The Rag - My Best Articles V
The Rag – July 24, 1969 - The Texas Water Plan
[I did my own typing and lay-out for most of my articles, but this one got away from me. I think that I was just tired out from the research and writing, plus the fact that I was working 40 hours per week at the Economy Furniture manufacturing plant. In any case there were many typos (granted that my handwriting was not always legible), and there were a couple of places on the second page where the narrative sections were misplaced. To make it readable, I’ve written the article out with corrections. I’m also showing the article as published, plus the front page illustration. After the amendment was defeated handily, Kaye Northcott of The Texas Observer hailed me on the Drag to congratulate me on the result. It was a nice gesture, but we both knew that one Rag article did not really affect it.]
Rocky and the Pirates, assisted by the oil, cotton, sulphur industry establishment in the Southwest, and cheered along by Preston Smith,
John Connally, and other crooked politicians, have cooked up a plot that could have all of us further up against the wall than usual in a very short time. The Texas Water Plan, to come before the voters on August 5, is a swindle: If put into effect it will ruin the ecology of Texas and Louisiana, gobble up billions of taxpayers' dollars, possibly ruin the climate of the whole region, and benefit only the large farm corporations and the oil/sulphur industries, and not the average taxpayer. In short, it will line the pockets of the super-rich with even greater profits and leave the rest of us shopowners, bricklayers, fishermen, policemen, small farmers, students, kids and adults, black, brown, and white holding the bag.
On August 5, the people of Texas vote on an amendment to the Texas constitution which, if approved, authorizes the sale of a $3.5 billion bond issue. The money from the sale of bonds is to pay for construction of two main canals, plus a number of feeder canals and reservoirs, which will be used to move water from the Mississippi and East Texas rivers to South and West Texas. The idea is to provide enough water for farming, municipal use, and industrial use for the whole of Texas. But, as we shall see, it is big industry and big farming that will reap most of the benefits, not the people of the state.
The Plan calls for importing 12-13 million acre-feet of water from out-of-state sources, mostly from Louisiana (the Mississippi River). But there is no agreement with Louisiana for getting the needed water, and, if Louisiana knows what's good for it, there won't be any. Why? 1) The flow of the Mississippi keeps salt water from the Gulf of Mexico from coming up the river and destroying various industrial facilities by salt water corrosion of cooling apparatus and salt water intrusion into the manufacturing processes. Taking water from the Mississippi in the amounts projected by the Plan would allow salt water to back up into the Mississippi.
2) Salt water back-up would also assure pollution of municipal fresh water supplies (for drinking, bathing, etc.) in New Orleans and neighboring towns.
3) Salt water would also intrude in the brackish (salt-water diluted by fresh water) marshes near the coast. The effect of this would be to wipe out almost entirely the local fur industry, destroy the environment necessary for the larval stage of much coastal water life, and destroy the habitat of the vast numbers of migrating birds that winter in Louisiana coastal marshes. There will have to be a lot of fast talking before Louisiana will give up its water; if it does, it will face disaster, and, if it doesn't, the Texas Water Plan is useless.
If the Plan goes into effect, there will be an immense increase in evaporation of water from West Texas, from canals and reservoirs, from irrigation, and from the cotton fields and sulphur works that will be using a lot of the water (more on that shortly!). So air moving east from West Texas will be much more moist than it is now. But so will air above East Texas, because of the new reservoirs and canals to be built there. Air from West Texas will meet a high rate of evaporation over East Texas that could mean a couple of things. It might create a tremendous amount of rain on East Texas; or it could mean that the
East Texas moisture will prevent the West Texas moisture from precipitating and that the two together would blow on to Louisiana, creating a rain-forest in northern and central Louisiana and a perpetual flood around New Orleans. I don't know, because I'm not a meteorologist; the point is that nobody else knows either, and few care, especially those who are promoting the Plan. They are in it for PROFIT, not for the general welfare of the people of this region.
One of the main justifications for the Plan has been the estimated growth of Texas population to 30 million by the year 2020. But most population experts predict a population of between 13 and 18 million for Texas by 2020 with the most frequent estimate being 16 million. [I was really off on this prediction.] There are reasons for this lower estimate: mainly that big cities like Houston are becoming increasingly uninhabitable due to air and noise pollution from big industry. Houston has the potential of a pollution problem on the scale of New York or Los Angeles. But Houston does not have the glamour of those cities and probably never will. Besides pollution and general unattractiveness to depress the population growth rate, there is the immediate problem of water. The ground water in the Houston area has declined about 200 feet since 1930 and is dropping steadily.
Hcustonians are not supposed to water their lawns or wash their cars right now, and the hottest part of the summer is yet to come. Also, Houston industry uses a lot of the water and then pollutes it so that
Galveston's water supply is becoming critically short; all the more reason for people not to move to the [region ??]
You would think that the people who want the water made available by the Plan would pay for it. But that's not the way it's going to be. Estimates of the price that agricultural users (basically cotton growers) could afford to pay range from $10 to $30 per acre-foot of water. But that is far below the actual cost of the water. The cost of electricity alone (to run the pumps which will force water uphill into West Texas) is $30 per acre-foot. Over and above that cost will be the cost of building new power stations to generate the electricity and the cost of the construction of the canals. Municipal water purification plants will have to be built and maintained because the Mississippi south of New Orleans (where the Plan projects picking up water for Texas) is practically unusable for human purposes. Because of the amount of silt (dirt) in the Mississippi there will have to be constant maintenance of canals to remove sediment - or else a constant water speed of 20 miles per hour (uphill!) in order to keep the silt from settling - another problem for municipal purification plants.
The expense of repairing the wear and tear on the canals from such high-speed water would be prohibitive (and can you see yourself swimming in 20 MPH currents?), so the first alternative, constant silt-removal, will probably be what will happen. And that means a very high constant expense.
The Texas Water Plan needs the revenue from a 3.5 billion dollar bend issue to pay for the cost of construction and maintenance. But who is going to buy the bonds? If the rate of interest on the bonds is low, the bonds won't sell, because the current inflated and inflationary money makes bonds (very long-term investments) a bad deal compared to high-interest short-term investments like personal loans and mortgages, or compared to stocks whose value rises as fast or faster than inflation reduces the value of money. If the bonds won't sell, then the money for the Plan will be taken out of taxes, as has been done in California in the last few years. If the interest rate on the bonds is high enough to be competitive in the money market (say 7-8%), then the banks will invest in them more heavily than the people of the state will be able to, so the banks will make a 7% profit on their investment, and not the people. The Banking industry is controlled by a relatively small number of very rich people, and those same people control the oil industry: T.S. Wright is heavily into Standard Oil of Indiana and the Continental Illinois Bank and Trust Company; G.V.
Meyers, Standard of Indiana and American National Bank and Trust in Chicago; J.S. Bugas, Standard Oil and The One William Street Fund; R.K. Mellon, Gulf Oil and the Mellon Nat'1 Bank and Trust Co. In Texas, Allen Shivers sits on the Board of Directors of Champlin Oil Co. (Subsidiary of Celanese Corporation), the Texas Gulf Sulphur Co.,
Austin National Bank, and the Texas National Bank of Commerce in Houston. Geoffrey Rockefeller is into the Freeport Sulphur Company; he's the brother of David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan Bank in New York, center of a financial empire that extends world-wide (Chase Manhattan has two branches in Saigon!) J.M. Meyer Jr. is into Morgan Guaranty Trust and the Texas Gulf Sulphur Co.; Lucius Clay is into Chase International Investment Corp., the Lehmann Corporation, and owns 300,000 shares of stock in Texas Gulf Sulphur. All of these men stand to make huge profits from investing in the Texas Water Plan Bond issue. Also, as we shall see shortly, they will reap most of the benefits of the water, through their control of the cotton and sulphur industries in Texas.
These men will make the profits, but where will the money cone frcm to pay off the Bonds when they come due? The money will come from you and me, Texas taxpayers. If the rate of interest on the bonds is high enough to be competitive, so as to sell most of the issue, the interest rate will increase the cost of the Plan by 1-1/2 over the 20-year period in which the bonds come due. We've already seen that the agricultural sector of West and South Texas won't be able to pay even for the cost of moving the water. The taxpayer is going to have to pay the cost of the interest on the bonds, as well as the cost of construction and maintenance of the canals. And remember that the projected cost of construction is probably nowhere near what the actual cost will be.
That sort of thing happens again and again. It happened last year with the construction of the Houston airport. The only difference this time is the monstrous scale of the Texas Water Plan Boondoggle and Porkbarrel.
We've seen that the big financial interests are also the big Sulphur and Oil interests. That's very interesting because it's the Sulphur industry in Houston and other places that is using most of the water presently available. Nearly all sulphur is extracted by the French process. Sulphur melts at around 240° Fahrenheit, and it is found in certain kinds of geological formations, especially salt-domes, where it occurs in almost pure form. To get it to the surface, water is superheated and sent down a tube into the ground. Pressure is added to keep the water superheated and to bring it and the suspended, melted sulphur up another tube. Given the current low cost of water and, up until now, its availability along the Coast, the French process makes the sulphur industry a high profit venture. The social costs are quite high, however, since the process uses up millions of gallons of water which are then unusable, because of the amount of sulphur that stays suspended in the runoff water.
Fortunately for the future water supply of Houston, the sulphur is nearly played out along the Coast to New Orleans. The Sulphur industry is going to have to go elsewhere. And where it is going is to South Texas and West Texas, the very places to be served by the Water Plan! The large oil companies control the sulphur industry, and they know where the sulphur deposits are, because sulphur cones from the same kind of geological formations as oil does. Not only that, but the extracting process (the French process) is nearly the same for sulphur and oil. And it's a safe bet that the boilers used to heat the water burn fuel oil.
Now the oil companies have mineral leases throughout West and South Texas. They also control the loyalties of the people in those areas because they provide jobs. The oil is slowly playing out to some extent in those areas. In order to maintain political and economic control of those areas, as well as to increase profits immensely, the oil-controlled sulphur companies have already started moving in. The few that have already gotten enormous wealth from oil will continue to get it from sulphur - people like Allen Shivers in West Texas and the Kennedy family (owners of the King Ranch) in South Texas. John Connally and Preston Smith will make a piddling million or two (they are only the hired lackeys of the big money interests). But most of the money, and therefore most of the power will go to the Northeast, to the Rockefellers, the Mellons, Lucius Clay, H.J. Morgan, etc., etc.
These people will make money from the bond issues; they will also make money from the sulphur industry, which will use water paid for by the taxpayer and not give much of anything back - not even jobs, because although sulphur extraction crews are about the same size as oil-extraction crews, the refining process takes far fewer men.
The Sulphur industry is one major beneficiary of the Water Plan; the other is the cotton-growing industry. The cotton industry is controlled by the same banks that are controlled by the oil industry.
A short digression: People curse the "farmer" for his subsidies for not growing things. But it's not the small farmer that gets those subsidies (the establishment press, radio and TV lie when they say it is). A small, individually-owned farm doesn't have the acreage necessary to make such subsidies possible. You have to have so many acres in production before you can leave some fallow and collect the subsidy. The small farmer hardly has enough acreage under cultivation to qualify, let alone any left over to leave fallow. On the other hand, the large farm isn't usually owned by a "farmer"; it's owned by a grocery store chain or by a railroad or one thing or another, all of which come back to being controlled by the banks either by interlocking corporate directorships or by high-interest loans.
As to cotton itself: The water table in West Texas is dropping because of the cotton fields, which evaporate lots of water. Municipal use and dry land farming for sorghum do not reduce the water supply, because this water is reusable. Sewage, for instance, can be treated by bacteria or chemicals which encase sewage and drop to the bottom of a tank where they can be removed by mechanical means. The water can be returned to the ground supply by wells and other means. But cotton-growing takes a lot of water, and much of it evaporates at a high rate on the West Texas plains. It's hot out there and the winds from the West Coast are dry, having lost their Pacific Ocean moisture over California and the Rockies in New Mexico and Arizona. The water that doesn't evaporate is so full of nitrates from the fertilizer and chlorinated hydrocarbons from insecticides that it constitutes a serious menace to cattle and people if it is allowed to return to ground water sources. The nitrates are fairly readily converted to stable nitrates which affect the hemoglobin in your blood, making it almost useless for carrying oxygen. Chlorinated hydrocarbons are long-lasting, poisonous, and they accumulate in the fatty parts of your body.
And guess who controls the industries that make fertilizers and insecticides? The oil-banking fraternity (Rockefeller - Mcnsanto Chemical; Shivers - Celanese Corporation) does. Not only that, but Sulphur is an important ingredient in insecticides. The Big Money interests are going to make even more money through bond investments, cotton, sulphur, oil, fertilizers and insecticides. They are going to use up the water that the Texas taxpayer is paying for. They are not giving much back except poisons.
Basically, the Water Plan serves the cotton and sulphur industries. These are high-profit industries because they use very few men and inexpensive long-lasting equipment. The refining process for sulphur consists basically in letting the sulphur dry out - not much labor required for that. Increasingly, cotton-farming is becoming mechanized, especially in South and West Texas, where the land is flat and farm equipment works well.
The only other major beneficiaries of the Water Plan are cities and fruit and vegetable growers. The Rio Grande Valley farmers have al1 of the cheap labor they can use (at this point). Unless La Huelga succeeds finally, the benefits of the Water Plan will accrue only to the Valley bankers and "farmers" who already control the wealth of that area.
As for the cities, adequate water isn't going to make them grow 500% in 50 years. But, to make the Water Plan estimate reasonable, they'd have to grow a hell of a lot faster than that.
The Texas Water Plan will not create any sizable number of jobs; it will not provide a cheap source of water for municipal services. The costs of the project - and probably even the ongoing costs of delivery of the water – will be paid by the people of the United States of America and, especially, the people of Texas.
What can be done? First, the Amendment #2 should be defeated on Aug. 5. It should be defeated, if for no other reason, because it involves a whole lot of guesswork, hasty research, and a hasty and very quiet legislative o.k. You'll notice, if you come across an ad for the amendment, that it doesn't speak to a single substantial thing about the amendment; it simply says Texas needs water, vote Yes. And, just for a joke, notice that one of the cosponsors of the ad is Alien Shivers. Shivers would screw everybody in Texas to get that thing passed - it means millions to him.
If, as is likely considering the lack of money and staff of those of us who know the facts on this project, the amendment is passed, there are a couple of possibilities. One is that the people of Texas demand that the sulphur and cotton industries pay about $300 per acre foot of water, leave all groundwater sources alone, build plants to purify the water they use, pay damages for climatic catastrophes that occur as a result of the project, and that they not raise their present prices, except for inflation adjustments. That won't work, though, will it?
Because, if the people of Texas got together and demanded that, then the sulphur and cotton industries would abandon their present plans and locations, and we'd be stuck with all that water and those canals and very damn little to do with them.
On the other hand, we could demand that the sulphur industry mine sulphur in the way that coal or iron is mined. After all, a big hole in West Texas isn't nearly as obscene as one in the mountains of West
Virginia. Open-pit mining would create a lot of jobs - jobs which the French process eliminates in a sense. Of course, it would be nasty, hot work; so I don't think that it would be unreasonable to demand a four hour workday – especially since sulphur is a high profit industry and could afford to pay $6 or $7 more per hour for very large crews. As long as we're going to pay for that water, we ought to at least get a decent job out of it. And this kind of mining eliminates a large part of the projected water need, so we could start with a much more modest plan.
It's doubtful that the big industries would be willing to reduce their profits enough to make life a little better for the rest of us, though. In fact, it's doubtful that any of the big money interests are going to do anything but try to make more money - and the people of Texas and of the whole world can go to hell. The big money-men, the capitalist bankers, corporation owners, and politicians, will continue to try to make life bad for people who work for them, so that the people will be willing to work for lower wages rather than starve - low wages to workingmen means big profits for bosses.
If we don't want to continue to be swindled and boondoggled, if we want to make a better life in a better environment for ourselves and our neighbors, then we're going to have to get together and kick the big capitalist money-men out of power. We're going to have to get together and take over ourselves - all of us - so we can make a better life, a better nation, a better world, for all of us, not just for a few. Power to the people!
all [seems to be missing from the pdf file]
