David Brooks Again! Catches Heat from Readers.

In again trying to play philosopher-columnist-king,
(someone should tell him it's not a good look on him),
he pulled off another doozie today. Seems he's got this idea, at this late date, of getting himself out and about the country (and Cuba!), mixing it up with the American people, all in the hopes of bringing back a story.

Remember the champagne-laden fancy cruise that was parodied by the young? Seems he learned nothing...

LOST HILLS, Calif. — What is the central challenge facing our era? My answer would be: social isolation.Gaps have opened up among partisan tribes, economic classes and races. There has been a loss of social capital, especially for communities down the income scale.

Take, for example, the town of Lost Hills. Lost Hills is a farming town in the Central Valley, 42 miles northwest of Bakersfield. It is not a rich town, but neither is it a desolate one. There are jobs here, thanks to the almond and pistachio processing plants nearby. When you go to the pre-K center and look at the family photos on the wall, you see that most of the families are intact — a mom, a dad and a couple kids standing proudly in front of a small ranch house. Many of these families have been here for decades.

But until recently you didn’t find the community organizations that you’d expect to find in such a place. There’s still no permanent church. Up until now there has been no library and no polling station. The closest police station is 45 miles away. Until recently there were no sidewalks nor many streetlights, so it was too dangerous to go trick-or-treating.
...
Fortunately, we’re beginning to see the rise of intentional community instigators. If social capital isn’t going to form spontaneously, people and groups will try to jump-start it into existence.

Lost Hills is the home of a promising experiment. The experiment is being led by Lynda Resnick, who, with her husband, Stewart, owns the Wonderful Company, which includes FIJI Water, POM juice and most of the pistachios and almonds you eat. You should know that I’m friends with Lynda and Stewart and am biased in their direction. But what they are doing is still worth learning from.

David got schooled in the comments:

75% of Lost Hills' poor, mostly Latino 2,400 people work for one company, Paramount Farms, the pistachio/almond water-hungry subsidiary of the duplicitously named Wonderful Company LLC, the private corporation owned by billionaires Stewart and Lynda Resnick that uses 120 billion gallons of water each year, enough to supply San Francisco’s 852,000 residents for a decade.

The Resnicks are the Koch Brothers of both California and Fiji water who work full-time behind the political scenes to ensure their privatized profits are guaranteed full exploitative economic rights over public water rights.

“As a result of the political influence of billionaires who receive taxpayer-subsidized water, California's Dept. of Water Resources functions almost as a subsidiary of the water exporters,” wrote Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, executive director of Restore the Delta.

“Through a series of subsidiary companies, Roll International (Wonderful's old company name) is able to convert California’s water from a public, shared resource into a private asset that can be sold on the market to the highest bidder” and as one of the largest private water brokers in the US, Roll International makes millions in profits off marketing subsidized public water back to the public, wrote journalist Yasha Levine.

https://goo.gl/zWEg2z

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/09/fiji-spin-bottle

This column is completely nuts on every conceivable level.

Number two:

Mr. Brooks, no one thinks your bias is personal. It's entirely ideological.

Stewart and Lynda Resnick are "flooding" Lost Hills with their charity. But how do they make that money in the first place?

FIJI Water sells water at 300 times the cost of the same product that comes out of your tap. It's an especially useless contribution to the plastic gyres slowly circling the planet's oceans.

"Most of the almonds and pistachios" in this country are grown in California, which has a water crisis. It takes over a gallon of water to grow a single almond. If the Resnicks grow most of California's almonds and pistachios, they're using at least 10% of the state's water. The state government targets individual homeowners who waste water, but it subsidizes wasteful well-connected agribusiness interests like the Resnicks.

Mr. Brooks wants us to believe that if we allow the Resnicks of the world to do whatever they want, their fortunes will save places like Lost Hills. But the aggregate effect of their fortune is still harmful. It might be a good deal for a few individual communities, just as the economic system Mr. Brooks prefers might be a good deal for a few individuals. The rest of us can buy Fiji Water when the public supply runs out.

One, two... we want more!

The central challenge of our era isn’t waiting for some corporation to adopt an American town. It’s to level the playing field so that no one has to get up at 2:45 AM to squeeze in some gym time before they spend the day processing nuts.

David Brooks thinks the answer is for millions of pockets of volunteers to take over the task of rebuilding communities. But it's we the people, not the corporations, who are charged with promoting the general welfare of our nation. The ruse of declaring that corporations are people doesn't change that fact...

And on and on and on and on...

The central challenge facing our era is living wage jobs, David. Everything else that you are deeming helpful and important - community activities, social clubs, religious activities - are difficult for people to focus on and maintain *if they don't have enough money to live on*. This is really not a complicated concept, but you insist on not seeing it.

It's wonderful that your friends are charitable business owners, truly. But let's be honest: if their business wasn't profitable none of those other wonderful things would be happening in the company town. One point of this American experiment was for citizens not to end up needing the charity of the nobility in order for life to be worth living.

We want a government who understands its job is to help create the environment (good schools, medical care, regulations that make the 1% and corporations pay their fair share and protect our natural resources, etc..) so that the "pursuit of happiness" is not dependent on the whim of the factory owner.

Shut up, already... Damn!

Corporate paternalism by another name.

The Resnicks aren't "people and groups" and they aren't "the community": They are a rich family molding a town into their own image and according to their personal values.

There's nothing "promising" about this "experiment". The story is that it's what we've come to: Communities dependent on the beneficence of a rich family.

Tell me who in this house know about the quake?

Slam! Ouch! That was the sound of my head meeting my desk.

Would it be possible for David Brooks to be any more obtuse? I think not. Social isolation is not the problem -- it's a sign of the problem. It's the inevitable result of thirty-plus years of economic terrorism waged upon working people by the 1%ers and those who serve them, mainly Republicans but also corporatist Democrats.

I mean really, really...

The central challenge facing our era is not social isolation. It is the fact that most of the wealth of this country belongs to a very small group of people, and these people show no interest in sharing their good fortune with the rest of us. On the contrary, they work 24 hours a day 7 days a week through lobbyists to FURTHER increase their economic advantage.

But Mr. Brooks will never, despite his amusing trips he is doing to see the real world, admit that we have nothing more than an oligarchy not a democracy.

That oligarchy is our real challenge;that is, how to cut it down to a proper size, so the rest of us can prosper also.