A disturbing trend in the water sector is accelerating worldwide. The new “water barons” — the Wall Street banks and elitist multibillionaires — are buying up water all over the world at unprecedented pace.
Familiar mega-banks and investing powerhouses such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, UBS, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, Macquarie Bank, Barclays Bank, the Blackstone Group, Allianz, and HSBC Bank, among others, are consolidating their control over water. Wealthy tycoons such as T. Boone Pickens, former President George H.W. Bush and his family, Hong Kong’s Li Ka-shing, Philippines’ Manuel V. Pangilinan and other Filipino billionaires, and others are also buying thousands of acres of land with aquifers, lakes, water rights, water utilities, and shares in water engineering and technology companies all over the world.
The second disturbing trend is that while the new water barons are buying up water all over the world, governments are moving fast to limit citizens’ ability to become water self-sufficient (as evidenced by the well-publicized Gary Harrington’s case in Oregon, in which the state criminalized the collection of rainwater in three ponds located on his private land, by convicting him on nine counts and sentencing him for 30 days in jail). Let’s put this criminalization in perspective:
Billionaire T. Boone Pickens owned more water rights than any other individuals in America, with rights over enough of the Ogallala Aquifer to drain approximately 200,000 acre-feet (or 65 billion gallons of water) a year. But ordinary citizen Gary Harrington cannot collect rainwater runoff on 170 acres of his private land.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-new-water-barons-wall-street-mega-banks-are-buying-up-the-worlds-water/5383274
There are several things to which we should all have access as basic human rights:
- Air to breathe
- Water to drink
- Food to eat
- Shelter to protect
- Energy to empower
Instead, all of these have been turned into commodities, allowing the rich to continue to enslave the rest of us.
That sucks !!!
What is happening in Detroit is the latest US example of what happens when such rights are not recognized, but it will not be the last:
http://detroitwaterbrigade.org/
The clear message here is that if you are a useless eater (and there are 93 million unemployed Americans who fall into that category), you do not deserve access to the necessities for life. In other words, as far as the market state is concerned, you do not deserve to live.
You ought to think long and hard about that, because we are rapidly losing the protections of our dying nation state and being subject to the law of the jungle.
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