On May 12, the Port of Long Beach announced the launch of a zero-emissions green truck corridor connecting the port with the Central Valley, “to improve air quality and reduce greenhouse gases on one of the nation’s busiest truck routes for global trade,” according to a press release.
But POLB’s latest “green port” advance has more than one dark side to it. The port’s two partners both have troubling billionaire ties. Lincoln Transportation Services will be starting out with an order of 300 Tesla Semi electric trucks, from the widely reviled fascist billionaire, Elon Musk, whose destruction of USAID is projected to cause more than 20 million deaths by 2030.
The billionaire owners of the port’s logistic partner, The Wonderful Logistics Center, have much better PR than Musk, but as the 2024 documentary Pistachio Wars shows, they, too, have a lot to hide. Stewart and Lynda Resnick, owners of its parent Wonderful Company, routinely tout the $2.5 billion they’ve given to philanthropic causes. They like to brag about their “place-based giving,” but the place they’ve promoted as their Central Valley model—Lost Hills—doesn’t even have safe drinking water, although it sits in the center of their water-intensive farm that’s ten times the size of Manhattan. It’s a classic company town, where more than 40% of households work for their company, and conditions are deplorable. They should be ashamed, but they’re not.
Quite the opposite. They’re so proud of their philanthropy in Lost Hills that they’ve even made a documentary about it: “Finding Lost Hills.” Clips of it are featured in “Pistachio Wars,” letting the company speak for itself in the only way it would, since it declined repeated interview requests.
“I had reached a moment in my life where I had to give back in a meaningful way,” Linda Resnick says in the film-within-a-film. “She was ready to change the Central Valley,” it claims grandly, before toning things down. “She wanted to change the quality of life in Lost Hills.”
But as Pistachio Wars filmmakers Yasha Levine and Roman Wernham reveal, there’s little there to be proud of, despite Resnick’s self-declared glee in saying, “It’s so much fun to say that Lost Hills has been found.”
“As you drive in from the south, the place doesn’t look so bad,” Levine says in the documentary. “There’s a nicely renovated promenade, leading up to a park in the center of town.” There they were met by a local health worker, Dr. Rosanna Esparza, who had agreed to show them around. But before they could get started, a Wonderful Company representative showed up, wanting to know what they were up to, asking them not to film their encounter, and questioning their right to film anything at all.
“If you take a deeper look around this town, it’s clear why the company gets nervous about people with cameras,” Levine explains. “Once you get off the main drag, the place looks nothing like their corporate PR.” The footage is bleak, and Esparza concisely sums it up. “There’s no infrastructure here,” she says flatly. ‘”So there’s no bank, there’s no libraries, and there’s no pharmacy. I could go on and on and list everything that is not.”
The litany of what’s not there is even more remarkable when you look at the Wonderful Company website, and read about how they spent so much time trying to figure out what the people there really needed.
“The Central Valley is one of the poorest places in America, and Lost Hills is poor, even by the standards of the Central Valley,” Levine says. “There really is nothing here. The town center is just the intersection of two busy highways.” In fact, Kern County’s poverty rate is 18.6%, more than 50% higher than the state-wide average of 11.8%, and Lost Hills is dramatically higher still: 26.9%, well more than twice the statewide average.
And it’s not just poor, it’s polluted.
“If you drive past the spruced up promenade, you hit an oil field and a refinery,” Levine continues. “It was the site of one of the biggest well blowouts in history. A giant gas fire that took two weeks to put out. The fumes from the refinery add to air quality problems here,” which are also compounded by pesticides airplanes spray on the crops.
“As we talked to more people we found that the other big issue here is that the tap water is undrinkable,” Levine goes on to say.
“It seems like they put a lot of chemicals in it,” one resident explained in Spanish. “So you can’t just drink the water easily, unless it’s an emergency. That’s why we don’t drink it.”
But the abject poverty of the Resnick’s showcase is only one facet of the story told in Pistachio Wars. The film also digs into the generations-long history of legalized water theft on which most of the Central Valley landowners’ wealth is built, along with more contemporary shenanigans.
“In a long line of wealthy farmers to plunder the Central Valley, the Resnicks aren’t anything new,” Levine notes. “The liberal social politics, the flashy marketing, they’re just a modern flavor of something as old as America itself. Farming isn’t so different from the historic booms in gold and oil. It’s an extraction industry. But the resource that’s being mined to depletion is water.”
But there’s another part of the story, too. Pistachios are only one of several main products the Wonderful Company sells, but they have a particularly toxic political legacy to them, given that Iran is the historic world center of pistachio agriculture. While California has grown some pistachios since the 1930s, it was only after the 1979 Revolution and the following trade embargoes that industry really started to grow, helped along by 241% tariff put in place in 1986, that virtually put an end to Iranian imports. The Resnick’s active involvement came later, aimed at the global market, and promoting sanctions to cut off Iranian competition.
“The US pistachio industry as a whole is very aware that its success has been born out of the sanctions against Iran,” Levine notes. And this has led the Resnicks to donate to three Central Valley Republican Representatives—David Valadao, Kevin McCarthy, and Devin Nunes—who were not only agribusiness champions, but also leading foreign policy hawks when it comes to Iran, strongly opposing the 2015 nuclear deal, which ensured that Iraq would not build a nuclear weapon, but gave Iran sanctions relief, allowing it compete in the global pistachio market, until Trump pulled out of the deal. The Resnicks also donated to Washington lobby groups and think tanks with similar attitudes, including the American Jewish Committee and the Washington Institute on Near East Policy.
It would be unfair to blame the Resnicks for the current war with Iran, and the myriad problems it’s causing here at home and around the world. But they certainly helped to pave the way for it, and benefit from its destruction of their main international competitor.
So, yes, it’s good to see the Port of Long Beach move away from its historic involvement with fossil fuel transport. It’s good that they’re killing us less. But it would be a big mistake to think that all involved are good guys we can trust, when the moral standards that should guide us would require so much more.