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!
Yeah!
It’s almost as if obligations mean nothing at all.
I also love the red “revolution” shirt in the image.
In what community can people live and have water and not pay the utility company? This is crazy.
I guess you could have a well...but then you need electricity to pump it.
Tap water you have to pay for. They can go down to the river with a bucket, so they actually are not being denied water.
“Pay your bill.”
But that would mean no cable, cigarettes, or visits to the beauty salon.
Aren’t they near a lake or something? Who says they have to be supplied with water for free?
Apparently water is not a priority for these folk. I wonder what is? They receive more than $500. weekly in gov benefits. I guess they figure that money should be used for nice things instead of plain ole water. They should get their water free because it’s just water.
I see people walk around here that have nicer shoes, cars and phones than we can afford and they don’t work.
LOL, that is a fact.
They expect us taxpayers to foot the bill for everything. Remember those women who thought that since Obama was elected they’d have no more rent, utility, car or grocery bills?
Leeches !!!
.
dear parasites bite me.
I think that a more accurate statement would be that people who fail to pay their bills are always getting their utilities cut off. I suspect that when she and her Momma suffered that fate, their account was in serious arrears. I'm sure that it never occurred to her Momma that paying the utility bill might be more important than paying the cable TV bill or the payment on the big screen TV.
My water company will shut off at 10 days.”
Ours in the Texas suburbs charges a HUGE penalty if payment is not made by the date it is due and cuts it off at five days. Reconnect charge is $150 plus whatever is due plus a $150 deposit which is retained until you move out of the water district.
Our normal water/sewer/volunteer fire dept fee bill is never more than $47 a month, even when we water every other day in the summer. New people are warned as soon as they move into the neighborhood that it’s best to set up autopay through their bank.
LOL hey parasites.
NY has water. In fact it has a whole ocean and its free for drinkin.
How do you expect her to be able to play on that Xbox if she sells the tv?
We used to have a DJ around these parts that professed:
“liberalism yields the exact opposite of it’s stated intent”
He had a unique way of communicating the real news...we miss his insight.
I have been broke before. I couldn’t pay my water bill. I couldn’t pay my electric. I had not two pennies to rub together. And there were a couple times the city shut me down. I didn’t cry scream or complain. I even went so far as to collect bottles and cans and turn them in for the deposit. Then went to the city building and explain that I just need some time to catch up on my bill. They would turn the water back on and I’d make payments until I caught up.
Heck. You can give the city $20 a month and they’ll keep your utilities on as long as you explain your situation and make a tiny payment.
Entitlement mentality says you don’t even have to make an effort and someone else should always pay your bills regardless.
When it was really bad I even went so far as to do yard work for the guy that owned my mortgage to pay a month or two when things were bad. I’ve negotiated with doctors and dentists. I’ve traded labor for a cheap old car when my old one died and I had no transportation.
WTF is wrong with the country when people can’t even take some responsibility for themselves? YES. I understand and know how powerless it feels to be completely broke. BUT it never held me back. A little hustle, hard work, and creativity let me keep my house. I have traded yard work to have teeth fixed from local dentists. I did some machine work for a doctor who gave me a checkup and refilled a prescription for me when I couldn’t even scrape together $100 for an appointment.
Sad to see so many lazy people democrats have created.
I remember reading about the days when local villagers would give teachers chickens and vegetables to pay for their services of education for their children.
Water is not a right.
Housing is not a right.
Sustenance is not a right.
Clothing is not a right.
Electricity is not a right.
Not quite getting what you mean by “Water should be a right like the air we breathe.”. Use of air is involuntary...it’s a condition of being an aerobic organism.
If you want water, you work for it; you tote it by the pail, you dig a well, and retrieve it from the ground, or you work for money, or barter, to pay an entity to pipe it to your home.
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