“As municipalities run into difficulty managing their public water systems, large conglomerates and multinational corporations are stepping in to take over; but critics say public water should not be in private hands,” writes Michelle Chen in “Corporations Grope for Increasing Portion of Public Water Supply” at New Standard News, a solid on-line news service.
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Thank you for highlighting an important issue that is usually deep in the background, since it’s not as immediate or as obvious as Iraq, erosion of our liberties, etc. On the other hand, water is right up there with air as something we can’t do without, and it doesn’t reach our taps by magic, although we seldom stop to think about how it does get there.
My personal opinion is that as a fundamental human need, the water supply should be managed by the local government, although if they want to contract out construction jobs that’s probably OK. The actual hands-on control of the process of purification, however, is something that must be operated without any potential conflict of interest.
This potential for conflict of interest will only get worse in the future, as energy supplies tighten and prices rise. Why? What does water have to do with energy? Pumps run or electricity; without power there’s no water, as many places found out during major blackouts. Also, for a large city purifying a surface water supply, lime (calcium oxide) is used by the boxcar-full, and chlorine tanks have to be trucked in. When profits are squeezed, there is going to be serious pressure on these multinational firms to cut corners and keep stockholders happy.
Suppose you’re the local plant mamager for one of the European-owned operations firms mentioned in the article. Where do you cut corners? Do you hire someone less qualified to perform the tests in your lab? Do you cut the amount of chorine down just a tad, risking waterborne infections for those folks out at the far end of the distribution system? Do you let that slug of pesticides and herbicides entering the plant in the river water, caused by spring rains upstream, go partially untreated because you’ve spent your quota of activated carbon or permanaganate for the month? What effect will it have on cancer rates, really? And it will be 50 years before epidemiologists pick it up, if at all. After all, it’s a far cry from the cholera outbreaks that ran rampant a century or so ago…
[Full Disclosure: My first job out of graduate school with a MS in chemistry was in the lab of a large midwestern city’s water and pollution control department.]
I would not be at all surprised if this issue isn’t starting to face public health departments. After all, it’s also facing schools, with the “charter school” movement. Why not hire out the entire EPA to KBR; they know how to clean up a Superfund site? Why not hire out the CDC to the pharmaceutical industry; after all, aren’t they the folks that are really doing the heavy lifting to protect us from disease?
Concern about conflicts of interest, where shareholder equity trumps the public good are so 20th century, after all. Do you think this is the FDR administration or something? </snark>
Did you know department: Did you know one of the underlying issues in the recent unrest in Bolivia was the foreign control of their water supplies? As mentioned in the article, it’s our unbridled free trade agreements coming home to the USA…
I’m not a Socialist (that’s my son, who posts over at Kos), but it seems to me that certain “natural monopolies” like the water supply – and for that matter the power supply – belong in publicly held utilities. Some of us have been on the losing side of this fight since the Reagan Administration (even during Clinton). Maybe, just maybe, the tide is starting to turn, finally?
Hopefully, by the time I have to put my teeth in a cup at night the water they’re sitting in won’t be brought to you by some multinational conglomerate.
Wow! I thought maybe no one would post. I hope YOU WILL DIARY this story since you know much more about it than I. Keep us informed!
“Don’t worry honey, this won’t hurt at all.”
Riiiiiiiiight. Econ 301. You learn that in some industries, competition is impossible or not good at all. Privatization of things that are common goods can really, really blow up on you. Complete privatization causes collapse. Uncontrolled monopoly of a basic necessity leads to disaster and revolution.
What kind of competition is POSSIBLE in water distribution? It’s not like we’re on a national water grid (like our power grid). You can’t go around burying more pipes. And, why do we want to privatize a NECESSARY GOOD? We want strict control of the water supply (and hence strict control of price). We want one set of pipes that are consistently maintained. We want to keep the bodies of water they pipe out of as common goods (else we can have a company decide that certain people just can’t get access to water).
This isn’t like phone or cable service. This is freaking water! What’s next, privatize our electoral, marital, and education decisions too?
Oh.
Is that palladiate as in to coat with palladium?
Inquiring (or just nosy) chemists want to know.
Heheh. Well it COULD mean that.
It means three things:
1) Latin, I tried to figure out a latin word back in grade school
a) stem Palla(s)- Pallas, or Athena, Goddess of wisdom. Pallas is invoked when wisdom and understanding are sought.
b) root *ate To command. And in “Do this!”
c) Add a “d” to combine, as in Palla(d)ium (Image of Pallas, or a bust). Hence Palladiate, be commanded to wisdom. To force yourself to understand. Control over your mind. (also now a verb that someone attributed to me, Google it).
This has been a favorite hot-button topic for me for quite a long time. There has been an all-out war going on for several years in several towns south of SF over not private management, but private ownership of water districts. Think it couldn’t happen to you?
Those systems account for 500,000 customers in California and 15 million nationwide.
It’s all here in a SF Chronicle article from 2002.
But for many people, water should not be a commodity like cars or shoes.
“In layman’s terms, this water comes down the creek right behind my house and runs downhill to the collection point,” said Almquist. “We pay for pumping it back up to our homes, and we buy the water.
“It was one thing to pay for that service,” he continued. “But now we’re paying profits to a CEO in Germany for moving this water a little distance, and that’s bizarre.”
In the business deal that saw American Water Works acquired by Thames Water, which was then acquired by RWE of Germany, many of our country’s water districts have fallen under this ownership model.
Thames’ pollution-friendly business model is being exported to the rest of the world as part of the increasing concentration and consolidation of transnational corporations pushing to privatize the world’s water.
Thames Water was fully acquired by the German energy conglomerate RWE AG in January 2003. RWE is one of the world’s largest energy giants with more than 640 subsidiaries worldwide and annual revenues of more than $50 billion. RWE is in turn acquiring American Water Works through Thames Water–the largest publicly held U.S.-based water utility with 16 million customers in 29 states and three Canadian provinces. Thames is the operational manager of RWE’s international water business, including the management of the U.S. properties owned by American Water Works. Thames/RWE is gaining yet more control of U.S. water and wastewater services by entering into an agreement with Operations Management International (OMI), a Denver (US)-based firm. The corporate web is spun.
Dear god. “Pollution-friendly”
What can we do?
Well, the little town of Felton, CA, in the Santa Cruz Mountains, has fought back to try to regain ownership of their water district from AWW. They have gotten their county board of supervisors to approve a buy-back plan (I’m a little unclear if this is being done through eminent domain or what). They are now in the process of trying to raise the millions that it will take to reassert control of their own water (sadly, it seems like community garage sales may not be enough).
But the media has done very little (and even the blogosphere doesn’t seem all that interested) in promoting this as a story. Yet it is so insidious and, obviously, has the potential to severely impact the lives of all of us, that we need to get the information out any way we can.
Maybe you can help by telling the story through diaries … you write very well so you’re a natural to do that. Would the local paper take a guest column from you?