Posted on 06/28/2014 5:50:44 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Every week, as some 3,000 additional families’ water is shut off by their “public” utility, Detroiters protest on Freedom Friday.
“We are hiding out in our own house with no water,” Shelah, a 15-year-old youth and poverty skola whispered on the phone to me. She went on to tell me she and her mama and 9-year-old brother were among thousands of poor families who have had their water service cut off in the last few months by the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department.
Since spring, up to 3,000 Detroit households per week have been getting their water shut off – for owing as little as $150 or two months in bills. This is the Detroit facing water privatization in which upward of 150,000 customers, late on bills that have increased 119 percent in the last decade, are now threatened with shut-offs. Detroit organizers estimate this could impact nearly half of Detroit’s mostly poor and Black population – between 200,000 and 300,000 people.
Privatization is the U.S. corporate answer to everything, and to Detroit, like Chicago and New Orleans and Oakland and hundreds of other U.S. cities, this means the private corporate theft of all of our public resources, including schools, parks, streets and housing. As us poor folks know, the result is we end up water-less, house-less, street-less and park-less – gentrified out of our own neighborhoods, schools and communities and shuttled into the biggest profit-maker of them all: plantation prisons.
This is nothing new. Poor people are always getting our so-called public utilities shut off. When me and my mama were dealing with our life-long poverty and about to be houseless in Oakland, all of our utilities were cut off. The first thing that happened was my mama was afraid CPS would find out and mark her as “negligent.” This is part of the deep criminalization and Catch 22 that poor families face all the time, causing us to not even seek so-called “help” for fear of more theft, removal and criminalization.
Since spring, up to 3,000 Detroit households per week have been getting their water shut off – for owing as little as $150 or two months in bills.
“My friend was put into foster care after her water got cut off,” Shelah whispered. She and her brother are among the many children who are now at risk of seizure by Children’s Separation Service, as it might as well be called, because after they take everything away from us poor folks, then they threaten to take our children. “That’s when we went into hiding,” she concluded.
This is nothing new. Poor people are always getting our so-called public utilities shut off.
Grassroots organizers have been fighting back.
A coalition of grassroots groups like Detroit People’s Water Board, Food and Water Watch and Canada-based Blue Planet Project issued a report on June 18 containing the testimony of people who are affected by the service shut-offs and said they were given no warning. They submitted the report, “Submission to the Special Rapporteur on the Human Right to Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation regarding water cutoffs in the City of Detroit, Michigan,” to the United Nations naming these shut-offs as a violation of human rights.
The U.N. answered back: “Disconnection of water services because of failure to pay due to lack of means constitutes a violation of the human right to water and other international human rights,” the U.N. officials said in a news release. “Because of a high poverty rate and a high unemployment rate, relatively expensive water bills in Detroit are unaffordable for a significant portion of the population.”
The public water system, a prized resource worth billions and sitting on the Great Lakes, is now the latest target of the private developers – and these mass water shut-offs of our people’s homes are a way to make the so-called public utility more attractive in the lead up to its privatization.
“Disconnection of water services because of failure to pay due to lack of means constitutes a violation of the human right to water and other international human rights,” the U.N. officials said in a news release.
As po’ folks, our so-called public resources are always under attack, our so-called free lives, which were used, stolen and exploited to build this stolen land they call amerikkka, are always at risk of eviction, displacement, gentrification, death by police terror and/or incarceration. This is why us poor and landless stolen and diasporic Afrikans, criminalized, false bordered, indigenous and po’ folks at POOR Magazine are actively creating an international model for poor people-led change we call Homefulness in Deep East Ohlone Land (Oakland) where we take our stolen resources back, self-determined by us, and teach descendants of stolen wealth hoarders to redistribute their families’ stolen and hoarded blood-stained dollaz.
This is what we at POOR Magazine call Community Reparations. And this model needs to be practiced across the United Snakkkes of Amerikkka and the world so these violations of our human bodies, our communities and our land will cease to occur.
All power to the people in Detroit!
The buck-passing must stop somewhere, and it is about time that the business side of running a city was run like a business. As to people needing water but cannot pay, where are the charities, where are all the wealthy people who donate to the arts and who endow liberal professors at universities, and where are those churches that are busy agitating for “social justice”? Crickets!
Water’s cheap. I have a 2,000 livable area square ft. Home on two acres and spend about $10.00/month on water. They’ll be OK if they spend a bit less on basketball shoes and more on
water.
Pay no taxes, get free food, free medical care, free housing,free cell phones and now free water. Makes total sense. Where can I sign up? I’m sick to death working 60 hours a week, paying taxes, and not getting any free stuff at all.
FWIW, we pay our water bill and got our first flat screen TV ever for Christmas 2013. It is only 32". Woe is us!
When I worked at the unemployment office I worked with both veterans and welfare recipients at different times in my 15 years there. Do you know how many free or very low cost education, training, apprenticeship and vocational programs there are in this country for low income individuals?
The only reason we have one is that my wife won one several years back in a contest at work.
We didn't have running water, electricity or a phone until I was 7.
Living in rural Vermont, that was just the way it was.
Nobody thought of complaining.
When we did get a phone, it was on a 12 party line.
We lived in an old logging company camp building, you could see through the cracks in the walls.
In the winter it got down to 42 below inside.
No big deal.
I will send a donation. Too bad we all couldn’t do that.
Obama be fixin this, soon as he brings peace to the Middle East. Which be soon.
When did water become a right? Where is that protected in the Constitution?
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When some community organizers were instructed to get the UN involved in this Detroit issue. Blue helmets coming soon to a town near you.
I won’t. They’re already getting plenty from us. They should set aside some EBT money to pay their water bill instead of going to Popeye’s, McDonald’s, Chuck E. Cheese’s and Dave & Buster’s and Shoe Carnival.
the Detroit River is full of it... drink up
Once you get past that blacks are fully on board with "entitlements," it is surprising how low they set their expectations. We could turn Detroit into a black reservation meeting all the basic needs for housing, food and water for only the price of maybe ten lilly whites. Maybe even just with what Al Gore, Bill and Hillary, and Diane Fienstien skim off the system.
“Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Water is second to air for life. Denial of water is denial of life.
Whoever made the rivers and ground water become too polluted to drink owes the people drinking water or free relocation to a place where water is free.
Me, too. Water bill is due on 20th of every month. Not paid by the 30th? Click. Water is off. Everyone in the community knows the rules and lives by them. Not too expensive, either. Family of four uses about $30 worth a month.
Don’t like it? Pay someone to drill you a well.
Sad to see so many lazy people democrats have created.
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Great Post...telling it like it is.
I never quite reached that end, but have gotten close.
I had vowed that I would ‘Pick $hiite with the Chickens before.....’
There are still some of us that truly believe:
“IF YOU ARE LOOKING FOR A HELPING HAND, TRY THE END OF YOUR ARM”.
They should pay their gd bills and STFU.
Around here its a natural gas and water bill. This is what the freeloaders do here: get the service turned on, pay the bill thru the summer when its just the water. When the winter comes, pay the same amount as the summer and let the gas bill accumulate because they can’t turn off the water or gas until April 1st. Then pay the bill with that big ole EIC tax refund or let it get shut off oweing the bill. Get the service turned back on under someone else’s name, repeat it again and again. There are young adults who can’t get their service turned on because Momma done used their name for her service and ain’t paid the bill and they owe thousands
It's not quite the same as air, and people should pay for it if they can, to have it piped into their dwelling to run from the sink taps, flush and fill the toilet, bathtub/shower, washer if you are lucky enough to have one in your home. The only reason they should pay for it is because of maintenance costs in modern living. Renters can't dig a well in their back yard. There are no public pumps but there are hydrants but they can't open them all at once.
The possibly could catch rainwater but the PTB would squelch that in a hurry
All of those things you mentioned should be rights, just that you should work for them and pay for them yourself if you can. The plight of the poor has been made much worse these past several years. If people on welfare work for it by maybe babysitting, doing something they can do, then welfare takes it away from them so there is little incentive to work unless you can land a really good paying job, much better than minimum wage.
Well, I know what Jesus said, "I was thirsty and you gave me to drink." Whatsoever you do to the least of my people that you do unto me. Does that mean if the poor aren't baptized and don't go to church or some other religion we shouldn't help them with water?
I saw this article on Detroit and the poor the other day, didn't have a knee jerk reaction one way or the other, need to think about it more, know specific reasons why they didn't pay the bills, etc. All I can think of is Jesse Ventura snooping around a swamp in Michigan near the great lakes, a Nestle plant pumping our water into huge floating bladders and shipping it to China.
I found this: "Isaiah 58:7 Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter-- when you see the naked, to clothe them, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?".
I had geared up for a rant about that but no point in it. The only thing is I will not feel guilty for not taking strangers into my home and I never visited anyone in jail yet, not even my own kids who were in several times. I bailed them all out once and was done with it. Tough love.
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