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.
“of the people, by the people, for the people. . .”
75 for increasing rates of water extraction. 79.925 for not increasing rates of water extraction.
This is very important. I don’t agree we should vote out every office holder. We need to educate ourselves as to those that want to poison the earth, and those that want to preserve it.
This is all to increase the use of plastic bottled water – and thereby choke our landfills and befoul our oceans.
Blue Gold: World Water Wars is a 2008 documentary film directed, co-produced, and co-written by Sam Bozzo, based on the book Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World’s Water by Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke.
Check out the book or movie to see the level of concern some had way back in the good old days of 2008 – it’s not getting any better
Nestle should be paying a heavy extraction fee for taking that water. Landowners typically get 12% or 16% of the value of the resource extracted. Does Nestle pay any thing for the 400 gallons per minute they will be extracting? Why don’t we pay a deposit fee on water bottles the way we do for soft drink bottles? That would keep most of them out of landfills and off the roadsides. Most of the unelected people that give out the permits either don’t have the spine to make the right decisions or hide behind phrases like ” They meet all requirements” so we can’t deny the permit.
Nestle pays the State of Michigan a flat fee of $200 per year for rights to pump and extract Michigan water. It turns around and sells it bringing in a revenue of $343 million dollars in 2017. That’s a pretty nice profit.
Nestle is doing what any corporation does to turn a profit (and create jobs), they supply a demand in the market. Evidently, the public demands bottled water because of a number issues.
– They don’t trust their own sources of water.
– They don’t like the taste of the water source they draw from (either public or private).
– Buying bottled water is convenient.
I would think #3 is the major source of Nestlé’s popularity is more #3 than the other two. The public is the source of the demand. Make the demand go away, Nestlé’s has no market. Nestlé’s goes bankrupt in their water market, and the plant stops production. Easy solution. Hard for people to change their consumption of bottled water.
Who would have thought 30 years ago bottling water would ever be popular when we could get all the water we wanted from a faucet in our homes? However, many people are stupid and ignorant, so bottled water is probably here to stay for the immediate future.
Too much emotion; too little facts
From a financial viewpoint, Nestle employs over 300 people in an economically deprived area. That’s a $13 million payroll spent in the area. They spend over $50 million for goods and services from other business. As many as 175 truckers arrive every day to haul away bottles of water. The statewide impact is 765 jobs and $160 million in economic activity. (Facts from impartial consulting study.)
From an extraction standpoint, Nestle withdrew 3.4 billion gallons over a ten year period (2005-2014). At the same time, municipalities pumped 782 billion gallons from wells (Wayland included). The huge users are farms, parks, and golf courses that withdrew 1.37 TRILLION gallons of water. Nestle accounted for 15 hundredths of 1% of total (2.15 trillion gallons) extracted in Michigan in those ten years.
Oh, and municipalities that get their water from the Great Lakes (i.e. Grand Rapids) – pulled 3.13 trillion gallons of water from the Great Lakes for people to drink, bath, and wash their cars over that same 10 year period.
Mr. Andrews,
Using facts is not fair, it is all about the end of the earth because of corporate greed. Using facts is just not fair, feelings are more important.
Very good job, thank you.