Changes To America’s Infrastructure Could Make Our Tap Water Unaffordable.
Now they say it got lead and stink in it (New World Water) Fluorocarbons and monoxide Push the water table lopside Used to be free now it cost you a fee Those are lyrics to a song that is 18 years old, yet prescient as ever.
In 1999, Mos Def’s “New World Water” described the dystopian, greed-driven trends in the government’s treatment of the planet and its citizens.
Referencing many of the hot-button issues popular today in discussions about climate change, the rapper now known as Yasiin Bey also touched on the privatization of the global water supply, co-opting a human right into a for-profit service.
In 2017, the state of America’s infrastructure – including its water systems – remains substandard, and with a presidential administration with apparently no regard for Earth’s rising temperatures or poor Americans’ access to clean drinking water, we have a tragic case of art imitating life on our hands.
Trump is expected to submit his official plans for the nation’s infrastructure – buildings, roads, utility supplies – this fall.
Along with things like crumbling bridges and rotting foundations, the nation’s infrastructure responsible for bringing millions of Americans tap water will likely be addressed in the literature.
Directly overseeing the organization’s Water for All campaign, Grant is critical of any politician who supports the privatization of America’s tap-water systems and warns that “it seems like the Trump administration is putting forward a plan that relies heavily on privatization of our essential infrastructure.” Inherently troubling about such a position is, of course, that privatizing infrastructure means that the bottom line becomes more important than public good – precisely the kind of ethical dilemma that led to the human-rights disaster in Flint.
“It’s a myth when you talk about privatizing infrastructure assets like water systems, and think that it’s going to reduce the cost of the service — it doesn’t, you pay more when private companies take over water systems.
They want to use their water systems as cash cows to pay for other government services,” she warns.