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TechnoratiCorporations Badmouth Public Water
Things aren't looking pretty for drinking water these days. Recent articles from The New York Times and the Associated Press have exposed unchecked pollution, grave gaps in oversight, decaying infrastructure, and concerns about emerging contaminants.
Yet one voice sees the decay of our water infrastructure through a rose-colored glass. "We're bullish on water in the next 10 years," said Nestlé Waters North America CEO Kim Jeffery, on a recent call for analysts. How exactly can he say this, given recent reports?
The Clean Water Act was passed in the 1970s in response to widespread public concern about high levels of water pollution. Images of the Cuyahoga River in Ohio burning or the dredging of Boston Harbor still linger as a reminder of how bad things had become. There has been much progress in the 40 years since, but there are still problems and a long way to go.
At the root of these problems lies the question, "for whom?" For whom are our country's waters intended first and foremost? Surely our founding fathers' design was not to have a set of private polluters and users control it as they please.
Behind many of the problems facing our water resources and systems lies corporate control of water. Big corporations often have priority access to water, which they then overuse, abuse or appropriate to benefit their bottom line without regard for the costs to the public. Sometimes the impact is direct-Massey dumping coal slurry into streams in West Virginia, or General Electric's legacy of PCB contamination in the Hudson River. In other cases, it is indirect--pesticides and fertilizers may be applied by farmers, but the agribusiness and chemical corporations that produce them profit handsomely from encouraging their overuse, while the impacts flow downstream.
When this is what the upstream impact of corporate control looks like, why would we look to yet another private corporation to make things right?
Nestlé's Jeffery said that, "we believe tap infrastructure in the U.S. will continue to decline. People will turn to filtration and bottled water for pure water needs." The bottled water industry isn't just seizing an opportunity- it is banking on the decline of our water infrastructure as key to their successful business model. Nestlé is actually helping to further this decline. Jeffery boasts that, "our company is the only one out there driving the consumption of bottled water in America and the need to consume bottled water in America."
Well, how does one do that, if not by disparaging the alternative-the tap? And what public, disheartened by accusations against the tap, would advocate for renewed investment in public water? (Ironically, Nestlé's Pure Life brand is bottled tap water and bottled water in general is less regulated than the tap.)
Nevertheless, Nestlé might argue, "isn't a business model based on bypassing or cleaning up other corporation's messes an illustration of the ‘magic' of market forces?" The reality is this ‘magic' means those who can pay, will, and those who cannot, will go thirsty.
As pollution increases and clean water becomes scarce, the expensive treatments required will make providing it more expensive. As rates increase, wealthy users of water--well-to-do gated communities, industrial users or big agribusiness firms--will pay what they need to pay. For the rest, there will either be derelict tap water or bottled water at prices much higher than what most of us currently pay.
Relying on corporations to provide solutions to our drinking water challenges doesn't solve the problem because it relies on the same principle--corporate control--that created many of the problems in the first place. There are other ways. Federal spending on our water systems is at historic lows. We can invest the money needed to rehabilitate them; an investment which would help pay for itself and then some by creating local jobs and promoting further economic development.
We must reaffirm our nation's commitment to first provide clean, affordable drinking water for all, and ensure that our water systems and resources are democratically controlled for the public good. Because as Nestlé's Jeffery aptly points out, "the only question [now] is who gets what share of water." It's our choice.
8 Comments so far
Show All"the bottled water industry isn't just seizing an opportunity- it is banking on the decline of our water infrastructure as key to their successful business model."
It's worse than that. The corporate interests are deliberately manipulating the dismantling of the public water supply system, blocking funding, lobbying for new laws in their favour. They are creating a crisis, engineering a take-over.
In Walkerton, Ontario, corporate water management was so corrupt it killed people, made many ill. Many of the places that tried privatization of the water supply have reverted to the public option. Bolivia gave Bechtel the boot when, among other things, it became a crime to collect rain water for your garden. (the spurious "right vs. need" argument)
According to what I've observed, not a single thing that's been "privatized", not a single thing, is being run better or more cheaply than the public option, government; always more expensive, less accessible, incompetent, rude, constantly breaking down, running late, out of service, etc., evidence of a deep contempt for the customer/citizen.
It should be pretty obviousby now that the corporations are stripping resources, devastating environments with pollutions and destructive practices, that they feel no responsibility to the peoples whose resources and lands they raid. they'll clean the place out and abandon it. Like Fiji, leaving the locals to cope with the social and environmental effects of the devastation. They'll treat you the same way - already are, look at the damage being done to schools and other public infrastructures, or to war veterans.
Stop drinking bottled water! Their ridiculous profits are funding the take-over of the COMMON GOOD. You do not need 8 glasses of water per day - it's a crock, a scheme to make you consume those little bottles. The plastic waste is destroying the planet. And most if it is tap water anyway, tap water from far away - think of the trucks, ships, and the gasoline wasted on what you can get by opening a tap...in your own home, any time of day or night.
Get one of those colourful steel bottles - 10 refills from the tap, and you've paid it off and prevented the likes of Nestle and coca-cola, Pesi, Bechtel, etc. from a little bit of their unjust enrichment. We keep a couple full in the fridge for when we need refreshment.
Look here:
http://www.citizen.org/cmep/Water/general/majorwater/
Obviously the key here is to combine sophisticated filtering - and sometimes even distillation - with Bolivarian-style public action to starve off the water-jackals.
Accordingly, links to analysis of filter-types should accompany this kind of article.
If they really believe that public water is bad, then they ought to stop buying public water at the obscenely-cheap prices they negotiate with local municipalities, and they might want to stop setting up bottling companies in areas without abundant fresh water, like the deserts of Southern California, the dying wetlands of Florida, and the country of India, where local wells have mysteriously been sucked dry shortly after the opening of a nearby Coca-Cola bottling plant.
It's just a coincidence, like when areas downwind of coal-fired electrical plants mysteriously become dangerously contaminated by high levels of mercury, or when industries recently deregulated suddenly have layoffs and start screwing their customers.
Excellent article!
Focuses on the need to fight hard for strong clean municipal water systems.
Thank you!
On this planet we've always had random criminals acting individually or in small groups to murder, bludgeon, rape, steal from, etc., their otherwise innocent fellows. And we use government outlaw these criminals' conduct.
We also have officially defined crime syndicates that do the same horrid things on a larger private scale, and we rightly use government to outlaw their behavior, too.
Then we have civil governments themselves; run all too often by people who make it legal for themselves, in the name of 'the government,' to do or to sponsor the same horrid things as private criminals do; though, arguably, outlawing such government corruption, especially in a formalized democratic republic, is understood to not involve wanting to outlaw the concept of civil government itself.
Finally, we have modern, vastly wealthy, so-called public/ for-profit corporations, perfunctorily 'state-chartered' to operate according to Public Law,'bu in reality operating as private governments unto themselves, since such legal entities now have the power to purchase from an always-corruptible civil government any law needed to make private profit by.
While there's not much more that law abiding humans can do about standardly-illegal petty criminals or private crime syndicates, than to expect civil government to fight them for us, citizens can do more about legally-chartered but criminally acting corporations.
Corporate personhood can be reversed by Law, and corporate chartering law can be re-legislated to make ALL corporate behavior more accountable to the non-shareholding public.
Virtually every dire social, economic, and environmental crisis that law-abiding citizens are now faced with, in the US and increasingly throughout the world, is due to the legalized sociopathic behavior of corporations which are chartered in the name of The People.
Removing this institutionalized insanity needs to be the focal point of, the main mission, of our present politics.
Excellent post CC.
Focus on the STRUCTURE of our economy and political system, which exalts corporate power and subverts all forms of democracy.
Fight the power!
This shows one of the underlying flaws of the CAPITALIST Model.
It is in the BEST interests of the Corporations that the resource called water BECOMES POLLUTED or SCARCE and in order to maximize profits they will work to ensure that happens.
Capitalism rewards bad behaviour . It can not act in the Public Interest.
Exactly!
The bottles themselves contaminate & pollute. Those who consume bottled, unregulated water are poisoning themselves & killing the planet.
Capitalism kills, all the way to the bank.