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!
I doubt Detroit well or river water is safe to drink.
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’m having very good luck. 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. Water is as essential and natural as air and must remain available as it did in nature.
Anywhere with clean well, river or lake water. Water exists in nature just like air.
That is true for most of the country and was true of Detroit before pollution.
“Maybe she didn’t buy that TV, her son looted it for her. :->”
Maybe she got it at one of those “rent to own” rip-off joints. You know, only $27 a week for five years.
“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?”
According to a recent study, 100% of the job growth since 2000 went to immigrants, legal and illegal.
Remember the advice the late comedian Sam Kinison gave to the people of Ethiopia? MOVE!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0q4o58pKwA
(WARNING: Language)
“What about the basic human right to not be raped by UN Peacekeepers?”
I think UN Peacekeepers might be out of their league in Detroit.
“That might be, but there are plenty of good jobs here:
http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=&l=76208";
The word “plenty” gives me pause. I would ask the number of applicants and the number of jobs.
If there are more applicants than jobs, I would ask how the various demographics are faring. By the time you get to straight white men, disabled, sick, and in their sixties, there might not be what you would call a “plethora” of opportunities.
I lived on the street for a period of time, by choice. It was an eye opener. I didn't have much worry, and happiness is a state of mind. It's very different when one is supporting a household, and income doesn't go far enough to make ends meet. That's my current condition - not poverty, but worry, worry, worry.
And they use the phrase, "Some for as little as...". One must wonder what the average debt/time without paying is ....
It was OK to cut off the water when the Democrat-controlled GOVERNMENT did it.
Yeah.
And in their minds, they have a right to not pay.
They never heard of “TANSTAAFL”.
I wonder if they were able to pay their cable TV bill.
They probably did.
Link them.
If you are able to pay for cable TV and not water, then cut it off. Let’s see what the UN says then.
Such thinking is too complicated and advanced for some.
And probably considered “rasis” in the lib mindset.
No doubt.
My next idea is to turn on a public spigot. Homes will be provided with 2 buckets to transport the water back home.
The Detroit River is large enough to allow ocean going vessels to pass through. I don’t know how potable it is, but it costs money to bring it up to first world standards. The author either does not know or does not care about this.
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