Tikkun Magazine, March/April 2008 

FILM

Theft of the Commons

THIRST: FIGHTING THE CORPORATE THEFT OF OUR WATER

Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman with Michael Fox Jossey-Bass, 2007

Review by Barbara Garson

A FEW YEARS AGO I READ THAT some South Africans had been arrested demonstrating against water cut-offs in the Johannesburg township of Soweto. I happen to be a shareholder in Suez, the private company that owned Johannesburg Water, so I responded by organizing a shareholder's demonstration outside the South African consulate. I'd demonstrated so often outside the old apartheid consulate that I felt entitled to sound off against the new government's policy of privatizing water and charging everyone the full cost.

My protest was on the behalf of distant people, so poor that rate hikes led to Cholera epidemics when disconnected families took to collecting polluted water. Yet I was joined, to my surprise, by affluent citizens of Bergen County, New Jersey, who had their own grievances with my water company. Their water bills had also gone up when Suez took over. But their main complaint was that the company had sold off what they considered to be preserve land around the reservoir to real estate developers. As an investor I called Suez and learned that they ran profitable water systems in seventeen U.S. states and Canada.

I had no idea that water privatization had gone so far in my own country. But I would have known if I'd seen the impressive documentary Thirst on PBS, for it describes the opposition to water takeovers all around the United States. Now the filmmakers Deborah Kaufman and Alan Snitow have, with Michael Fox, given us a written version of Thirst featuring detailed case studies of the successful and unsuccessful local fights that inevitably follow water privatization. It's the book you need as soon as you hear about a privatization scheme in your region. As a matter of fact, you need it sooner than that. For if the water companies have their way, you won't hear about water theft until the wells run dry.

In the United States, those who want to privatize services like health, education, and transport can count on rallying people against big government. But every Western movie fan knows immediately that the man who wants to control the water is the villain. Water is so vital and so traditionally communal that talk about selling our water to a private company automatically evokes anxiety. Furthermore, water privatization makes no economic sense. So corruption and concealment are often big factors in pushing the plans through. Most of the successful tactics explained in Thirst depend upon finding out early, spreading the word, and demanding a local vote.

One lively chapter of Thirst describes how the governor of Wisconsin made a quiet agreement to allow Nestles (Perrier) to pump out huge amounts of state water for bottling. Nestle chose to start at a stream in a state park where they would, presumably, be least noticed. But as it happened, a big Republican contributor fished in that stream. A single letter to the governor got the pumping sight shifted to another location. But a group called "Trout Unlimited" didn't share the all too common not-in-my-trout-stream philosophy, alerting individuals in the less influential community. There it took an exhausting public struggle to halt the plan. Foiled in Wisconsin, Nestle moved on to Michigan.

By the time you read Thirst, many of the corporate names will be outdated. For you can't generate constantly rising profit rates by delivering clean water to everyone in a community year after year. So the common business plan in the United States seems to be: buy a management contract, cut staff and raise prices, then sell the system back to the government when the water gets unacceptably dirty. You can also sell off an asset, like the land around the reservoir, and deliver the one-time cash to shareholders, then sell the system to someone else. Sometime after I demonstrated against the French company Suez, it sold its U.S. holdings to the German company RWE. Bergen County's water system has yet another owner today. When no bold privateer can think of any further asset to strip, the public will have to take it back.

Unfortunately, the only asset worth stripping, in many places, is the water itself. India, with 18 percent of the world's human population, has only about 4 percent of its fresh water. That's why some Indians are furious about water sales to Coca-Cola (Dasani) and Pepsi (Aquafina). It is important to note that pumping contracts can give bottlers access to all the ground water in a region's aquifer. Imagine: a private company has the right to sell away the underground water, before then shared not only by humans but also by the region's vegetation. Indian environmentalists have called for a boycott against all bottled water. That means that they're organizing on our behalf too.

It is certain that the bottling barons won't give up on us easily. Science fiction writers have fantasized the bottling and selling of air in some future dystopia. But water, too, is life, and bottled water is already here. We'll have to hone the tactics documented in Thirst, and invent some new ones too, if we're to foil this theft of the commons.

Barbara Garson is the author of the play MacBird!, and the books All the Livelong Day: The Meaning and Demeaning of Routine Work, and Money Makes the World Go Around.

Garson, Barbara. 2008. Theft of the commons. Tikkun 23(2):72-73.