← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
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Sam. Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Updates, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives, our jobs, our debts, our incomes, the conditions of our work and what they look like coming down the road, not just for us, but for our children as well. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life, which I think has prepared me, I hope, for offering some insights as to what's going on in the economy we all depend on and live in and with. I want to begin today with a particular update. Before doing the announcements, I often start with, and this has to do with, yes, our president, Donald Trump. On the 17th and 16th of the month of August, he entered into a major fight with some of the largest corporations here in the United States. Merck in the pharmaceuticals, Amazon in the delivery operations and many others. In some cases, he attacked particular CEOs, in other cases, the company as a whole. And this is interesting and demands a bit of economic analysis. So let me do that. The Republican Party has always been a coalition, as has the Democratic Party. And the Republican Party's basic coalition had two parts. On the one side, business, particularly big business, was the champion, the funder and the dominant influence. Junior partner was what we might call social conservatives, collection of groups that included fundamentalist, religious folks, people who were in favor of all kinds of particular social conventions, usually lumped under the term conservative. And the Republican Party, to be successful, had to hold this coalition together. It had to be the party at the same time of business, particularly big business, and of social conservatives. And this was a difficult coalition to keep together. When the Republicans were able to do that, they would win. And when they failed to do it, they would lose. When Mr. Trump attacked the large corporate CEOs, he was straining to be as polite as I can. That coalition, when he ended the business advisory councils, which he really had to do because the business leaders were quitting, resigning from being on those councils as a protest, particularly of what the president said in the aftermath of those horrible events in Virginia. But let's look at one case in particular to understand what's at stake. Mr. Trump specifically singled out and attacked the the Amazon Corporation, and he attacked that corporation whose leader had been critical of him for not paying taxes and for ruining all across the United States small retailers that were competitors and many towns that depended on those retailers, eliminating many jobs by their high tech approach to the delivery process and so on. And true to form, the defenders of Amazon rushed forward to say there should be no criticism. All that Amazon is doing is bringing progress and higher technology to the particular areas where they are dominant. Well, let's take a closer look. The argument about technological advance is really silly. Sure, technology advances, but what matters is how you use it. Do you use it to make profit for a small number of people? That's what Amazon is doing. Or do you use it to relieve large numbers of people of drudgery of the sort we used to have? The mass of people would like technology to be used for the second purpose. Capitalist enterprises prefer to use it for the first and Amazon uses it for the first time. There's not much more to be said about it. What about taxes? Well, the truth of the matter is that Mr. Trump has a point. Amazon doesn't pay its fair share of taxes and never did. Let me just give you one statistic which for me is kind of overwhelming. Between 2007 and 2015, the average annual percentage of taxes paid on their profits by the Amazon Corporation was 13%. That's not just for their federal taxes. It includes also the taxes they paid to the state governments where they are active, and the taxes they pay to the local governments. You know, if you own a big warehouse in a local community, you have to pay property tax like every other business. And if you're active in a state that has a corporate profits tax, which most states do, you have to pay. So you put together the federal, state and local, and it worked out to 13%, folks. That's a smaller percentage than most Americans pay individual Americans when they put together the federal income tax, the state income tax, the local property tax they pay on their automobile or their home. So Amazon has been getting away with tax evasion, using the law, using an army of accountants, using an army of lawyers. When Mr. Trump goes after them, he is right about their tax evasion. Now, true, he's never done a thing about it. He's never joined any movement, let alone led one that did anything about this. And he is straining the alliance. The business community wanted things out of Mr. Trump and supported him. They wanted to get out of those high taxes that the Obamacare added to them. Mr. Trump failed. They wanted a big tax reform that would lower the tax burden on them. He hasn't delivered yet and it's not clear if he ever will. What the business community got out of him is little so far, and it's not looking good going further. And now with his support of the conservative and even the most right wing of the conservatives, they're facing political social turmoil, which they don't want either. So the coalition of the Republicans is fraying. Meanwhile, Mr. Trump, as he goes and lurches to the right, and Amazon, as they blithely avoid paying taxes, call each other out. It's kind of a modern version of the falling out among thieves. The next update I want to talk to you about is Americans dying younger, a big story in the Bloomberg News back on August 8 that deserves much more attention than it got. Mortality. That's the average length of our lives before we die. How long we live has been falling since the 1950s, a sign of economic well being, a sign of economic improvement of people's conditions. But it stopped rising in 2011 and in the last two years, excuse me, it stopped falling until 2011 and it's been rising, that is we are dying at an earlier age. This is extremely important for at least two reasons I want to bring to your attention. First, it is a stunning statistic undermining the notion that we are enjoying an economic recovery in the United States. We aren't. And one of the stunning demonstrations of that fact is we are dying at a lower average age than we used to. The improvement in longevity is over. It's now deteriorating. And that is a very powerful comment on the conditions of people's lives, especially because experts tell us that the economic conditions of people's lives, the stresses associated with them, the physical and mental exertions associated with them, are major causes of how long we live. So it's a critical sign that there's a problem with the economic situation. We have not recovered. In fact, it's going the other way. And here's the second economic fact. Corporations, as Bloomberg points out, are making billions by this. And you know why? Very simple. They have obligations to pay pensions. The sooner the worker dies after completing his or her work life, the less they have to pay out. It's even making the Social Security systems crisis less than it was before because the government doesn't have to pay out after you die. So this bad news for the mass of people is, in a perverse way, good news for the very corporations whose work conditions are part of the reason why people are dying earlier. Before I turn to the next updates, I want to remind you by making a short announcement of some important considerations. If you would like to see this program in its full glory as a new, upgraded production, please take a moment to Visit us at Patreon.com P A T R E O N If you go to patreon.com economicupdate you will see the entirety of this program and you will be able to show in an interesting way your support for what we are trying to do. Secondly, I want to remind you of the two websites we maintain available to you 24, 7, no charge ever for any of it, where we upload all kinds of material that you will find interesting that supplements what we do on this program. You will also be able to communicate to us what you like and don't like about this program. You'll be able very simply to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and so on. Make use of these websites. Be a partner for what we're trying to do by sharing with other folks what you find on those websites, including a complete archive of these programs. Finally, I want to inform you, as I have in the past, that we are now represented by a speaker bureau. And if you would like to have me come to your area and do a public presentation, very simple. Get a hold of an organization called speakoutnow.org all one word. And if you want to email them, Simply write to infospeakoutnow.org and they will work out with you the details of such a visit. Now back to our updates. Once again, I find myself talking to you about the Monsanto Corporation. It's on this program all too often, and in each case, virtually each case, it's because it is doing something that demonstrates what it means. When you have an economic system that puts profit before all else, or to use the other way of saying, it makes profit. The bottom line, the thing that is most to be focused on this time, Monsanto has produced a remarkable herbicide. If I understand exactly what it is, the name of it is dicambo. D I C A M B O. This herbicide, it gets rid of weeds, at least that's the idea, is produced by Monsanto. But there's an interesting story of a new version produced by them and marketed by them that was covered by Reuters, the international news agency, very short time ago. And I want to bring it to your attention. Why? Well, it turns out that when dicambo was used, and particularly on beans, peaches and vegetable gardens, they died. That is not the weeds, but the bean plants and the peach trees and the vegetable plants. That's not what the herbicide is supposed to do. And it devastated the farms, the livelihoods and the natural environment that we all depend on in millions of acres. Apparently startling pictures swirled around the Internet. So Reuters looked into it and what they found is something I want to tell you about. What they found is that Monsanto had departed from the usual procedure. The usual procedure when you have a new Chemical like this, and you want to market it, is that your scientist tests whether it's safe. But of course, not only your scientists. Typically, the company that makes such a thing gives samples to university laboratories and to other independent testers so they can all make the relevant tests and only market the product if all the tests indicate that it's safe to be used on food products. One of the things that every test should incorporate, should test for, is. Is called volatility. And I had to look up what that meant, so let me share it with you. Volatility is a measure of whether an herbicide, if used in one part of a field, is likely to blow over and affect the plants in another part of the field. Volatility is a measure of where the herbicide can go beyond where. Where you apply it. And now we get the interesting conclusion of the story. Monsanto did give the University of Arkansas, the University of Missouri, and the University of Illinois samples, but for the first time that anyone in these universities had ever seen, as the Reuters story makes clear, they gave them them with a strict rule that had to be signed and agreed to no test for volatility. Test for everything else about the safety, but not the volatility. Wow. And guess what the problem was when the herbicide was finally produced and sold and used by unwitting farmers. Turns out the product had a problem with volatility. It blew from those areas where it was initially applied to nearby areas, particularly with beans, peaches, and vegetable gardens. When confronted by Reuters with this story, this story of a bizarre, unusual procedure that made it profitable for Monsanto to sell something which had, in the end, devastating effects, I would like to tell you what Mr. Scott Partridge, Monsanto's vice president of global strategy, hears what he had to. We tested it, and it seemed safe. Ooh. But here's the better. To get meaningful data takes a long, long time. Mr. Partridge said this product needed to get into the hands of growers, end of quotation. Well, that's not very subtle, is it? They were in a rush to make money, and that's what they did. They rushed the product and they made a lot of money. But in the process, they put their profitability, what they could market to growers ahead of what was safe for the human race. And we are suffering as a result. And this happens so often that I just occasionally take your and my time to give you an example. The important lesson here is to see that there's a system in this society that fosters, promotes, incentivizes this kind of behavior that's the problem. I really am not picking on Monsanto, although they do provide so many examples. But I could pick others, as I occasionally do. But again, the important point is what kind of a system functions in this way. Let me turn next to another update that caught my eye and again, it has multiple lessons for us. This one comes for those of you who'd like to pursue the details from the New York Times dated August 16, 2017. The report in the Times says the that 100,000 children in New York City were homeless at some time during the 20152016 period that we are headed for and could already this year, this coming school year be in a situation where one in seven public school children in New York City is homeless part of the year? Why am I talking to you about this? Well, first, it's a stunning statistic. 100,000 children are suffering homelessness, children enrolled in school. This is one of the richest cities in the world, New York City in one of the richest countries in the world, the United States. What in the world is going on if 100,000 children in one city are suffering homelessness part of the year? Beyond that, I want to talk to you about what this means, since perhaps you haven't thought that through. And when I read this story, I began to try to think it through. And there were things in the story that helped it. First thing in the story that caught my graduation rates. Turns out the school has been keeping records. What is the percentage of students who graduate high school who were homeless part of the time versus those who did not have that problem? The answers are stunning. Homeless students graduated at a rate of 55%, barely over half graduated students who had steady housing graduated at the rate of 74%. A completely different number. My goodness. Here's another statistic. In the elementary school, the first school that a child attends, homeless students missed on average 88 days of school. All right, I don't want to over dramatize this, but if you miss 88 days of school on average, and remember, an average means a large number of students missed even more than that. But 88 is enough. The average just like 60 would be enough and 40 would be enough. In what sense? In the sense that you're going to fall behind, you're not going to be able to keep up. You will have missed this lesson or that lesson in arithmetic or reading or writing, and then you will have the added burden of coming to school school not able to do what the other students sitting around you are able to do and feeling bad about it. And Maybe hiding it either from your parents, your friends, or maybe even from yourself. And if you fall behind early on, that tends to get worse over time, alienating you from the other kids and from the whole educational process. Because it is embarrassing, because it is undermining your self esteem as a human being. We are doing an unspeakable injustice to millions of our fellow citizens children by blocking their ability to access a decent education and a decent life based on on a decent education. But I want to take it another step. There are those amongst us whose response to the awful problem of poverty in this society is to blame the poor, to blame the victim. But what this story shows is how terribly wrong that is. How large numbers of the poor are. People who, at a time when they have no responsibility for it at all, were denied the opportunity for an education from the beginning. I'm talking kindergarten, first and second grade who were deprived, through no fault of their own, from the access to an education, throwing them back in terms of their levels of achievement, making their relationships to the rest of their schoolmates and to the school experience as a whole one full of embarrassment, difficulty, shame, failure to blame them as adults for their poverty without recognizing how much of that poverty is accounted for by a failure of the system. We are not a poor country. We have huge amounts of housing that sits empty. We have the capacity to build housing that is as good as any in the world. What excuse could there be? And then to point to the poverty that we have allowed to evolve and to blame the poor. Once you understand what the condition of our schools is, that really takes a bad problem and makes it worse. Homeless people have 10 times more problems than everybody else because they're homeless. This does not require rocket science. Children, as I've just shown you, suffer especially in something as vital as their education. From the fact that of homelessness, we know from the statistics of homelessness that more and more of the homeless are families, parents and their children. We know where this ends up. What kind of a society is unable to make the decision that those who have extraordinary wealth should be encouraged. And if they fail to heed, the encouragement should be required. Whether it's by tax functions or by changing the wages people are paid. So we don't have to take it from somebody to give it to somebody else. Because we pay good wages and give decent jobs to people from the beginning, whatever it takes, we can solve the problem of homelessness and and in that act do a major thing for social justice for innocent children and to eliminate poverty in the long run. Which flows from that homelessness and its impact on the children of this nation. It seems to me extraordinary to read such a statistic and to not have it create the uproar that it deserves in terms of both the problem it presents, but the solution it crystal clearly lays out for how to solve the problem. We've come to the end of the first half of today's economic update. I would like to urge you again to follow us on Patreon.com and to make sure you make use of our rdwolff with two Fs.com and democracyatwork.info that's all one word. Democracyatwork.info. please stay with us. We will have a short interlude and then we will come right back with the second half of this program which will involve a very interesting interview about the water issues that bedevil the United States in every part of our country in terms of adequate water, in terms of safety, in terms of drinkability. Water, as you well know, is one of the most basic requirements of human life and nothing is more urgent than the human right to have access to clean, safe water. Please stay with us. We will be right back.
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Everybody knows that the days are loaded Everybody rolls with with their fingers crossed Everybody knows the war is over Everybody knows the good guys lost Everybody knows the fight was fixed the poor stay poor the rich get rich that's how it goes Everybody knows Everybody knows that the boat is leaking Everybody knows the captain lied Everybody got this broken feeling like their father or their dog just died Everybody talking to their pockets Everybody wants a box of chocolates in a long stem rose Everybody knows.
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Welcome back to the second half of economic update for this August 2017. Well, I'm very pleased to have bacal in this program, someone who's been here before, but we're going to be talking about something different today. My guest is Rob Robinson. He's a staff volunteer with the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative. What we who know about them call nesri, a human rights organization based in New York City. He is also a volunteer organizer working with community based organizations in New York City and indeed around the world. He likes to refer to himself as a human rights enforcer and not merely a defender. So welcome to the program again, Rob, and thank you very much for coming.
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Thanks for having me, Rick.
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So let's get right into the topic today, which is water. In what way would you say water is a problem, a social problem, maybe even a crisis here in the United states right now, 2017.
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So I think there are several Ways that water is a problem here. One, it's unaffordable to many particularly poor people. It is being polluted by big business around the country. It is being poisoned with lead in places like Flint, which is well documented and I probably don't have to go through again. But I think it is important to understand that once you ingest lead, it just doesn't go away. Even if you start to put chemicals in that water to make that water indeed potable. The harmful effects that you get from ingesting that are lifelong, right? So there's continued medical care that has to go behind that. You see extractive mining processes that pollute water in places like New Mexico, California. So I think there are a myriad of problems around the country pertaining to water. There's also sanitation issues that are related to water. Improper sanitations in the places like the south and Alabama where people don't have sewage systems because they're poor and the government won't provide the money to put that infrastructure in place. Instead they put it on the backs of poor people and they can't dispose of sanitation properly.
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Has this always been true in the United States or is this some kind of new problem?
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I think it's always existed, Rick. But I think Flint has raised awareness about the issues behind water around the country. As somebody who has been a longtime housing organizer and land and housing activists, when we got together with the human. The US Human Rights Network organization, asking them to help us mobilize and organize people around the country, you saw people stepping up out of places you never expected, right? You expect this not to be a third world type country, but the way some people are treated with respect to water, it reminds you of third world countries.
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I was going to pursue that for a moment. Water is something human beings know they need. I mean, literally, we are told we have to drink, what is it, A dozen glasses a day to keep hydrated because it's fundamental to our physical and mental health. So you would have thought long ago that water, being so basic and fundamental, would be provided. So again, is this an old problem, a new problem? How are we in a position at this point in human history to have one of the richest countries on earth display what you just described?
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Well, I think there are several ways. I think one is corporations get precedent or access to water at levels that you wouldn't believe. So very often a big company like Nestle's are allowed to go into rivers and streams and pump out water to put in bottles to sell to us, when in fact the government is not leading to its obligation to provide clean, potable drinking water to people. Right. They are getting it from the same that many of our water sources come from. Right. Except in a place like Flint, Michigan, they wouldn't dare go into Flint, Michigan and start putting water in bottles, but they go back to the Detroit river where the water in Flint once came from, to fill bottles to sell back to us. Right. So there's a lot of contradictions with the way it runs. And I think also government has stepped away from its obligation to oversee the infrastructure related to water. And, and I'll just quickly touch on, there's a problem of extracting water from out of the ground and delivering it through the faucet. If you were to ask the government, there's a disconnect and they would admit as such. Right. Which means they aren't overseeing the extraction of water to the ground, to the delivery to yours and my household. Right. And that's problematic.
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Tell me, am I understanding you right? Some companies pollute the water with their chemical and other wastes, which enables other companies to get water, clean it up, put it in a bottle and sell it to us because the first group of companies made the water we would otherwise drink too dangerous to drink. This is crazy.
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If it wasn't people's lives that are at risk here, it would almost be humorous the way that it happens.
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But.
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But we've started to realize as people on the ground that either we don't get access because we can't afford to pay, or if you do get access, you can buy from the bottles, but the government is giving access to certain companies. It's just a whole bunch of contradictions put together, Rick, around the delivery of water in this country that really needs to be looked into. And I think folks on the ground are rising up now and organizing themselves and saying, for my very mere existence, I need water. And if the government can't live up to its obligation, then there's a problem. Right? And the US will tell you in a minute how much potable water it delivers around the world to all these third world countries. But you have people living in third world existences here in the us the wealthiest country in the world.
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When I was a child, as best I can remember, there was no such thing as bottled water. In other words, everybody who needed a drink of water or needed water for something went to the faucet in the house and got the water and didn't even think about it and drank it under the notion that it was a public service. Sort of like leaning over that faucet in the public park that you have in most towns. And you drink that water because you're thirsty. And you assume that of course it's safe to drink. Whereas now in large parts of the country, people who have access to a water faucet don't use it or run the water through a filter in order to be safe. What are we saying?
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I think what we're saying is government is stepping away from its obligation to take care of its people. Right. This is people can't afford to ensure that the water in the ground is safe. That takes huge infrastructure and a huge investment in infrastructure. That is the responsibility of local, state and federal governments. So governments are lax in their duties to maintain these systems. I think you also have a problem with manufacturing. And we know this for a long time. Factories were dumping their runoff into water. I think one of the strange things we found in the Flint situation is GM had a plant in Flint, Michigan that was using that same water source that was poisoning the people. Except they saw their cars having trouble early on. Once that water source was switched from the Detroit river and went back to the authorities in Flint and said, we don't want to use this water. It's ruining our cars. So if it was ruining GM's cars, what do you think it's doing to a human body? Right. So there are so many problems that, that add to this the overall problem, but they're not being looked at. They were ignored for so many years and I think now we're really feeling the effects. After Flint, Flint raised awareness in this country like we've never seen before. And then it also got us voices from around the world. Where other countries are suffering from the same things. There are similar situations.
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Can you remind us for the audience and also for me your summary sense of what happened in Flint? If it was such a big wake up call, give us a summary if you can, of what that. What happened there and why did it wake us up?
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So I think two big reasons there. One was democracy and the stripping away of democracy. So in places like Detroit and Flint, where cities were going bankrupt, there is a process in place called emergency management. The governors of different states have the opportunity to put somebody in there to run that particular locality if they're bankrupt. In lieu of the people that were elected to be in office in that given community, this person is to make all the decisions for a community. The emergency manager in Flint decided to switch the source of the water from the Detroit river to the Flint river to get water to feed people. Knowing that the flint.
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Why?
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Why? Because he was going to save money, was going to save the city money. So one of his terms, you're in bankruptcy, so we're going to save the city a lot of money. I think they were going to save about $5 million making this particular switch. They started to switch this water. But unbeknownst, I wouldn't say unbeknownst, I do think there was some investigation to understand that the pipes weren't severely, weren't severely covered with a material that would prevent lead from coming off these pipes and that lead would eventually get into the water and into the drinking water of the folks. Now it was learned early on that this lead was getting into the pipes and that you needed to put different chemicals in that particular water so that it was safe for drinking people. But they ignored those findings and they continued to use the source of water. And then people started to get ill. Awareness was raised. So I think two problems. One is not properly coating those pipes with a material that would prevent the lead from getting in the water. And, and then the stripping away of democracy. Having one person make a decision for a city in lieu of the people that were elected in a democratic process to make decisions on behalf of those people.
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And it was particularly children, right? The children are specifically more susceptible to the lead?
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Yeah, I think more so. It's always older, very older, senior citizens and children in particular. And there were many stories documented of families, children all of a sudden becoming ill, getting spotted skin, you know, bathing in this material, starting to get itchy skin and skin falling off and breaking out and different, you know, different things. But it's a long term effect, right? Lead stays in the body and it has a long term effect. So you're talking about a community relatively poor, right? May not have medical care. Long term medical care. We all know that the auto industry started leaving Flint in places like Detroit, so jobs aren't plentiful there. People are poor. The poverty line is a pretty high poverty line. So folks are struggling in that city. So how do you ensure the long term life sustainability of these folks? Right? And this is what the major fight is now. Folks who have ingested these waters may need long term health care and they're not getting that from the government currently.
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So once again we see that it's the dollar, it's the almighty dollar, that if I understand you correctly, and please correct me if I'm misunderstanding, the poorer the community and the poorer the individual, the more difficult it is becoming for him or her to get access to clean, safe, Water. It's.
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C
I think that's absolutely the truth, Rick. You know, I've been very much involved in the struggle for access to affordable and clean water in Detroit. I'll give you a couple of quick examples. So Detroit also went through bankruptcy. 82% of the population of Detroit is African American. 40% of those folks live below the poverty line. When the city of Detroit was bankrupt and that emergency manager decided he was going to start to push to get these back monies owed on water bills from the people, made a decision. If you're two months in arrears or you're $150 in arrear, you can't have water anymore until you pay up your back bill. Right. The fact that you need water to survive didn't come into the equation. Doesn't matter. If you can't pay, you can't have. That's problematic. And it's targeting a certain section of the society. I think at the same time that these decisions were being made, you'd look at the public golf course, $500,000 in arrears. But you ride by the golf course any night between midnight and six and the water faucets are just going constantly. All you hear is water being sprayed on the grass. So there are so many contradictions involved in this and the way people are being treated. You're targeting one particular class of people, and it's basically poor people and particularly people of color, because that's who's mostly affected. But it's not only. I want to be clear about this. It's not only places like Detroit. These issues are surfaces in places like Baltimore, Philadelphia, around the east coast, out west, west and California, and poor rural areas where folks depend on clean water to raise crops, have no access to clean water, and the government won't provide the infrastructure to get that clean water, even though it may be nearby. Right. If you want to pump water from another source, you have to provide the infrastructure. That's not the way government in a democracy should run.
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No. And I believe, and you're a specialist on human rights, that you fight for it. It's a human right to have access to water. I don't understand, and perhaps I'm just naive. How could a city government, let alone a major city government, Detroit's a major city in the United States. How could they not deliver water to people? The fact that you haven't paid doesn't do away with your human right to water. I mean, other solutions have to be found. But you can't stop providing water to People literally, you're threatening their lives.
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C
Well, I absolutely agree with you, Rick, except we live in a country where human rights are totally dismissed. Right. We believe this country, we believe in civil rights, what's written into law more than we do human rights. Right. And it's up to us to start to articulate what those rights are, which is why when you preface me in the program, I said, no, I'm not going to defend these rights. I'm going to enforce them. The very fact that I'm a human being, I deserve fresh, clean drinking water and it is plentiful there and it should be out there for all of us. So it's going to be up to people to rise up. And I think that's what you're seeing now around the country with this national campaign on the human right to water and sanitation. We've gotten the US Human Rights Network to facilitate this, to pick up grassroots movements around the country and bring people together and start to have conversations about how our communities are being affected. But not only how they're being affected. I think we can all articulate that pretty easily. But you know, what is it causing and how do we change this? So folks have gone to the Inter American Commission on Human Rights and had hearings. They've gone before the US Government. So they've called. They've called to action now. So there's a challenge now with the government. I will say this. There are some challenges while we made headways over the last couple of years with the U.S. government to change an administration. You know, you make three steps forward and sometimes you end up taking two steps backwards. And we're struggling a little bit now after making relationships with certain government officials who are no longer in power. So some of that has to start all over again. But I think folks are at a point now where they realize that this is a human right. Their rights are being violated and they have to articulate those rights.
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A
Tell us a little bit about these organizations. Who's getting involved and what strategies and tactics are they using.
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C
So I think you have folks like the indigenous community in New Mexico, the Environmental Justice Coalition, the Coalition for Clean Water in Boston, there are so many of them. There are numerous ones.
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A
If you were to go to locally focused in each.
- [46:33]
C
And mostly these are locally focused. And what folks had heard from us as we started to organize these groups, hey, they would call us up or email us. I heard you guys are organizing around water. Well, this is the problem where I live. And all of a sudden this coalition just exploded in size and numbers. You can see an actual list on the group if you visit ushr network.org, ushumanrightsnetwork.org, will list all of the different groups involved in the national campaign for the right to order.
- [47:01]
A
Bill youl mentioned earlier the cause. Is there a general understanding of what the cause of this problem is?
- [47:09]
C
I think there is a general understanding and I think it's twofold. It's government aligned with corporations to say this capitalist model is the way we're going to proceed. If you want water, you have to pay. Well, who made that decision that the water is a commodity that belongs to a certain group? And I think going back and that's the big fight that we're trying to have right now and trying to bring to the forefront, right? Who says they own the water? Similar to the fight for land. That's why it was easier for me to get involved. Right? Land was always something that we Common right. And land can grow food. We could all have a home. If the community controlled it, our lives would look different. If the community controlled access to water, our lives would look totally different. So I think folks are rising up right now. Understand that the very fact that I'm a human being, I deserve water. I deserve access to water and I deserve access to clean water. Especially if you use the values and principles of human rights, which says everybody gets what they need, equity, right, gets what they need and pays what they can.
- [48:14]
A
Is there a plan? I know this is. I'm not being critical here. I don't at all intend that. But is there an idea of how to do it? What would be a way to meet the social obligation, the human right to water?
- [48:31]
C
So there is now a plan afoot. There are several universities, Berkeley out in California, among them the support of the National Law center on Homelessness and poverty in D.C. the U.S. human Rights Network are bringing people together along with the legal community to start to write an water affordability plan. It started in Michigan. They've now submitted legislation in Michigan for water affordability. It's going to make water affordable to everybody on your ability to pay. But now they're working on national legislation. So I think it's all about policy, putting policies in place that are going to ensure that this happens in the future.
- [49:08]
A
So let me understand, is it so we might see making the price in some sense of water be coordinated with the ability to pay. In other words, Rockefeller doesn't pay the same amount for a gallon of clean water as does his servant.
- [49:26]
C
You're right on hand. You're Right on point there, Rick. That's exactly it. Right. We. We get what we need, we pay what we can. Everybody doesn't have the ability to pay at a certain level, but those who do have the ability should pay more than others. Right. And it just makes total sense.
- [49:43]
A
It's the same principle as the federal income tax. Absolutely. The percentage of your income you pay goes up with the greater the pay is that you have.
- [49:52]
C
I think one thing that folks should understand and all your listeners and people watching this program should understand, poor people in Detroit never ask for free water. They ask for affordable water. Nobody ever said they didn't want to pay. I think the same thing happens in Baltimore, Philadelphia, all these places where people are living. And I can tell you there are documented places in places like Philadelphia where people have been living in households without water for as long as two years. Right. But nobody's ever said, I don't want to pay. What they said is, I want an affair affordable rate that I can pay.
- [50:25]
A
It's interesting that you say that, because how many of us have grown up, gone to a city park or a town park where we live and gotten thirsty and gone to the water fountain there and drank the water. If there had been a meter saying, well, you could have one minute drink for $2 and two minutes drink for $3.50, we would have been outraged because we had become a society that said, anyone can go to a park. It's there for everyone, and so is the bathroom to use, and so is the toilet and the water fountain. And we collectively paid for it. We all chipped in so we could all have it.
- [51:11]
C
Absolutely.
- [51:12]
A
It's not that this is a weird or strange or foreign idea idea. It's simply saying, well, the same logic that applied in some sense to the water fountain in the park should apply to water everywhere, since we need it as human beings.
- [51:27]
C
And I think that's what the UN is trying. The message the UN is trying to deliver. So in 2014, we brought the UN to Detroit, and on their way out, one of the things we did, this.
- [51:39]
A
Was an official un.
- [51:40]
C
It was an unofficial mission by UN Special Rapporteurs. So at the time, the rapporteur on the right to water and sanitation was Caterina de Albuquerque. She visited along with Leilani Farhad, the UN Rapporteur and the right to adequate housing. The reason why we also asked the Rapporteur and adequate housing to come along is because if you fall behind, if you're a homeowner in Detroit and you fall behind on your water and you can't pay the bill. They give you a water payment plan that gets attached to the taxes on your home. If you fall behind on those taxes, then your home falls into foreclosure. And we saw so many homes taken away in foreclosure because people couldn't afford those additional payments. Right. So it was very important for us. But on the way out, it was an unofficial mission. Those rapporteurs used their own money because they thought it was an important mission and they documented it. So they were allowed to write a report on what they would. And on the way out, as they were leaving, we made sure to drive them past the Great Lakes, which borders Detroit, so they could see how much water was plentiful out there. Right. But people weren't allowed to have. It's such a contradiction in the wealthiest country in the world.
- [52:53]
A
Tell me what you think is going to happen to this, if I can call it that, water rights or water movement in America. You're involved in it. You see it. Is it growing? Is it drawing support? How do you see it playing out in terms of a struggle of people to do something to change an economy that is holding them back from water?
- [53:13]
C
I think it is resonating with people around the country. It is resonating with people around the world. The US is on a shameful stage right now as a country who can't even supply water to people in their own countries, but will stand up on its bully pulpit and tell you we ship potable water all around the world, but yet there are people without it. So I think the movement is growing. There's recognition by elected officials. John Conyers in Michigan introduced the legislation around the Water Affordability Act. He's a senior member of Congress, so he's gotten some recognition around that. California has said water is a human right and they've passed legislation to match that. So we're trying to make mirror that around the country. We think what happened in California was a foreground of what could happen around the country. And there's a move afoot now to sort of replicate that model in California.
- [54:08]
A
Last question. If I'm not mistaken, the media discussion of the crisis in Flint had as one of its results the information that in fact the quality of water in Flint wasn't very different from the quality of water in many other parts of the United States. But somehow Flint made us aware. But that there are a lot of other Flints out there.
- [54:34]
C
Absolutely.
- [54:35]
A
Is that has that provoked people where that's the case to do something?
- [54:40]
C
I think the perfect example is right here in the Tri State area in New Jersey, particularly Newark, New Jersey, which has a. What they call one of the sites that were polluted by factories earlier in the year. The Passaic river is a Superfund site that raised awareness there. Folks started looking into the schools and realized that their schools had water fountains that contained a lot of lead in their water. And the main reason that this is happening is bad infrastructure. There are pipes that are 150 years old that need to come out and be replaced. Right. But as long as you have this crappy infrastructure in place, there's always that chance that this lead will flow through our water system. And sometimes you can't even put enough chemicals in there to reverse the process. The bottom line is we need an investment in infrastructure in this country. We need to start changing some of these pipes. You've heard many stories. You live in New York City like I do. When a water main breaks, they tell you it was 125 years old. Well, it's too old. It needs to be replaced. Nothing lasts forever, particularly those particular pipes that are pumping water into our homes.
- [55:46]
A
And that brings us back to the tax structure. If you don't tax the wealthy, even at the level we once did, say in the 50s and 60s, then you don't have the wherewithal to replace the pipes.
- [55:59]
C
Absolutely.
- [56:00]
A
Again, what strikes me, always, these are not financial problems. These are not technical problems. We know how to solve the problem, and we know that it's a human right. It's the political power of those who have the resources, those who have become richer over the last 40 years than anyone thought they could, who can control politics, not to put the money on the table. That solves the problem.
- [56:25]
C
I totally agree with you, Rick. I call it an issue of political will. That's the bottom line. We don't have the willingness of the elected officials to make that particular change. We know it works. As you said, we've done it in the past. It's not rocket science.
- [56:41]
A
Rob, thank you very much. I really appreciate your sharing this with us. And the water issue is something I've thought about, and this gives us a chance to share with our audience. Thank you very much for coming.
- [56:54]
C
Thanks for having me.
- [56:56]
A
Well, folks, I think that's something to think about, something to get involved in, if you care about it, as I think most of you do. Let me close by thanking all of you for listening and for being a partner with us, which is our goal. I want to thank truthout.org, that remarkable independent source of news and analysis that has been partnering with us for years. And by partnering, I mean make use of those websites we maintain. They're full of materials you can share with others. Rdwolf with two Fs.com and democracyatwork all one word democracyatwork.info. thanks again and I look forward to speaking with you again next week. Change, change change. Things gonna change here.
- [57:49]
C
The deal it.
- [58:17]
A
Sam.