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 Detroit river is where the water comes from now.
He’s donating his skin tags to be used as a burning fuel source...
Today , the Child Protection Services would swoop in and “rescue” the children, in other words destroy the family so they can have government jobs.
Drive through any Western State and notice the remains of still standing pioneer homes. Today, that would be considered child abuse by government workers who treasure their jobs more than the welfare of the children. Those tiny little shacks housed **huge** but ***successful*** families.
The poor interviewed in this article are indeed in a Catch 22 when it comes to the CPS..
Why shouldn't they think that? They spent 13 or more years in “free” indoctrination camps ( Opps! government single-payer schools) with Marxist trained teachers.
Remember! Any child in a government single-payer school risks learning that the same voting mob that gives them “tuition-free” schooling is also powerful enough to give them **lots** of “free” stuff!
If you went to a government single-payer K-12 school or state university or college you lived it every day for years!
Remember. When a child attends a government single-payer K-12 school, then risk learning that the same voting mob that gives them tuition-free schooling can also give them **lots** of “free” stuff!
Even grey haired white guys find jobs there.
I had a well dug, 24 years ago. It cost me $500, and has since given me good, clean water, and 23 years of various veggies, out of my garden.
The small electric pump uses pennies per day, and I have a hand pump for power outages.
All the folks around me have wells....I think I’m the only one with a manual pump, though.
Not that big of a secret.
I'll bet the well quality is fine, especially in that geographic location...it was covered with a mile thick sheet of ice 15,000 years ago...
What if your local water became polluted, the sole municipality kept increasing your rates and you did not have the means to leave (because nobody wants to buy your polluted property in a dying area)? That is basically what happened in Detroit.
I don't mess with "what if"'s, or straw-man theory...I deal in the now, the facts, realville. If my water were to get polluted, I would clean it with charcoal, and boiling. If it was beyond cleaning, I would move.
I don't live in a municipality.
I’m having very good luck.
Fleeing a top-down authoritarian government, and coming to a country that is rapidly headed that way, doesn't sound like good luck, to me.
I just believe people should be held responsible for stepping on the freedoms of others. The polluters and government agents who allowed it are responsible for the lack of natural drinking water.
I believe the original post was about people not paying their water bill, and having service disconnected. If you want a service, any service, you have to pay for it.
As far as government agents go it should only be the local court...if some person, company, or corporation is polluting your water, you sue them in court to make things right.
Water is as essential and natural as air and must remain available as it did in nature.
Water is abundant, and still available in nature, but it is not a Constitutional Right. You can provide it by your own means, as I have, or you can have someone provide it for you....and pay for it.
I wonder if these people in Detroit know that all those illegals crossing the border get all the water they want?
The government, be it local, state, or federal produces nothing, and therefore has nothing to sell for profit. It must confiscate from you, and me property (earned wages are property) to give to others. That is not a legitimate, Constitutional function of government.
Government largess has caused the problem. “Look how good we are! We gave money to the poor!” Good intentions, right? We’re not allowed to talk of the consequences, because of political correctness. Glad I’m not PC;-)
This largess has successful destroyed the black family, and some whites. It has removed the father from the responsibility of raising a family, and child bearing into a hobby. Their condition of life is one borne of irresponsible behavior, bad decisions, choice, or a combination. Do I want to reward that? Not so much, but the government compels me to do so under threat of fines, or confinement.
If people were to take advantage of their freedom, and “play” by the rules of Common Law, everyone would benefit. Everyone providing for their own family, shelter, clothing, food, water. Yes there would be few, but some who couldn’t provide for themselves, and I think that’s where Isaiah’s admonition comes in play. I think it’s an admonition to individuals, not government.
I’ve had strays under my roof many times two legged, and four, and no strangers. The two legged provided labor for their keep, the four legged provided a big wet tongue, cold wet nose, and a tail wag for their’s....and security...keeping squirrels out of the garden:-)
I have found wheelbarrows in my advanced age a little tricky to balance and with a heavy load, easy to tip over. I was hauling 50# or so bags of compost, topsoil. The river rock. Forget it. I worked out of the trunk of my car until it was used up lol.
And yes they have destroyed families; news and Hollywood, the music industry had a hand in it too with declining morals.
Let's hope those people in Detroit had their DPT shots. I will tell how it used to be before we had those, lost several ancestors. One was in KC, MO, Mother died of typhus, looked and looked for one son and found him in the same register 10 days later dying of the same thing. Unsanitary conditions cause it and it doesn't necessarily mean people were dirty but kids, outdoor toilets, flies, doesn't take much.
So I rail against so many immunizations now but haven't lost a family member from that for maybe 2 generations now.
I can talk both sides of the welfare/disability situation. And absolutely you do not want to reward bad behavior.
The only thing that has contributed to it you didn't mention is that so many jobs have been outsourced that a lot of these people could have done for better wages. But it looks to me like they have just written off blacks in favor of Hispanics.
Destruction of the family is the key. Until we get some of our morals back which isn't going to happen, it is just going to get worse until Christ Himself comes back.
I understood the passage from Isaiah was for individuals. There was no government welfare ever until the Anglo nations went for it. In my mind I see a picture of people able and willing to work marching on ahead, living more or less by Judeo Christian values, ongoing inflation that never gets rolled back, and the people who choose to have multiple children out of wedlock what is left for them? It's just spiralled out of control, left behind to be repeated by future generations only there is going to be a breaking point where it can't go on the way it has.
Churches used to help, didn't say anything about that; it gets too complicated; I don't know if they could collectively sacrifice and carry the whole load or not. I don't expect churches to help drug users and alcoholics but then something has to be done for their dependents if they have any.
So that woman at the well Jesus talked to. That water was free but she had to go fetch it. The building of the well had been long since "amortized" and any periodic maintenance was probably borne by the community for the good of all. Just a guess, not idealizing that society but they did have a number of things going for it. Jubilee. Now it's some church ritual, I don't know the purpose of it.
boil it.....bleach helps some problems too.
Then they can by Mio by the case.
It really changes your water.
I haven’t seen want ads like that in decades.
The Detroit system covers a large area, about 1000 sq miles and has bonding for over $1 billion worth of construction in the next four years to maintain its system.
I noticed from me fact sheets posted from last year, the average residential service is for 1000cuft of water for about $90/mo.
The article indicated the customer was being charged for about $200 or about 2000 cuft of water.
1000 cuft of water is about 7480gal or about 250gal/day.
Military planners for infantry plan on as little as 5gal/day/capita. Water districts usually plan for about 200 gal/day/capita. 1000cuft water/month is quite a bit for a family of 4.
In the desert, we consume about 400cuft water / month for a couple who water plants, twice daily, but don’t have trees or grass. Our bills should be around $40/mo for water and sewer in SoCA. $80/mo isn’t unreasonable, but memorable, and that is in an area having to bring water in several hundred miles, or bore deep, say 1000ft for reliable wells.
IMHO, the Detroit system has a large fire protection grid one way of dealing with the problem is to simply charge $50/mo water will for continued service, then file mechanics lein or a bond on properties where the full charges are unable to be paid as is done for a water bond. Meanwhile, provide an open tap at hydrants near parks for people to fill up coolers and containers, if they are that desperate.
That means the tenant can still get water for daily living in their homes, but they can’t sell the property until the debt is paid off.
There is a very well refined branch of law regarding water rights. Water rights usually are associated with land ownership and vary from state to state. Liberals typically believe such rights may be privatized, while conservatives generally believe one of very few services which may be regulated are the provision of utilities, i.e. commonly needed services provided for a least cost for everybody in the community, because everybody has to have those resources. Utilities frequently take advantage of economies of scale to produce large volumes of a commodity with a distribution and service network included t in the utility cost.
Most utilities throughout the US have not been maintained or kept pace with useful life amortization. Many will need replacement in 20 years.
However, I doubt that would work for the average city/suburb dweller.
And truthfully a lot of rural folks are out in the cold as well. Myself included. Sometimes the water table is too deep and the water to alkaline to drink.
I live on a lake and could haul water if push came to shove...but until that happens I think I'll just pony up the dollars to have a faucet turn on and water come out.
Then kick the squatters and water system non payers out of the City owned home.
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