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Middle East: Water Crisis and Water Refugees
Droughts for several consecutive years and the damming of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers have the Middle East facing its worst water crisis in decades.
by Deborah Amos
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122294630
Ideas for community resistance to water privatization from Lee, MA.,U.S.
Video showing action speaks' panel in Providence Rhode Island. Deidre Consolati, leader of Citizen's Resistance to Municipal Water and Sewer Privatization in Lee, MA is highlighted.
Bailed-Out AIG Forcing Poor to Choose Between Running Water and Food
Thanks to AIG, some of the poorest residents of rural Kentucky learned you can always be made poorer by corporate villains. What are we getting in return for the bailout? So far, predatory credit card rates, exorbitant bank fees and obscene Wall Street bonuses. But we're being robbed in other, sneakier ways, too. It seems that taxpayers in the poorest, most vulnerable parts of the county are getting plundered by the same institutions they bailed out. One example is AIG's underhanded fleecing of residents of rural Kentucky.
Middlesboro and Clinton are two tiny, impoverished towns in southern Kentucky with a combined population of 12,000. In 2008, Middlesboro's per capita income was $13,189 a year, only a few hundred dollars more than the average worker earned in third-world Mexico. That is if they were lucky to even get a job. Real unemployment hovers somewhere around 30%, and the state is so broke that half the people eligible for unemployment benefits can't receive them. Life may be tough and most people live in poverty, but that doesn't mean they can't be made a little poorer. That's the lesson locals learned after bailed-out insurance villain AIG took over their water utility and instantly raised rates to squeeze an extra $1 million in profits out of its new customers, forcing some to consider choosing between running water and food.
The towns are so rural, their residents have yet to be touched by the Internet revolution. Forget comment sections or forum threads. In Clinton, you have to track down actual hand-written notes that residents filed with city hall to read their complaints about the rate increase. Luckily, city officials were nice enough to scan some of them.
Here's one, dated August 8, 2009:
My husband and I are on a fixed income and with everything going up in price this would be very a very large burden on us as well as most of the citizens of Clinton. Our town is mostly of people like us and this would be such a hardship for us. A 50.8% raise is outrageous on anything. Please do not let this happen. It would mean the difference in bringing buying food and medicine or paying a high water bill to make someone else's life easier.
Here is how the AIG takeover went down: In 2005, flush with cash from its shady dealings in the mortgage derivatives market, AIG announced that it was in the process of acquiring Utilities Inc., a holding company that controlled scores of small water utilities across 17 different states. With just 300,000 customers, the company wasn't huge, but it boasted of being the largest privately held water utility in the country.
"We have long considered water infrastructure as an attractive investment opportunity and an excellent complement to [our] existing energy infrastructure portfolio. Utilities Inc. is a leader in this industry and we are pleased that [we have] the opportunity to acquire this business,” AIG Chairman and CEO Win J. Neuger gloated in a press release.
AIG had reason to be pleased with its purchase. Water utilities are one hell of a profitable business, with international corporations easily making a 20 to 30% profit margin, according to a 2007 report by Food and Water Watch. In the US, federal regulations limit profits to 10%, a pesky rule that companies easily subvert by shuffling their income around and “investing” it in side businesses. These kinds of returns would be the envy of the pharmaceutical and oil industries. How do water companies do it? According to Food and Water Watch, they charge 50% more for services than public utilities and pocket the difference, thereby unleashing the potential of the free market.
People who have been ripped off by bailed-out banks' schemes to trick late fees out of their customers will recognize what Utilities Inc. did to the people of Middlesboro and Clinton. In the summer of 2008, as AIG was teetering and desperate for funds, it "upgraded" its billing system, and suddenly a slew of late fee charges hit the struggling locals.
(Rest of the story at http://www.alternet.org/water/144203/bailed-out_aig_forcing_poor_to_choo... )
By Yasha Levine, AlterNet. Posted November 26, 2009.
U.S. Water Use Declines, But Points to Troubling Trends, Says USGS Report
U.S. water use is at its lowest while the economic productivity of water in the country is at an all-time high, according to a USGS report released Tuesday.
October 29, 2009
by Andrea Hart
Circle of Blue
http://www.circleofblue.org/waternews/2009/world/u-s-water-use-declined-...
Present state of Clean Water Act
October 22, 2009
New York Times Editorial
Clean Water: Still Elusive
Rightly celebrated as one of this country’s most important environmental statutes, the 1972 Clean Water Act has greatly improved the quality of America’s waters, turning contaminated rivers and lakes into swimmable, fishable and even drinkable waters.
But even its staunchest allies agree that the act has grown old and fallen well short of its goals, crippled by uneven and sometimes nonexistent enforcement by state and federal agencies — particularly during the Bush years, but even before — and by shortcomings in the law itself.
A comprehensive series of investigative articles in The Times by Charles Duhigg makes it clear that the time has come to strengthen enforcement and the law. More than 40 percent of the country’s waters, he found, remain dangerously polluted. Nearly 20 million Americans fall ill every year from drinking water contaminated with parasites, bacteria or viruses. Polluters — public and private, large and small — treat the law with contempt. Violations have jumped significantly. Penalties for noncompliance are small and rarely assessed.
President Obama’s new team seems to be paying attention — chiefly Lisa Jackson, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, which oversees the act as well as a related measure, the Safe Drinking Water Act. Ms. Jackson has ordered an assessment of the agency’s shortcomings, promised stronger enforcement, added new chemicals to the long list of contaminants and promised to investigate others. But she agrees that more must be done, by her and by others.
POLICE THE STATES As with most environmental laws, responsibility is shared. Washington sets the health standards; the states write and enforce the permits, which tell polluters what can and cannot be discharged into the water. Some states are tough, others weak, but in all cases the E.P.A. has the authority to intervene and enforce the laws when states fail. Worried about disturbing the federal-state balance, intimidated by industry, the E.P.A. has never used this power the way it should.
CLOSE OBVIOUS LOOPHOLES There are two big gaps in enforcement. Large animal-feeding operations — the huge sheds containing hogs and chickens — are supposed to be regulated as “point sources” just like factories. They are not. In Iowa, not a single confined animal-feeding operation has a clean water act permit telling it what to do.
Power plants are another big loophole. What utilities put into the air is regulated. Not so the toxics — arsenic, lead, cadmium — they discharge into the water. The agency was supposed to have set limits on these pollutants in the 1980s, and never has. That’s disgraceful.
FIX THE LAW The 1972 act focused largely on what was then seen as the most obvious threat: direct discharges from large “point sources” like factories and municipalities. The bigger danger today comes from unregulated sources like runoff from farms, suburban lawns and city streets. The act should be rewritten to give these nonpoint sources higher priority.
FIX THE FINANCING The number of regulated sources has grown enormously, from 100,000 in 1972 to an estimated one million. Adding nonpoint sources would increase the burden on underfinanced and understaffed state agencies, not to mention the E.P.A. itself. The Clean Air Act requires states to collect fees from the largest air polluters. A similar, federally mandated fee system might be considered for water polluters.
There are other problems. Data collection from industry and local authorities is hopelessly outdated. Two misguided Supreme Court decisions have forced the E.P.A. to use precious resources to resolve jurisdictional disputes over its authority to protect wetlands and small streams. But beefing up enforcement, repairing regulatory and legal flaws and putting the entire effort on a firm financial footing are the big ones. Ms. Jackson deserves all the help she can get from the White House and Congress in tackling them.
