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The Michigan Socialist | News | World News

Fight capitalist privatization!
Water is a human right!

By MATT ERARD
The Michigan Socialist

IN THE PAST few years we have witnessed an increase in the privatization and commodification of water at an exceptional pace.

For decades, water privatization has been a hallmark of structural adjustment programs (SAPs) imposed on poor countries by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, as a condition for loans.

It was this routine policy that forced the citizens of Cochabamba, Bolivia, to shutdown their city for a week in early 2000 and endure brutally violent retaliation from their government after IMF-imposed privatization policies cut off access to water for many and caused water rates to double across the board.

In South Africa, the only country in the world in which the citizens’ right to water is in the constitution, over 10 million citizens have had their water shut off since the imposition of the World Bank’s “cost recovery program,” in which the availability of water is contingent upon the water company’s ability to cover its cost plus profit.

One result has been over 100,000 people in South Africa’s province of Kwazulu-Natal becoming infected with cholera after water sanitation services were shut-off because of non-payment.

Last March, police opened fire on the Gauteng Anti-Privatization Forum (APF) in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Fifty-two members of APF were arrested, including six children, for violating the Gatherings Act, an apartheid-era law granting police broad powers to obstruct and ban protest activity.

Similar conditions have existed in the Middle East for decades, where water, for the most part, is far more valuable than oil as a commodity.

As first revealed in detail in Mechiro shel Ihud, a comprehensive book of Israeli cabinet records between 1967 and 1977, water remains one of the pivotal reasons for the continuance of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, where Israel gets roughly one-third of its water supply.

As a result, Palestinians in the West Bank are forbidden from digging deep wells, preventing Palestinian farmers from using more water per day for farming than Israeli city dwellers are allotted for drinking.

Likewise, privatization and control of the Tigris River will also likely be one of the final results of the U.S. invasion of Iraq as the Mount Hermon watershed and Litani River was for the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

For the United States, the control of citizens’ access to water is not only an end for invasions, but also a tactic for when they begin.

From the U.S. invasion of North Korea to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the systematic singling out of water treatment facilities, sewage systems and dykes as “soft targets” for bombing has become a standard operating procedure for the U.S. military.

Clearly the commoditization of water and the use of water depravation as a weapon of war is nothing new for the United States ruling class or any of its international fronts.

What has expanded in recent years is the centrality of water as a focus for these ends.

WITHIN THE BORDERS of the United States, this augmented focus has hit Michigan the hardest.

The number of homes in Detroit and Highland Park that have had their water shut off due to non-payment is now over 100,000, resulting from a crackdown by Detroit Water and Sewage Department chief, and former Thames Water and United Water Companies executive, Victor Mercado.

Meanwhile, city corporations that account for three-fourths of the overdue money face no threat of shut-offs.

The Nestlé Corporation, through its subsidiary Ice Mountain, continues to pump 200 million gallons of Michigan’s water per year to bottle and sell back to Michigan citizens and others around the Midwest for profit, without paying a cent for the water it takes.

Last November, Judge Lawrence Root ordered Nestlé to halt operations at its Mecosta County bottling plant after a suit was brought against them by Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation.

Before the December deadline to end operations, however, Nestlé was granted an emergency stay by the Michigan Court of Appeals under pressure from Governor Jennifer Granholm.

While attorney general, Granholm referred to Nestlé’s theft as “export and diversion” of Michigan Water, and campaigned on removing Ice Mountain.

Since her election as governor, however, she has remained even cozier with the company than former Republican Governor John Engler.

After warnings that the economic crisis in Highland Park, in which 38.3 percent of the population are below the poverty line, could likely cause a second Benton Harbor if something wasn’t done, Granholm again chose the option most beneficial the capitalist class without any regard for the long-term interest of the city’s working people.

Granholm, through the city’s state-appointed Emergency Financial Manager Ramona Henderson-Pearson, proposed a plan to the Highland Park city council to privatize the Highland Park Water Department under the control of private management firm, Rothchild-Wright Group LLC, an uncannily secretive company that provides no information on its history or background even to its potential clients.

The contract would allow the company to keep the vast majority of the profits from the water system and require the city to pay back all of the company’s investment within a specified period of time or be foreclosed upon by the company.

Citizens of Highland Park packed the City Council meeting on May 24, along with members of the Highland Park Human Rights Coalition and the Socialist Party of Michigan, to demand that the council vote no on the proposed contract.

Joseph M. Wright, representing the company, dodged every question that came from city councilors and citizens, urged the council to ignore the “streetcorner revolutionaries” from the Socialist Party and vote in favor of the proposal.

By a vote of 4-1, the City Council voted down the proposed contract resulting in cheers and applause from the citizens both inside and outside the courtroom where the meeting was held.

Wright held a brief press conference outside the building after the decision was made where he declared that his company “will not take ‘no’ for an answer,” and will continue to explore other options to take control of the city water department.

WITH THE EVENTS we have witnessed in recent years pertaining to the private control of water both at home and abroad, there are two vital questions to ask:

First, why is there an increased focus on the commoditization of water? Second, why is Michigan presently the primary target within the United States?

There is no question that tightened SAPs from the IMF and World Bank are a significant factor.

Even without the backbone of military force, these programs allow the United States and other great-power capitalist countries that compose the Group of Eight (G8) to mandate privatization policies of all kinds throughout the world even within countries whose governments attempt to resist them.

Among all of the public resources and institutions affected by privatization policies, however, there are important reasons that water exceeds the others as a current central focus.

Along with increased population growth and climate change, capitalism’s environmental policies, lack of cooperative economic planning, and continuous need for short term gain has resulted in water becoming an increasingly scarce resource at epidemic heights.

Currently over 1.1 billion of the world’s people lack access to clean water and 2.4 billion lack access to proper sanitation.

According to the 2003 United Nations World Water Development Report, the global water crisis will reach unprecedented levels and a dramatically increased per capita scarcity in the years ahead.

As the scarcity of clean drinking water increases, so does its value as a commodity. The profit system is following its very nature by taking the necessary steps to reap the fruits of the epidemic it caused.

Another reason for the central focus on water is a human being’s dependency on it for survival.

Water privatization and commoditization is a way that the ruling class can constantly remind the working people that its survival and the satisfaction of its most basic physiological needs are dependent on its productive output for capitalist profit-making.

For workers to deviate from doing so can cause any of them to interchangeably become part of the unneeded “surplus population,” whose fundamental rights to life and subsistence are only privileges.

To increase such a state of desperation among working people is to cause workers’ demands to wane and the tolerability of abuse to grow.

It is this same reason that cutting off civilian access to water is so often used as an imperialist weapon of war. In both cases, the end result for the ruling class is the stability and expansion of profit and oppression.

ALTHOUGH THE ISSUES of water privatization and shutoffs in Michigan do not all necessarily relate to Great Lakes water directly, it is the presence of the Great Lakes that has caused Michigan to become the initial prime focus of these policies within the developed world.

Michigan’s surrounding lakes compose the largest body of fresh water on the planet, making Michigan the perfect premiere state for corporations to test how much they can get away with in water privatization schemes and austerity measures.

Corporations have thus realized that pooling their assets toward maneuvering the policies of Michigan’s state government and local governments, particularly within Michigan’s poorest and most desperate areas, is the next major step toward the commodification of water in the developed world.

Once a sufficient level of progress has been made in cracking open the door to public resources, a point which we have already reached, corporations can then rely on international agreements such as the World Trade Organization and NAFTA which effectively mandate increases in the privatization of public resources once they’ve begun.

The fact that water bottling companies have not yet attempted to unleash NAFTA and WTO complaints against the State of Michigan over Ice Mountain’s exclusive pumping permit, indicates that these companies are waiting until the door opens further on different fronts within the state, such as the attempted proposal in Highland Park, before taking action through these agreements.

Working people in Michigan need only look to the conditions faced by other workers overseas to see the devastation created by water privatization and control of water from without.

Michigan workers in the cities of Detroit and Highland Park have already experienced the results firsthand through the imposed policies of city governments working in cooperation with multinational corporations.

Michigan workers must fight in solidarity with workers around the world against such regressive policies in order to keep the advances achieved by workers of the past.

The fight for free access to public water is a fight for workers’ rights, human rights and the fundamental right to live.