The Resnicks' and The Wonderful Company
Billionaire Zionist Philanthropists, Lynda and Stewart Resnicks nutty success story in Water Wise California
In Los Angeles Water demand is at an all time high as the Fire fighters pour millions of gallons on the fires. Who knew that much of the Los Angeles Public water supply is privatised, monetized and in the safe hands of Zionist Philanthropists Lynda and Stewart Resnick who have built an multi billion dollar farming fortune by reportedly donating almost $2 billion to academic institutions, climate change initiatives, cultural organizations and programs benefiting their workers in California's Central Valley.
A 2016 investigation by Mother Jones found that the Resnicks' agricultural businesses consumed more water in some years than was used by the residents of Los Angeles and the entire San Francisco Bay Area combined.
Lynda is 82 this year.
Lynda Resnick was born Lynda Rae Harris to a Jewish family in Baltimore, Maryland, and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Growing up in Philadelphia in the 1940s, Lynda had ambitions to become an actress. Her father, Jack Harris, produced the cult hit The Blob and later moved the family to California. Though wealthy enough to afford two Rolls-Royces and a 90210 zip code, he discouraged Lynda from attending art school, so she found work in a dress shop, where she found early financial success creating ads for the store. Her first marriage to publisher Hershel Sinay ended in divorce in 1969. They had two children. By the age of 24, the divorced mother of two had launched her own advertising agency, Lynda Limited.
Stewart Resnick was president of American Protection Industries in Los Angeles, a janitorial service he started while still in law school, when Lynda met him while pitching her ad agency for his business.
They married in 1972. Together they created multiple successful businesses. However many of their lucrative schemes appeared conceptually flawed.
In the 1990s, the Resnicks reportedly bought up tens of thousands of acres of almond, pistachio, and citrus groves for bargain prices in and around Kern County, in the San Joaquin Valley. Back then, California was building new water infrastructure with taxpayer money, to divert rivers and store water to supply the farms and cities in drought-prone areas during seasons when the rain didn't fall.
The Resnicks secured long-term contracts, including a majority stake in the Kern Water Bank, a 32-square-mile recharge basin that stores up to 1.5 million acre-feet of water, according to Forbes. At times, the bank sells water back to the state.
After the state paid for this large underground storage facility it was mysteriously handed off to Kern County officials, who then gave much of it to Westside Mutual Water Company, a private water supplier owned by the Resnicks.
Through what sources call ‘backroom negotiations’, in 1994 the water bank was transferred under what's known as Monterey Plus Amendments from the public to the private ownership of the Resnicks’.
Yearslong lawsuits have failed to nix the water deals that benefit them, and the Resnicks appear to have enough support among state politicians to weather the criticism about their farming practices.
While Water prices continue soaring in California’s Central Valley, where a quarter of the nation’s food is grown, the West Coast’s megadrought worsens. The billionaire couple’s farming business has long been scrutinized for its outsize role in the arid region’s water supply. Their crops consume an enormous amount of water.
Not much water bang for nut.
Other lucrative Resnicks ventures have attracted similar criticisms.
They imported bottled water from Fiji, in the South Pacific. Foreign conservationists criticized the Resnicks’ for "hogging the archipelago's precious water supply... while island natives didn't always have water to drink themselves, due to crumbling and insufficient infrastructure." Shipping Water into The U.S. from Fiji left a costly Carbon footprint to offset against their lucrative returns.
Their claims for the health benefits of the Resnicks’ POM pomegranate drink were contested in court and found to be false advertising. According to Forbes, "The Federal Trade Commission filed a complaint in 2010 that the Resnicks' POM Wonderful used deceptive advertising when marketing the antioxidant-rich drink as being able to treat, prevent or reduce the risk of heart disease, prostate cancer and erectile dysfunction.
In 2012 a federal judge agreed that their ads were misleading. Despite spending fortunes on multiple legal appeals to this judgment, in May 2016 the Supreme Court declined to take their appeal case further.
Stewart Resnick, 88, was born in 1936, and raised in a middle-class Jewish family in New Jersey, later moving to California with his family in the 1950s. In 1959, he graduated with a BS from the University of California, Los Angeles and then a JD from the UCLA School of Law.
Stewart is still the wealthiest lawyer to ever farm in the United States; with a net worth exceeding eight billion dollars as of 2022. Stewart Resnick, the owner of Paramount Farms, controls 58% of the Kern Water Bank.
The Kern Water Bank Authority consists of four water districts and a private company, Westside Mutual. Westside is a shell corporation owned by Paramount Farming which is a subsidiary of The Wonderful Company. It is primarily through Westside that the Resnicks’ own a major share of the Water Bank.
News outlets, academic papers and advocacy groups have criticized The Wonderful Company for its possession of what was originally meant to be a public asset; and the monetary benefit they have gained through it.
The Wonderful Company has been criticized for its aggressive consumption of water in drought ridden California. The company has expanded its business even as California residents faced water shortages and the water ecosystem has been irreversibly damaged.
Residents of the Central Valley, targets of the company's charitable philanthropic giving, suffer from an acute water crisis. Sensibly, the company lobbies to privatize the state's water while funding opposition research on the impact of farming in the drought.
The Resnicks’ became super-wealthy after setting up a string of businesses in Los Angeles; after the success of Stewart’s original Law school venture, a janitorial cleaning service.
The couple started investing in farmland in the Central Valley in the nineties at a time when farmland was relatively cheap. When Central Valley had enormous poverty statistics linked to lack of education. They eventually transformed those cheap acres into what’s now one of the biggest private farming operations in America, producing seedless lemons, Halo mandarins and wine. They own Justin Vineyards and Winery.
A riches from rags story.
Wonderful says it’s the world’s largest producer of tree nuts. Altogether the company has about $5 billion in sales. (According to Wiki.)
In 2024, The Wonderful Company sought to halt a new state law that would make it easier for its employees to unionize. The move came after United Farm Workers started representing some of its employees in Kern County under the recent law.
Lynda Resnick and her husband Stewart also own:
Teleflora, the nation’s largest flower delivery service;
Fiji Water, the best-selling brand of premium bottled water;
Pom Wonderful, the iconic pomegranate juice brand;
Halos, the unusually popular brand of mandarin oranges formerly known as Cuties;
and Wonderful Pistachios, with its “Get Crackin'” ad campaign.
The Resnicks are the world’s biggest producers of pistachios and almonds in addition to vast groves of lemons, grapefruit, and navel oranges. All told, they claim to own America’s second-largest produce company.
MSN reports that “With their $13 billion fortune, the Resnicks are California's richest farming family, with some 185,000 acres of land and a stake in the Kern Water Bank, a nearly 20,000-acre reservoir of water surplus in the San Joaquin Valley.”
By comparison, the Worlds largest produce company is The Dole Food Company employ over 38,000 people in a multi billion dollar per annum business. The Wonderful Company’s Linkdin Page says “ The company's 10,000 employees worldwide are committed to bringing consumers everywhere the freshest, most wholesome pistachios, citrus and pomegranates; bottling the finest water and wines; and creating colorful bouquets that are sure to touch the heart.”
The Wonderful Company employ many people in their lucrative farming business. You can bet all of their harvesting crews were well paid legal migrant-workers. No sub minimum-wage exploitation of the disenfranchised slave-labor underclass going on here. No undocumented migrants harvesting fields for cash in hand.
To succeed in the water dependent world of agriculture in drought affected California the Resnicks’ have enjoyed unprecedented success in winning control of multiple water boards. As a result they have been sued for directing disproportionate amounts of water towards their properties. They have succeeded in winning control of water supply to the point they can now claim to own California’s water supply chain. The Resnicks are powerful and their control of so much water is ridiculous,' filmmaker Yasha Levine, co-director of the forthcoming documentary Pistachio Wars, told DailyMail.com.
'How can one family own more water than the entire city of Los Angeles, almost 4 million people, uses in one year?
This dominant market share was achieved largely by strategic philanthropy and diligent investment in politicians.
The Resnicks’ donate hundreds of millions of dollars to politicians and research institutions, which help them secure control over water systems, occassionaly with taxpayer funding.
One significant Resnick Water hoarding success is the proposed California Delta Tunnel, a taxpayer funded project which would send water from Northern California to Central, where the Resnicks’ farms are. They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on California and federal legislation and politicians who support the tunnel project.
Their favorite favored politician was Senator Dianne Feinstein, then chair of the Energy and Water subcommittee, and a close personal friend of the Resnicks’. Feinstein was a frequent attendee at their holiday parties in Aspen.
Feinstein was born Dianne Emiel Goldman in 1933, to Leon Goldman, a prominent surgeon, and his wife, Betty (née Rosenburg), a former model. Her paternal grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Poland while her maternal grandparents, the Rosenburgs, were of German-Jewish ancestry. Feinstein graduated from Stanford University in 1955 with a Bachelor of Arts in history. When Feinstein first ran for statewide office in 1990 she supported capital punishment.
In September 2016, in advance of UN Security Council resolution 2334 condemning Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, Feinstein signed an AIPAC sponsored letter urging Obama to veto "one-sided" resolutions against Israel.
Feinstein was described during her lifetime as a "hawk" on matters of national security. She voted for the extension of the Patriot Act and the FISA provisions in 2012. Feinstein also voted for President Trump's $675-billion defense budget bill for FY 2019.
In 2003, Feinstein was ranked the fifth-wealthiest senator, with an estimated net worth of $26 million. During the decades of her freindship with the Resnicks’ Feinsteins net worth increased to between $43 and $99 million by 2005.
Feinstein's later years in office were marred by poor health and growing concerns over her dementia. In the fall of 2020, multiple media reports indicated that Feinstein was experiencing and demonstrating effects of cognitive decline and short-term memory loss. She responded that there was no cause for concern and that she had no plans to leave the Senate. Feinstein died in office at the age of 90. By the time of her death Feinstein was the oldest sitting U.S. senator and member of Congress. She was also the longest-serving U.S. senator from California and the longest-tenured female senator in history. None of which she was aware of for some years before her death as an extremely wealth woman.
Why shouldnt a senator be worth over a Hundred Million dollars. The current annual salary for a U.S. senator is $174,000.
Senator Feinstein’s close friendship with the Resnicks’ show payments related to Kern-adjacent water projects from long before she aged-in-place as a nonagenarian Senator.
When a nuisance study about endangering salmon and shad fisheries threatened the Delta Tunnel, Stewart wrote to Feinstein, a friend to whom he, his wife and the executives of his companies have donated over the past two decades, urging her to intervene, calling the studies "sloppy science."
Based on studies showing potential danger to the fish population, the federal government planned to curtail irrigation pumping at the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. The plan was bad news for Stewart, who owned 118,000 acres of orchards in the water-strapped state.
Senator Feinstein promptly wrote to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, asking them to re-examine the science behind their plan. The administration agreed.
Feinstein’s spokesman, Gil Duran, said the senator's letter was "based on what she believes to be the best policy for California and the nation. No other factors play a role in her decisions."
Feinstein forwarded Resnick’s complaint to two US Cabinet secretaries, adding in her own letter that the administration should spend $750,000 “for a sweeping re-examination of the science behind the entire Delta environmental protection plan,” California Watch reported.
The result: “The Obama administration quickly agreed, authorizing another (expesnive) review of whether restrictions on pumping irrigation water were necessary to save the Delta’s fish.” $750,000 spent to come up with the same outcome as the first study.
In all, the Resnicks and their executives have made political donations to the tune of nearly $4 million, including $246,000 to Democratic political committees. Their donation pattern seems nonpartisan.
Lynda and Stewart Resnick’s generosity throughout Kern County is a fine example for us all. They care about helping underserved communities where their employees and families live and I’m grateful for their efforts.
Dianne Feinstein U.S. Senator
The two Resnicks’ are among the top donors to the University of California system, with their donations focusing on agricultural and ecological studies. The Resnicks’ have bought entire departments behind studies on how water systems should be managed, and where funding should go, leading to more federal and state taxpayer dollars being used for the Resnicks’ benefit.
Agriculture uses 80% of California’s water, while Agriculture represents 2% of its GDP. The Resnicks’ own the largest part of California’s Agriculture.
Max Blumenthal tells the story of how the Resnicks’ fund some of the most militantly pro-Israel think tanks in Washington, including the American Jewish Committee and the Washington Institute on Near East Policy (WINEP). Both of these outfits have lobbied heavily for sanctions on Iran and against the Iran nuclear deal. One WINEP executive, Pat Clawson, has even called on the US to stage a false flag attack that could trigger a war with Iran.
The Resnicks’ support for the Israel lobby helps protect their monopoly from a nation traditionally recognized as the producer of the world’s best pistachios.
If you google ‘The worlds best pistachios’ you find;
”People worldwide have always preferred the flavor and taste of Iranian pistachios. Iranian pistachios have a rich and distinctive flavor. Turkish pistachios are also tasty for the same reasons. American pistachios are less tasty than Iranian or Turkish pistachios.
“The billionaire nut barons were not only threatening the environment and livelihoods of their local competitors, they continue bankrolling forces determined to take America to war against a rising Middle Eastern power” say Levine and Wernham; whose documentary on this subject is provisionally titled “Pistachio Wars.”
The Resnicks’ water monopoly is just one way their quest for wealth hurts all Californians.
Their giant crops lead to monocultures which kill important pollinators.
They siphon taxpayer dollars into the charter schools they own, set up to train children to work on their farms.
They misdirect educational research institution to buy their influence, setting precedents in academia based on corruption above science.
And of course, like any company of this size, they exploit their workers while at the same time proclaiming their enormous Transparent caring for the workers they pay so handsomely and treat so well for their valued support in creating their multi billion dollar fortune. Anything between 8 and 13 billion depending which account you read.
In December of 2022, ten months before October 7, Lynda and Stewart Resnick, pledged a $50 million gift to Israel. A gift to fund research into controlling the global population, Israeli style.
Here’s their press release:
HAIFA, Israel, Dec. 19, 2022 /PRNewswire/ The Technion-Israel Institute of Technology announced today that American philanthropists Lynda and Stewart Resnick, co-owners of California-based The Wonderful Company, have pledged, through their foundation, a $50 million gift to transform the university's research and development of sustainability and catalysis. The $50 million gift will establish the Stewart and Lynda Resnick Sustainability Center for Catalysis, designed to empower faculty and students to uncover new ways to maintain global growth while protecting the planet for future generations. The pledge is the latest in a series of gifts by the Resnicks' foundation to improve the quality of life of future generations by protecting the ecosystem and preserving natural resources. The Center's activity will strengthen the State of Israel and its economy and bolster the Technion's position as a global center of innovation. It will facilitate the recruitment of young scientists and promote research collaborations with academia and industry.
The Center's activity will ‘strengthen the State of Israel and its economy’.
Controlling your own water empire in a drought blight state is quite a feat that has brought rich rewards for the couple, enabling their enormous Philanthropy to keep pace with what appears to be a 10% overhead in tax efficient Charitable donations.
The Resnicks’ split their time between Beverly Hills and Aspen.
The Beverly Hills Resnick Residence is Sunset House; a 25,000-square-foot Beaux Arts mansion. Its cavernous reception hall is bedecked with blown-glass chandeliers, its windows draped with Fortuny curtains, and its drawing room adorned with a life-size statue of Napoleon so heavy that the basement ceiling had to be reinforced to bear its weight. The Resnick Art collection in Sunset House includes work by Picasso. The Resnicks’ purchased and tore down three adjacent houses to make room for a 22-space parking lot and half an acre of lawn. The estate employs at least seven full-time attendants.
If the fires spread to Beverley Hills, the fire fighters who will attend protecting the Resnicks’ expensive home will be using Fire Hydrants drawing on the over taxed water supply.
The Resnicks’ philanthropic donation have a strategy.
A $45 million gift to the Los Angeles County Museum of Arts plus $10 million in artworks. Lynda is on the executive board of UCLA Medical Sciences, the Prostate Cancer Foundation and the Milken Family Foundation. The Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital was named for Resnick and her husband in honor of their involvement. $4 million to Children's Hospital Central California in 2006. $20 million towards a "sustainability center" at Caltech to be named after themselves. $30 million to the Hammer Museum; The Lynda and Stewart Resnick Philanthropy for the Arts Wing. $750 million to the California Institute of Technology for environmental sustainability research.
Tens of millions in the US. Tens of Millions in Israel. Possibly hundreds of millions.
In 2009, Lynda Resnick co-authored a book, Rubies in the Orchard: How to Uncover the Hidden Gems in Your Business, in which Lynda explains the marketing and business ideas she used to build successful brands. Her book promotes a philosophical concept she labels transparency:
"Transparency is very new...you have to be a good citizen of the planet. You have to give back."
The book has 119 Reviews on Amazon - described as a NATIONAL BESTSELLER.
POM Wonderful. FIJI Water. Teleflora. The Franklin Mint. Lynda Resnick's marketing triumphs read like an encyclopedia of branding. She is the smartest and hardest-working marketing brain in the business - the kind of marketer who can sell "ice sculptures to Eskimos." But her brilliant ideas aren't simply the result of random inspiration; they're the products of a systematic approach to marketing that any company -- large or small -- can adapt to achieve success. In RUBIES IN THE ORCHARD, she divulges her secrets for creating some of the world's most memorable and iconic brands, and the bull's-eye strategies to sell them.
Profound wisdom sold at a sensible price by a Woman worth many billion dollars, who lives a regal lifestyle in testimony to her success with monetizing farmland. An employer who transparently paid workers in one of Americas poorest communities, Central, less than $15 an hour through the years that the multi billion dollar farming business was being established.
Billionaires who make large philanthropic donations seldom do that without good advice from their tax attorneys, and always with a financial motive. Benevolence is not the pathway to a billionaire destiny.
According to their press, Resnick and The Wonderful Company have made significant improvements to the communities that dot California's Central Valley since 2010, especially in the city of Lost Hills, where half of the homes have at least one family member working at The Wonderful Company.
When I last drove through Central I was moved by how much poverty was visible from the road. Beat up old trailers, beat up old Trucks, in what looks a lot like low income Trailer communities. Perhaps they were even poorer before all this munificent spending by the Resnicks’. I have no way of knowing that, although it seems unlikely.
Over the years the Resnicks’ and their billionaire business has given over $100 million to two charter schools for their employees, and $20 million to an agriculture-career college prep program for seven public high schools in California's Central Valley. Training workers to work for life in The Wonderful Company.
Funding generational poverty more than opportunity, depending on who you ask.
Forbes reports that between 2010 and 2015 "the Wonderful company” helped 55,000 students in the region through programs like college prep, scholarships and summer camps. Resnick and The Wonderful Company report they have been leaders in minimum wage increases.
In 2019 the company announced they were raising minimum pay to $15 an hour for all of its California workers. Prior to 2019 they were paying their workers below $15 an hour.
You don’t become a Billionaire Lawyer in the Farming game by paying workers more than the legal minimum. Probably you don’t stay a billionaire by paying out more in charitable donations than the minimum required to be tax efficient.
You don’t dominate Americas Pistachio market by letting a superior foreign built Pistachio compete. Not when you can lobby your Government to bomb the competition.
Capitalism doesn’t get better than knowing the firefighters protecting the Picasso’s in your mansion from burning depend on American Fire Fighters using using American water that generates profit for you to spend on more money to Israel.
