STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
Water Scarcity: Blame It on Corporate Manipulations, Not Markets
By Staff News & Analysis - July 29, 2014

Companies proclaim water the next oil in a rush to turn resources into profit … Mammoth companies are trying to collect water that all life needs and charge for it as they would for other natural resources … "Is now the time to buy water?" enquired the email that showed up in my inbox earlier this week. Its authors weren't worrying about my dehydration levels. Rather, they were urging me to think of water in quite a new way: as a commodity to invest in. Making money from water? Is this what Wall Street wants next? After spending nearly 30 years of my life writing about business and finance, including several years dedicated to the commodities market, the idea of treating water as a pure commodity – something to bought and sold on the open market by those in quest of a profit rather than trying to deliver it to their fellow citizens as a public service – made me pause. – UK Guardian

Dominant Social Theme: Corporate ownership of the world's water is the inevitable next phase of capitalism.

Free-Market Analysis: We've predicted this in a series of articles. Enforced scarcity is how the power elite initiates further globalism and exercises controls.

See here:

Middle East Is Running Out of Water … Call NASA

Is It Peak Water Yet? Another Phony Meme

Water Scarcity Promotion Begins?

Of course, the mainstream media is sure there's a water problem, one that is only going to be compounded by a capitalist takeover of the global water supply.

But, heck, let's state for the record, we hope that fresh water IS privatized, and oceans, too. When it comes to resources of any kind, there's no substitute for private ownership.

You won't read that in this article, though. Here's more:

Sure, I've grown up surrounded by bottled mineral water – Evian, Volvic, Perrier, Pellegrino and even more chi-chi brands – but that has always existed alongside a robust municipal water system that delivers clean water to whatever home I'm occupying. All it takes is turning a tap. The cost of that water is fractions of a penny compared to designer bottled water. This summer, however, myriad business forces are combining to remind us that fresh water isn't necessarily or automatically a free resource. It could all too easily end up becoming just another economic commodity.

At the forefront of this firestorm is Peter Brabeck, chairman and former CEO of Nestle. In his view, citizens don't have an automatic right to more than the water they require for mere "survival", unless they can afford to pay for it. For context, the World Health Organization sets such "survival" consumption levels at a minimum of 20 liters a day for basic hygiene and food hygiene – higher, if you add laundry and bathing.

If you're reading this in the United States, the odds are that flushing your toilet consumes 50 liters of water a day. Brabeck is right to argue that we risk depleting the world's supply of fresh water irresponsibly through careless and thoughtless consumption of an apparently free resource. How many lush golf courses should we be sustaining with millions of gallons of water in parts of the world that are naturally arid, like Arizona or southern California?

… Today, throughout most of North America and Europe, we take the ready availability of clean, running water for granted. We have forgotten what its relatively recent arrival on the scene – within the last 100 to 150 years – has meant for health, nutrition and hygiene – and for the development of society, business and industry, as a result. To the extent that we allow purely market forces to shape water consumption, we limit future contributions to our world to the scions of wealthy families.

There is a role for the free market in water, however. It comes at the bleeding edge: in the area of technologies that can be developed to treat waste water or desalinate water to make it usable or potable, or, alternatively, to develop ways to use less water in everything that we do now, from growing crops and making paper to producing iPhones.

Modern elites always promote at the bottom, most basic level, of survival. Air, food, water – these are the targets of ubiquitous scarcity promotions.

The "capitalist" takeover of water resources needs to be seen within the context of these promotions. First, the groundwork has been laid to create the perception that water is a "valuable commodity" around the world. This has been done in part in the West, especially through the proliferation of bottled waters and private brands.

Anyone who experienced the sudden rise of bottled water must see parallels to what is going on as regards cannabis. We are supposed to believe that the sudden surge of marijuana legalization around the world is merely the outgrowth of better information and a more mature attitude toward drugs in general.

We don't see it that way. The War on Drugs was manufactured; legalization is manufactured as well. And thus it is with water. One year there was no branded bottled water. (Or perhaps only Perrier.) The next, there were seemingly several hundred brands.

People have been conditioned to believe that water is scarce and thus the purchase of water resources by large companies will not be considered unusual. When these same corporations begin to manipulate water resources, the resultant scarcities will be reported within the context of what people think they already understand: There's not enough of it and soon there will be less.

Most of the world is covered by water and desalinization techniques – possibly retarded on purpose – are nonetheless gaining ground. Here's one example we found posted over at Breakthrough.org:

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Stanford University are working on a new desalinating method using porous carbon aerogel electrodes. The system, which they call flow-through electrode capacitive desalination, or FTE-CD, removes salt electrically. Although still in the early stages, its developers say the technique requires little equipment or energy, and the system could be scaled to fit any need: from portable personal devices to city water treatment.

There are plenty of other solutions online, some more advanced than others, if you wish to look.

The real problem here is not desalinization but corporate control. Corporations were virtually written out of the US Constitution because of the horrors perpetuated by Dutch and English "East India" companies. These were mercantilist facilities that ransacked whole countries and did so with the full force of their Crown's authority. There is little difference today except modern multinationals do not overtly field their own military. Or not yet.

Global corporations only exist because of judicial decisions that allow them to. Corporations are ALWAYS conflated with "capitalism" in the mainstream media and the result is that generations have been brainwashed into thinking these illegitimate facilities represent a marketplace evolution. The world would be much better off if the world's fundamental resources were privatized as necessary. In a transparently competitive world, complete with the predictable, charitable impulse, there would be far less want. The kinds of devastating manipulations that we can see arising as corporate titans expand their illegitimate "scarcity" memes would be considerably negated.

In fact, water probably does constitute a good investment, given the power elite's determination to manipulate it. But don't confuse this manipulation with a marketplace. When it comes to fundamental resources, markets are inevitably controlled, and if the globalists have their way, the control is getting worse.

Conclusion: This may lead to significant profits for some so long as people tolerate this state of affairs. Hopefully, one day they won't.

After Thoughts

This may lead to significant profits for some so long as people tolerate this state of affairs. Hopefully, one day they won't.

Posted in STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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