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Water, once thought to be an unlimited and natural resource, now has a price tag on it. Water’s availability, and the publicly funded infrastructure to deliver it, at one time allowed for the massive development of industrial centers such as Detroit auto and Baltimore steel, and a healthy working population to operate the industry. Today, the industries are automated and workerless or have been moved to low wage areas outside the country. The water delivery, sanitation, and sewage systems are over 100 years old and in a serious state of disrepair. To make matters worse, the federal investment and local tax base for making the repairs is not there.
The following are excerpts of articles from around the country that appeared in the People’s Tribune of June, 2015. They highlight the growing national crisis of water. The accompanying editorial discusses the implications of the situation we face and points out a way forward.
- Baltimore City, whose police are under Federal investigation for outrageous cruelty [most notably the recent murder in police custody of 25 yr old Freddie Gray], started shutting off water to 150 families a day. Baltimore City Public Works started raising water bills in 2013 and is hoping to squeeze 42% more money from the public. But they are not closing off the water for the 369 commercial accounts that owe one-third of the $40 million in outstanding bills. Instead, Public Works is concentrating on the poor and defenseless people. One of the biggest unpaid bills is for the closed recreation center at 2601 Tally Street. Here, the Mayor and City Council owe $16,760. The other is R.G. Steel, (the old Bethlehem Steel) whose millionaire owner is hiding in bankruptcy.
- Highland Park [a suburb of Detroit] was at one time a thriving industrial town built around the auto industry. Today it has about 9,000 residents that are low income, seniors, and retirees. In 2012 the city stopped sending out water bills. The mayor, without the authority to do so, shut down our water plant and put us on Detroit’s water and sewage system. We are now in debt to Detroit because Highland Park wasn’t paying Detroit so we were sued for $24,000,000. All this is going on [to] our property taxes. Now the residents are getting water bills for thousands of dollars. Even though we didn’t get bills for 14 months, there is no way we used that much water. There are homes that are unoccupied where the water is shut off and the owners got bills in the thousands. Some haven’t gotten water bills in four years. Then, under what they call the “wrap it up program,” residents were told to make arrangements to pay it off or their water would be shut off. We risk losing our homes. And if water is shut off, those with children risk losing them.
- Governor Jerry Brown of California has declared a state of emergency in this rich agricultural state, which is enduring the 4th year of a historic drought. He demands a 20% reduction in water use statewide, while exempting farmers who consume 80% of the state’s water. The Governor is showing that he is most responsive to corporate interests, including billionaire farmers growing water hungry almonds for export to China and oil company executives who use millions of gallon s of water drilling for oil in the midst of a drought. Residents of East Porterville, one of 17 impoverished communities of farm worker families similarly affected, go without water to shower, cook, and clean. Dependent on groundwater, their community wells have gone dry as agricultural interests with deeper wells shift to intensive pumping of groundwater. It does not seem to matter that many of them live adjacent to the Kern Water Bank, the world’s largest underground reservoir of water in the world, subsidized by tax dollars and sold for a profit. Meanwhile, water rates are increasing for urban residents in the Bay area and Southern California.
What these examples show is that the rules have changed. Once the saying: “What is good for GM is good for you” had meaning. Today former workers are unemployed, and retirees see their pensions threatened due to city bankruptcies. Worse yet, their access to water is threatened. They face losing their homes due to outrageous water bills, as investors stand ready to gobble up forfeited properties for encroaching gentrification.
Similarly, farm workers in the Central Valley of California are used as pawns lobbying in Sacramento with signs stating that “without water there are no jobs and there is no food.”They are not told that there may not be jobs regardless, as technological developments are beginning to replace even field jobs.
In the past, the plentiful supply of water through taxes that we all paid for benefited both the development of industry and humanity. That is no longer true. Tax subsidized water goes to the highest bidder, whether it be bottled water companies, water used by real estate developers, or water for fracking by oil companies.
Those who seek to privatize water and its distribution do not see water as a human right. Through powerful lobbies they influence decision makers whether in Washington DC, Michigan state or in Sacramento, California. Their callous disregard for human life shows that they are no longer fit to rule. We need to do something about it. A first step is to stop the privatizing of water, our most precious resource.
