Not shocking at all. Water and sewer should be run by your local government for public interest and not for profit.
When public services are run for-profit, services get cut down right up to the regulation line.
Why bother getting 99.9999999% of the bacteria and literal shit out of the water when regulations say I only need to get 98%? BTW I ~~bribed~~ lobbied politicians to change regulations down from 99.99%. That was just unreasonable and everyone knows a little cholera is good for the heart.
When public services are run for-profit, services get cut down right up to the regulation line.
Yep. And Republicans are getting elected and gutting those regulations.
coughuspscough
And why shouldn't Nestle have a monopoly on water? They should be able to drain the Great Lakes and sell it to everyone else but the US if they damn well please!
Note: I've never said anything with more sarcasm in my life and now I feel like just by typing this out it's already in the playbook for when Trump steals the next election.
Note: and now I need a drink.
It should be illegal to privatize any utilities.
Privatization means higher prices and worst service. Look at any private utility over the course of its lifetime to see a service that eventually fails to serve.
To the surprise of no one who's been paying attention ever...
If you go to bed with capitalists, you wake up with fleas.
Also probably missing at least one kidney. Nothing personal, it's just good business!
My sister is a civil engineer in PA and is familiar with this situation. She told me that basically these municipalities did not take care of their pipes, refused to raise any money for them, then, when they got old enough that the situation became critical, sold it off. Now this company comes along, has to make required fixes to the pipes, and has to raise the money to do so. The private company gets to be the bad guy, while the local governments, who neglected the pipes for a decade or more, don't get heat.
All this said, if they weren't allowed to sell it to a private company, there would be no "get out of jail free" card and maybe they would have pushed harder to take care of them damn pipes.
Point is, I don't think it's quite as simple as it looks on the surface.
She told me that basically these municipalities did not take care of their pipes,
So it's bog-standard "let-it-break-and-then-sell-it-for-a-song" neolib shitfuckery.
Yeah, man if Boomer's parents could see how they are running the government systems that were so carefully put in place there would be a lot of beatings again.
We really are in the "gut everything and fire everyone so that I can save a few more bucks for myself" endgame
It's the same tactic for the NHS in the UK, the one remaining publicly-owned service the Tories can't get away with selling off, so they're letting it slowly die.
so they’re letting it slowly die.
It's the exact same thing here in South Africa with the electricity grid - popular resistance is too strong for the ANC-regime to just sell it off to billionaire parasites, so they are just "sabotaging it in place."
The state could have done any number of things to make sure a situation like this would never happen in the first place.
Not going to dox myself, but I'll just say that I'm familiar with how (functioning) state government agencies finance these types of infrastructure projects. Often, it's not even state money, they get it from the Federal government, and are responsible for administering it according to certain requirements.
In fact, Biden's Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provided billions of dollars to states for this exact type of project. PA State government failed it's citizens. Again.
This is a feature of corrupt state government in the US south. They abandon their infrastructure, pocket the cash, sell the infrastructure once it fails or do what Mississippi did and just make fema come in and replace it all.
Corrupt southern states hurt their own constituents for money.
So what is the answer to that?
Clearly representative government simply doesn't work since even after a revolution, some unscrupulous evildoer can just fake their way into office and repeat the cycle all over again, so what will it take to fix the problem?
The answer was to go back in time and make sure we don't fuck up Reconstruction.
But what do we do now?
Clearly we need a better way that ensures our basic needs are met and other people can't simply fuck it up or take them away from other people.
Even typical infrastructure funding ultimately gets money from the EPA. Before it was just NEPA projects, but now we have BIL, ARPA, and WIIN grant projects.
Yeah, I mentioned that. People don't really have a concept of how much money the federal government is giving to states for infrastructure projects...
I was on site for an ARPA project and the contractor was complaining that Biden never did anything for rural America...
Yeah, the cognitive dissonance is wild. Even in a blue state.
No shit. The private companies aren't buying it up to lose money. They want to profit, and that means they're going to charge you as much as possible for as little as possible.
Imagine having a water bill in general. Our society is trash..it's a basic human need.
"it's a basic human ~~need~~ Nestle Product!"
:(
To play the devil's advocate... Water shouldn't be free, because that's how it gets taken for granted. While I absolutely agree that there is a human right to water, it's a shared resource that is becoming increasingly unpredictable due to weather and water quality. I live in a state that was hit hard by drought multiple times over the past decade and we're always reactionary in addressing the problem at the time, rather than trying to establish efficient water use in the long term.
Water rate structures are an important tool for ensuring that people use water efficiently. Things are slowly changing for the better in terms of infrastructure, but not fast enough to match existing issues. So the demand side needs to be addressed as well as the supply side. Having a rate structure that gets increasingly expensive on a per unit basis for wasteful households is the gold standard (although of course it's difficult to implement without enough data, which is why creating a robust rate structure is a balancing act that can take a few years of study).
(Of course there are other elephants in the room, like the inherent racism in the water rights system and the fact that agriculture uses way too much of it...)
One thing that would help this whole situation is not living in sprawling suburbs and exurbs that require maintaining so many more miles of pipes per person.
Wow, its almost as if essential services shouldnt be profit driven, since they arent fucking businesses, they are fucking services.
But how are the oligarchs going to squeeze every last penny out of the peasants, if public services serve the interest of the public? Checkmate leftists!
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