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!
You are a FAR BETTER man then I’ve ever been or will ever be.
“for owing as little as $150 or two months in bills.”
Too me that sounds like a lot of money.
Boy, do I hear that!
I’m very rural or I wouldn’t have cable or satellite. But since I am (and can’t get reception) I switched to satellite a couple of years ago.
The installer actually laughed at my tv and was worried it might not accept the signal. It did.
I don’t watch enough tv to warrant an expensive one.
But my utilities are paid. :)
This is entertaining. I first saw this as a Sharpton segment last week.
There is no end to what these moochers think they should get at others expense.
OK, SgtBob...give up your secret. :)
Years ago I had a friend that hitched a large tank to his truck and went around when he knew his friends were at work (me included) and filled this ginourmous tank up on the sly. When all of our water bills soared...we got suspicious. He was busted!
So if that’s how you do it...please don’t tell me.
I suppose my power could get cut off if times got bad but I own still my water sources. If I lived there and I had any means of transportation including public I'd get my hind end to the lake and draw water. I'd take it home and treat it myself. Not so long ago in this nation many folk walked up to a mile in some places to fetch a bucket of water back. They called it life.
as the U.N. says... all people are entitled to water...isn’t there a very large river running through Detroit???there are people all over the world who walk a little to get their water.
That computes to about $31/mo if you are a renter or don't carry the extra $20 ins. Last winter we had continuous sewer line breaks all over town in our old system. I may have computed the ins wrong as I thought that was per month, too late to think straight.
So why would Detroit be so much more expensive I wonder? Maybe like another poster said, just charging people more to make up for other shortfalls.
I'd better see if they changed the bill frequency, been meaning to ask about fluoride anyway. I've always drunk the city water except when it tasted really bad from algae one summer.
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These ‘folks’ are criminal. They steal from the water dept. and expect others to pay. Geesh! Wait till the power is cut: no frig for beers, no microwave for popcorn and no power for TeeVee. What will the do then? Take to the streets and begin the same games Chicago plays?
If water is a human right that doesn't need to be paid for, then housing where taxes aren't paid for get’s confiscated by government.
Either way you slice it, someone will need to pay the operating and bond repayment costs of the water/wastewater system. The systems officers (or elected officials) have bond covenants that they have to live up to and probably there are also ratemaking regulatory requirements against having other classes of customers pay the bills of those that can't afford to pay.
I don't see a simple solution.
I saw the same thing in Istanbul. Most apartments and homes have water, but still there were people lining up with buckets every day at municipal water points. No charge for filling your container, but you have to get it home by wheelbarrow or some other way.
she needs to get some money from Obama’s “stash” !
It gets shut off. It's not a right.
And who is this "private" entity that seeks to come and seize someone's children for not having running water in their house?
Oh, that's right: the government.
Having said that, I have no doubt that a lot of the evils of "privatization" are probably magnified due to illegitimate arrangements between government and large corporate interests. Government-granted monopolies often lead to unfair business practices, inflated rates, and so on.
Such policies invariably bring into effect the worst of both worlds, this absurd hybridization of capitalism and socialism which is, as F. A. Hayek demonstrated, the true "Road to Serfdom".
no warning?
I am sure they know they haven’t been paying their water bills
Detroit is on the edge of a very large fresh-water lake
foreclose on a $100 home?
The city of Detroit probably holds title to 10,000 abandon houses
I misplaced my water bill once here and they sent me a scary ‘Water being shutoff’ notice postcard.
And this is not privatized, this is the peoples republic of Maryland doing this.
Detroit's problem is that they elected corrupt dishonest Dems who bankrupted the city, thinking they would get the most free stuff from them.
Why doesn't the UN pay their water bills if they really care? (rhetorical)
In their minds, they are special snowflakes that have “rights” that none of us in the realworld have even heard of.
They also feel entitled to “things” they didn’t work for or earn.
Sickening.
And the politicians want to keep it going and growing.
When you truly stop and think about it, it’s really not funny. I had a taste of poverty when I was young just starting out. It’s awful when you have to worry about whether you can pay your bills every month and every penny has to go towards neccesseties, nothing left over to enjoy life. I don’t like the fact that there are leeches in our society who pop out kids while sitting on welfare but for other people living in areas with little opportunities, the price of living these days does make me sympathize with their predicaments.
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