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Editor’s note: The People’s Tribune, Joseph Peery, interviewed Marian Kramer, Co-Chair of the Highland Park Human Rights Coalition.
People’s Tribune: Tell us the problems faced by Highland Park residents from corporations attempting to privatize your water.
Marian Kramer: We’ve been involved in this fight to maintain Highland Park’s water as a public utility since 2001. Highland Park, MI, pays the highest water bills in the country. We are paying not just a water bill but sewerage treatment supplied by Detroit as well, which is the biggest part of the bill, and can be as much as three times that of the water. You can’t drink the water without sewerage treatment.
People are in danger of having their children taken from them because they can’t pay their water bill. We also face the danger of them making the water bill part of the property taxes that put people in danger of losing their homes.
We found out that Highland Park used to pump water for 50,000 people that lived here. That was the population of Highland Park at one time. When we confronted the Emergency Financial Manager, she said that we still had to pump water for 50,000 people even though only 10-12,000 people live here now. So the cost of that was on our backs. We were paying for a bunch of ‘ghosts.’ We were also paying for all those plants that closed and left. They didn’t pay for the water bill when they left.
You have to understand that water is today’s gold. The corporations want the Great Lakes. If they get Detroit and Highland Park water they get the key to privatize the Great Lakes.
They are trying to regionalize the water in Highland Park right along with Detroit. Corporate people are going to be on the Regional Water Authority Board working in the interest of the corporations. They’re not going to regionalize it for our benefit. They are going to regionalize it in the interest of the corporations. If that doesn’t work for them, they can still send in an Emergency Manager and override everybody to privatize the water.
PT: What is the lesson about the struggles around water privatization?
MK: If they can get away with this nonsense, changing laws and all that type of stuff, without the public having an opportunity to have any say so in the process, then they can come to your neighborhood and do the same thing. This is just the stomping ground of what they want to do on a national level.
PT: What is the solution?
MK: They are moving to privatization, we’ve got to move to nationalization of the water. Nationalization is the opposite of privatization. In other words, keep it public for the benefit of the people and under our control. The only way you can do that is to nationalize it, not in the interests of the corporations or the banks like they did with our moneys that bailed them out. Nationalization has to be under the control of the public and in our interest. Water needs to be provided to all based on needs rather than ability to pay.
