Stop Feinstein's War on Salmon and Fishing Jobs!

I encourage everybody to send this alert from the Planning and Conservation League to everybody they know to stop Dianne Feinstein's war on Sacramento River Chinook salmon and fishing jobs. Feinstein is proposing an amendment to a federal jobs stimulus bill that, in effect, would suspend rules that protect salmon from being killed by the giant diversion pumps in the San Francisco-San Joaquin Delta and would pump more water from the estuary. This amendment will make the jobs bill into a jobs killer!

Feinstein, the faithful friend of agribusiness tycoon Stewart Resnick and Westlands Water District, the Darth Vader of California water politics, is also collaborating with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to build a peripheral canal or tunnel. The peripheral canal project, whether in canal form as originally proposed or in its latest incarnation by the Bay Delta Habitat Plan as an underground tunnel, will cost Californians between $23 billion and $53.8 billion. While putting Californians into debt for generations to come, the canal is also likely to result in the extinction of Central Valley steelhead, Sacramento River Chinook salmon, green sturgeon, Delta smelt, longfin smelt and southern resident killer whales.

The canal will not only be a fish killer, but a giant job killer. By increasing water exports from the California Delta to corporate agribusiness and southern California, the canal will destroy California's once vibrant recreational and commercial fishing industries and the thousands and thousands of jobs that they provide to coastal and inland communities. The salmon collapse has already resulted in the loss of 23,000 jobs - we cannot allow Feinstein and corporate agribusiness to further devastate the communities that depend on salmon and other fish for their livelihoods.