If it's not nailed down, privatize it.

The FCC voted in a 3-2 party-line vote to end net neutrality, despite overwhelming bipartisan and public support for it.

Net neutrality is now officially on life support. Here’s what happens next. by Aja Romano (VOX)

Banned video exposes the Military Industrial Complex

Privatization: keep your eye upon the donut, not upon the hole

In the wake of massive of tax giveaways, governments are having trouble maintaining public services.

The Right will use this crisis to achieve a long-time goal: privatization (through tax cuts, many billions of dollars that belong to the public have been privatized already).

This is how privatization will go.

Businesses will use some of their new cash surpluses to buy public services (roads, bridges, parks, stadiums, libraries, water and waste water systems, trash collection operations, prisons, police/fire/rescue departments, power generation and distribution setups, etc.).

Many will be sold at fire-sale prices. Or given away.

Once in private hands, services that were created with public wealth and have worked well for generations (roads, bridges, parks, stadiums, libraries, water and waste water systems, trash collection operations, prisons, police/fire/rescue departments, power generation and distribution setups, etc.) will be milked, trashed, bled to death.

The public will continue to transfer more tax revenues to private hands for continuing operations or will pay directly for services through fees, tolls, etc.

The services will decline. They will reach the point where new money will need to be invested to keep them going. Business noggins will not regard this as money well spent.

The services will be returned to the public. They will not be sold at fire-sale prices. Nor will they be given away. The companies will demand -- and receive -- compensation, not only for the value of the land, buildings and "improvements," but also for "lost future revenues."

The service infrastructure will be repurchased by the public using tax dollars.

New taxes will be needed to restore the infrastructure to the condition it was in before privatization.

This story happened to appear today: Private services gaining toehold in Tucson (Arizona Star 2011-10-02).

H2O is the new oil: Water, water everywhere? Not so much

Thousands have lived without love, not one without water. -- W.H.Auden

It is now almost six years since the people of Uruguay voted to make access to fresh water a human right. In the years since, the race to privatize the world's fresh water supply has accelerated, encouraged by the water privatization policies of the World Bank.

By almost two to one, Uruguayans elected to amend their constitution to ensure not only that access to piped water and sanitation is a fundamental human value, available to everyone, but also that in planning and policies affecting water, social rights and needs take precedence over economic considerations. Further, it is now national policy in Uruguay that the “public service of water supply for human consumption will be served exclusively and directly by state legal persons,” i.e., not by for-profit companies.

The referendum in the South American nation, the result of a two-year grassroots fight led by a network of trade unions, human rights groups, and environmental organizations, gave a boost (pdf) to the international civil society water movement that hopes to spread the principles reflected in the amendment to other countries and regions and to enshrine the right to water in international agreements.

The world’s water crisis due to pollution, climate change and a surging population growth is of such magnitude that close to two billion people now live in water-stressed regions of the planet. By the year 2025, two-thirds of the world’s population will face water scarcity. The global population tripled in the twentieth century, but water consumption went up sevenfold. By 2050, after we add another three billion to the population, humans will need an 80 percent increase in water supplies just to feed ourselves. No one knows where this water is going to come from. -- Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water

Action: Join the People's Water Forum in defense of water as a human right, a public good, and a central component of the global commons.

Further reading:
-> Our Water Commons: Towards a new freshwater narrative by Maude Barlow (pdf) (The Council of Canadians, onthecommons.org)
-> Right to Water: From Concept to Implementation by Celine Dubreuil (pdf) (World Water Council 2006).
-> International Conference on the Right to Water and Sanitation in Theory and Practice - Conference Programme and Abstracts (University of Oslo, University of Oxford, United Nations Development Programme - Oslo 2009-11-26/27)
-> Social movements are working hard in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay to put water services that were privatized in the 1990s back in state hands. -- Who Controls the Water? by Marcela Valente (IPS 2006-07-21).
-> Campaign in Colombia Seeks to Make Water a Constitutional Right by Helda Martínez (IPS 2007-08-29).
-> Cochabamba, the Water Wars and Climate Change by Amy Goodman (Democracy Now! 2010-04-21)
-> Is access to clean water a basic human right? So far, the U.S. says no by Yigal Schleifer (The Christian Science Monitor 2009-03-19).
-> Historical background on Privatizing U.S. Water (Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy 2007)
-> The Business of Water: Privatizing An Essential Resource by Stephen Lendman (Baltimore Chronicle 2010-03-09).

Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water by Maude Barlow (New Press 2008-9 - the paperback edition arrives on Saturday 2010-05-15) is a cool, clear, thorough and authoritative overview of a crisis that stretches from North America -- Barlow predicts that as many as 36 states could reach a water crisis in five years -- to Africa and Asia, where desertification has destroyed once vast water resources such as Lake Chad and the Aral Sea.