By: Bruno De Oliveira,
True Activist.
Is not water essential for human survival? A question which should be ludicrous is also a question that opens the door to the grotesque outline of the stupidity that is the free market capitalism. Is not charging for water an attempt of assassination?
The “democracy” of the self-classified first world nation-state has an ideological license to cease one’s existence. The democratic nation-state makes our means of existence a commodity. I am not just referring to selling bottled water which is a ridiculous concept in itself and makes of those how buys it pretty much of fools. Well, I was talking to a friend once and he told me about the walks that he did in London and Paris where you could walk for such a long time but you knew that you would find a water fountain waiting for you. You could have fresh and free water along you journey but now you must buy you water in a bottle because water fountains are becoming extinct. In other words, I am referring to the perversity of the water trade. I am writing about the state and private appropriation, collection and supply of water to sell you back your existence.
Is not water essential for human survival? A question which should be ludicrous is also a question that opens the door to the grotesque outline of the stupidity which is free market capitalism. Is not charging for water an attempt of assassination? Water averages about 57 per cent of one’s total body weight. Thus, half of my composition is water. They will be charging me for being me. This act of water privatisation is supported and it is carried out by the democratic state to its “free” citizens.
Well, it is not because the capitalist state allows the “strong” and big corporations do whatever they can get away with it not just in the name of profit but to validate this post-ideological society. In other words, there is an imposition of a reality which there is no alternatives for capitalism. Therefore, actions lobbied by individuals that own a corporation in the “eternal” of limitless narcissistic search for profit such as Fracking goes ahead despite public and academic opposition to such action. The justification for such exploitation is such activity is profitability.
Fracking according to charitywater.org (Doing what the state should be doing) is a hydraulic fracturing process of drilling and injecting fluid into the ground at a high pressure in order to fracture shale rocks to release natural gas inside. It is an absurd which just makes sense under the ideology of capitalism. Fracking requires more and less 400 tanker trucks to carry water and site supplement. The smaller tankers trunk curries around 20.000 litres of water. The charitywater.org says:
“…those Diseases from unsafe water and lack of basic sanitation kill more people every year than all forms of violence, including war. Children are especially vulnerable, as their bodies aren’t strong enough to fight diarrhoea, dysentery and other illnesses. 90% of the 30,000 deaths that occur every week from unsafe water and unhygienic living conditions are in children under five years old. Many of these diseases are preventable. The WHO reports that over 3.6% of the global disease burden can be prevented simply by improving water supply, sanitation, and hygiene.”
We need a charity to do a job which supposed to be the state’s job in telling us that fracking is a dangerous activity and put it into the public eyes. Nevertheless, the average human being needs to live well to drinking approximately 2 litres of water a day. Therefore, under absurd of capitalist’s realism a fracking small tanker truck full of water is equivalent at 10.000 human lives. The absurd and the unregulated economic base of capitalism legitimises a world where 3 tankers trucks in a week used in fracking could potentially save the lives of those 30.000 people that dye weekly due the lack of drinkable water as pointed out by the Watercharity.org. However, the absurd that capitalism creates is that waste water in fracking is more profitable than distribute or develop structure to save human lives. Fracking don’t just waste water it also pollutes underground water reservoir up to 600 chemicals are used in fracking fluids. The concentration is 17 times higher in drinking water wells near fracturing sites than in normal wells. In addition, there have been over 1,000 documented cases of water contamination next to areas of gas drilling as well as cases of sensory, respiratory, and neurological damage due to ingested contaminated water.
Nevertheless, the good news is that around of 30-50% of the fracturing fluid is recuperated; the rest of the toxic fluid is left in the ground and is not biodegradable. However, the bad news is that the waste fluid is left in open air pits to evaporate, releasing harmful VOC’s (volatile organic compounds) into the atmosphere, creating contaminated air, acid rain, and ground level ozone. Many fracking lobbyists and politicians in the UK argued that fracking would low the price of gas. The Independent newspaper published an article says that following:
“George Osborne’s plan to deliver cheap energy by fostering a fracking revolution has been dealt a severe blow after an influential cross-party group of experts said any boom in shale gas production would be “unlikely to give the UK cheap gas”
After all that, who protects us against the state? Who protects the nation state itself? Well, for the water trade that is great news the less safe drinkable water that is the more expensive drinkable water will be. An issue of water shortage which is portrayed as an issue of some parts of the African continent could become also an issue of other part of the planet. Justice Robert Jackson, judge at the Nuremberg trials stated that ‘It is not the function of the government to stop the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.’
This is a serious issue and the discourse of Water as a commodity and not as a human right and it has been intensified and the people is been left out of this debate. CEOs of some corporations already started to claim that water is not a human right and it needs to be treated as a product. Therefore, you cannot exist if you don’t pay. Water is been portrayed as luxury and not necessity or as a human right. For example, the CEO of Nestle gave a kind of interview-propaganda like saying that water should not be a right and that water should a commodity. However, we leave in a society where human right isn’t a human right. He goes on talking about how now we live longer and better. The real threat that capitalism brings to society is to make such claims accepted by such flawed ideological discourse and creates a “new” form of apartheid. It is a real threat for humanity when a CEO or chairman of such large corporation comes publicly and says that he needs to secure water sustainability first for his company growth then secondly for human kind. What is amusing is that capitalism still needs to impose apocalyptic fears out of the historical context of social relations. The discourse now is that water will run out before oil will accord Brabeck who won in 2007 the Black Planet Award. The International Ethecon Black Planet Award With this award, Ethecon exposes and condemns individuals who have contributed to the destruction and downfall of our Blue Planet in an outrageous way.
Well, it won’t surprise me if Brabeck win a Nobel Prize one day for saving the Earth’s water reservoir as did Obama won one for peace despite being the Drones president and for falling to close Guantanamo bay prison to date. Meanwhile 10 December is called Blessed War and is dedicated to Obama’s acceptance of the Nobel Prize, when Obama said there are ‘times when nations will find the use of force not only necessary, but morally justified.’ Eduardo Galeano noted that: ‘Four and a half centuries before, when the Nobel Prize did not exist and evil resided in countries not with oil but with gold and silver, Spanish jurist Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda also defended war as ‘not only necessary but morally justified.’ The slogan of post ideological capitalism seems to be: screw you humanity as we have a short collective memory and save capitalism! But if there is no humanity there is no capitalism right? Wrong, they will make robots to replace us. If robots are programmed to buy and accept such ideological discourses they are way better to society. Do you know why? Well, I think it is because humanity has developed something that annoys any capitalist, humanity has developed solidarity and critical thinking.
Imagine if they could use the superstructure of society (School, the media, art, aesthetics, politics, technology and so on) to transform humans into robots to just obey and accept the imposition of the economic bases of society which are portrayed as natural. It seems the only way to not be under a control and regulation is to be a corporation. The stupidity of capitalism goes far beyond water, for example, Spain Levies Consumption Tax on Sunlight. Proving that absurdity truly has no bounds, Spain issued a “royal decree” taxing sunlight gatherers. The ‘state’ threatens fines as much as 30 million euros for those who illegally gather sunlight without paying a tax. The tax is just enough to make sure that homeowners cannot gather and store solar energy cheaper than state-sponsored providers. The Secretary of State for Energy, Alberto Nadal, signed a draft royal decree in which consumption taxes are levied on those who want to start solar power systems on their rooftops. The tax, labeled a “backup toll” is high enough to ensure that it will be cheaper to keep buying energy from current providers. ‘Spain Privatizes the Sun’. If one gets caught collecting photons of sunlight for your own use, you can be fined as much as 30 million euros. If you were thinking the best energy option was to buy some solar panels that were down 80% in price, you can forget about it. The state isn’t there on the interest of the people; it is there to maintain capitalist exploitation. “Of all the possible scenarios, this is the worst,” said José Donoso, president of the Spanish Photovoltaic Union (UNEF), which represents 85% of the sector’s activity. Before the decree it took 12 years to recover the investment in a residential installation of 2.4 kilowatts of power. Following the decree, it will take an additional 23 years according to estimates by UNEF. The people are exploited by corporations and by the state which should be there to protect and care for its people but the state seem to be there to oppress its people even more.
