It Could Happen Here - The City Sold Your Water feat. Prop 

Episode Date: April 22, 2025

With the LA wildfires of January 2025 still fresh in Californians' minds, a number of little considered issues popped up. Not least of which is, where does the water to fight fires come from? Wait… someone owns the water?! This episode is about the privatization of utilities and how we got here.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

From the producers who brought you Princess of South Beach comes a new podcast, The Setup. The Setup follows a lonely museum curator, but when the perfect man walks into his life, Well, I guess I'm saying I like you. You like me? He actually is too good to be true. This is a con. I'm conning you to get the Dilama painting. We can do this together. Listen to The Setup on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Are your ears bored? Yeah. Are you looking for a new podcast that will make you laugh, learn, and say, -"Que?" -"Yeah." Then tune in to Locatora Radio, Season 10 today. Okay. Now that's what I call a podcast.

I'm Theosa. I'm Mala. The host of Locatora Radio, a radiophonic novella. Which is just a very extra way of saying a podcast. Listen to Locatora Radio Season 10 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2020, a group of young women found themselves in an AI-fuelled nightmare. Someone was posting photos.

It was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts. This is Levertown, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg, and Kaleidoscope about the rise of deepfake pornography and the battle to stop it. Listen to Levertown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Find it on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton English.

I'm Greg Glott. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. Last year, a lot of the problems of the drug war. This year, a lot of the biggest names in music and sports. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We met them at their homes. We met them at their recording studios. Stories matter and it brings a face to them.

It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs Podcast Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Call zone media. What's up, y'all? It's your favorite cousin. I just came over, you feel me?

Y'all don't have no cousins that just kind of pop up, just be at the house like a 90s sitcom where you don't knock on the door, you just be walking in. That wasn't my life, mainly because most of the cousins on my mother's side lived on the other side of the country. And then my cousins on my father's side, since we lived in gang infested areas, you didn't just pop up.

That was just not the safest thing to do. But I'm doing that at your house. And you know what happens when you have cousins come over. Well, now a small percentage of y'all are black, but a lot of percentages y'all grew up for, which means that you got whoopings just like we did. So, you know, usually when your cousin comes over, somebody's getting, we all, somebody getting in trouble and it's usually you cause you supposed to know better. I never got more spankings.

I never got more spankings Then when my cousins came over because We would just get into stuff and then since I'm the one that lived there and I was cutting up in front of company I ended up getting into most trouble. Anyway, this isn't where I'm working out trauma Although it is called it can happen here podcast so I feel like we all collectively working out trauma of being Americans. And lastly, on the rambling preamble, I got a dog now. Well, my daughter got a dog. And to all the parents that listen,

you know when your child gets a pet, whose pet that actually is. So I find myself doing a lot more chores than I signed up for, but it's a pug and it keeps trying to eat the cat's food. Therefore it's got liquid doo-doo and I'm not a fan of that. And since I get to work in my pajamas because I'm just recording podcasts and rap music back here, seems to fall on me to scoop up this liquid doo-doo but that's

only when she eats the cat's food. Stupid dog, eat your own food. Anyway I'm here to talk about something that you can do nothing about. Alright y'all ready? Here we go. A brother like me who bleeds Los Angeles you cut me open and Pacific Ocean salt water comes out. You poke my lungs and smog pours out of me. I could work for the tourist department of Los Angeles. I love this city at an unhealthy level. There are things about this place that is absolute trash. Don't get me wrong.

There is a lot wrong with this city, with this place. The ground shakes up under us. We've been such a horrible steward as to how to take care of this land. I'm gonna include myself, even though I am not the invasive colonizer. But there are really only nine native trees to California, two of which are not the palm tree or the eucalyptus. The plants that are here naturally are

drought resistant and fire resistant. They don't burn that easy. The ones that burn up real quick are the sycamores and the palm trees. And if you may have noticed, Los Angeles hit a bit of a dry spell recently and had quite the disaster. Now I'm slowly backing, backing that thing up into what we're going to talk about right now, which you should probably know if you have already read the show title when you clicked play. But I'm gonna back that thing up into it.

California catches fire every year in some location. Now, my mother, you know, mama, mama prop, she worked 30 years for the LA County Fire Department, you know, in the city of West Covina, because I'm a 626er. And I have vivid memories of the different firemen, fire chiefs. I think I talked about this in the LA on Fire episode.

Block is literally hot on the hood politics show, which hopefully you guys are supporting and listening to also. But even my boy Chris, who's firefighter, you know, been fighting the fires out here, everybody knew that one day this day would come and that let's just say all of the bureaucratic failures had not happened. If the water was as full as possible, the fire hydrants were fine. If everything was the budget,

if everything was done perfectly, this was going to happen. This day was going to come. That it's a perfect storm. We had a specific type of drought, lack of rain, the Santa Ana winds, and then a fire sparking, and that fire sparking in a densely populated urban area.

It was every fireman I knew was like, yeah, one day it's going to happen. And like I said in the last episode, yeah, like, you know, we could find ourselves a time machine and practice the indigenous practices. Oh, actually, as a small little beacon alike, there's an area out ofadena that was actually given back to the Tongva tribe many years back. There was a first like actual land back given back to the tribe and they started taking care of the land the way that their elders and ancestors did.

And guess what? That area didn't burn. Anyway, in the midst of this disaster that we were having a desperate, desperate man, who I completely understand is desperation. On Tuesday night on January 7th, while the fires were just rumbling through the palisades, a man named Keith Wasserman, who's the co-founder of a real estate investment firm, desperately took to Twitter and said,

does anyone have access to private firefighters to protect our home? Need to act fast here. All neighbors houses burning will pay any amount. There was another click of Rick Caruso, who almost in a multiverse situation is our mayor, a billionaire developer who owns the Grove and on the West side, just that if you ever watch TMZ whenever somebody is walking out of a place, it's probably at the Grove and was a, you know, real estate magnate.

Anyway, there were videos of him driving through an area that he had with his, like, private security and private firefighters where there's smoke billowing all around the place, but his situation was fine. Why? Because he had private firefighters. They shaved his shop and center. But he tried to unsuccessfully save nearby homes as well, which reminded everybody about the time that Kanye

and Kim tweeted about their house being saved by firefighters and which made people be like, wait a minute, you can buy a fire department? Man, what the hell is this? What type of shit? Man, what? We over here arguing over fire hydrants and tanks running low

and somebody just paid up. Where they get the water from? How the hell you can just, oh my God. What the hell water you using, oh my God, what the hell water you using? Nigga, that's not your water. And what you gonna do? Are you gonna help out the neighbors? Okay, so if I buy a fire department,

fire department show up at my house, but the neighbor's house is burning. You just gonna leave the neighbor's house? You gonna tell them to call the city's fire department? What the hell is happening? How does this shit work? Is there any other way rich people can be evil? What is happening right now?

Which is basically what happened at how most of the regulars felt. So this episode is not just about private fire departments because that would not be a very interesting full episode. It's about the question that private fire departments bring up, which is like, nigga, whose water is that? Wait a minute, who owns the water? Is the water private too?

And if the water's private too, what else of my utilities are private? And this is what I mean by there is nothing you can do about it. Now, if there is any of you that are built like Robert and Magpie, then maybe you ain't gotta worry about this. Maybe you could dig your own well and find the groundwater. However, there are things called water land rights,

which I will talk about into this so even if You move off the grid to live on a mountain you find somewhere in the backwoods You know four acres away from magpie wherever the hell magpie live and you dig to find some water Somebody owned that water it already happened here y'all. Let's go All right. This may or may not be a shock to y'all. I know in the first, the Block is Literally Hot episode I did, way, way, way, way back when I first joined,

when Cool Zone Media first launched, when I first joined the team, my first episodes. It was one of those things where it's like, the thought has probably never crossed your mind. And some of it's like sitting, I'm talking to y'all who pay bills. Some of this stuff is sitting right up under your nose. Like Southern California Edison

is one of our power companies, but then there's PG&E. This isn't the city of Los Angeles providing this. That's a company. In the same way that your internet come from a company, what makes you think your power don't come from a company? And if your power come from a company in the same way that your Internet come from a company. What makes you think your power don't come from a company? And if your power come from a company and an Internet come from a company, why wouldn't your water come from a company? Well, I like why I don't know what would make you think

that that's just a city municipality. Well, because because waterfall from the sky. What the shit? So what I'm paying for you to pump it through the through the dog on pipes. Waterfall from the sky. What the shit? I'm paying for you to pump it through the dog on pipes. Boy, I mean, I understand that. That's a service, but what the hell are my taxes for? Somebody like, I don't know if you noticed, you can own the rain.

So the water that fill inside the lake, somebody bought the lake. This is the episode that I'm finna tell y'all right now so your utilities most likely your city has sold your water and your sewage processing to a private company and the bills that you pay it your water bill is not going to the city for the service you are receiving it is paying the company back the money that the company paid Yo City to get this gig. Let me back up here. First, let me cover the private fire departments. Now here's the thing. Private fire departments usually are hired by insurance companies. So what they do a lot of

time is like prevention. They're coming here and, you know, clear out shrub, make sure that your house is not like set up for failure. You know, in California, I mean, people always talk about our strict laws and building codes and it's like, well, nigga, do you see why? Every time you got a bureaucratic law, like there might be a historical evidence as to why we need that. One of which is, my nigga, California ain't got a lot of water. So if you're going to build a house, you can't just have dry shrubbery up around your house. Why? Because you just basically put a box of matches just around your house.

So yes, fam, like that's why you can't do that. Why you not allowed to have a lot of trash in your house, nigga? What I mean, what the hell you think? Because the shit will catch on fire. So these private companies, private fire companies usually come through and again, they hire body insurance companies normally to come and clear shrubbery, make sure that your lint, your actual dryer is cleared out,

make sure your HVAC is good. And usually they got their own little tank, right? So they come in with their own little tank of water. That's their private water. They basically, they bring in their bottled water, you know what I'm saying? While the rest of us is using tap, right? But eventually that little tank go run out, feel me and then at that point you got to tap it to the fire hydrant

Right now What most of these companies will say is like the guys were not monsters, dude Like if if the neighborhood is on fire, of course, we're going to help. What do you like? What are you talking about? Which I truly believe for this reason, if I'm paying to protect this house, but the neighbor's house is on fire, that probably means that the neighbor's house

is gonna cause my house to catch on fire. So of course it would be in my best interest to help put that one out. According to the New York Times, they reported that, yeah, good 45% of all firefighters working in the United States today are employed privately, right? Now, a lot of those are like wildlife suppression. Now, there's such thing as called

the National Wildlife Suppression Association, which represents more than like 300 private firefighting groups. And a lot of them work more as like government contractors, right? As far as like, again, supplement for like wildfires, right? And like I said, the others are hired by private companies. Yo, and peep this like a little two person private firefighting crew with a small vehicle.

I mean, it could cost like three grand a day. Like a large crew of like 20 firefighters and four trucks can run $10,000 a day. This is according to Brian Wheelock, the vice president of the gray back forestry. It's a private firefighting company in Oregon, but most of the time, like I said, these people don't really work directly with homeowners. But that's not what's the interesting part of this story to me. The interesting part of this story to me is the reality of the utilities that we live in. ["Sweet Homework"]

Hey kids, it's me, Kevin Smith. And it's me, Harley Quinn Smith. That's my daughter, man, who my wife has always said is just a beardless, d***less version of me. And that's the name of our podcast, Beardless, D***less Me. I'm the old one. I'm the young one.

And every week we try to make each other laugh really hard. Sounds innocent, doesn't it? Lot of cussing, lot of bad language. It's for adults only. Or listen to it with your kid. Could be a family show. We're not quite sure, we're still figuring it out. It's a work in progress.

Listen to Beardless, D***less Me on the iHeRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On November 5th, 2018, at 6.33 a.m., a red Volkswagen Golf was found abandoned in a ditch out in Sleephole Valley. The driver's seat door was open. No traces of footsteps leaving the vehicle. No belongings were found except for a cassette tape lodged in the player. On that tape were ten vile, gr, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, this too. A horror anthology podcast. Listen on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Israel Gutierrez, and I'm hosting a new podcast, Dub Dynasty, the story of how the Golden State Warriors have dominated the NBA for over a decade.

The Golden State Warriors once again are NBA champions. From the building of the core that included Clay Thompson and Draymond Green to one of the boldest coaching decisions in the history of the sport. I just felt like the biggest thing was to earn the trust of the players and let the players know that we were here to try to help them take the next step, not tear anything down.

Today, the Warriors dynasty remains alive, in large part because of a scrawny 6'2 Hooper who everyone seems to love. For what Steph has done for the game, he's certainly on that Mount Russmore for guys that have changed it. Come revisit this magical Warriors ride. This is Dubb Dynasty. The Dubb's dynasty is still very much alive.

Listen to Dubb Dynasty on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We ready to fight? I'm ready to fight. Is that what I thought it was? Oh, this is fighting words. Okay. I'll put the hammer back.

Hi, I'm George M. Johnson, a bestselling author with the second most banned book in America. Now, more than ever, we need to use our voices to fight back. And that's what we're doing on Fighting Words. We're not going to let anyone silence us. That's the reason why they're banning books like yours, George. That's the reason why they're trying to stop the teaching of black history,

of queer history, any history that challenges the whitewash norm. Or put us in a box. Black people have never, ever depended on the so-called mainstream to support us. That's why we are great. We are the greatest culture makers in world history. Listen to Fighting Words on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Now, let me go ahead and run off some statistics to you.

I just want to go ahead and add to the dystopia that we live in because we need to say, we need to change the name of this show to it has happened here. I'ma link all this data to the show notes. Now you're ready for this? Water and wastewater service privatization follows broader trends.

More than 40% of drinking water systems nationwide are private, regulated utility systems. Of the 60% of the systems owned by local governments, privatization by contracting of operations management has grown rapidly since 2001. Nationwide, the privatization of water, wastewater grew by 13% after growing 84% over the decade in the 1990s, right? So what that means is almost half of y'all are paying a private company for your water. Now, let's make some distinctions here between public utilities and private utilities.

And, you know, what are we even talking about? So public utilities are owned and operated by your local state and federal governments on behalf of the citizens and customers in that area. So a public utility would be your municipal water, sewage, sanitation services, like if you have a public electricity providers, government ran public transit systems, state-owned telecommunication companies, public utilities, right?

Now listen, here's where it's interesting. Have to balance serving the public interests while remaining financially sustainable. Since they are not profit driven, any revenue earned is invested back into maintaining the infrastructure of the operations, which seems like a big old duh. We're not here to make money. This is not our money making interest. This is living, right? It's a utility. Like it's just, I'm not trying

to make money off it. I'm trying to keep the lights on, right? But's a utility. Like it's just, I'm not trying to make money off it. I'm trying to keep the lights on, right? But as we know, it costs to do those things. So the temptation becomes easy to be like, how do I offload this cost, right? And make sure that this service is there. Because as you know, oftentimes, public utilities don't be very good.

Right. You know what I'm saying? Flint still ain't got fresh water right now. Alta Dena is in a situation where they was like, look, don't even boil the water. Like whatever coming out of your tap is just not good. Boiling is not good enough. Like do not drink this water. Right. Is the situation that they in and it's like,

well where the money at? Like how are we gonna fix this? Now that's a public utility. Now a private utility is utilities obviously owned and operated by private companies. So that would be an investor-owned electricity company, like a private telecommunication, private-owned oil, gas, and pipelines,

and private-owned waste management companies. Now, their goal, because it's a company, is still to make profit for their shareholders while also delivering reliable service. Now, they argument, their defense would be, if we don't give you a good product, we won't have customers. So it is in our best interest for our own money to give you a best service. However, are you seeing the truck size hole in a logic?

Nigga, we don't have a choice. Do you have a choice as to what water company provides the water to your house? Who gonna run the sewer? I don't have an option anyway. So the key differences are very obvious, right? One is the ownership and motives like publicly owned utilities serve the public interest rather than pursue profits, right? Private owned utilities are there for their investors and to maximize returns.

Regulation and pricing. Public utilities are regulated by the government-appointed commissions that oversee pricing. Private utilities are also regulated, but usually more flexible in a rate setting because what the hell you gonna do? Yeah, you gonna call the water company

and be like, I ain't paying this bill. They gonna be like, oh, no problem. Service areas. Most public utility service customers are within municipal boundaries. Investor-owned utilities often are defined by regional monopolies with little overlap or competition with customers.

Listen, if you ever moved into an apartment and you was like, y'all I'm trying to like, you know, install cable and they was like, or your internet, it was like, oh, it's AT&T over here. I was like, like, you know, install cable. And they was like, or your Internet. It was like, oh, it's AT&T over here. I was like, oh, but I have Spectrum. They're like, Spectrum don't serve this area. Nigga, it's the Internet. It's the air. It's wires, this poles.

I'm not allowed to. You can't come over here because it's a private company. Now I'm in a situation where AT&T knock on my door every day and being like, yo, we laying fiber optics, you know, we laying new pipes down here up under your street. We can move faster than Spectrum. I done ditched them both. And then Spectrum still email me every day.

Spectrum sent somebody, it was like, we heard you left Spectrum, we're trying to figure out why. I'm like, nigga, cause I don't want to use either of y'all. But we're the area you serve. When I first moved into the house that I'm in now, like, I made a account on Edison and they were like, oh, nigga, Edison don't serve here. You have SoCal gas.

And I was like, who the hell is SoCal gas? They was like, that's who else going's who else gonna give me the gas? I don't have no options. All right, I live in LA. This is who serves LA. Infrastructure spending. With public utilities, they might find it easier to raise funds for long-term capital projects

and maintain infrastructure proactively while privately owned businesses and utilities answer to shareholders seeking returns which impact investment decisions. Meaning if I'm like, yo, somebody got to clean this sewer pipe because this water ain't good in this neighborhood. It will behoove the city of Los Angeles to fix this

and it will be easy for them because I am a Los Angeles resident. This is a public utility. If I have private water, they might be like, how much money does that neighborhood give us? If we fix the water up there in Palace Verde, you know what I'm saying? We gotta talk to them

because they kind of give us the bread. So they're not incentivized necessarily to fix my infrastructure. Right. And then the customer service focus, right. Public utilities often focus more on customer satisfaction and addressing community complaints while private entities have profit motives. I mean, I don't know what else I need to explain to y'all. Right now, let me show you how this works and what the allure is for a public city council

to make this decision. Are y'all hip to more perfect union? It's another one of those podcast folks that just got more money than us. They able to produce things that we had bred, we would produce. Anyway, they did one about investor owned water companies and how they lobby to give them the contract to run their sewage and water, right? And it's a super dope study. It's a good like focused study to show like as sort of an example of how it could happen anywhere. And they focused this one study on this city

in Pennsylvania, right? And here's the ill part about all of this, is that how would you know this is happening? I mean, are you really looking at the logo on your water bill? I mean, no, you just like looking at the costs, right? And hoping that it don't be that much. Now, again, if you rent an apartment, I don't know what utilities you gotta cover, right? And hoping that it don't be that much. Now, again, if you rent an apartment, I don't know which utilities you got to cover, right?

Let's say you are renting an apartment, you know what I'm saying? Like a lot of times your utilities, it's like they cover water and gas, you cover electricity and internet. And then whatever it is, I'm not thinking about who the company is. I'm just like paying the bill. But if one day your bill triple, I mean, who do you call? You're like, I haven't used more water. I don't understand why it costs more now. You might call the city, the city like,

oh, we don't even run the water no more. And that's exactly what happened. So in 2020 in New Garden, Pennsylvania, they sold their water to get this. Agua, Pennsylvania, they sold their water to get this. Agua, Pennsylvania, jerks, a subsidiary of essential utilities. And they sold their water for $30 million. And just for you to get a grasp on how much money

can be made by doing this, if you're a company, that company made $2.05 billion in 2023. And essentially, if you're the city, the city runs up, you are, you have all kinds of problems. You got people not paying bills on time. You got all these different, you know, all this stuff. You got to hire the workers. You got to do all this stuff.

And this company runs up and was like, yo, we'll take all this off your hands. Not only will we take it off your hands, we'll pay you for it. So to the city, and they saying, look, I do a better job than y'all do. Why? Because this is all we do.

You got all this other stuff. You got to take care of. We're going to only take care of the water. Look, we'll give you 30 million dollars for it. That's free money. And you ain't got to worry about it. All you got to do when people call complaining about their water is just say, please hold and transfer it to us.

You ain't got nothing to worry about. And the city say, okay, that sounds good. Now, are you going, you're going to change your prices? It's like, why would we change our prices? We don't need to change our price. Matter of fact, we can probably charge less because we ain't got the same things y'all got. Well, at least for the first few years, kind of like the phone bill when they like, oh, you sign up for this much money a month for the first three months, or your cable for the first two years.

And then one day your cable bill come in and it's just psycho. And you like, I don't know why the hell this costs so much more. And they're like, oh yeah, the contract was for this long. And then after that, it went back to regular price. That's essentially what's happening. That's why I was like, if your water bill go crazy,

who you gonna call? Like, what are you gonna say? Like, they could just be like, yeah, it just costs more now. So for the city, the city's like, look, it's free money. We could put this money into other stuff we've been trying to work on and y'all gonna get a better situation.

And again, no one looks at the logo on their bill. So the utilities industries, right? A few years ago, I think in 2016, got this law passed that made cities want to sell it. It's called the Fair Market Value Laws. One example is in Pennsylvania was Act 12, which was in 2016. And the concern is cities feel like they can keep up with, dun, dun, dun, environmental laws and keep up with city growth. Cities are growing so fast.

So many people are moving in. We're destroying the earth at a particular exponential rate and the government wants us to not destroy the planet. Oh, hum. So I got all these laws. I got, we just, yeah, we just don't have the money for it. We just don't have the money for it. What other time?

So when you're evaluating how much this utility would be worth, you can include, because of Act 12 in Pennsylvania, the median income, the expected repairs and future revenue, which means it makes that water worth way much more. And a lot of times when you selling this utility, the price tag, what these people be paying you be six times the city's budget.

So think about this. I just trying to make this real for you. Let's just say somebody comes in and says, I'll buy your car. You say word for how much. And they say, I tell you what, I'll pay you your year salary for this car, the fam. You go ahead.

I had another car in there for that. You know, I'm saying, hey, you know, throwing throwing another six months worth of salary, I'll make you some dinner. Like it's it's kind of a no brainer. You like you. Our entire year's budget. Just for the water. No brainer. But who pays the company?

Nigga, you. You paying the company. What do I mean by that? The company cuts the city a check. Now the company gotta make they money back. How they make they money back? Nigga, yo bills. What is you saying?

Of course they gonna make they money back. Now again your bills. What is you like? What is you saying? Of course, they're going to make their money back now again. They're incentivized to make that money back as fast as possible, which means they're not going to spend more than they already spent 30 million dollars to get the thing. But then they'll promise to like fix their systems, their promise, like you you you sold the city saying, I'm going to be able to spend some time to upgrade and do all this different. And they don't ever upgrade nothing because it's kind of a no brainer. This is easy money to them.

In Philly, there's this area called the Chester water authority that went straight up bankrupt. So like the city's water authority just went bankrupt. So they was like, y'all, we got to sell it. They got offered $410 million. Well, the city did. And the city says, nigga, Chester Water Authority, you ain't got the right to sell because you are not a company. You are part of the city of Philadelphia.

Chester Water Authority is like, my G, I mean, what the hell you want us to do? How does this stuff become legal? Well, like same way any other stick come legal. They just, you lobby candidates all the time. And the only way to stop this is you got to sign up to some sort of city council newsletter or something to be able to walk up in there and protest the shit.

Nigga, good luck. Now let's talk about specifically California. Beardless, I'm the old one. I'm the young one. And every week we try to make each other laugh really hard. Sounds innocent, doesn't it? A lot of cussing, a lot of bad language. It's for adults only. Or listen to it with your kid. Could be a family show. We're not quite sure.

We're still figuring it out. It's a work in progress. Listen to Beardless, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Israel Gutierrez, and I'm hosting a new podcast, Dub Dynasty, the story of how the Golden State Warriors have

dominated the NBA for over a decade. The Golden State Warriors once again are NBA champions from the building of the core that included Klay Thompson and Draymond Green to one of the boldest coaching decisions in the history of the sport. I just felt like the biggest thing was to earn the trust of the players and let the players know that we were here to try to help them take the next step, not tear anything down.

Today, the Warriors dynasty remains alive, in large part because of a scrawny six foot two hooper who everyone seems to love. For what Steph has done for the game, he's certainly on that Mount Russmore for guys that have changed it. Come revisit this magical Warriors ride. This is Dubb Dynasty. The Dubb's dynasty is still very much alive.

Listen to Dubb Dynasty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On November 5th, 2018 at 6.33 a.m., a red Volkswagen Golf was found abandoned in a ditch out in Sleephole Valley. The driver's seat door was open. No traces of footsteps leaving the vehicle, no belongings were found, except for a cassette tape lodged in the player. On that tape were ten vile, No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, Oh my god. Oh my god. Horrific stories that to this day have been kept restricted from the public. Until now. No!

No! No! No! You feeling this too? A horror anthology podcast. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Are we ready to fight? I'm ready to fight.

Is that what I thought it was? Oh, this is fighting words. Okay. I'll put the hammer back. Hi, I'm George M. Johnson, a bestselling author with the second most banned book in America. Now more than ever, we need to use our voices to fight back. And that's what we're doing on Fighting Words. We're not going to let anyone silence us. That's the reason why they're banning books like yours, George. That's the reason why

they're trying to stop the teaching of Black history or queer history, any history that challenges the whitewash norm. Or put us in a box. Black people have never, ever depended on the so-called mainstream to support us. Or put us in a box. Black people have never, ever, depended on the so-called mainstream to support us. That's why we are great. We are the greatest culture makers in world history. Listen to Fighting Words on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I guess. All right. I bring up specifically California because of all the stuff about the fire hydrants and water issues that we had recently. Remember that the water that waters Los Angeles comes from the North, right? It comes from the North. Right?

It comes from right up under Sacramento through the California aqueduct that was put together by this man named Mulholland. So the Mulholland Pass, Mulholland Drive, that was all based on this man that made Los Angeles be possible because he just went up there, just like any other colonizer was like,

I'll buy your water. And Nate was like, water ain't for sale. He was like, yeah, it is. And went over their heads and bought the water. Built a whole basically like when you was a kid at the beach and you dig a little thing in the sand to make the water go a certain way. That's basically what he did through the middle of California

to bring water to Los Angeles. Now Los Angeles did have one river that was the San Gabriel River that starts in the top of the San Gabriel foothills and comes into what we call the LA River, which is paved which there is a movement to unpave that because that would probably help us with a lot of climate issues.

But either way, that was an actual river. It was enough to support the native tribes here because it wasn't that many people here. And they had sense enough to not plant plants that need the water that they ain't got. They wasn't trying to build a city in the area that ain't supposed to be a city. Nigga, have you ever been to Las Vegas?

There should not be a city there. Y'all ever been to the Inland Empire? There should not be that many humans there according to the earth, unless you pump water over there. The natives were fine. The indigenous communities figured out how to live in the shit for thousands of years. But, you know, we had to do our thing.

Now, some vocabulary. California got a thing called senior water rights, which means whoever got there first gets the water. Like basically it's my land, I licked it, right? But they only got them rights when it started from the gold rush. So they was like, well, who was there first? Was this white man, not the people that already lived there,

but these white men. So if you happen to have a farm, you know, up near North Fresno, if your family been there longer than somebody else's family, then that water is yours. Right? That's senior water rights. And then there's junior water rights, which is like the second person. So whatever water you don't use, they get to use.

Right? Now, why that is specifically important for California, especially the Central Valley, is because Cali provides everybody's produce. I mean, for the rest of the country. The vast majority of the fruits, vegetables, nuts, and lagoons that you eat come from California. We gotta have water. It would behoove of rest of America

to make sure that Cali got water. So those are water rights. Now, the water that gets pumped down into our fire hydrants. Here's the situation. Like that had to do a water pressure. Now you could refer to the block is literally hot episode where I go into detail as to what happened with that. But there was this whole thing about the water being owned by some billionaires. Now I would love to run with that one, but the fact is that's just not true. It's not that simple. Let me go ahead and fact check that. So the wonderful

Co, which is who they were talking about, it's Stewart and Linda Resnick. They do have a majority stake in a water bank that can store up to 1.5 million acres, right? Which is close to 500 billion gallons of water. But the realness is that's like a tiny fraction of the water capacity of California. California's groundwater basins combined can hold more than 566 times as much water with a storage capacity of 850 million to 1.3 billion acres of feet across

the California Department of Water Sources. The state's surface resources hold more than 40 million acres on top of that. So there's two types of water here. There's surface water and there's groundwater. Groundwater, obviously that's the stuff that you would dig in for. Well, that's a whole other thing, right? Now it is true. This family owns brands as like Wonderful Pistachios, Fiji Water, Wonderful Land Halos, Wonderful Halos and Palm Wonderful.

And that's a, you know, I don't know if you're into pomegranate juice, but if that's your thing. But anyway, let me quote from PolitiFact. The water the Resnick's use gets stored underground initially before the water is delivered to the roots of Resnick's pistachios, almonds, pomegranate orchards. Specifically, it's stored in the Kern Water Bank that is the most valuable water resource in the region and critical to America's fresh food supplies. The water bank, which is, watch this, the bank itself, a public-private partnership with the Resnick's own

57% of the stake is 32 square mile recharge basin, which looks like flood lands from the street that essentially stores, again, the 1.5 million acre feet of water, 500 billion gallons. The Resnick's storage arrangement is very controversial. They've been banking on the water by using public and private dollars

to corral public resource. Because of their water rights and their wealth, they are insulating themselves from this type of drought, which of course, that's what rich do, right? This is what Chas Miller says, the director of environmental analysis at Pomona College. Private capital has no problem with the drought, while the rest of us are looking at deep social divides.

Somebody bought the water. But water isn't the only thing, like I said, that somebody else owes. According to publicpower.org, utilities that were sold since 1980 have ranged dramatically in size, although many had a small number of customers at the time of the sale,

with a median of fewer than 600 customers. Less than 30% of utilities sold had more than a thousand customers at the time of sale, right? So back then it was a small amount of people, right? Watch this, only five public power utilities with 10,000 or more customers have sold, right? And four of those five sales occurred were approved since 2015.

Now, the largest sale of such electric department was the city of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, which had about 68,000 customers. And when it sold to the middle Tennessee electric membership cooperative in 2020, other utilities, substantial size include those serving the cities of Vero Beach, Anchorage, Alaska, Eagle Mountain, Utah, and altogether we are talking about 800,000 citizens today

have their electricity private. Sales have occurred in 26 states, and almost all of Kansas was sold, and it was sold in the 1980s. Now, why even make an episode on this? And it's because of this last thing, corporate cities. Now, of course, company towns is as old as companies are. You know, you had train things and stuff like that,

you know, where like a company moves in and it just made sense for the company to make sure that they were providing housing and saloons and stuff like that for the people that, you know, lived in their area. It just made sense. That was just made sense. That was just, it was just good business, right?

You wanted to attract more people to stay in this area. If you've ever been in Northwest Arkansas, city called Bentonville, it's actually very dope to be in, but it is the headquarters for Walmart. So if you're going to work in corporate Walmart, you got to live in Bentonville. Now the city's dope. Is that a corporate town? Not in what I'm talking about. It is a company that said,

we are gonna dump a kajillion dollars to make this city as dope as possible. That's one thing. I am talking about a brand making a city. I wish I was making this up. Google got one, is working on a community called North Bay shore in Mountain View, California. That'll have 7,000 housing units

and another called Middlefield Park that'll have 2000 units. Metta is building Willow Village dubbed Zuck town in Menlo Park, California. And they'll have 1,700 housing units, a hotel and plenty of retail. Disney is developing a 1,400 housing units across 80 acres in Kissimmee, Florida, right near Walt Disney World.

Elon Musk is building his city called in Snailbrook outside of Austin, Texas for employees of his constellations of startups, including SpaceX, Tesla and Boeing. But the most ambitious is California forever. It's supposed to be Silicon Valley 2.0. It's this group ran by the former Golden Sax Trader, Jane Simark, and is backed by investors like the LinkedIn co-founder, Reid Hoffman, Chris Dixon, and this philanthropist named Larene Powell.

And it plans to create this new city in Solano County, 60 miles north of San Bernardinoino with tens of thousands of homes, large solar energy, orchards with a million new trees and a hundred thousand acres of new park space. And they hope to build this community will generate thousands of jobs in a walkable Paris or West Village in New York. And there was this reporting of this unknown group that was coming up and just like, just buying farmland. It was called Flannery Associates. And for years, nobody had any idea who these people were. They purchased 52,000 acres, spent $800 million dollars, paying five times the market rate. And nobody knew who they were. they were his little po-duck town people selling their little farms and it's because

these billionaires is building a city now I am telling you all this ultimately to introduce you to Curtis Yarvin who is probably going to be a future bastard pod person or either way, one of these shows is going to cover this man. Because this man in a lot of ways is the patient zero, the contagion number one of these new Republicans, this new conservatism, this new extremists that's been kind of been trying to tell everybody, here's why it's so poisonous. He's like, because not only is democracy dead,

democracy been dead and whatever you think you have now, ain't a democracy to which all of us would be like, nigga, yes, that's why it's so dangerous. Cause I'll be like, yeah, he's like the system's failing you. And I'm like, amen. So his solution is a monarchy. But he made a monarchy like a CEO. So this man says, if the country was ran like a tech company,

everything would be cool. We would all be better. And his example of that is he would say, okay, look at that laptop you're using, look at that laptop you using. Look at that phone you got. Do you think you would have got to that phone, to that laptop, the quality of that laptop you had if it was done by the city of California's tech municipal department? He's like, nigga, no, you got that because of Steve jobs.

That's why you got that phone. Cause that nigga was like, look, this is what we doing. This is how we doing it. He would argue that Roosevelt over the New Deal. He was a tech bro. He ran his mug like a tech startup. He was like, look, nigga, this is what we doing. We building freeways.

I don't care what you all say. We building freeways. He's like, if the country was ran like a tech company, then maybe this country would work better. And he's like, and newsflash, whatever the hell you think you got now, ain't working anyway. We might as well just lean into it. All I'm saying is, I don't know what I'm saying.

Fam, it could happen here. So this is your favorite cousin swooping in and signing off, ruining another thing for you. Don't catch me at the hud politics pop. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonedmedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Are your ears bored? Yeah. Are you looking for a new podcast that will make you laugh, learn, and say, que? Yeah. Then tune in to Locatora Radio, Season 10 today. Okay. Now that's what I call a podcast.

I'm Fiosa. I'm Mala. The host of Locatora Radio, a radiophonic novella. Which is just a very extra way of saying... A podcast! Listen to Locatora Radio Season 10 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. From the producers who brought you Princess of South Beach comes a new podcast, The Setup. Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

In 2020, a group of young women found themselves in an AI-fueled nightmare. Someone was posting photos. It was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts. This is Levittown, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg, and Kaleidoscope, about the rise of deep fake pornography and the battle to stop it.

Listen to Levittown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Find it on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glott. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. recording studios. Stories matter and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.