PHOTO/VALERIE JEAN
America is heading for a showdown between the corporations and the American people. Corporate owner Warren Buffett gave notice in 2006 when he said, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” One of the leading edges of the war Mr. Buffett is talking about has become known as “water wars.”
Donald Trump’s proposed budget intends to eliminate one quarter of the Environmental Protection Agency’s 15,000 jobs as well as slash the agency’s budget by 31%. Where are people supposed to take their just grievances if this crippling of the EPA succeeds? With ever-new revelations of poisoned and polluted drinking water popping up all over the country, it’s just a matter of time before other disasters like Flint, Michigan occur.
Just four days after President Trump’s inauguration he issued a memorandum ordering the restart of construction on the Dakota Access Pipeline. This reversed months of successful protests by water protectors and thousands of supporters at the Sioux Standing Rock Reservation who feared that the pipeline would pollute their drinking and fishing waters.
While the government is trying to get us to focus on making war abroad, the same government is eliminating all restraints on the corporations, and the result is what amounts to a war being waged against our children and us.
We see this in Flint and the other Flints that are yet to come. Whether it’s Detroit, Michigan; rural West Virginia; Dimock, Pennsylvania; Corpus Christi, Texas; East Chicago, Indiana; or rural Nebraska, water wars are being waged on us and we have no rights that this corporate government is bound to respect. Our children, their bodies ravaged by lead and other poisons face early death preceded by a lifetime of illness, lowered IQs and behavioral problems. To add insult to injury the people are forced to pay inflated water bills for water they and their children still can’t bathe in, cook with or drink. And if Trump and his ruling class have their way, people will be denied needed healthcare that could help alleviate their suffering.
The corporate governmental power that is being consolidated in the Trump administration recognizes no human right to water. There is simply no profit in that for the billionaires. Once it became cheaper and more profitable for them to use robots and computers instead of us, our access to clean, safe water came to an end. They are not going to provide water for people they do not need. The only rights they recognize are corporate rights to steal our publicly owned waterways, rivers, lakes, aquifers and water infrastructure, make them their private property and then sell it back to us for a profit, while denying it to those who can’t afford to pay.
Water is life. It is not something that should be owned by corporations. If we don’t have control of our water we cannot survive. Ask yourself, on a planet where three fourths of the surface is covered by water, why should corporations have rights to all that water while the human right of “we the people” is denied? In fact, under such conditions, why should anyone get a water bill at all?
An economic system that creates unusable water for the people by dumping toxins under the guise of trying to save money, and on the other hand, steals the water rights of the people in the service of the corporations, must be replaced. Our water, our economy and our government must be publicly owned and run in our interests, not the corporations.
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