev" (massive subsidy #2). The goal is a Central Valley that has a large population but grows no food, a chain of Sustained Developments, each with a transportation/utility jugular that is effectively a gun to the people's heads. Oh but they'll get lots of "Nature" all around them (aka "no man's land"). It'll be paradise! (cough!) All they need is customers. No problemo.
The key fact is that water is more valuable for development than it is for agriculture. As long as that is true the crooks in the "investment" business are going to tweak things against farming. They're "investing" in farming overseas in "places more appropriate for farming (see "comparative advantage" and "free trade"). So they get the trade agreements they want, push those annoying owners off their land, so that they come running to cities, including here, looking to be the customer base for their housing. That they'll subsidize exactly the same way they are doing now using your tax dollars to feed, clothe, educate, and medicate their brainwashed children up to speed, you know, until things are "fair." They'll make better slaves because they already know the score. Americans are too deluded with relic ideas of "freedom" to be quite as useful.
You really didn't think that Democrats like Pat and Jerry were going to let the "wrong people" make money did you? They got the farmers to pony up the cash for the construction of this massive investment subsidy, by teasing them into salivating at a profit in real estate. They got the farmers to pay for the infrastructure and let them hold the bag until the big boys saw the right time. They had to wait until they were finished building out the desert anyway. The recession plus the idiot voters wishing up a passenger train boondoggle presents exactly such an opportunity.
Smelt, smelt, oh no, the smelt are dying... uh, the farmers are still hanging on... Oh steelhead, salmon, oh the humanity!!! (they're more photogenic anyway.) So it goes. I'll bet whoever wrote that biological opinion will end up running a lab.
Hey, you forgot to ping those FReepers who you know will instantly give you a tinfoil hat as they hope your readers will put on (or keep on) blinders to the facts.
The libs in my extended family, even though they know me to be painfully honest, scream that they only want to hear good things about their President. “I thought liberals have an open mind,” I tell them. Two of them, separately, have said “okay, I’d rather keep my head in the sand.” No $h!+.
Why am I telling you? You have run into the same thing on many levels and from many strangers as well as family I bet.
If only there were good and right minded people in government that would let the natural forces of nature and free markets and our country's founding principles rule with the force of law, rather than pretended altruism and sophistry...