Editor’s note: Water cutoffs in Detroit are spiraling out of control, reaching thousands of families every week. What’s behind this is the attempt on the part of the city and the corporations to privatize the water system. We need a publically owned water system in America. Below are excerpts from an interview with Maureen Taylor, State Chair of the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization, speaking on Democracy, Now!
Democracy Now: How many people are having their water cut off in Detroit?
Maureen Taylor: We’re told that it’s anywhere from 3,000 per month to 3,000 per week. But at our offices at Michigan Welfare Rights, we are getting 30 to 40 calls an hour where people are saying, “I’m afraid that my water is about to be cut off,” or, “My water has already been cut off.” So, it is scandalous.
In Michigan, it is particularly egregious, because a household that has welfare involvement, and water is turned off with minor children in a home, means that protective services can come in and take the children out and put them in foster care. It’s just scandalous.
This is an orchestrated attack by banks and corporations to enrich themselves. But when our colleagues in Canada suggested we should go to the United Nations, we jumped at the opportunity. And we are expecting the U.N. to come to Detroit, take a look at what’s going on here and to make some kind of declarations about human rights violations. This is an outrage.
Democracy Now: There’s been basically no federal aid for Detroit. But seeing how banks, how auto companies got big bailouts, and Detroit was left to bleed, it’s a city that’s four-fifths Black, 80 percent African-American. Do you think racism is at play here?
Maureen Taylor: Racism is always at play. People of color can never escape the shadow of the plantation. But we are joining this question of Black and white with green. This is about greed. This is about the fact that there used to be about 1.4 or 1.5 million people living in Detroit. And what was popular here was Dodge Main, Chevrolet Gear and Axle, Huber Avenue Foundry, Lynch Road Assembly, Rouge Plant, the great Rouge Plant. And these factories built something called a “middle class” across the country.
Just where I live in Detroit, 400,000 manufacturing jobs have disappeared. They went the way of technology. The technology that used to enhance labor, now replaces labor. So R2-D2 robots now work at these, quote-unquote, “factories.” These dinosaurs are gone. And so those good-paying jobs left with them. And, of course, you have people of color—“let’s go get them first,” they say. Of course, you have blue-collar workers—let’s go get them first.
But this is more egregious. This no-good, trifling, backstabbing Kevyn Orr, the emergency manager, is getting a thousand dollars an hour. This man makes $8,000 in one day; and a family of two, $5,040 in a year. It’s outrageous. And then to come after folks that have lost jobs, that are staying in Detroit to try to help to rebuild and repopulate my city, and then to say, “What we’re going to do is turn your water off because you can’t pay for it”? We’re not going to tolerate it.
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