And this is what capitalism looks like. The air you breathe is next.

Gov. Granholm (D-MI) signed over water rights is Mecosta county to Nestle-bottling the aquifer for profit. You cant trust any of them to not sell out.
Better to do something about it now-occupy and protest for public-owned and get that written into law (again-spelled out prohibition) for the people so there is no ability for corrupt local, state, federal to sell us out.
Our Great Lakes and Michigan is fighting fracking and off coast drilling.

This is Texas we are talking about; everything (and everybody) is for sale there. Oh, well, Robert, might be time to stop watering the stupid grass - it will take care of itself, more or less ....

Corporations like Monsanto and Bechtel and their ilk are buying up water supplies all over the world. Then, as is their wont, raising prices drastically.

Corporations have already taken over our breathing air with plumes of industrial chemicals and agribusiness pesticides spread far and wide so that we cannot help but breathe them into our bodies, causing cancers and other ills which then benefit the petrochemical corporations. Win, win for them..

And, excepting for those of us who grow or buy organic food, corporations have taken over our food, too, putting various poisons in them to make them taste "good" or fool our stomachs into thinking we're still "hungry." or just poisoning us from within with genetically-engineered "food."

These are the wages of a system which promotes private profit over the health and welfare of earth's humans and other life forms.

It's immoral and amoral and if we care about our own and other creatures' survival, we will come up with serious ideas, and then work for them so we can have a society where We, the People, make the decisions that affect our lives.

Let us recall that when a far right wing government in Bolivia privatized the national water supply and attempted to charge for water that had been drawn from wells for thousands of years, the people revolted and deposed that government.
Tony Vodvarka

Furthermore, that lawn and all other lawns ought to be turned into gardens to grow food.

Raised beds about two feet high, 4-5 feet wide, and as long as they want, built out of plain lumber (pine is a bit soft, but it will work) - no treated wood - then filled with soil from their own yard or composted food and yard waste (do NOT buy "compost" which contains sewer sludge - toxic), plant seeds, weed, harvest food.

Raised beds are efficient users of water, especially with drip irrigation. Then just let whatever will grow in unmown "lawn" grow. I don't mow at all, just clip paths, and lots of good edible "weeds" pop up which I add to my salads.

This will soon become necessary to people's survival, so might as well begin now to save money and eat healthier by growing one's own food, at least in part.

Kudos to you “abvodvarka” for remembering Bolivia. The people rose up and took back their water rights. Why aren’t Americans doing the same thing, especially all those big-mouthed Texans?

Water is a human right. What is it about the issue of privatization that people do not understand? There is Commons….that which we all hold in common as the rights to water, air, all things that sustain life. Then there is privatization whose only mission is to make profits and to enrich their shareholders and if you cannot afford whatever they are selling such as water….then FU.

The fabled 'Free Market' does not function without competition. These private water ventures are monopolies. The Texan citizenry has no alternative water source. The Texas state government has taken a laissez-faire attitude and not legislated a level playing field. The Texas state government has not acted in the interest of its citizenry. Extortion, by any name, needs to be called out and prosecuted. Nixon put price controls on oil. Price controls are needed on water in Texas. Why do we have a government at all? Do all bad things come out of Texas?

To make matters worse, fracking, a Halliburton creation, is fouling the fresh water supply all over North America. Fracking is systematically decreasing the fresh water supply and thereby increasing the value of the remaining supply. In the future, polluted water will need to be processed to be potable. Today, private water ventures are getting in on the ground floor of a supply side economics investment boom. There will be no returning to the land. There will be no 'Agrarian Justice'.

Big money needs a place to be. What better place than invested in utilities with no risk of loss. Great and powerful criminal masterminds are creating a water shortage that they will be in a position to profit from. Water processing plants will need to be built, financed and operated. We will be billed in perpetuity. Our ever decreasing discretionary income will again decrease.

The coming water crisis is the energy crisis redux. The same supply side time tested con. Control the supply of an essential mass consumed resource - get a monopoly. Keep supply below demand to drive price. Maintain the staus quo.

Is water not a human right? Will we finally get solar power when the great and powerful grant themselves patents on the rays of the sun itself? In 100 years will we pay for the air we breath? The greed of the few has privatized humanity.

you take care how you go through those puddles - they don't belong to you.

H-2-owe.

Privatization in action. When you add in that profit motive, sensibility goes right out the window. ANYONE who thinks that when given the chance, the rich WON'T screw you is a complete fool. In fact, you had better COUNT on it.

We need relief not only from water barons but folks that think in this day and age that you can have a big grassy lawn that require too much water. This kind of greed has to stop also.

In many places its also against the law to collect the rainwater that falls on your property and rolls off your house. And you WILL be fined if caught.

I used to live in west Texas, very little rain and like a fool I watered my few square feet of grass....it did no good at all. Then I learned sense and left it all to its own devices, no grass but greenish weeds and then drought resisant shrubs and plants. Looked fine to me. Here in more humid Mississippi I don't water at all in the summer and if we hit a dry spell the grass dies out, first sprinkle of rain it greens up again. Most people train their grass to 'expect' more water that it needs. Yep, raised beds are easy once you have built them and require very little 'work'. The water you save on the grass can help the home grown veggies and once you've eaten your own home grown tomatoes I bet you NEVER eat store bought again. The issue of privatized water is very real luckily we have a water cooperative so our rates are very low...but its still just common sense to conserve regardless of cost.

Anyone maintaining a green lawn in a desert should have to pay enormous fines. I don't have any sympathy for the guy in the article. That being said, yes the privatization of water is a problem that we have seen growing for years. Is anyone actually surprised??

Whenever one's water and sewer 'service' is privatized, those whom had the foresight to have a rain water capture system in their rain gutters and a grey water system for their landscaping & / or garden will thank themselves as their payback period had just accelerated.

In his documentary “The Power of Nightmares,” Adam Curtis traces Muslim extremism back to Sayyid Qutb’s stay at the University of Colorado in Greeley. He was appalled by many aspects of US culture, but one of them, in line with his more general critique of US superficiality and materialism, was our obsession with lawn care. When I watched that part I burst out laughing. Living in our little fiefdoms, well separated from our neighbors by lawns, the bigger the better. This great fertile nation wasted on lawns.

Ask most people what the “Amerikan Dream” means, and they’ll tell you a more lavish lifestyle. A land where you can keep a green lawn in Texas, dumping scads of poisons all over it along with endless waterings in a world increasingly short on water, and then take the kids to an “all you can eat” buffet, where most of the food is thrown out at the end of the night. In your minivan, which has TVs all over it so the kiddies won’t whine. Ah, the good life.

Privatization of such necessities as water is truly disgusting, but one wonders what else but high prices would keep people from wasting water here in Amerika. That this will mean profits for the one percent is just part of the design, as people have been too obsessed with their little “good” lives to notice what’s been coming down the pike as they applaud idiots that say privatization is the answer to everything, and hope to move to a bigger house with a bigger lawn. Hey kids, let’s go watch Donald Trump’s new show! Maybe he’ll run for president!

I wrote a post on the “Occupy Our Homes” story on Friday. A bedridden woman on disability wants to keep a 2200 square foot home that is in danger of being foreclosed on. Apparently she lives there herself. I sort of wondered why some of the Occupy protestors, many of whom are short on cash, couldn’t offer to move in and pay a modest rent and help out with the yardwork, natch, allowing her to keep her spacious home that way. I wonder what she would have said to that. The post disappeared (which I take to be a glitch in the system; some of my more strident posts remain, so go figure).

But that would hardly be the Amerikan way, would it?

Our love of lawns probably is descended from nostalgia for the Northern European origins of our early American ancestors. Of course privatization of water is horrible, but the upside is that people living in arid places may rethink that huge waste of resources and the intense poisoning of our soil traceable to our silly, conformist, square, green 'swards.' Get a good book on xeriscaping or use native plants to indicate some sense of place - ya know?