Privatization of Water as an Owned Commodity Rather Than a Universal Human Right
By Joachim Hagopian Global Research, June 25, 2016
There is no greater natural resource on this earth than water. As
the sustenance of all life, water keeps every living and breathing
organism, every plant, every animal and every human being on this planet
alive. In the same way that without air to breathe, without water we
humans cannot sustain life for more than a few days.
Due to global warming, widespread drought and increasingly polluted
water systems, the projected availability of clean freshwater in years
to come to meet the rising demands of a growing global population is
among the most daunting human challenges of this century. By 2015 a 17%
increase in global water demand is projected just for increasing
agriculturally produced food. By the same year 2025, the growing global
population will increase water consumption needs by a whopping 40%.
While oil played the keenly critical role during the twentieth century,
water is being deemed the most valued precious natural resource of the
twenty-first century.
As such, several years ago the United Nations declared
access to clean drinking water a universal human right. Conversely,
willfully denying it is considered a serious human rights violation that
denies life itself. And any calculated decision denying people their
universal right to life is nothing short of a murderous, shameful crime
against humanity.
Despite the human air pollution that has long been dirtying our
lungs, while also causing global warming, climate change and increasing
catastrophic natural disasters, not to mention the growing global health
hazard for us humans, the very thought of making clean air a precious
commodity that can opportunistically be packaged and sold by the same
corporations that have been ruining our air, that very notion would
instantly be criticized, scorned and ridiculed.
Yet that is exactly what has been happening for the last thirty years
now all over this planet with the earth’s preciously dwindling
freshwater drinking supply. The World Bank has been financing global
privatization of the earth’s water supply making clean water that is so
necessary for survival an unaffordable private commodity for the poorest
people on earth to even access. They are literally dying of thirst and
disease because of greedy psychopathic corporate profiteers once again
placing theft and greed over human welfare and life itself.
But then that is the globalist agenda – thinning the human herd down
from near seven billion currently to as low as just half a billion. That
means 13 out of 14 of us alive today according to their diabolical
oligarch plan simply must die within the next few years. And what better
way to rapidly kill off the human population than taking full ownership
and control over the earth’s limited diminishing water supply.
More people on this planet are dying presently from waterborne disease from dirty water than are dying from all wars and violence worldwide combined. Every hour 240 babies die from
unsafe water. 1.5 million children under five years of age die every
year from cholera and typhoid fever due to unsanitary water conditions.
These incredibly sad, alarming facts illustrate just how significant and
critical a clean freshwater supply is to staying alive on this planet.
Taking control over the earth’s clean water supply is achieved by
turning water into a privately owned commodity that only the largest
corporations and banks control. Simply making water unaffordable and
thereby inaccessible to the poorest people on the planet is one
extremely effective, albeit most sinister way to reduce the so called
overpopulation problem.
Three primary ways that the human population decreases significantly
every year is death caused by starvation and malnutrition (including
lack of drinkable water) at between seven to eight millionpeople, diseases that kill between two to three million (with mounting threats of infectious diseases becoming pandemics) and upwards of near a half million dying each year from war.
Behind closed doors oligarchic globalists periodically meet and
discuss what is best for humanity and the planet according to them and
their megalomaniacal self-interests. For many years now this all
important topic of water privatization and control as a convenient and
most effective means of addressing the overpopulation problem has been
regularly tabled for discussion… along with related topics like
geo-engineering, GMO’s, vaccines, overuse of antibiotics, planned wars
over oil and water, devising global policies designed to increase
political destabilization, poverty and undermine economies, nuclear
radiation and a host of other means for culling the human population.
Time Magazine reported
how the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been financing research
at the University of North Carolina among 78 others to develop
ultrasound infertility contraception techniques to sterilize male sperm.
At a 2010 TED conference Bill
Gates spoke openly of depopulating the total of 6.8 billion people
living on earth by up to “10 to 15%” using both of his heavily funded
vaccine and contraception programs that will render much of the global
population infertile. Meanwhile, billionaire Ted Turner went even
further, offering his public opinion to decrease the world population by
70% down to “two billion.” It too is on tape.
Calls to begin sterilizing the human population began surfacing back
in the mid-1970’s with Henry Kissinger as former Secretary of State and
high ranking Bilderberg member in his declassified National Security
Council document (1974) entitled “The Implications of World-wide PopulationGrowth
on the Security and External Interests of the United States.” This
document emphasized highest priority given to implementing birth control
programs targeting thirteen Third World nations mostly in South
America. Extraordinary resources were allocated through the U.S. Agency
for International Development (USAID) pushing the carrot stick of
additional financial aid to countries willing to enact sterilization and
depopulation programs.
More overt evidence of the callous contempt that globalist oligarchs
have toward us 99%-ers is captured in a statement written by Prince
Phillip, Queen Elizabeth II’s husband in the forward of his book, “I
must confess that I am tempted to ask for reincarnation as a
particularly deadly virus” to reduce the human population. It seems
readily discernable that an explicit globalist agenda for a New World
Order openly propagated with repeated references by President Goerge
Bush senior includes depopulation through various means, water control
through privatization just one of many in the power elite’s arsenal.
Humans have been dying from lack of clean water for a long time now
and will only continue dying at an even greater frequency if the plan to
privatize water continues to unfold unchecked and without opposition.
Fortunately forces have been mobilizing to combat water privatization.
Just last week on the heels of the World Bank annual convening in
Washington DC for several days ofconferencing,
an international coalition of anti-privatization water rights groups
from India and America sent a formal message calling on the World Bank
to end its destructive practice of privatizing water around the world
under the guise of developmental progress. The Bank’s DC meetings had
been touting lies and disinformation in an attempt to paint a glowing
report showcasing the so called efficacy and successes that turning
water rights over to the private sector have accomplished in recent
years. The World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) as the
planet’s largest funding source for water privatization provides loans
and financing to Third World nations for private water management
companies to take charge of municipal, regional and national water
rights.
The director of a global advocacy group called Corporate Accountability International,
Shayda Naficy, pointed out that 75% of expenses for running a water
utility company should go to infrastructure. In nation after nation
private companies have placed the priority of making a profit over the
need to invest in necessary infrastructure to connect and adequately
service water customers. In efforts to maximize cost efficiency as well
as profits, water prices invariably go up and fast become out of reach
for poorest customers. Cutting off the water supply to thousands of low
income families unable to pay for their rising costs has become the all
too frequent inevitable result. The World Bank’s 34 percent failure rate for
all private water and sewerage contracts between 2000 and 2010 far
surpasses its single digit failure rates in the telecommunications,
energy and transportation industries.
Critics maintain
that the public sector is far more accountable to its public
constituents than private sector businesses that only answer to its
board of directors to show sufficient profits. Corruption becomes
commonplace. Additionally, a conflict of interest exists when the IFC
acts as both a money lender and consultant to foreign municipalities in
assigning no bid contracts to favored private water utility companies.
To best illustrate typical scenarios where water privatization is
either not working or already proved a failure deserve close
examination. The good news is that in recent years people in various
parts of the world have been mobilizing successful efforts and campaigns
to stop water privatization in their own backyards. Presently in a
number of regions in India, citizens are banding together to confront
and fight the myriad of problems with water privatization in their
country.
Recently in Nagpur, central India’s largest city where the country’s first municipal partnership with
a private utility company is being played out, major tensions have
erupted. Three years ago the city signed a 25-year contract with Veolia
Water to supply the city of 2.7 million residents with 24 hour-7-days a
week water service. Instead unforeseen delays driving up prices manyfold
along with unfair water distribution and frequent service breakdowns
have led to widespread angry protests in the streets and charges of
corruption. City officials point to a series of serious contract
violations. Again cutting corners by refusing to invest in the needed
infrastructure appears to be the primary cause for this failed project.
The Corporate Accountability International’s 2012 report called “Shutting the Spigot on Private Water: The Case for the World Bank to Divest” cites a number of similar cases where privatization has proven ineffective.
Bold and empowered citizens in Bolivia in the year 2000 made headlines around the globe when
they were victorious in kicking out privatized water there in the form
of the Bechtel, the fifth largest private corporation on the planet.
Impassioned protestors in Bolivia’s third-largest city managed to oppose
Bechtel’s increasing prices and demanded that the company abandon its
hold on their city’s municipal water supply, eventually driving the
powerful scandalous giant out of the country. Though big business
efforts to buy and control water rights in many Latin American nations
have each had their turn in nations like Equator and Brazil, only Chile
water services are privatized. Ultimately local residents virtually
everywhere privatization has attempted to take hold has been met with
such strong resistance from consumers who realize their private utility
company has failed miserably in delivering quality service at affordable
prices.
The story is always the same. That is why advocacy groups like
Corporate Accountability International is proactively working toward
educating governments and citizens worldwide to ensure water remains
under the public domain. The exhaustive and expensive legal process of
ending long term contracts and successfully removing privatized foreign
corporations once established in a city, state or country is formidable.
It is obviously in the best interests of people around the world to
ensure privatization of their water supply never gets a local foothold
in the first place.
Nestlé corporation’s
marketing campaign targeted wealthy Pakistanis in Lahore, and its brand
of bottled water ‘Pure Life’ became a status symbol for the rich. To
bottle its product, Nestlé busily dried up local underground springs
that subsequently caused the village poor unable to buy the bottled
water stolen from their springs to end up consuming contaminated water.
Nestlé went on to extracting water from two deep wells in Bhati Dilwan
village, forcing them to turn to bottled water. A similar story emerged
from Nigeria where a single bottled water exceeds the average daily
income of a Nigerian citizen. Nestlé is notorious for draining local
water supplies used to bottle its water brands, then charge unaffordable
prices to the local population whose clean water supply was stolen from
them.
Corporate Watch released
a report exposing some of the unethical and illegal practices that
Nestlé has long been committing around the globe, completely
disregarding public health concerns while destroying natural
environments to ensure huge annual profits of $35 billion just from
water bottle sales alone. In Brazil’s Serra da Mantiqueira region where
the groundwater is rich in mineral content containing medicinal
properties, over-pumping has depleted its valuable water resources and
caused permanent damage to the natural environment. and long-term
damage.
Nestlé has also allegedly been involved in human trafficking of child slave labor.
A BBC investigative report claimed that “hundreds of thousands of
children in Mali, Burkina Faso and Togo were being purchased from their
destitute parents and shipped to the Ivory Coast to be sold as slaves to
cocoa farms.” Yet Nestlé likely bought the cocoa from the Ivory Coast
and Ghana knowing it was produced using child slaves.
Finally, Nestlé owns or leases fifty spring sites throughout
America. Nestlé controls a third of the domestic market for bottled
water in the US. The company is notorious for unlawful extraction of
spring water while engaging in price-gouging and reeking havoc in
numerous communities. An example of the trouble Nestlé typically causes
is Colorado where 80% of the citizens of Aurora were opposed to Nestlé’s
presence, fully aware of the company’s terrible reputation for damaging
communities and natural environments. Yet the city council voted in
favor 7 to 4 to let the devastation begin and over the next decade
Nestlé extracted 650 million gallons of precious Arkansas River valley
water that went into its Arrowhead Springs brand of bottled water. For
years the embattled townspeople of Aurora fought to rid the company
predator from destroying their precious aquifers. Additionally, the
plastic non-biodegradable bottles are major pollutants that stay
toxically intact for a full millennium.
The cumulative grave effects of
privatizing water as a global commodity are appalling. The
underprivileged residents of Jakarta, Manila and Nairobi pay 5 to 10
times more for water than those living in high-income areas of those
same cities. People living in the Third World slums even pay more for
water than upscale New Yorkers and Londoners. This kind of unfairness
and inequity is obscene. Women in places in Africa where privatized
water is beyond their limit walk miles to obtain dirty water from rivers
and then too often die along with their children from contamination and
disease. Asian farmers are losing their livelihoods if they are unable
to receive state funded irrigation. The human suffering caused globally
by wealthy private corporations from North America and Europe exploiting
people from Third World nations for pure profit is nothing less than
pure psychopathic evil.
Taking on global privatization of water for the well being and
greater good of the people is but an example of the monumental work that
needs to be done. Only if informed, caring and committed human beings
collectively come together worldwide to take a global stand against this
gravest of life and death issues facing humanity can this oligarch
agenda be stopped dead in its tracks. As global human rights activists
it is up to us to end the global corporate malevolence and malfeasance
from further damaging and afflicting our planet like never before.
With
the recent formal finding that Americans no longer live in a democracy
but an oligarchy, as if we did not already painfully know, it becomes
even more “formally” imperative now that we as ordinary citizens of the
world take the vested interest in preserving life on our only planet
before it becomes too late. It is high time we take back our planet once
and for all from the oligarchic corporatocracy bent on insidiously
making our earthly home increasingly uninhabitable for all life forms.
Mass extinction of plant and animal species that have thrived on this
planet for millions of years is silently, invisibly taking place every
single day right before our eyes. At ever-perilous stake now is our own
human species as well as all living species inhabiting this earth,
suffering at the hands of national governments that have corruptly
co-opted with the banking cabal-owned transnational corporations and for
too many decades been systematically destroying the richly diverse
natural ecosystems of all earthly life forms on an unprecedented scale.
Since governmental co-opting with global fortune 500 corporations has
been polluting and poisoning the earth’s skies, its waters, food
sources and seeds for so long, global theft and destruction has us
humans and all life forms teetering now on the brink of complete
self-annihilation and extinction, human-induced for the first time on a
massive never before seen scale. It is time to hold the oligarchy in the
form of corporations responsible for all the damage they have reeked on
this earth. No more grotesque “Abama-nations” of bank and Wall Street
bailouts at taxpayer expense. Since the 99% in debt to the hilt have
been squeezed dry, while the 1% have made this planet nearly unlivable
as the only ones filthily richly profiting from their plundering this
earth, the transnationals are the sole entities with the financial
capital and means to clean up the very mess they created. It is only
fair then that after an entire century of mucking the planet up at our
expense, that they now need to finally be held accountable for repairing
the destruction they directly caused and obscenely profited from.
Joachim Hagopian is
a West Point graduate and former Army officer. His written manuscript
based on his military experience examines leadership and national
security issues and can be consulted at http://www.redredsea.net/westpointhagopian/. After
the military, Joachim earned a masters degree in psychology and became a
licensed therapist working in the mental health field for more than a
quarter century. He now focuses on writing.
The original source of this article is Global Research
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For God´s sake, somebody stop President Temer from privatizing our major water reserve,selling out to Néstle for more than 100 years.
THE OTIUM POST
