Friday, February 29, 2008

Nader - Gonzalez '08 - Opposing Corporate State Control Of Our Country

Check out the video of the press conference.

Better stronger democracy.
Addressing issues, conditions and solutions ignored by the other major party candidates.
Opposition to corporate state control of our country.
"Corporation should get out of politics. They should be our servants not our masters." - Business Week.

February 29, 2008 www.votenader.org

 

Good morning.

It's Nader/Gonzalez.

Yesterday, at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., Ralph Nader announced that Matt Gonzalez, the former President of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, will be his VP running mate. Check out the video of the press conference.

This morning, Ralph will appear on C-Span's Washington Journal from 8:00 to 8:30 EST.

Matt and Ralph will be interviewed on KQED radio from 12 noon to 1 p.m. EST.

And Ralph will appear Monday on the Lou Dobbs Radio Show from 3:10 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. EST

Last night, Ralph and Matt appeared before a young and energetic crowd at George Washington University. C-Span taped that event and it will air on C-Span sometime soon.

It's been a hectic week.

And people are paying attention.

What the inside the beltway partisans just don't understand is that we are on the opposite side of the fence from the corporate Republicans and Democrats.

And we are determined to build a nationwide movement to challenge their corporate policies.

To do this effectively, we first need to get Nader/Gonzalez on the ballot all across the country.

So, to give a big collective thank you to Matt Gonzalez for standing up to the political bigots and joining our campaign, please donate now whatever you can.

And spread the word.

Onward.

The Nader Team



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Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Baquba Iraq Losing Life – And Hope

most blame the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad.

"The government can easily reduce the suffering of these people by providing fuel and other necessities," grocer Fadhil Abdullah told IPS. "But instead, we all continue to suffer. There is no future for us."
+++

Baquba Losing Life – And Hope

Inter Press Service
By Ahmed Ali and Dahr Jamail*

BAQUBA, Feb 27 (IPS) - Life has been bad enough in Diyala province north of Baghdad after prolonged violence, unemployment and loss of all forms of normal living. What could be worse now is the loss of hope that anything will ever be better.

In Baquba, capital city of Diyala province 40km northeast of Baghdad, it's all about staying alive. Most people have abandoned all projects and activities to sit at home in safety.

"The Iraqi government achieved nothing, just death for this poor province," Hadi Obeid, a now idle trader in Baquba told IPS. "If you look for rights, you will find death."

"People of this province are dead," says resident Luay Amir, who returned to Iraq in 2004 after living 16 years in Austria. "There is no sign of life to be seen. Faces are pale and lifeless, the city is desolate."

People in the city, he said, "have no ambitions, no dreams. When they see each other, they greet one another saying, 'good to see you safe'."

The lack of electricity, clean water, security and jobs is clearly taking its toll.

"People are deprived of everything in this province, and it's a miracle that life still goes on amidst this deprivation," Abdul-Ridha Noman, an employee in the directorate-general of statistics told IPS. "People here have no goal except to move from today to tomorrow."

Noman added, "But they are afraid of tomorrow because it might only bring death or loss."

Many people have fled the violence, but also the hopelessness. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, at least 1.5 million Iraqis have fled to Syria by now. Many have gone from Diyala.

"They sold their properties to live away from terror," Abdullah Mahjob, a 51-year-old schoolteacher in Baquba told IPS. "And they spent their savings to make their children safe."

Ahead of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, people in this city had dreamed of a better future for them and their children. Now, that's a broken dream.

"Life is destroyed by the occupation and its corrupt government, and people have reached a point where nothing means anything to them any more," local dentist Mudhafer al-Janaby told IPS.

"People are concerned about electricity because they see that the children need light because of the examinations. They search for fuel for kerosene heaters in the cold winter, and for their cars," local farmer Iman Mansour told IPS.

"They are concerned how they will find medicines for the sick. They need to find work and then get to it, but there is a curfew, and the militants are everywhere. How can an individual plan for a future while surrounded by all these troubles?"

Rather than save for the future, people are selling what they can to survive right now. Many have begun to build shops in their homes; some simply rent their outer walls to shop owners.

"These very simple shops are a substitute for the big market at Baquba city," says local resident Abdul-Latif Farhan. "Some people left their shops in the central market and opened these because of the militants and the absence of security."

Some with larger houses are dividing them into two or three to get rental income. One way or another, people are extracting all they can from their own resources; the world outside has little to offer.

And, most blame the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad.

"The government can easily reduce the suffering of these people by providing fuel and other necessities," grocer Fadhil Abdullah told IPS. "But instead, we all continue to suffer. There is no future for us."

(*Ahmed, our correspondent in Iraq's Diyala province, works in close collaboration with Dahr Jamail, our U.S.-based specialist writer on Iraq who travels extensively in the region)

 


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Maude Barlow: Blue Covenant - Water Justice Global Movement

the inconvenient truth of water. And that is that our abuse, pollution, misplacement, displacement and just mismanagement of water is actually one of the causes of climate change. And it’s a really different kind of way of looking at it.

+++



Blue Covenant: Maude Barlow on the Global Movement for Water Justice

February 27, 2008

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/2/27/maude_barlow_on_the_global_movement

BarlowwebMaude Barlow is the head of the Council of Canadians, Canada’s largest public advocacy organization, and founder of the Blue Planet Project. Barlow is author of the new book Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water. [includes rush transcript]

Guest:

Maude Barlow, Head of the Council of Canadians, Canada’s largest public advocacy organization, and founder of the Blue Planet Project. She is the author of sixteen books, including Blue Gold. Her latest is Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water. She is a recipient of Sweden’s Right Livelihood Award, known as the “Alternative Nobel.”

Rush Transcript

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AMY GOODMAN: Eight of the nation’s largest water providers from California to New York have announced the formation of a coalition to develop strategies on dealing with climate change. The members of the newly formed Water Utility Climate Alliance together provide water to more than thirty-six million people in the United States. The group has developed a list of goals that include expanding climate change research, developing strategies for adapting to climate change and identifying greenhouse gas emissions from individual operations.

Today, we’re going to spend the rest of the hour looking at the global water crisis. Flow: For Love of Water is a new documentary screened here in New York last night. The film examines how the world’s water supplies are diminishing and how the privatization of water is worsening the crisis.

    PETER H. GLEICK: For the longest time, people have taken water for granted. Most people don’t think about where their water comes from. They just turn on the tap, and they expect it to be there. Those days are ending.

    MAUDE BARLOW: This notion that we’ll have water forever is wrong. California is running out. It’s got twenty-some years of water. New Mexico has got ten, although they’re building golf courses as fast as they can, so maybe they can whittle that down to five. Arizona, Florida, even the Great Lakes now, there’s huge new demand.

    PETER H. GLEICK: The Nile River doesn’t reach its end. The Colorado River, the Yellow River in China, they, for the most part, don’t flow anymore to the sea.

    MAUDE BARLOW: So this notion that somehow these problems are far away, get rid of that. You know, take it out of your head. You know, delete that.

    PATRICK McCULLY: We’re treating the water resources of the planet with contempt, which is just so stupid, because we depend on them. We need water to live. We will only survive for a day or two if we don’t have water.

    WILLIAM E. MARKS: Scientists, through decades of study and millions and millions of pieces of data, now recognize the fact that we’re on the brink of the sixth great mass extinction ever to be experienced on the face of the earth. The fifth mass extinction was the dinosaur age.

    MAUDE BARLOW: You know those movies where there’s the comet coming at the earth, and all of a sudden the governments of the world say, “Gee, we’re not—our differences aren’t so big anymore, because we’re about to all die”? That’s really where we are. There is a comet coming at us. It’s called water shortage.

    PETER H. GLEICK: Climate change is a real problem. Humans are changing the climate. We already see evidence about it. One of the most significant impacts of climate change will be on our water resources.

    PATRICK McCULLY: We’re going to see a lot of people are going die because of the floods and droughts and various social upheavals that are caused by global warming. What’s also tragic is that there’s a lot of awareness of that now, but so much of that awareness is then being used by corporate interests. Oh, we’re running out of water, and we need to invest so much money in water, and it’s so terrible how water is managed. And then, somehow they make the flip to: oh, we must privatize it, so then we’ll use it more efficiently and everybody will be better off—which is total nonsense, total amount of nonsense. It means merely that these people have an interest clearly in making money or to selling water to people.

    MAUDE BARLOW: There are private corporate interests that have decided that water is going to be put on the open market for sale. It’s going to be commodified and treated as any other saleable good.

    REPORTER: Water is now a $400 billion global industry, the third largest behind electricity and oil.

    WATER EXECUTIVE: I bought the green. I had the blue. And I have about half of the yellow.

    MAUDE BARLOW: The market is amoral, and it’s going to lead you to taking advantage of pollution and scarcity, frankly. It’s going to lead you to selling it to those who can buy it but not to those who need it.

    ROD PARSLEY: The water sector is going to grow two to three times the global economy over the next twenty years. By buying the companies that source, treat, distribute and monitor our water supply, you’re likely to have a pretty strong investment over the next decade or so.

    BOONE PICKENS: People say that, well, water is a lot like air. Do you charge for air? Of course not. You shouldn’t charge for water. Well, OK, watch what happens.


AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt from the documentary Flow—that’s F-L-O-W—For Love of Water by filmmaker Irena Salina. The documentary features one of the leading figures in the global water justice movement, Maude Barlow. She is the head of the Council of Canadians, Canada’s largest public advocacy group, founder of the Blue Planet Project. Maude Barlow is author of sixteen books—her latest just came out; it’s called Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water—joining us now in our firehouse studio.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

MAUDE BARLOW: Pleasure to be here. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the crisis. Where has all the water gone?

MAUDE BARLOW: Well, I guess the most important thing I want to put out to the world is that we always hear that climate change—and that is, greenhouse gas-induced climate change—is affecting water, which is true—melting glaciers and all of that. But I am, with this book, trying to put a new wrinkle, if you will, into the whole debate. It’s kind of—I call it the inconvenient truth of water. And that is that our abuse, pollution, misplacement, displacement and just mismanagement of water is actually one of the causes of climate change. And it’s a really different kind of way of looking at it.

Very simply, Amy, the story is that as we have polluted the world’s surface water, we are taking water from the ground, from ground water or from wilderness or from watersheds, and we’re moving it where we want it to be, so to water great big huge cities that then dump it into the ocean, so don’t return it to the watershed, or we pave over what’s called water-retentive lands, so we don’t have the hydrologic cycle able to fulfill its responsibility and bring water back. We’re doing something called virtual water trade, which is where we use our water to grow or produce something that then is exported. In the United States, you export a third of your water, domestic water, every day out of the United States in terms of these exports. You don’t have enough water to do that. And—

AMY GOODMAN: Who exports it?

MAUDE BARLOW: Mainly large agribusiness. It’s mainly commodities and corporations that are using this water to—well, to export massive amounts of commodities. But all sorts of countries are doing it. Australia is doing it. Australia has hit the water wall, and Australia is absolutely in crisis right now, and they’re still exporting massive amounts of water through virtual water, say, to China. So the question is here—we all learned somewhere back in school that it’s impossible for us to interrupt the hydrologic cycle. Not true. The hydrologic cycle has been dramatically and deeply affected by our abuse and displacement of water, and we have to stop.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain who the corporations are and how they get their hands on this water. In the film and in your book, you talk about this. I mean, there’s the struggle in Michigan. There’s the companies in California that get the water for free—explain how it happens—and sell it for—

MAUDE BARLOW: Well, basically, if there was lots of water, it wouldn’t matter, I suppose, if some people were getting wealthy from it. But the fact is that we’re living in a world of diminishing water. We’re actually running out. And I want to make this point so clearly. And you’re running out in many parts of the United States. It is not cyclical drought. This is the end of water in many parts of the world unless we change our behavior.

Just last week, there was a report that came out that Lake Mead may not be gone in thirteen years. This is the big backup system for Las Vegas and Phoenix. I mean, this is crisis. The Colorado is in “catastrophic decline”—is the language of one scientist. And we need to understand this isn’t cyclical drought.

So if this is the case—and it is the case—then the question of who owns and controls water is very important. Who’s going to make the decisions around water in the future? And what’s happened is that a large number corporations are now coming into the field saying—actually creating a kind of global water cartel, just as there exists for energy now, a cartel of corporations that control every drop of oil before it’s taken out of the ground. These companies are either big utility companies, like Veolia and Suez from Europe, that run municipal water systems on a for-profit system, and in the third world they deny millions of people who can’t afford it.

There’s also bottled water. We put something like fifty billion gallons of water in plastic bottles around the world last year, dumping those bottles everywhere.

AMY GOODMAN: That they’re not biodegradable.

MAUDE BARLOW: Mostly not biodegradable. About 95 percent of them don’t get recycled. But the newest corporate player on the block is the whole water reuse and recycling industry. And this is—the biggest water company in the world is probably General Electric now. Who knew, right? Dow Chemical—

AMY GOODMAN: General Electric, which owns NBC.

MAUDE BARLOW: Which owns—yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Among many other companies.

MAUDE BARLOW: And is now getting heavy-duty into the water recycling industry. Now, let me be very clear, there’s a very important place for water recycling, of course. And we’ve got to—

AMY GOODMAN: What is water recycling?

MAUDE BARLOW: Water recycling is either toilet-to-tap recycling of water or there’s now—or desalination. There’s many forms water recycling, and it’s the big industry. It’s the fastest-growing part of the water industry. And this is the cleanup of dirty water.

And my concern—and the more research I did on this, the more concerned I got—was that this government, in particular, the United States, but many governments, are putting all their water eggs in the basket of cleaning up dirty water, instead of conservation, instead of protecting water at its source. What they’re coming at—the way they’re coming at it now is to clean up water after it’s been polluted. And there’s huge amounts of money to be made. And my concern is, who’s going to control that? Who’s going to own the water itself? If Coca-Cola can own the water it sells you, why wouldn’t General Electric or Suez be able to say, “Well, we own the water that we cleaned up, and we will decide how much money we make, and we will decide how much—who gets it and who’s not going to get it”? So it’s very much an issue of control, and also control about regulation at the other end.

One of the things, Amy, that I found that really kind of surprised me, because I wrote another book called Blue Gold six years ago, and at the time there was no recognition at the federal level in this country that this country was in a kind of crisis around water. Water now has moved right up to the top of the agenda, in terms of a national security issue. The United States is as worried about water as it is about energy and finding new and secure sources of water from around the world.

And this is also true for China. China is on the search for water. It’s destroyed its water table, so that all the running shoes and toys in the world, and so on, are come from there, so they’ve diverted their water from watersheds and from growing green for their people to production. And so, now they’re going to build a great big pipeline up to the Tibetan Himalayas. They’re going to take the water that belongs to the rivers that feed all of Asia. So if you want to see a water war coming, you keep your eye on that one.

But I think, similarly, the United States, it’s very clear, is looking to Canada, is looking to the Guarani Aquifer in Latin America around water sources. It’s looking to secure water as a national security issue, just like energy, because you can’t be a superpower and be running out of these essential resources. So—excuse me, this is an old cold. So, suddenly, water has just become a huge issue.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Maude Barlow. Her latest book is called Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water. So you’re describing the water hunters. You also talk about the water warriors.

MAUDE BARLOW: Yes. It’s a term we use to describe the global water justice movement, and it’s a fabulous movement. We work with people in the Global South, we work with communities across North America and Europe, people who are fighting for local control of their water, either against a local bottled water company like in Fryeburg, Maine, or in Mount Shasta in California, where these big companies come in and take away the local water, or India, where Coca-Cola has just been kicked out of several communities. We work around the world for people who are fighting against the big water transnationals who are coming in and running their water on a for-profit system and putting in meters into people’s homes—or, you know, these slums, generally—and telling people that they have to pay. And we’ve had a tremendous success. We really have created a global water justice movement that has taken off.

And right now, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization and the World Water Council, which has set itself up—I call it the Lords of Water—are all on the defensive and understanding and admitting that their program of privatization has been a massive failure. And now we’re saying governments have to come back into the picture. We have to have public control, public transparency and public accountability.

AMY GOODMAN: Maude Barlow, I want to play another excerpt of the documentary Flow: For Love of Water, where the film takes us to this issue of bottled water.

    ERIK D. OLSON: Bottled water is used by millions of people around the world, because they think it’s safer than tap water. There is less than one person, according to the Food and Drug Administration, regulating the entire multibillion-dollar bottled water industry in the United States. That means that that poor person does multiple things, and one of them is water. The Food and Drug Administration, if you ask them what’s in any brand of bottled water, they’ll say, “We have no idea.”

    PENN GILLETTE: It’s so stupid. Why would people pay such a premium for bottled water? To find out, we took over a very trendy California restaurant. We printed our own elegant water menus with phony imported waters costing as much as $7 per bottle. Our water steward gives our first lucky couple our special water list.

    CUSTOMER 1: I guess we’ll get the l’eau du robinet.

    WATER STEWARD: The l’eau du robinet?

    CUSTOMER 1: Yeah.

    WATER STEWARD: Oh, fantastic!

    PENN GILLETTE: It’s French for “tap water.”

    CUSTOMER 1: Cheers! Yeah, it tastes clean.

    CUSTOMER 2: It has a flavor to it.

    WATER STEWARD: How would you compare it to tap water?

    CUSTOMER 2: Oh, yeah, definitely better than tap water.

    PENN GILLETTE: What was the actual source of these chic waters? A garden hose on the restaurant patio.

    LEE JORDAN: Three-out-of-four Americans drink bottled water, and one-in-five will only drink bottled water. And water is something we already pay for.

    UNIDENTIFIED: Leading brands are basically tap water, often sold for more than the cost of gasoline.

    GIGI KELLETT: So today we’re here at Tufts University, organizing our forty-second tap water challenge.

    CHALLENGER: I thought for sure that the Dasani water was tap water.

    GIGI KELLETT: They’re spending tens of millions of dollars every year to convince us that bottled water is better than tap water, when, in fact, it’s much less regulated.

    ERIK D. OLSON: We tested over a thousand bottles of water, over a hundred brands that are sold in the United States, and we found that it is not necessarily any safer or better or purer than your city tap water. We found some of them had arsenic in them at high levels, Some of them had organic chemicals in them, a variety of bacteria. So there were problems with about a third of the brands that we sampled. Some of the water we saw had pictures of mountains on it; it was city tap water. Glacier water came from groundwater in Florida. Some of them said that they were pure mountain. I mean, the list is very long. We found a case in Massachusetts where a guy had sunk a well in an industrial parking lot that was near a superfund site. He was pumping water out of this well and selling it under multiple different brands. So people buying this stuff had no idea where it was coming from.

AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt of the new documentary Flow: For Love of Water. Its director is Irena Salina, and its producer is Steven Starr. Maude Barlow, you’re the chair of the board of Food and Water Watch. In this last thirty seconds, what are you doing with it?

MAUDE BARLOW: Well, we’re pushing here in the United States for a trust fund for infrastructure. The sewage disposal system in the United States, as in many countries, is in a mess. We’re pushing—we have a “Think Outside the Bottle” or “Take Back the Tap” campaign for bottled water. We’re getting restaurants to agree not to serve bottled water. And we’re fighting the desalination plants, particularly in California, because it’s a bad technology, it’s an admission of failure. And we can do much more with conservation and caring for source water.

AMY GOODMAN: Maude Barlow’s new book is called Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water. Thanks for joining us.

MAUDE BARLOW: Thanks for having me.



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Sunday, February 24, 2008

Nader Runs, Obama Responds Wisely

Nader's appeal will be determined in large part by the extent to which the Democratic candidate is willing to be bold.

Obama seems to understands this. Unlike Gore or Kerry, who never quite "got" the point of Nader's runs in 2000 and 2004, ... the point is to be more appealing to progressive voters who might consider voting Green or independent.

"I think the job of the Democratic Party is to be so compelling that a few percentage [points] of the vote going to another candidate is not going to make any difference," says Obama.

That is the bottom line with regard to Nader's latest bid.

If Obama runs as a progressive, Nader will have little room to maneuver.

If Obama runs to the center, Nader's space will open up ...
+++

Nader Runs, Obama Responds Wisely

Posted 02/24/2008 @ 8:29pm
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?bid=1&pid=289744

Ralph Nader is running again for president.

After four previous bids, mounted in varying forums and with varying goals, Nader is used to the slings and arrows that will be tossed his way. He is conscious and committed. He will not back off.

He knows how to campaign in the face of a firestorm of criticism.

Above all, he knows how to make himself heard -- even when almost everyone who guides the political processes of the nation wants to shut him up.

The latter knowledge will serve him well in a 2008 contest where the man who is either a national treasure or a national frustration, or perhaps both, may find himself more marginalized than ever before.

Nader is running for the same reason he has run in the past: Because the likely nominees of the two major parties do not begin to meet the standards that might reasonably be asked of progressive contenders in 21st-century America.

Fundamental issues -- Wall Street-defined globalization, rampant and frequently deadly corporate crime, out-of-control military spending and an imperial foreign policy -- are not going to be addressed in a realistic let alone definitional manner by the Democratic nominee (be he Barack Obama or be she Hillary Clinton) or by Republican John McCain. And that, says Nader, will leave millions of Americans feeling frustrated and disenfranchised.

"You take that framework of people feeling locked out, shut out, marginalized and disrespected," he explained on NBC's "Meet the Press," the same forum where he announced his 2004 presidential run. "You go from Iraq, to Palestine to Israel, from Enron to Wall Street, from Katrina to the bumbling of the Bush administration, to the complicity of the Democrats in not stopping him on the war, stopping him on the tax cuts."

Nader's points are all well taken.

And they come from a man who is quite rational in his awareness that he will not be sworn in as president on January 20, 2009.

While Nader has yet to determine whether he will run as the Green Party candidate, a Green-backed independent or a genuinely unaffiliated independent, he is clear about his chances.

The arc of history bends toward Obama and the Democrats, not his candidate, acknowledges Nader.

After eight years of George Bush and Dick Cheney, he said, "If the Democrats can't landslide the Republicans this year, they ought to just wrap up, close down, emerge in a different form. You think the American people are going to vote for a pro-war John McCain who almost gives an indication he's the candidate for perpetual war?"

Presumably, the Democratic landslide that buries McCain will also sweep away various and sundry third-party and independent candidacies, including Nader's.

If that is the case, it will not be a new phenomenon.

Nader has bid for the presidency in different ways in every election since 1992 -- as a write-in candidate in the New Hampshire and Massachusetts primaries of that year, as a Green contender in 1996 and 2000 and as an independent with support from some of what remained of Ross Perot's Reform Party in 2004. His most notable run, in 2000, won 2.7 percent of the national vote, along with anger from Democrats who thought he "spoiled" their chances by tipping Florida -- and the presidency -- from Al Gore to George Bush. In fact, Gore won Florida, only to have the results manipulated into Bush's column by the Republican nominee's many allies in state government, with an assist from the Supreme Court.

In the intense 2004 competition between Bush and Democratic John Kerry, Nader's run won just 0.3 percent on 34 state ballot lines.

This year, Nader could have a harder time of it even than he did in 2000 or 2004.

Unlike Gore and Kerry, Obama -- now the likely Democratic nominee -- has taken savvier stands on a number of issues close to Nader's heart, such as trade policy. This is not to say that Obama is as good as Nader on the issues. Far from it. But Obama's more nuanced platform, as well as the movement character of the Illinois senator's campaign, is likely to leave even less space for Nader to deliver a message.

That said, Nader is a determined, sometimes unrelenting, truth teller.

He notes that Obama is something less than a pristine progressive.

Obama may be "the first liberal evangelist in a long time," says Nader, but the senator's "better instincts and knowledge have been censored" since he hit the nation stage.

"(Obama's) leaned, if anything, toward the pro-corporate side of policy-making," Nader said of the senator from Illinois. The consumer activist also scored Obama on on foreign policy, noting that, "He was pro-Palestinian when he was in Illinois... Now he's supporting (right-wing Israeli policies that thwart progress toward peace in the Middle East)."

Such blunt statements may not win Nader many friends among Obama's enthusiastic backers, and Obama did not exactly welcome his new rival to the race. "Ralph Nader deserves enormous credit for the work he did as a consumer advocate," Mr. Obama said while campaigning in Ohio "But his function as a perennial candidate is not putting food on the table of workers."

But Nader's not looking for Valentines from the Democrats.

Frankly, he's not even all that interested in popular approval.

The public-interest crusader worries far less about poll numbers and even vote totals than about saying what he feels needs to be said -- and using the forum of the electoral process to say it. And he is certainly not the first progressive -- inside the Democratic Party or out -- to suggest that Obama needs to be prodded on issues ranging from labor law to corporate regulation to single-payer health care and Middle East policy.

Nader's greatest value in any race is -- like Socialist Norman Thomas in his races against Democratic Franklin Roosevelt -- as a source of pressure on the Democratic nominee to address fundamental questions and perhaps to take more progressive stands on a few issues. As in 2000 and 2004, Nader's appeal will be determined in large part by the extent to which the Democratic candidate is willing to be bold.

Obama seems to understands this. Unlike Gore or Kerry, who never quite "got" the point of Nader's runs in 2000 and 2004, the Illinois senator appears to recognize that it is pointless to grumble about Ralph Nader as a "spoiler." Rather, the point is to be more appealing to progressive voters who might consider voting Green or independent.

"I think the job of the Democratic Party is to be so compelling that a few percentage [points] of the vote going to another candidate is not going to make any difference," says Obama.

That is the bottom line with regard to Nader's latest bid.

If Obama runs as a progressive, Nader will have little room to maneuver. If Obama runs to the center, Nader's space will open up -- a bit.



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Wednesday, February 20, 2008

See What the Young Are Saying…and Be Moved!

facing the world with hope and courage and actively seeking practical solutions.
I became very motivated to DO something."
circumstances as human-made, they become influence-able. We have full responsibility."
inspired a curiosity within myself to really think about how things are currently around the world and to learn more about what's going on, to see what I can do ...
'sustainable' or 'green' changes in my life will affect it and the way I see myself living it in the future."
understand and make changes within ourselves before we can make changes in our community.
make changes
I [have] the potential and the passion
I cannot simply ignore it, ... I cannot simply give up hope and be depressed
what is important for me right now is taking the steps to enact change at home."
it is important to remain positive and start at the local level."
anger is good only when it is taken in a positive direction.
passion for change."
+++

See What the Young Are Saying…and Be Moved!

by Olga Bonfiglio

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/02/20/7172/

In my peacemaking class I challenged my 20-year-old college students to approach global issues by studying the conflicts they engender and then to seek the ways of peace and nonviolence by starting with themselves to "be the change they wish to see in the world."

Over the past six weeks we have looked at global warming, overpopulation, the "clash of civilizations", and resource depletion (i.e., oil). I feared depressing them and even apologized for presenting them with such a glum picture of the future!

And then they surprised me.

As I read their journals, which reflect on the past week's work, I consistently discovered that my students were far from being paralyzed by all these troubles. Instead they were facing the world with hope and courage and actively seeking practical solutions. Look at some of the remarks from their papers.

"I am depressed by the current situation, horrified by the possible future, and at the same time, completely inspired. As our conversation began to shift from how frightening the circumstances are at this point to what can still be done, I became very motivated to DO something."

"Yes, it is true that our generation will be facing some of the most challenging decades to come….Yet, humanity is at the mercy of its own doings, and this is a beautiful concept in my eyes, because it means that there is a budding potential for change. If we look upon the history and disposition of civilization that produces such circumstances as human-made, they become influence-able. We have full responsibility."

"One person at a time will change the world little by little, even if our good actions aren't seen instantly."

"I don't know why I didn't feel depressed or upset about our current and future state of affairs. Rather, it inspired a curiosity within myself to really think about how things are currently around the world and to learn more about what's going on, to see what I can do and how minor 'sustainable' or 'green' changes in my life will affect it and the way I see myself living it in the future."

"Through all the dust and piles of dry wall, I could still see the progress we had made [in our Habitat for Humanity project]. It might be a slow process, but every shovel and every bucket full of dry wall is another step closer to the final product: a house for someone who could not afford one otherwise. And knowing that I am contributing to this product makes everything worth it. That is why I am willing to devote 3-4 hours every other Saturday morning."

"We have to understand and make changes within ourselves before we can make changes in our community. I think that is vital for everyone, without exception. I never would have thought that I could make changes without first realizing that I had the potential and the passion [to so do]."

"I feel that I have reached that point in my life where I have become aware that something I love [the earth] is currently being destroyed. I cannot simply ignore it, because if I truly love it then I have to do something to save it. I cannot simply give up hope and be depressed about our situation because that is what enough people are doing already."

"I think that my biggest downfall in my pursuit of the peacemaker lifestyle is my tendency to be overwhelmed by the feeling that I want to fix every problem of the world. This sensation of drowning in the problems of the world can often inspire feelings of apathy, and the notion that nothing you do will be enough to change the world. However, I have recently decided that what is important for me right now is taking the steps to enact change at home."

"I believe that seeing the immediate effects on my college and community will not only make me a more engaged citizen, but will also remind me why it is important to remain positive and start at the local level."

"How tired I am of having all the anger of seeing how others are more privileged, are better-off than I am and then to pretend that everything is all right….I now understand that anger is good only when it is taken in a positive direction. This is what creates passion, passion for change."

And then here are some things they say they will do:

  • Begin an urban organic garden this summer in my community
  • Join Building Blocks (http://www.kzoo.edu/servicelearning/buildingblocks.htm) a College project where students paint houses in poor neighborhoods
  • Reduce my carbon footprint (http://www.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx)
  • Slow down my pace of life
  • Double my efforts in conserving resources that I use and encourage those around me to do the same
  • Change the way I view production, the economy, and our consumerist culture
  • Make a conscious decision to walk when I can instead of driving and encourage others to do the same.
  • Protest against the energy crisis by becoming a vegetarian "as an alternative to the gluttonous carnivorous [American] lifestyle"
  • Take cold showers twice a week during Lent to be in solidarity with the poor
  • Do more research on New Urbanism (http://www.newurbanism.org/) to reduce urban sprawl
  • Observe more closely the violence that is inherent by our inaction (i.e., Hurricane Katrina, Kyoto Protocol, allowing the Iraq War to continue)
  • Apply for a job with Greepeace (http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/) in order to fight global warming
  • Apply for Teach for America (http://www.teachforamerica.org/)
  • Organize College events for Women's History Month, volunteer for the Amigos Tutoring Program (http://www.kzoo.edu/servicelearning/amigos.htm), work with College Democrats
  • Continue to work on alternative forms of energy. (Last summer the student built a solar oven and planted a first-time organic garden.)

Truly, the best part about teaching is being inspired by the students!

Olga Bonfiglio teaches a peacemaking class at Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She is the author of Heroes of a Different Stripe: How One Town Responded to the War in Iraq and writes on the subjects of social justice and religion. Her website is www.OlgaBonfiglio.com. Contact her at olgabonfiglio@yahoo.com



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Everything You Need to Know About Water Privatization

Everything You Need to Know About Water Privatization

Posted by Jared Simpson, Waterblogged.Info at 2:07 PM on February 19, 2008.

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/77335/

A new web page of resources about whether corporations should own and control water for economic gain.

Today we proudly launch Getting serious with Waterblogged.info: Water Privatization a page of web resources related to the question of whether small groups of people should be permitted to own and control the elixir of life and disseminate it to the rest of the globe for their personal gain. Obviously, we don't think so, but we feel compelled -- like the wimpy-assed, fair-minded liberals we are -- to present resources supporting both sides of the argument.

Below are more links to water privatization resources than you can shake a water-divining rod at. This will be regularly updated. No, really, it will.

Water Privatization - Fact Pack

A "fact pack" from the State Environmental Resource Center (meaning a resource for all states) is a good a place to start as any to get basic information about the history of and prospects for water privatization in the U.S. (It hasn't been updated since 2004, but most of the info is still useful.)

Pacific Institute: Topics - Water Privatization

Pacific Institute: Topics - Water Privatization California-based think tank provides timely and common-sense analysis. Typical of their approach, they take a middle-of-the-road, grant-funding-agency-friendly approach to privatization.

AlterNet: Tags: water privatization

Stories, blog posts, and videos tagged as "water privatization" from a politically progressive news site.

Grist magazine privatization debate

For those of you who think there are two sides to the question of the privatization of the elixir of life, the environmental online magazine Grist has posted a five-part smackdown between some water industry flack and anti-privatization H2O huggers Maude Barlow and Sara Ehrhardt, who are with the, gasp, Council of Canadians. Our feeble attempt to be balanced notwithstanding, this is great.

And the list goes on ... To see more links about water privatization, visit the continually updated list at Waterblogged.info: Water Privatization.




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Tuesday, February 19, 2008

This Year Give Up Bottled Water for Lent

This Year Give Up Bottled Water for Lent

Posted by Tara Lohan, AlterNet at 5:22 PM on February 13, 2008.
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/water/76960/

What happens when religion and the environment mix.
This week the BBC reported on a new group getting on board the "think outside the bottle" mentality -- the church.

The patriarch of Venice is urging Catholics in the Italian city to give up bottled water for the Christian fasting season of Lent.
Angelo Cardinal Scola wants them to donate the money saved to a water pipeline project in Thailand.

Apparently he has the mayor's blessing on this as well. The mayor is apparently a tap-only drinker. But their decree may be falling on deaf ears. The story reports that "Nearly all Italians drink bottled water rather than the piped stuff. The industry is worth an estimated 3.2bn euros (£2.38bn) a year to the Italian economy."

But Scola and others have good reason to for their actions and the movement against bottled water is gaining steam among environmental groups -- particularly in the U.S. and Canada where campaigns have been waged by Polaris Institute, Food and Water Watch, and Corporate Accountability International.

A recent piece in the UK's Guardian, declared that "bottled water is set to be the latest battleground in the eco war."

As recycling rates remain dismally low, making bottles requires virgin materials, namely petroleum feedstocks. It takes 162g of oil and seven litres of water (including power plant cooling water) just to manufacture a one-litre bottle, creating over 100g of greenhouse gas emissions (10 balloons full of CO2) per empty bottle. Extrapolate this for the developed world (2.4m tonnes of plastic are used to bottle water each year) and it represents serious oil use for what is essentially a single-use object. To make the 29bn plastic bottles used annually in the US, the world's biggest consumer of bottled water, requires more than 17m barrels of oil a year, enough to fuel more than a million cars for a year.
Given that water bottles suffer from lamentable recycling and reuse rates (the screw caps are usually of an unidentified plastic that doesn't fit into most local authority recycling schemes), the question is: what happens to our enormous pile of empties? The answer isn't encouraging. Most are landfilled (Americans throw 30m water bottles into landfill every day) or, in the UK, increasingly incinerated, where only a tiny proportion of their energy value can be recovered; the rest becomes environmental pollution, particularly in the ocean where, as the plastic slowly fragments, it poses a serious threat to wildlife .

The environmental threats are great -- and so are the threats to rural communities from where spring water is pumped.

But, thanks to groups like Polaris, FWW, and CAI, enviros are making progress. As the Guardian reports:

New York City launched a campaign to persuade people to cut back on bottled water use and return to good old tap water (officials claim it's the finest in the world); San Francisco's mayor Gavin Newsom banned city employees from using 'public money' to buy anything so ludicrous as imported water; while Chicago mayor Richard Daley brought in a five-cents-a-bottle tax on plastic bottles from the start of the year to limit the strain on municipal waste systems (currently the subject of a legal challenge from the water industry). On 1 February, the House of Representatives launched an investigation into the effect bottled water manufacturers have on health.

Now if we could just get those Catholics on board in Italy, we'd be on our way.

Digg!

Tagged as: bottled water, water



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Maude Barlow: The Growing Battle for the Right to Water

Maude Barlow: The Growing Battle for the Right to Water

By Tara Lohan, AlterNet. Posted February 14, 2008.
http://www.alternet.org/water/76819/?page=entire

Maude Barlow's new book about the water crisis is a call to arms to protect a fundamental human right.



From Chile to the Philippines to South Africa to her home country of Canada, Maude Barlow is one of a few people who truly understands the scope of the world's water woes. Her newest book, Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water, details her discoveries around the globe about our diminishing water resources, the increasing privatization trend and the grassroots groups that are fighting back against corporate theft, government mismanagement and a changing climate.

If you want to know where the water is running low (including 36 U.S. states), why we haven't been able to protect it and what we can do to ensure everyone has the right to water, Barlow's book is an essential read. It is part science, part policy and part impassioned call. And the information in Blue Covenant couldn't come from a more reliable source. Barlow is the national chairperson of the Council of Canadians and co-founder of the Blue Planet Project, which is instrumental in the international community in working for the right to water for all people. She also authored Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop Corporate Theft of the World's Water with Tony Clarke. And she's the recipient of the Right Livelihood Award (known as the "Alternative Nobel") for her global water justice work.

She took a moment to talk to AlterNet in between the Canadian and U.S. legs of a book tour for Blue Covenant. (Barlow just kicked off her U.S. tour; for a list of tour stops and dates, click here).

Tara Lohan: This year in the U.S. there has been a whole lot press about the drought in Atlanta and the Southeast, and I think for a lot of people in the U.S. it is the first they are hearing about drought, but the crisis here in North America is really pretty extreme isn't it?

Maude Barlow: It really is, and it kind of surprises me when I hear people, for instance in Atlanta say, "We didn't know it was coming." I don't know how that could be possible, and I do have to say that I blame our political leaders. I don't understand how they could not have been reading what I've been reading and what anyone who is watching this has been reading.

I remember attending a conference in Boise, Idaho, three years ago and hearing a lot of scientists get up and say, "Read my lips, this isn't a drought, this is permanent drying out." We are overpumping the Ogallala, Lake Powell and Lake Meade. The back up systems are now being depleted. This is by no means a drought ...

The thing that I'm trying to establish with the first chapter, which is called "Where Has All the Water Gone," is that what we learned in grade five about the hydrologic cycle being a closed, fixed cycle that could never be interrupted and could never go anywhere, is not true. They weren't lying to us, but they weren't aware of the human capacity to destroy it, and the reality is that we've interrupted the hydrologic cycle in many parts of the world and the American Southwest is one of them.

TL: How is this happening?

MB: By farming in deserts and taking up water from aquifers or watersheds. Or by urbanizing -- massive urbanization causes the hydrologic cycle to not function correctly because rain needs to fall back on green stuff -- vegetation and grass -- so that the process can repeat itself. Or we are sending huge amounts of water from large watersheds to megacities and some of them are 10 to 20 million people, and if those cities are on the ocean, some of that water gets dumped into the ocean. It is not returned to the cycle.

We are massively polluting surface water, so that the water may be there, but we can't use it. And we are also mining groundwater faster than it can be replenished by nature, which means we are not allowing the cycle to renew itself. The Ogallala aquifer is one example of massive overpumping. There are bore wells in the Lake Michigan shore that go as deep into the ground as Chicago skyscrapers go into the ground and they are sucking groundwater that should be feeding the lake so hard that they are pulling up lake water now, and they are reversing the flow of water in Lake Michigan for the first time.

We are interrupting the natural cycle. And another thing we are doing is something called virtual water trade. That is where you send water out of the watershed in the form of products or agriculture. You've used the water to produce something and then you export it, and about 20 percent of water used in the world is exported out of watershed in this way, because so much of our economy is about export. In the U.S. you are sending about one-third of your water out of watersheds -- it is not sustainable.

This is not a cyclical drought. We are actually creating hot stains, as I and some scientists call them, around the world. These are parts of the world that are running out of water and will be, or are, in crisis. Which means that millions more people will be without water. I argue that this is one of the causes of global warming. We usually hear water being a result of climate change, and it is, particularly with the melting of the glaciers. But our abuse, mismanagement and treatment of water is actually one of the causes, and we have not placed that analysis at the center of our thinking about climate change and environmental destruction, and until we do, we are only addressing half the question.

I do blame in a very big way, the political leadership in most of our countries for having failed to heed the call of scientists and ecologists and water managers who've been telling us for years now there is a crisis coming -- there are 36 states in the U.S. in some form of water stress, from serious to severe. Thirty-six states! Most Americans don't know this -- why is this not part of people's everyday concerns? That is what I'm hoping this book will help do.

TL: Do you think governments, like the U.S. or Canada, have any kind of a contingency plan?

MB: No. There are people in the U.S. who believe Canada is the contingency plant. Or Northeast water or Alaska water. So, moving water is one of the contingency plans, likely by pipeline. You could also ship it by tanker. Other than that, no. And not only are there no backup plans, but there is not even an understanding that you've got to stop increasing the demand on water. In the U.S., people are moving into the very area of the country that has no water -- a huge migration is taking place to to the American Southwest where they're building more golf courses.

I just read about a new water theme park in Arizona that will have waves so big you can have serious surfers, like real surfing in the desert. There is just this lack of understanding about how nature works, how the hydrologic cycle needs to be protected and how watersheds need to be protected, and when you start playing god by moving this stuff around like this we are just creating this massive crisis. There is not enough water for the demands being made on it in the American Southwest.

TL: You said 36 states in the U.S. are water stressed -- what does that actually mean for the people who live there?

MB: Well, in a dire case, literally running out of water. In many other cases, the predictions are that the demand will increase seriously and they've got to start planning. I quote in the book that the demand in Florida is growing so much and overpumping is happening so much that there are actually sink holes opening up and swallowing homes and streets and sometimes whole shopping centers. It is called subsidence. Mexico City is sinking in on itself because all the water under the city has been taken out and now they are going farther afield pumping water.

It can go from that kind of crisis, or as in some communities in the Midwest, you face having no water to the Chicago area, where the demand is going to grow hugely, and therefore the demand will be on the Great Lakes, which are already in trouble. There are four trillion liters taken out of the Great Lakes every single day and believe me, nature is not putting a trillion gallons back in. It is not rocket science that we are not allowing nature to refill and replenish. And now there are new demands on the Great Lakes because communities and industries off the basin are now demanding access to it.

TL: You mentioned global warming earlier, and I just want to come back to that for a moment. Are we approaching climate change in the wrong way by not recognizing its connection to water?

MB: Yes.

TL: So what should we be doing?

MB: Well, we have to put it into the equation. I've found that some politicians are actually using global warming as an excuse not to do anything, and I'll give you an example. It is the polar opposite of the Bush administration, which is that global warming doesn't exist. In Australia, which thankfully has gone through a government change, they are disengaging the water from the countryside and letting farmers sell it through brokers, they are disrupting streams and aquifers. They are draining the wetlands. They are privatizing. They are doing all sorts of things wrong, including overusing and polluting it, and so on. And what did the prime minister say? "It's got nothing to do with anything we're doing; it's global warming, and it blew here from away -- we didn't even create it."

I think global warming is becoming a little bit of a catch all for some governments to do nothing or to put off a solution to other things until they find a solution to global warming, and there is no excuse. Right now we have got to stop the abuse of water. The single most important thing that we can do for global warming, aside from stopping the overpumping of greenhouse gas emissions, but the twin to that is to retain water in watersheds. Because the hydrologic cycle is what cools the temperature.

Global warming can be averted through a great extent if we could maintain watersheds and maintain the cycle in its purest form. That means keeping green spaces, building green rings around urban centers -- everything from parks and gardens -- stop polluting, stop overmining groundwater and retain water in watersheds, which means we have to live more sustainably, we have to grow our food differently, we have to stop believing in unlimited growth and more stuff and more competition, and all of that.

I find that global warming is such a crisis that we won't do anything on any other front because all our attention is going there. I think we are terribly missing the boat on this, and I'm very interested in getting a debate going on this in the climate-change community so that when people are talking about the causes of climate change, our drying up of the earth from below will be considered as serious a cause as the trapping of heat from greenhouse gas emissions. It is not only part of the analysis we are missing, but part of the solution.

TL: That is interesting. I haven't heard a lot of people talking about it from that angle.

MB: Nobody.

I'm working with a group of scientists in Slovakia and a few other places, voices in the wilderness, but when you start putting it together, honestly, it makes such sense. I mean if you start to look at the growth of deserts -- in the last 30 years we've doubled the growth of deserts in the world, and it will double again in 20 years. Well, if you are creating deserts and you've got heat rising from the earth with urban heat islands, the inability for the hydrologic cycle to be maintained because of urbanization, it makes a lot of sense. Of course that is all exacerbated by melting glaciers and the lowering of the ice packs, which protects from evaporation. It is kind of a deadly combination. I spoke at a conference about this recently in London, England, and was received by people from the climate change world, really, really well, and I thought "This is a good sign."

TL: You spent a lot of time in this book, and also in Blue Gold, talking about privatization. Can you talk a little about why we should be concerned about it?

MB: Well, as water dwindles in the world and available fresh water is becoming more scarce, the demand is growing, water is becoming a commodity, it is becoming valuable to those who want to put a price on it, which is why I called the first book Blue Gold. And this blue gold is attracting private sector interest in many, many ways, and there is a private sector interest coming together to control every level of water, from when we take it out of the ground, bottle it, to how we deliver it, to wastewater treatment, and now the biggest and newest is water reuse and recycling. That sounds benign at first, but when you really start to look at it, really it is about big, big corporations like GE, Dow Chemical, Proctor & Gamble getting into the ownership, control, and recycling of dirty water, which because there are billions of dollars at stake, in my opinion, becomes a disincentive to protect source water. And you can start to understand why governments, in collusion with these companies, are starting to spend millions of dollars on cleanup technology but will not enforce rules to stop pollution in the first place.

And then we have desalination. There are 30 desal plants planned for California alone. They are now talking about nuclear-powered desalination. They are talking about building those plants as we speak. The people in the anti-nuclear movement had better dust off and come back because it is all coming back with desalination. And then there is nanotechnology, which they want to be totally deregulated. I've got a great quote in the book where this guy says, "We are going to do to water what we did to telecommunications in the 1990s," which is total deregulation. They want governments out of the business of water.

I have a whole section in the book on how water has become such a hot commodity. When I wrote Blue Gold there was no water being exchanged on the Stock Exchange, now there are over a dozen indexes just for trading water. It has become a multi-multibillion-dollar industry just overnight. A lot of it is this water reuse -- it is the fast-growing section of the water industry. I argue that there is a race going on over who's going to control water, whether it will be seen as a public commons, a public trust, and part of our collective heritage that also belongs to the earth -- or whether it will be controlled by private corporations, and I don't know who will win.

TL: But it is not all bad news.

MB: No, we are making good inroads in the bottled water area -- a lot of universities, high schools, are having drives to reject bottled water. We're getting restaurants now taking the challenge up to not serve bottled water, and we're getting people to take a pledge not to drink bottled water.

There has been a huge fight back from the big utility companies, particularly in the global south, to the extent that Suez has basically announced it is going to leave Latin America because people are so furious with them, which has been the result of fabulous grass-roots activism. So, it is not that this is a done deal, but most of the our governments are supportive of these private-sector incursions.

It is all about technology and not about lifestyle and alternative ways and decreasing growth and stuff -- they are saying we are not going to challenge the model, it is unlimited growth, continued competition, continued economical globalization, continued privatization, continued deregulation -- we'll just continue to find ways to clean up the mess as we go along.

TL: Water is not just an environmental issue, but a national security issue, you discovered with this book.

MB: Yes, water has become an issue of national security in the U.S. Six years ago I couldn't find any inkling at the national level -- the Pentagon or White House -- of a coming water crisis, either globally or in the U.S. But in the last, two to three years, this has been hugely changed. There is now a consortium advising the Bush administration and the Pentagon -- it is called Global Water Futures. It is made up of this think tank called the Center for International Studies and Sandia Laboratories. Then I dug deeper and found it is being contracted out to be run by Lockheed Martin. And this consortium involves Coke and Proctor & Gamble and others. So you finally have the U.S. government saying, "Holy crap, we're in trouble here, you can't be a super power if you don't have energy and water." Now they've got this advisory body that not only has this think tank and the corporate side too, and the high technology side, and the military side. It becomes very clear what you are dealing with.

TL: Can you talk more about the grass-roots resistance to all of this?

MB: The thing that is so stunning, especially in the global south, is that when you are dealing with water, you are dealing with life and death. For a lot of people it is like, "Well, we didn't know what to do when they privatized our education or shut down our public hospitals -- but water is different." They are willing to go the wall for it -- as one person said to me, "You may as well kill me with a bullet as dirty water." People just take a stand and are determined they are not going to compromise.

We took the time as a movement ... whenever anybody always asks me how to build a campaign, I always include these steps. We took the time to find language that we all jointly agreed on -- that water is not a commodity, that it belongs to the earth and all species, it is a public trust and human right, and so on. We've taken the time to work this out so that if you ask any of us around the world, you are going to hear the same kind of language. There is a trust that we have built in this shared philosophy and shared vision.

TL: How is it that you've managed to create such as worldwide message and come together?

MB: Part of the origin was when I wrote a report for the International Forum on Globalization back in 1999. It was called Blue Gold: The Global Water Crisis and the Commodification of the World's Water Supply. It took off, and a bunch of people from around the world started reading it. We got it translated into many, many languages, and I started hearing from people saying, "I thought this was personal and we were fighting this particular company in our community, and we didn't know that this was a global fight."

So, to my knowledge, that was the first analysis, and that morphed into the book. I started traveling and meeting people and Food & Water Watch got set up in the U.S. And then there was meeting people in Europe who were fighting big water companies, coming together at the big World Water Forum and bringing folks together from the global south to challenge what we call the "lords of water." And, of course, technology has been incredible. You don't have to have a computer in every house -- you just have to have somebody on the other end who has the capacity to receive this information.

TL: What else do we need to be doing?

MB: We need laws. Martin Luther King Jr. said, "Legislation won't change the heart, but it will restrain the heartless." We need legislation at every level of our government. It is all well for grass-roots people to do all their wonderful work -- but they shouldn't have to do all the work. We need laws at every level, from municipal up to state to national to international, that protect water ecologically on one hand and protect the notion of a human right and right of the earth, and not a commodity, and that is so fundamental.

That is why I call the book "blue covenant" -- we need a covenant of three parts -- from humans to the earth to stop destroying the lifeblood of the earth, from the rich to the poor (global north to the south) for water justice, not charity -- justice. Water should be a fundamental right for all generations, and no one should be allowed to sell it for profit. We want this right up to the United Nations. It is a struggle at every level. But we just keep going. The fight back around the world is claiming space, but we have to have the weight of law behind us. We have to make, as a society, decisions about what matters. And if we believe that people shouldn't die because they can't afford water, then we have to bring things to bear to make that happen -- we have to change things. If the World Bank has money to give to Suez or Veolia, they've got the money to give to a public agency.

TL: So are you hopeful we can move change in the right direction?

MB: I'm always hopeful -- it is part of my job. I consider hope to be a moral imperative, and I also don't think you have any right to go around alarming people with these facts unless you are also prepared to talk about what needs to be done, and success stories, and be hopeful. I am very very hopeful that we can collectively do this.

If I'm worried -- it is about the exponential abuse of water -- can we catch this and stop it fast enough?

For a list of stops and dates for Barlow's book tour, click here.

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Tara Lohan is a managing editor at AlterNet.



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