PHOTO/BPITTENGER, 2014
OAKLAND, CA — Corporate dictatorship is naked in Michigan, but California Governor Jerry Brown is keeping his pants on. Corporate forces are already enforcing their will in the state through the collaboration of state and local government. California must learn from Michigan before it is too late.
The ongoing Detroit Bankruptcy is having a seismic impact on California. One corporate goal is to bring down the largest sector of public workers in the country by going after their pensions.
The Detroit judge held that private bankruptcy law trumped the state constitutional guarantee of public worker pensions. They are contracts, he said, the same as any other debt. This was the first legal precedent.
When Stockton, California went bankrupt in 2012, pensions were ruled untouchable. But last month the judge ruled that cities can use bankruptcy to wipe out pension responsibilities. This was legal precedent number two.
Cities all over the country are teetering on bankruptcy. Every municipal government body, from cities to water departments, pays millions a month directly to Wall Street. This is because they were suckered into predatory hedge fund deals that are similar to predatory mortgages on homeowners. The latter is the dispossession of families; the former is the collective dispossession of the public. Aspects of these contracts have been found illegal.
This is a form of blackmail! If pensions are contracts, why are judges ruling that these contracts can be broken, while the criminal ones with the financial industry are untouchable? Governments claim that their job is to improve the lives of the people, to extend the public interest, and, as Thomas Jefferson said, create public happiness.
This pension scam shows that the system is rigged. Government that is of, by and for the corporations is one that organizes massive displacement and gentrification.
The Detroit bankruptcy judge gave his opinion that people do not have an inherent right to water. This was a direct challenge to the UN, which is investigating water shutoffs to over 300,000 families in Detroit. This opinion has vast implications.
Water wars have gone national this year with massive shutoffs in West Virginia, Toledo, Ohio and elsewhere. Most of Detroit’s water debt is owed by corporations, but they are not being cut off. Fracking destroys millions of gallons with every well.
Nestle pumps 65 million gallons a year out of the Colorado River, which no longer reaches the sea. Drought-stricken California depends on this river for water to drink.
Agribusiness corporations get 80% of California’s water. Water is distributed in the state by private water contractors who get it for next to nothing and sell it for a profit. Corporate water is highly subsidized by charging the people high rates. Gov. Brown’s Proposition One doesn’t create one drop of new water; instead it diverts billions of dollars to corporations to escalate the private control over water for profit.
The legal precedent that people have priority over corporations for water was eliminated in California in1994. Their next step will be to follow Detroit and establish the legal principle that people have no right to water at all. We must hold government accountable and demand it reverse the corporate dispossession of the public’s water.
