← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
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Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Jobs, debts, incomes, our own, and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life, and I hope that prepares me well to present you with these analyses of the economic realities of our time. I want to begin by continuing the shout out I have offered to the teachers in four states. Courageous, successful, effective, Arizona, Kentucky, West Virginia and Oklahoma. Public school teachers in those states have shown the capacity to step up, to say enough is enough, to really stand for the public education of the children of their states by demanding, finally, that the governments in those states pay teachers properly so they can do their job and thereby serve the education of our children, which is about as important as anything states do. They showed the courage to do it and they deserve our respect. And I am happy to report that there are many cases now of public school teachers in other parts of the United States that are taking inspiration from what these teachers are showing in the way of making a real big difference in the way this world works. The second Update today has to do with something in the news that needs a little further exploration. This has to do with Facebook. The invention by Mark Zuckerberg and others of what we all take for granted these days as a mechanism of social communication. The original technical breakthrough, and the original idea was to make it easier for human beings to communicate with one another about a whole range of things. To stay in touch, to develop one another through a friendship. Electronically enhanced. So far, so good. But then the capitalist economic system intervened, as it does always with technical breakthroughs and typically in ways that do not enhance the technical change, but constrict it in the interests of profits for the few. Let's begin with Mr. Zuckerberg himself. He has become one of the 10 richest people on earth, even though his invention, however much you like it, is nothing more than a small step in the evolution of a technology about electronic communication that had many pioneers before him, that was learned by the teachers who taught Mr. Zuckerberg and who developed many of the ideas he then later used, give him an extra boost for having made the final breakthrough good. But to make him a multi multi billionaire when that money could and should be used for many more important things than fattening his individual wallet, I find that extraordinary. That's capitalism. It's how it works. It makes a few people ridiculously rich, thereby controlling wealth that could be much more usefully spent. But even that I could overlook. Asocial as it is. But now we see what use can be made by capitalism of this invention. It allows advertisers to track every one of us, to basically intrude themselves into the privacy of our personal lives, our personal communications with one another, to figure out how to annoy us and bother us with advertisements we don't need or want for products that are in half the cases faulty or misleading in terms of how they serve us. Not only that, it allows politicians who understand that what they do is to sell their Persona, their made up personality to the public. Much as otherwise the cereal company sends and sells its breakfast to you, they have also been exposed using and abusing this private information. It's the profit motive that drives these other things. It's how capitalism makes its use of technical breakthroughs that we don't want and that we don't need. It was clear from the beginning that if we have more private communications with one another through the medium of Facebook, and then there's a privacy issue and a respect for privacy issue that's wrapped up in that. That's why we make people go to a judge to get the right to listen in on our telephone conversations. But everybody could get access easily to Facebook. It's a shame what our economic system does to technical change. Deflects it, distorts it and turns it against us, rather than being an agency for our liberation. My next update has to do with a remark made by Harold O. Levy. You may not remember him, but he was the superintendent of schools in the city of New York starting in 2000. He was the superintendent for many years and New York City is the nation's largest public school system. He's currently suffering from ALS and knows himself to be dying and did something quite courageous that I want to talk about. He decided to write honestly in the New York times back on 7 April about something that has obviously bothered him for a long time. And here's what he basically said that US colleges and universities give lip service to enabling a few students to get into the ranks of the selective schools. Interesting word that selective. What he means is schools with reputations that are fancy and who therefore can give you a boost up for a job after you graduate. But the hard reality, says Mr. Levy, is that most schools reward privilege and reproduce it because they know that they depend for their reputations on having the money it takes to sustain those reputations. And so they want to create spaces and they tilt to create spaces, no matter what they say to the people that they know have the greatest chance of of being wealthy later on in life and making those contributions that make them the selective schools they are. This is a problem of this system. If you create great wealth in a small part of your population, you are creating the incentive and the wherewithal to allow those very rich people to secure privileged positions in the right universities so that they can carry on the wealth of this family. They can allow their parents to think that the wealth will last forever because they've gotten their kids into the right school, which was a way station to the right job and that will make them wealthy and they will pay back the school they went to. You can see the, the feedback loop here. And that's why, says the former superintendent of schools of New York, that's why it's just lip service and lots of PR for the few people from the bottom of the economic heap where two thirds of our people live. It's just a PR that they get in the schools. And the system conspire to make selective, well reputed schools the place where wealthy people send their kids. My next update has to do with a group of journalists and their associates in the Netherlands. They recently found and exposed documents and those documents teach us something. And it's been all the rage in the Netherlands. It has to do with one of the prime companies of that country, the Royal Shell Oil Company that will be familiar to many of you because of the Shell gas stations that dot the landscape in many countries, including the United States. The documents uncovered, particularly by the newspaper de Correspondent, my apologies if I'm not pronouncing it right, in Holland, in the Netherlands, show that as far back as the 1960s, Shell Oil scientists knew that fossil fuels cause catastrophic climate change. But they systematically misled the public about what their scientists had brought to their leaders attention. If this story sounds familiar, you. Yes, the same story has been associated with the Exxon Oil Company and many others. By the way, these documents about Shell, like the documents about Exxon, have been the basis for lawsuits. In the case of Exxon, lawsuits are now being pursued about the damage done to people by having withheld scientific information that was urgently in the public interest. The lawsuits are being pursued by New York City, by San Francisco, by the state of New York, the state of Massachusetts, the state of California for damage done and the litigants. And the litigation is growing. Let's be real clear about what happened here. Profit to be gained by finding bringing to the surface processing petroleum outweighed the staggering damage that the people profiting from oil knew burning fossil fuels would cause. This is an open and shut case of how and why the pursuit of private profit happens so often at the expense of public welfare. This issue could have been caught much earlier. Countless people's diseases and deaths from bad air, from pollution and so on could have been avoided. This is serious stuff. It reminds me also that in the news last week was stories about how Shell Oil and another oil company, the Italian ENI Oil company, are being accused in the Niger Delta in Africa of polluting that delta of one of the greatest rivers in the world, the Niger river, in catastrophic ways. Both companies have issued statements saying that they take great care not to pollute the area. I ask you what I asked how could we expect a rational human being to credit what those companies are telling us now about the horror that they're committing in Africa when we know what kind of untruths they dealt with for the last half century? Before I go to my next update, I want to remind you, as we often do in this program, that we have two websites that we invite you to visit where you can see these programs archived, where you can follow the work that we do. One is Democracy at work. That's all one word, democracyatwork.info and the other one is rdwolff with two f's. Com. You can of course follow us as well through those websites, if you like, on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. I want at this moment to also particularly thank our Patreon community, people who have gone to the patreon.com website that's P A T R E O N economicupdate. If you go there, you can see the entire program in its video version. But more than that, you can be supportive of us as you have been and as we are grateful for your continuing to be. And we are beginning to add new and interesting information at that website as well, and we invite you to go there to take a look at it. I also want to draw your attention to the podcasts that we produce Left out and Puerto Rico Forward currently. And I'm happy to announce more podcast programs are in the works and I will be announcing them as we move forward. The Puerto Rico Forward is also available on Apple Podcasts and Google Play. Returning to our updates, I want to bring your attention to a remarkable study in Great Britain. It's about something that will otherwise pass below the radar and it's going on in the United States, in other parts of Europe as well, but the British have done a fine job of documenting it recently and I want to commend particularly the British newspaper the Guardian for Making this publicly available since the 1970s. This research shows the average size of the rooms that British people live in have shrunk. And let me tell you about that. Average living rooms in British apartments have shrunk by one third since the 1970s. Master bedrooms have shrunk by 10%, kitchens by 13%. These figures are adding controversy in England to what is called you must love this rabbit hutch Britain. Apparently it turns out that British construction companies are busily converting former office buildings into apartment houses with apartments that are below the minimum size that England has created for any new home, namely 37 square meters. It turns out that in one property in the middle of London, in the Croydon section, The apartments measured 14.9 square meters. I could go on, but it is happening all over. And the reason I want to bring it to your attention is if you measure economic recovery from the collapse of 2008 and you don't measure this, you're missing what's going on. Even if people stay in an apartment that is, they don't become homeless. What we're seeing is that people are being crammed into smaller and smaller living spaces. That's not a recovery, friends. That's not the word that captures that economically. You know what word does it better? That's called economic decline. And the same is true of diets and many other things. There has been no recovery, friends, and there hasn't been one for more than the years since the collapse of 2008. Beware of the statistics and the boastful politicians, journalists and academics who want you to believe that that capitalism has recovered from its 2008 collapse. It hasn't. And the statistics I bring to your attention are just so many illustrations. My attention was caught this last couple of weeks also by the Sinclair Broadcasting Company. It's a very right wing broadcasting company that got caught recently when it required all of its announcers across all the many stations it owns to say the same thing on an evening night. So much for the editorial independence of the people who work for Sinclair. But many other journalists then asked those at Sinclair a simple why do you stay at a place that instead of allowing journalists to do their job, writes a script for them, making all kinds of statements that these journalists don't even believe or know to be false? It turns out that the answer given by the sad journalists at Sinclair was that many of them have a work contract with their employer that stipulates that if they leave the job, they must pay as much as, get ready, $10,000 of stipulated damages. This is illegal in most states in the United States, and there are now litigations beginning in California, Illinois and New York to deal with them. Once again, though, here we encounter a practice by employers to keep employees from leaving, but by requiring them to sign employment contracts, punishing them if they were to leave the job for a better offer somewhere else. Freedom means the right, at least if you're not treated well, if you're required to do things that are inappropriate or illegal or immoral, that you can leave your employer, you're not locked in where you have to compensate the employer. That's a new one and a sign of the relative weakness of organized labor and the opportunity for employers. The last update we will have time for today is one that is now in the news a lot. But I want to talk to you about it. This has to do with the epidemic of antidepressants. This is different from the opioid epidemic we have talked about on this program that has to do with anti pain medication and what it can do to you. This is a different kind of medication. It's called antidepressants. And I want to give you an idea of the numbers since they shocked me and they may have the same for you. More than 35 million people during the year 2013-2014, more than 35 million adults took antidepressants. As recently as 1999, 2000, the number of Americans taking them was 13 million. In other words, we've almost tripled the number of American adults taking antidepressant medicine. That's already a sign of something in the society not going real well. It's not what you would expect during a time of economic recovery. When things are looking better, things are looking up, when improvement is the order of the day, you wouldn't expect to see a tripling of the number of adults that need antidepressants to cope in their lives. But now the story darkens. It turns out that over one in 14Americans has been taking them for five years or longer. And it turns out that if you take it for a long period of time, there are serious side effects and they're difficult to measure and no systematic measurement has been done. And recently the following became common. People who have been taking them, particularly for long periods of time, which we can see millions of Americans have, can commonly cause the following side effects. By the way, the term here is commonly cause and my source is the New York Times April 7 On this material, emotional numbing, sexual problems like a lack of desire or erectile dysfunction and weight gain. Long term users report in many interviews, a creeping uneasiness about their dependence on these drugs that is difficult to measure. Popping these pills every day leaves them, in the words of the New York Times, doubting their own resilience. I want to read to you a summary statement about this situation by Professor Edward Shorter. He's a historian of psychiatry at the University of Toronto in Canada. Here we go. This is what Professor Shorter has to we've come to a place, at least in the west, where it seems every other person is depressed and on medication. You have to wonder what it says about our culture. Well, to help him not munder too much longer, I would say there's an awful lot of money to be made in marketing antidepressants to a population that is anxious about its life situation, that is doubly anxious about what the future holds, whose security in their work life and in their home life is shakier than it has been in decades. Those people are anxious. Those people get depressed? You bet. And so it becomes a real profit opportunity to feed that anxiety by promising good results from antidepressants. And in the logic of capitalism, it means not only promoting the good results, but hiding or minimizing the side effects, the costs, not undertaking the long term studies that might really shed some light here, making it necessary for daily newspapers like the New York Times to conduct the interviews that of course, should have been conducted by before these medicines became part of the daily life of 35 million American adults. This is capitalist medicine at its worst and needs to be exposed. In a concluding comment on this last week's economic events, I need to draw your attention to a remarkable other kind of development. The Labor Notes organization, which gathers together militants, activists, people committed to doing something to revive and to reinvigorate the American labor movement, had more people attending its Chicago conference than it has in years. And I take that to be a sign that's worth making mention of today, because it shows that people are slowly becoming aware, as of course they should have been for decades, that the decline of an organized labor movement serves only the interests of of the employers, who much rather deal with each individual worker by himself and herself, being able to fire them and replace them with others, especially at a time of masses of people eager for a job to not have to confront the possibility that an attempt to injure one worker will get you to have to confront all of them in a united way. The labor movement was always first and foremost an effort to correct the imbalance between an employer who has the wealth to hire people and the mass of workers who have to get a job precisely because they don't have wealth to rely on. That imbalance in power and economic strength allowed the employer to call the shots. And workers had to discover that the only way to get a balance back into that relationship was if the workers got together in a union. Have unions done bad things? Of course. They are like any other collection of human beings. They have their problems, they have their contradictions, their mistakes, their injustices. But that's true on all sides. And it's true with every effort to get human beings together inside corporations. All of those things have their effects and live their lives. It doesn't change the reality that if you have an unbalanced economy with power concentrated on the side of the employer and absent on the other, you, you're going to have the inequality and the accumulation of difficulties and problems that we see all around us in the United States today. And the Labor Notes Conference is a pushback against that. And for that they deserve a shout out. We've come to the end of the first half of this program. Thank you very much for staying with us in a very short time. We will be right back with an important continuation of an interview. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of this economic update. While it's a great pleasure for me to welcome back to this program someone who's been on here before and I want to continue the conversation, my guest is Rob. Robert is his full name, but we all call him Rob Robinson. An extraordinary fellow, someone I'm very proud to bring onto this program. He's a co founder and member of the leadership committee of the Take Back the Land movement, a very important global movement that deals with people denied their access to the land. And if there's anything as fundamental as the access to land of the human being, it would be access to water. And that's where we're going to be going a little later in the program. He's also a volunteer at the National Economic and Social Rights initiative known as NESRI. After losing his job in 2001, he spent two years homeless on the streets of Miami and 10 months in New York City's shelter system. He eventually overcame that homelessness and has been in the housing movement based in New York City since 2007. In the fall of 2009, Rob was chosen to be the New York City Chairperson for the first ever official mission to the United States of a United Nations Special Rapporteur of on the Right to Adequate Housing. He's worked with homeless populations in Budapest, Hungary and Berlin, Germany as well. He has Also been active with homeless populations and land and housing movements in South Africa and Brazil. It is an enormous pleasure for me to bring someone involved in these important global movements to talk with us in this case particularly, about the human right to water and where that stands as something human beings are struggling about. So I want to welcome Rob Robinson to this program. Thank you for coming, Rob.
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Thanks for having me.
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Okay. When we were talking before we got going, you told me that you have recently been at conferences in Brazil and elsewhere that deal with this whole issue of the right to water. And I want you to tell us basically how people are confronting interference with their right to water and what they think about it and what they're doing about it. Because I think that's an important struggle to understand. And then we can get into here in the United States and elsewhere, how it's working.
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B
Sure. So when we speak about human rights, we speak about the human need. What is it we need to sustain a certain level of life or to remain alive. And water is one of those things that we need. Right. But access to water has been limited for many reasons, mostly because of profit and the greed of a few corporations and governments who on addressing the needs of its people. So In Brazil, from March 18th through the 23rd, there was a big forum called the World Water Forum, where corporations come together along with governments, and they figure out basically how they can make more money off of water by selling it to people in many different forms. So you had companies like Pepsi, you had companies like Coca Cola, Ambev, all these large corporations. Nestle is there figuring out how they can increase their profits, how they can get governments to open up their rivers and streams to allow them to take more water. At the same time, folks decided we need to organize social movements around the world to fight back. So they organized the Alternative Forum on the Right to Water in Brazil from March 17th through the 22nd, intentionally organizing that forum to start before the World Water Forum and to end before, so that they could be sort of agitational, for lack of a better word, to.
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Offer an alternative idea of how to go.
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Exactly. So this was organized by many of the social movements, some of the biggest in Brazil, including one that you see me wearing a hat from, the movement of people affected by dams in Brazil. They go by the name of mabi, which is an acronym for that group. And MABI was one of the key groups organizing this because they've been affected by this water issue. But you also. They invited the international community. So you had folks from Sri Lanka, folks from Lagos, you had folks from Greece, folks from Italy, from all over the world who were struggling for access to water for various reasons.
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Tell me a little bit. Is this a situation where governments who used to find the water clean, the water, deliver the water to people's homes, are being withdrawn, in a sense, from the water provision so private companies can make a profit from what was before a public service?
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B
I think in many cases, yes. And I think that definitely plays out that way in the U.S. the government is backing away from that responsibility and offering it to private interests. Private interests have nothing in mind but making money off of this issue. So you see places like Detroit, things who, as I spoke the last time on the show, are struggling just for access to water for a number of different reasons. In Detroit, it's because poor people don't have the money to pay the high prices of water. In places like Flint, they were given water from a poisonous source. And then when it came to feeding them good water, the government was responsible for making deals with big corporations to provide them with fresh, clean, safe, bottled.
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Water, rather than having the government itself do that as a public service?
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Absolutely. So backing away from the infrastructure issue, backing away from the responsibility. So we've organized ourselves in the United States on the National Coalition for the Right to Water and Sanitation. And what we found out on visits to D.C. is the government is openly saying there is a disconnect from the time that water comes out of the ground until it's delivered into the faucet. They are openly backing away from their responsibility. And you really shouldn't give activists, you know, ammunition like that to run with. But they did it right, which says that government is backing away from its responsibilities. And then that calls into question democracy and some other things, especially the way this is being played out.
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How do you react to the proposition that when the government backs away from maintaining what we might call the traditional historical notion of a public war, water supply, meaning reservoirs, dams, all of that, is this something that private companies like those you mentioned are pushing the government to do? Because it literally creates a market for them.
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They're lining up, Rick, for lack of a better way to phrase it, to step in and take over the responsibility of bringing water to the people? Because, yeah, they can profit off of it. It opens up a market commodification. So it speaks to the economic system that we're living off, which your show is all about.
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Right.
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It's problematic, right? Capitalism finds different ways to reinvent itself, and they're doing it right now through water, which is a human need we all have to have it. There's not an infinite source of water in the world. But some of us think that way. Even some of us who have that need. Right. So they know there's a limit to this water. But. But if we can control it, then you're going to control the profits. And they're moving in that direction. But folks are organizing themselves to push back.
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Okay, let's explore this a little bit. Sure. I was reading recently that in a number of European countries and I remember particularly Germany and I think also Italy, that communities, municipalities that had turned over the provision of water to. To private companies rather than having it as a public service privatization, have now, after a series of years of living with that, decided under pressure from the mass of their citizens to go the other way to what's called re municipalize. Because the quality of the service, the prices people were being charged for the profit making delivery of water was unacceptable to the population. Is this going on? Do you have examples of that you could share with us? What do you think about this?
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B
I think in two places. So the one you mentioned, Italy. Yeah. There's a very vibrant movement to reverse that and go back to the municipal responsibility of water. Right. They're pushing that angle. They pulled it away from private interest and they basically won. Same thing has happened in Greece. Greece with the citizenry going together with unions. The municipal workers union have fought off privatization twice and won because they realize basically it's about profit. At the end of the day, how much profit can we pull from water? Right. And businesses motto is raise revenues and cut cost at any expense. They really don't. There was no morality in this issue. With respect, it's about making a dollar. And I think folks started to see that. It really reared its ugly head in some bad ways. Right. Poor infrastructure, poor maintenance of pipes that deliver water. If I go and protect it from lead, then I'm spending more money. My profit margin isn't as high. And people are starting to understand these fundamental things. For a long time we tended to ignore that stuff. It's too much information. I don't need to know this. But folks started to realize that they're losing control of their lives. People are getting sick. And I think for us back here in the States, I think the important thing was a lesson learned from Flint. Because it's more than just the two years of feeding your water from a bad source. What are the long term effects? Right. The children who ingested that water, what are they going to go through after ingesting lead at Such high levels for so long. What kind of sicknesses and illnesses are they going to go through the rest of their lives?
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All right, give us some examples. I think it would help people understand it. And let's start with inside the United States, but also outside the United States. And what I'm looking for is some real concrete stories about how water became an issue in a community and how the fight over it developed and then how that was resolved.
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So I'll start with Flint and I'll just touch on that briefly because I think that was a story that hit the press. But I would just say that it's a not over. Flint is not an issue. And if you heard in recent news reports, the government has pulled back from its responsibility of even delivering safe drinking water and saying the water is okay. But you never see an elected official drinking from that water source. Right. They just tell you it's okay because they're backing away even from that responsibility of paying for the bottled water. So I think that's one big issue. And I just mentioned before the long term effects of illness. You know, these are poor people. How do they pay their medical bills that they're going to incur? So these things pile up. I think Detroit is a better, gives you a better photograph of long term fight. So in 2006, folks in Detroit started realizing that water was a big part of their expenses. Right. I think our federal government says your water bill shouldn't be more than 3% of your gross family income. Something of that nature. Right. Water, electricity, all of these utilities should only be 3 to 4% of a family's income. Well, folks in Detroit were realizing it was as much as 10% for a lot of people. And they organized themselves and they actually worked with legal people and policymakers and created a water affordability plan. It hit their city council and then it just sat there. It was never passed. Right. Maybe the intentions of some other folks were this is not going to work because it's going to reduce our revenues. Right. So fast forward to recent times. 2014, 2013, Detroit goes through tough economic times. Emergency manager comes in, the emergency manager decides to start cutting other resources. But then he wants to put the water bills on the back of people. So folks who are in arrears, you're going to have to start paying your water bill. Now. Whether you're a poor person, whether you have money, whether you have a job or not, if you are $150 in arrears or two months behind in your water bill, you stand for a shut off behind the scenes, unbeknownst to a lot of people, if your water does get shut off and you can't pay, you stand to lose your children if you have children in that household. So they put people's lives in a precarious position. They started pushing back on people. Then they started going through mass shutoff. The UN came in 2014 and spoke out about it. UN rapporteur at the time spoke out very, very powerfully against this issue and said it needs to stop. So you had two rapporteurs, the Rapporteur on housing, and you had the Rapporteur on water and sanitation, Catarina de Albuquerque. They were very vocal in their assessment of what was happening to people, how it was happening. They went in people's homes over a weekend.
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A
They.
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B
They saw it, they heard the stories, they challenged. The government there, issued a very powerful report that says, here are our recommendations. People need water to survive. So you should basically shouldn't shut it off on people. You need to find other ways. You have this water affordability plan that was out there.
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A
Let me interrupt you.
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B
Sure.
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A
Because I don't want to miss the enormity of what you're saying. A point then comes where human beings are not given a job and or paid enough money to be able to afford the food, the clothing, the shelter, and the water, without which life is not possible. They can't pay. And you're now confronted with an economic system that has reduced human beings, large numbers of them in a major city like Detroit. Detroit, to an incapacity to enjoy their rights as human beings. And it is the moral, the ethical, and also the legal in terms of international agreements to which the United States is a party, which is why the UN is basically here to say you can't do that. It's not an option. It's sort of like the Ten Commandments. You can't deny water to people. But you've just done that. You've shut off the water to these people and there's no answer saying, well, they should have paid their bill. Since then, the problem would be they couldn't feed their children. They couldn't. You've got to deal with this problem. Otherwise you're just kicking it from one disaster to the other. Am I getting this?
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B
You're getting it absolutely correct. And they're putting it on the backs of the poor people. And I just. We have to remember this picture of Detroit, once a city of prosperity. Right. Automobile manufacturing. Right. And workers working in this auto industry, making great money, living a good life. You know, Detroit was once called the Paris of the US Right? Now we fast forward to these times. Automobile industries left because they're abusing labor elsewhere, you know, exploiting labor and, and paying below living wages in other countries in the world. Detroit never had a vision past automobile manufacturing. So it's a city that's falling in a bad way and quote, unquote, our democracy, the most powerful, quote, unquote democracy in the world, have made decisions like the ones you just laid out telling people, if you can't pay, you can't have. Right? Instead of finding solutions, basically, as you said, kicking the can, right? And if you can't kick it, then you get kicked out. Right? So people are having to make decisions. Do I feed my family? Do I get water? Maybe I get water this week we eat next week. It is insane. But this is what was happening in Detroit. Now if you stood, as I said earlier in the program, if you stood to have your water shut off and you had children in the house, the children, you could very well be taking water.
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A
You could take the children away. Because there isn't.
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B
Because, because there's water in the house. But you've contributed to this problem, right? You've exacerbated the problem as a government instead of finding a solution or an alternative. So it's been problematic, but folks are organizing themselves now. It's gotten into the national news, it's gotten into international news. Folks like the Council of Canadians were having water care events where they were bringing water out of Canada to Flint and Detroit to highlight the injustice and saying government can't supply its people, then people will supply the people.
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A
Were these Canadian citizens who did this as an act of solidarity, as an.
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Act of solidarity and morality? These are human beings that you're denying something that's going to sustain life. If you as a government won't supply it, then we have enough morality in us and enough compassion in us. As people across the border and our brothers and sisters in the United States, we will supply them with water.
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A
We should remind everyone of the geography that Detroit is literally on the border with Canada. So this is your neighbors in a way, your neighbors.
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And you're divided by these Great Lakes, right? Plenty of water there, Right? But you can't have it in Detroit, but Nestle's can reach in there and pull out gallons of it to put in bottles to sell you is such a contradiction.
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A
Were there movements inside the United States, in Detroit, in Flint and so on, or elsewhere in America that are doing something about this? Tell us about those. Right.
- [46:25]
B
So there Were individual, right? There were individual struggles around the country. So in Detroit and Flint, you had water struggles, which are well documented. Philadelphia was going through some similar problems. People living in apartments two years, no running water because either an inability to pay or they fell behind where they used to live. And you can't have it in a new space till you pay the old bill. Right. Baltimore, similar. Similar problems in cities like Atlanta. Atlanta has a nuclear plant pulling up fresh water out of a lake and spewing out waste into the drinking water supply, polluting the fresh water. You go down sanitation in places like Selma, Alabama, Lowndes county in Alabama, they don't have proper waste receptacles to get rid of waste. So they pump it out from your backyard, your cesspool, and they go to an open field and blow it in the air. People end up getting sick, getting ill behind it. Uranium mining in New Mexico, polluting the water in indigenous communities because you're mining for profit and forgetting about the people and their needs. Right? Let's go to California, where a lot of our fruits and vegetables are grown. Folks working in rural areas of California trying to grow fresh crops so that we have a food supply here don't have access to clean water from a well unless they put in the infrastructure themselves. The government is putting it on the backs of the people. So we see these struggles all over the country. And now here in the US We've organized ourselves with the National Coalition on the Right to Water and Sanitation, and folks are starting in an organized fashion to move towards water affordability Is a big campaign now, right? A national affordability campaign all over.
- [48:03]
A
It's interesting because if you made it a law, ironclad law, that you have to deliver water to the people of the community, then the cost of doing that would have to become a problem for the government, for the companies, because they would have to find other ways to make it pay because they're being closed off from cutting people off. And we have precedents for that in the United States. We once upon a time allowed companies to hire children below the age of 10 years of age to work long hours in factories. At a certain point, the government, through agitation from angry parents, said, you can't hire children. You can solve your problem any other way you want, but that is not available to you. The mystery to me is why isn't the same applicable to. To, for example, access to water? That's not negotiable. That's part of what it means to be a human community. And just like you can't Employ children, you can't deny water. You're going to have to solve the problem of paying for that some other way.
- [49:10]
B
So I totally agree with you, Rick. But I think we've moved into a place in this country where development and big business run the country. They are the voices of government. We as citizens elect certain people, but because they put funds in the pockets of those folks, they dictate how that money is used and how it plays out. So you live by development and builders rules, right? By these folks who big business dictates the rules. We put the money in your pocket to get you elected. Now you do as we say and I think that's problematic. So it always speaks to me about who we put into elected office and how we choose what those individuals. In the past it's been popular people, but you know, we've noticed and you know, Rick, you have a big international presence in places like southern Europe. There are people coming up from movements that are taking over in government. I always speak to Barcelona, Spain, where Ada Colau is the mayor of Barcelona. She came from housing struggles. She was with the platform of people affected by mortgages. She is now mayor of Barcelona. Barcelona is moving towards a human rights cities saying that we are going to live off a set of values and principles. We're going to operate off a set of values and principles that imply human rights standards. Right. And why can't we do this around the world? Right. And I think it's political will. So it says to me that we have to, we have to find the right candidates in office. And there are those of us who will say, well, I'm not going to vote because you have the same so and so going into office. Office, that's not going to work. Right. Until we change that system, then we're going to have to put people into office that have our best interest in mind.
- [50:51]
A
Can you give us an example outside the United States where people have made a difference on the water issue?
- [50:57]
B
So I would start with Greece. You saw big movements in Greece of people screaming, they're in austerity, they're struggling around. And you, and you want to charge us X amount for water? No, this doesn't make sense. Water is a human right. And they organized themselves with municipal workers, unions and got in front of the government and just basically told the government, we're not going to play, we're not going to pay the prices you want. Water needs to be affordable. They organized themselves, got with policymakers and instituted a policy that said water is not the commodity that you Think it is right. We need water to live. So water has to be be affordable. We're not saying it has to be free, but we can't give it to the private market. This is the people's water. And the people should decide on how this water is distributed.
- [51:41]
A
And they got that.
- [51:42]
B
They got it. They fought it off twice, they fought off privatization twice and won. In a place like Lagos, they're fighting back and they're organizing themselves. And their movement is just getting bigger and bigger because people are starting to say, enough is enough. We've had it up to here, and until we push back, nothing is going to change. So the voice of the people that would sit and just tolerate whatever government dished out, I think is disappearing in some of these places. People are trying to take control of their own situation. I always say, Rick, and you saw this play out a lot with informal settlements. When you talk about housing around the world, people are self determined. They have the solutions to their problems. So if government, who is charged with providing the solutions to problems, can do it, we'll figure it out. You may not like the methodology that we put in place, but we know, we know how to supply ourselves with water. I mean, I work a lot in Brazil and the dams are creating poisonous water all over Brazil, or water that can't be used for farming. But I've seen some incredible things on how they pull water sources and create water to grow crops that won't give people sickness and illness for the rest of their lives. So the ingenuity is there within the people, and the people are taking control of their situations.
- [52:54]
A
Is it too much to say, am I allowing wishful thinking that people who struggle over water have in a way, a moment in which they can see clearly how government, as you put it, having had money put in its pocket by the water companies, that there's a collusion here between government profiteers seeing in water something they can collaborate on if only the mass of people pay the price. And that there's a kind of ability for people to get involved in water struggles to see that clearly when there's so much else in the culture that makes it hard to see that there.
- [53:39]
B
Is something about water right here. Maybe it's that innate dehumanization of water and innate need that has gotten people to rise up. As you said in the beginning, when you introduced me, I did a lot of work around land and housing, but I never saw people mobilize and rise up like I have around the water issue. When you say to people, you can't have water because you can't pay. People all of a sudden become radicalized and militant and they're willing to at any cost. They'll fight, right? My baby can't go without water. It's like saying your baby can't have milk. Well, then it's me or you. I'm going to take your life out because my kid is going to survive. So I think we see people rising up around the world in ways that I've never imagined. Well, I never imagined in land and housing. Those lines are always blurred around property rights and individual ownership and people buying into some of those narratives and some of those things in certain time, although we should be able to common land also. But there's something about water that just sparks people around the world to get up and not only get up in their community to say, this is connected. Right. Katharina, when she came to Detroit, said US Looks worse than some third world countries I've visited. The way you're treating people in Detroit. Right. And that was meaningful to people to say, okay, here's this woman from outside of the US that called the US A third world country. We have to get up off our you know what's and fight back. So I think water is an issue that you're going to see people coming together around the world and really rising up.
- [55:12]
A
The best part of your story, just for me, is that people have seen it, have understood it, have organized themselves, have fought it and have won. I began today's program shouting out the public school teachers in Arizona, Kentucky, West Virginia and Oklahoma because they're making public education work. This is very important to see that people are making water as a human right work. So thank you very much.
- [55:37]
B
Thanks for having me.
- [55:39]
A
And I want to thank all of you as well, as we always do at the end of the program. I want to thank truthout.org that remarkable independent source of news and analysis. And I want to invite you, please, to join us again next week for the next edition of Economic Update.