Pom Juice Queen Has a Colorful Past (I'll Say)

"Lynda Resnick: She's got juice. And she made a mint."

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

It may be an exaggeration to call Pom Wonderful's founder, Lynda Resnick, the Forrest Gump of the American business world. But she does have a way of being part of events that capture the spirit of the age.

She was born in Baltimore – don't ask her when, but she's in her mid-60s – while her father was stationed at Fort Meade. She grew up in Philadelphia. As a child she did scripted stand-up comedy on "The Horn & Hardart Children's Hour," one of the live local variety shows that flourished in postwar America.

Her father, Jack Harris, was a movie distributor who wanted to make movies. In 1958, he made his first: "The Blob," now a cult classic. It is about an amoeba-like creature that comes to Earth in a meteor and proceeds to consume people in a small Pennsylvania town.

"The Blob" combined a growing fascination with space and the amorphous anxiety of the Cold War. It made a fortune, helped make Steve McQueen a star and allowed Harris to move his family to Southern California.

In her recently published book, "Rubies in the Orchard," Resnick explains that despite owning two Rolls-Royces, her father wouldn't pay for her to go to art school after she graduated from high school. She briefly attended community college, quit, opened her own advertising agency, got married and had two children.

By the fall of 1969, Resnick (then Lynda Sinay) was divorced and dating Anthony J. Russo, an engineer at the Rand Corp., a think tank in Santa Monica, Calif. He prevailed on her to allow him and a colleague, Daniel Ellsberg, to duplicate a large document using the Xerox 812 machine in her ad agency.

Starting the night of Oct. 1, Russo, Ellsberg and various helpers copied 7,000 pages of the government-ordered secret history of America's involvement in Vietnam: the Pentagon Papers.

After extracts of the Pentagon Papers were published by the New York Times in 1971 (and soon after by The Post and other newspapers), Ellsberg and Russo were arrested. Resnick was an unindicted co-conspirator and spent the next two years in and out of court: "a very dark time," she says. All charges against Ellsberg and Russo were dismissed in May 1973.

In 1985, Resnick and her second husband, Stewart Resnick, bought the Franklin Mint. They made a fortune essentially making toys for grown-ups: meticulously detailed model cars and dolls that nobody would let a child touch.

In 1996, Resnick paid $211,000 at auction for a string of fake pearls once owned by Jacqueline Kennedy. The Franklin Mint copied them and sold reproductions for $200 apiece, grossing $26 million, according to the book.

The couple bought Fiji Water in 2004. They increased their fortune (estimated to be about $1.3 billion) selling as an affordable luxury small bottles of artesian water from a volcanic paradise halfway around the world.

And now it's pomegranate juice, a boutique health drink.

Along the way, the Resnicks have become major philanthropists. They are giving more than $50 million in cash and art to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, paid for a neuropsychiatric hospital at UCLA, and have supported many educational and medical institutions in California's Central Valley, where their agricultural holdings are located.

They give each of their companies' employees $1,000 a year to give to charity and have contributed toward the college education of many employees' children.

– David Brown

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/20/AR2009042002409.html

"Her [Hillary Clinton] Chicago address is sponsored by Wonderful Brands, the makers of POM Wonderful pomegranate juice, which is owned by longtime Democratic donors Lynda and Stewart Resnick."

https://www.newsweek.com/clinton-dead-broke-remark-prompts-partisan-pushback-254410

https://www.nndb.com/people/458/000206837/

(This might post all wonky)

Resnick connections:

Roll International Chairwoman & Owner

FIJI Water

The Franklin Mint Co-Owner (1985-)

POM Wonderful

Teleflora

The Huffington Post Columnist

Al Franken for Senate

Aspen Institute Executive Board

CaP CURE

Conservation International Emeritus Director

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee

Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee

Dreier for Congress Committee

Forward Together PAC

Friends for Harry Reid

Friends of Hillary

Gore 2000

Hillary Clinton for President

Hillary Rodham Clinton for US Senate Committee

John Edwards for President

John Kerry for President

John McCain 2008

Los Angeles County Museum of Art Trustee (1992-)

McCain 2000

McCain for Senate '98

Milken Family Foundation

National Republican Senatorial Committee

New Leadership for America PAC

Obama for America

Obama Victory Fund 2012

Philadelphia Museum of Art Board of Trustees

Prostate Cancer Foundation

Voters for Choice

Pentagon Papers unindicted co-conspirator

"Stewart Resnick sits on the board with Rob Walton, the Chairman of the board's Executive Committee. Walton, the oldest child of Sam and Helen Walton, is Chairman of the Board of Wal-Mart Stores, Inc."

Stewart Resnick, the Beverly Hills billionaire owner of Paramount Farms in Kern County,and his wife, Lynda, have been instrumental in promoting campaigns to eviscerate Endangered Species Act protections for Central Valley Chinook salmon and Delta smelt populations and to build the fish-killing peripheral tunnels.

On April 25, Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, executive director of Restore the Delta, exposed in an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle the enormous influence of Stewart and Lynda Resnick and the Westlands Water District on the water and fish policies of Governor Jerry Brown and his predecessors.

“The influence of the Resnicks and their cohorts in the Westlands and Kern water districts has been brought to bear so heavily on the governor's office during the past three administrations that the fix is basically in on building the peripheral tunnels,” she said.

The Resnicks made $270,000 in contributions to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, $350,000 to support Gov. Gray Davis, and $102,000 to Gov. Jerry Brown, according to Barrigan-Parrilla.

“As a result of the political influence of billionaires who receive taxpayer-subsidized water, the state Department of Water Resources functions almost as a subsidiary of the water exporters,” she said.

“The outsize influence of delta water exporters can be seen in the recent 'drought relief' action by state and federal regulators, which undid with the stroke of a pen Endangered Species Act protections for fisheries that were the result of a decade-long legal challenge. In addition to the requirements set in the biological opinions for delta fisheries, there are three sets of water quality standards arrived at through legal processes that already take into account critical dry-year situations. Two sets of water quality standards are being waived as part of drought emergency measures - one set to protect fisheries, another set to protect water quality for delta family farm,” she continued.

“Beyond that, requirements in the court-issued biological opinions to protect fisheries are being waived. Now, Sen. Dianne Feinstein is working with San Joaquin Valley congressional representatives, who have received numerous campaign contributions from Stewart Resnick, on legislation to further weaken already inadequate protections in order to facilitate increased pumping of delta water to southern water users,” said Barrigan-Parrilla…."

https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2014/09/28/18762178.php

Was the Oroville Dam Disaster a FF, Q?

April 03, 2017 11:29 AM

President Donald Trump announced Sunday more than a half-billion dollars would be coming to California to help cover the damage from the winter storms, including $274 million for repairs to the Oroville Dam spillway.

The fulfillment of the fourth presidential declaration for damage from the winter storms totals an estimated $540 million.

Gov. Jerry Brown appealed for financial assistance last month in Washington. Brown met with Robert Fenton, acting administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as part of the Democratic governor’s outreach to the new administration and congressional Republicans who control federal spending.

Disaster relief is generally viewed as a dispassionate function of government. But Trump’s repeated rebukes of the state and its policies – from threats to defund “sanctuary cities” that shield unauthorized immigrants to warnings to withdraw federal funding from the University of California, Berkeley, over violent protests there – have inflamed fears that California would be punished for its strong independent streak.

https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article142272894.html

All told, the [Resnicks] claim to own America’s second-largest produce company, worth an estimated $4.2 billion.

The Resnicks have amassed this empire by following a simple agricultural precept: Crops need water. Having shrewdly maneuvered the backroom politics of California’s byzantine water rules, they are now thought to consume more of the state’s water than any other family, farm, or company. They control more of it in some years than what’s used by the residents of Los Angeles and the entire San Francisco Bay Area combined.

Such an incredible stockpiling of the state’s most precious natural resource might have attracted more criticism were it not for the Resnicks’ progressive bona fides. Last year, the couple’s political and charitable donations topped $48 million.

They’ve spent $15 million on the 2,500 residents of Lost Hills—roughly 600 of whom work for the couple—funding everything from sidewalks, parks, and playing fields to affordable housing, a preschool, and a health clinic.

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/08/lynda-stewart-resnick-california-water/

Who are these residents of Lost Hills? Slaves?

WTF

Lost Hills, California was best known for years as the town 30 minutes southeast from where James Dean crashed his Porsche in 1955. That's not saying much. Unincorporated and historically impoverished, it's a gritty town of 2,412 people, most of whom are Hispanic farm workers. Driving through, one passes a ramshackle tire shop and pool hall. But unlike the other small communities that dot California's Central Valley, this one is just miles away from thousands of pistachio and almond acres owned by billionaire couple Stewart and Lynda Resnick, which has been a boon for the town lately.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chloesorvino/2015/11/04/lost-hills-found-a-poor-farm-community-is-getting-assistance-from-agricultures-power-couple/#4ebb25a1151b

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chloesorvino/2015/11/04/lost-hills-found-a-poor-farm-community-is-getting-assistance-from-agricultures-power-couple/

This is Rancho Venada, and for all its isolation and ostensible inhospitality, it is the place that this state’s governor, Jerry Brown, is gravitating to as he approaches the end of his 50-year career in politics. These 2,514 wind-swept acres have been owned by the Brown family for almost 150 years, since the governor’s great-grandfather August Schuckman, a German immigrant, traveled to central California on a wagon train.

For the past year, Mr. Brown, 77, and his wife, Anne Gust Brown, have adopted this land as something of a mission. They sleep in the tiny cabin many weekends, rebuilding barns piled with garbage and pockmarked with bullet holes, organizing family reunions and laying plans to create a library here documenting the history of the ranch and this politically storied family. They may even live here after his term ends in 2019.

Mr. Brown has a history of unconventional housing choices. He spent three years studying to be a Jesuit in the enforced silence of a seminary.

Mr. Brown’s interest in the property grew deep enough that he asked a state official — one of his appointees — to research the mining and oil drilling history of the land, The Associated Press reported last month, prompting accusations of impropriety. The official who conducted the review has since resigned, although he said the decision was not related to the governor’s request, and another state employee filed a whistle-blower’s complaint for being ordered to do the work.

“What’s so special about Jerry Brown’s ranch?” asked the headline of a Los Angeles Times editorial that questioned Mr. Brown’s drawing on government resources for personal needs. Mr. Brown defended the request, saying he was simply seeking publicly available information, as any citizen is entitled to do.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/29/us/jerry-brown-california-ranch.html