UNITED STATES: WATER WARS

by People’s Tribune Editorial Board | 10th May 2017 3:31 pm

“Trump’s EPA will create more Flints… 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…”

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.

Proposed EPA cuts: corporations are making the rules

President Trump’s proposed cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency would nearly eliminate all regional cleanup programs, including those for the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico. The second-biggest cut would be the program which helps deal with pollutants from sources not directly regulated under the Clean Water Act, such as the phosphorus that flows into Lake Erie from fertilizer, harming fish and other wildlife.

The cuts would also: reduce grants that help states monitor the safety of public water systems; curtail the EPA’s ability to police and impose penalties on environmental offenders; and reduce funding for the Climate Protection Program.

The attack on the EPA may also include closing the agency’s Region 5 office in Chicago. Observers say this could undermine the EPA’s ability to monitor pollution in the Great Lakes and curtail its ability to carry out enforcement actions against coal-fired power plant owners.

Whatever the final picture looks like, you can bet there will be cuts of some kind, and they will be an attack on our lives and on the planet in order to make greater profits for big business. Whether it’s Democrat or Republican politicians in charge, it’s the corporations that are making the rules, and that’s what we need to change. We have to fight for a government that reports to the people, not the corporations. We have to get control over the corporations before they destroy society and the Earth.

 

By the People’s Tribune Editorial Board

May 2017

 

Source & References:

Image:

Protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, 13 September, 2016.

By Fibonacci Blue from Minnesota, USA [CC BY 2.0

(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0[1])], via Wikimedia Commons

Source:

http://peoplestribune.org/pt-news/[2]

Copyright remains with: © 2017 People’s Tribune.

References:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_water_crisis[3]

http://michaelmoore.com/10FactsOnFlint/[4]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/02/donald-trump-plans-to-abolish-environmental-protection-agency[5]

Video:

Flint residents protest paying for poisoned water (World Socialist Web Site)

Flint Water Crisis: Contractors Made Millions on Switch (February 2016)

Flint: Poisoned drinking water causing irreparable brain damage – BBC News (Jan 2016)

Source URL: https://globalrights.info/2017/05/united-states-water-wars/

---