ACHTUNG: This is not a “fair and balanced” story. It is an editorial by the editor.

A republic, according to the dictionary, is “a state in which supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives, and which has an elected or nominated president rather than a monarch.” At the same time, a democracy is defined as “control of an organization or group by the majority of its members.”

There has been a lot of semantic arguments over describing just what the United States of America is supposed to be, one or the other. It’s neither. I’ve come to agree with former President Jimmy Carter that America actually has become an oligarchy, which the dictionary defines as “a small group of people having control of a country, organization or institution.”

And that small group of powerful people is corporations.

The growing body of proof reared its ugly head again this week with the shameful decision by the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality to allow corporate giant Nestle to suck up even more water from one of our pristine streams and then sell it back to us. This was decided despite information that more than 80,000 citizens expressed opposition to the move and only 75 indicated support.

Talk about a landslide! But it matters not.

DEQ officials insisted they followed the rule of law by permitting Nestle to drain more public water for private profit, at the expense of the public. They said so while trying to explain overriding the overwhelming will the of the people. This leads people like me to ask why public bodies even bother to seek public input when they plan regardless to do the bidding of corporations that have lots of money and lobbyists.

If following the law means we have to let huge multi-national corporations take our water and sell it to us, it’s past time to change the law. The best way to start to do that is to throw out the rascals in the State Legislature and elect people who will appoint DNR and DEQ officials who will protect public resources. We can do just that this November in the only way we can fight back — at the polls.

Michigan is unique on this planet in that it sits on one of the very largest sources of freshwater on earth — the Great Lakes. This state touches Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, Lake Superior and Lake Erie. The time will come soon when life-sustaining clean water will be the reason why countries go to war, just like what we’re seeing now with fossil fuels.

I tell you the truth — Michigan is the Saudi Arabia of water. Yet we’re giving away our precious resource to a giant corporation that concerns itself only with profit. We are squandering our greatest asset. Just look at what’s been happening in Flint, in Rockford in the Straits of Mackinac with aging pipelines.

It wasn’t very long ago when I opined, “I’m sick and tired of the growing body of evidence that our lawmakers and government officials care not a whit about the will of the people.”

The examples I gave in that editorial involved marijuana, approved by 63% of the voters in 2008; passage in Congress of a new budget that gives generous tax cuts to the rich and blows up the deficit; permission to shoot fireworks in Michigan, despite polls showing most oppose, and a 70%-30% defeat at the polls statewide of a voucher system for private education, yet the privatization process continues unabated.

In all of these cases, government is ignoring the will of the people and satisfying personal agendas, or more often doing the bidding of their wealthy benefactors rather than “the people.”

When the oligarchy of big business rules, about the only thing we common, everyday working stiffs can do on our own behalf is go to the polls in November and send them out of Lansing. In a nutshell: Don’t re-elect anybody.