Global Water Capitalists War for Our Water.

For thousands of years, water has been seen as a free public good, with no price attached, but that's changing right before our eyes thanks to insatiable corporate greed. Their monopolistic exploitation of water – the world's most important raw material – in order to provide fabulous returns to investors from a captive market of consumers will eventually make water, like gold, too expensive for everyone but the wealthiest of the psychopathic elite if this global water cartel gets its way.  Unfortunately, although, there is life without gold, there is no life without water...I bet you didn't know that.

And speaking of psychopaths--not to mention, disappearing lakes--here's a clear example of one: former CEO Nestlé, now Chairman of the Board, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, who strongly believes our food--GMO farming /Monsanto--and water supply should be entirely controlled by corporations like Nestle (Nestle Waters North America received permission to bottle up to 210 million gallons a year from an aquifer north of Grand Rapids that recharges the Muskegon River, a major Lake Michigan tributary), with over $65 billion--or 90 billion Swiss francs-- in profit per year.

What's more, by using a little-known loophole--the bottled water loophole-- in the 2006 Great Lakes Compact that allows water to be labeled a "commodity," our government supports the plundering of our water supply.  Not only does Nestle Company siphon water for it's bottled water brand, it exports  fresh water out of Lake Michigan and ships it to China at a "240 times markup!" Their profit: an estimated $500,000 to $1.8 million per day. That's right. Our government representatives are allowing these multinationals all the cheap water they can get in order to make large profits. If we don't fight to protect the most valuable resource we have, that is, water,

And guess how much Nestle pays for the millions, perhaps billions, of gallons of water it drains? One hundred dollars annually. And let's not forget Texas billionaire T. Boone Pickens who is “the largest individual water owner in America, with rights over enough of the aquifer to drain an estimated 200,000 acre-feet a year, at least until the land goes dry.”

“Nestlé PURE LIFE has become in 2008 the largest bottled water brand sold in the world. The company is in 36 countries spanning 5 continents with 64 brands.

Other Nestlé products are Perrier, Vittel, Acqua Panna, Vera, Contrex, Aquarel, Poland Spring, S.Pellegrino, Vie Pure in Algeria and Nestle Pureza vital in some Latin American Countries. Nestlé, has been acquiring water companies since 1969 when it acquired its first 30 percent stake in the Société Générale des Eaux Minérales de Vittel, in France.

It gets even better. Not only is our government involved in this water securitzation scheme, the United Nations is the brainchild of this scam.  UNESCO's Intergovernmental Council of the International Hydrological Program's document HS 15322 explains how the "UN plans to secure resources to use at their disposal. Through the International Monetary Fund (IMF) under-developed countries are forced to sell their resources to the global Elite as “full cost recovery” to the global central bankers. Once those resources are under the complete control of the creditors, they become assets to be reallocated back to the enslaved nations for a price."

With the securitization of water  , it makes water sources under central privatization cost more and become less accessible to those who desperately need it. In other words, pursuit of water security means whoever gets the water, chooses who lives and who dies.

“The one water-export method that has been taking off is bottled water. It is among the fastest-growing and least-regulated industries in the world. In the 1970s, the annual volume of water bottled and traded around the world was 300 million US gallons (about 1 billion liters). By 1980, the figure had climbed to 650 million US gallons (about 2.5 billion liters), and toward the end of the decade, 2 billion US gallons (7.5 billion liters) of bottled water were being consumed in countries around the world.

But in the past five years [10 years ago], the volume of bottled water sales has skyrocketed, and in 2000, 22.3 billion US gallons (84 billion liters) of water were bottled and sold. Moreover, one-quarter of all the water bottled was traded and consumed outside its country of origin.

Among the brand name products are Perrier, Evian, Naya, Poland Spring, Clearly Canadian, La Croix, Purely Alaskan, and many more. Nestle is the world market leader in bottled water, with no fewer than 68 brands, including Perrier, Vittel, and San Pellegrino. As a past chairman of Perrier put it: "It struck me ... that all you had to do is take the water out of the ground and then sell it for more than the price of wine, milk, or for that matter, oil."

While bottled water may have started out as a pampered Western consumer affectation, Nestle has found a growing market niche for bottled water in nonindustrialized countries where safe tap water is rare or nonexistent. In these countries, its main product line is Nestle Pure Life, a low-cost purified tap water with added minerals. Marketed on a platform of "basic wholesomeness," Nestle Pure Life has sold well in Pakistan and Brazil, as have some of the corporation's other bottled water products in China, Vietnam, Thailand, and Mexico

[...]

“If the OPEC model were followed, the countries containing large supplies of fresh water in the form of lakes, rivers, and glaciers would constitute such a cartel.

Studies by the highly respected Russian hydrologist Igor Shiklomanov, described by Peter Gleick in his book Water in Crisis, identify the countries with the most fresh water in the world. Twenty-eight of the world's largest fresh water lakes, he writes, account for 85 percent of the volume of all lake water, including Russia's Lake Baikal, Africa's Lake Tanganyika, and Lake Superior on the U.S.-Canadian border.

As the world's largest lake system, the Great Lakes together account for 27 percent of global lake volumes. The world's largest 25 rivers include: 11 in Asia (the Ganges, Yangtze, Yenisei, Lena, Mekong, Irrawaddy, Ob, Chutsyan, Amur, Indus, and Salween); 5 in North America (the Mississippi, St. Lawrence, Mackenzie, Columbia, and Yukon); 4 in Latin America (the Amazon, Parana, Orinoco, and Magdalena); 3 in Africa (the Congo, Niger, and Nile); and 2 in all of Europe (the Danube and the Volga).

I'm not really sure what the protocol is when posting a quote from someone commenting through Facebook on another website.  For instance, should I post their name?  Or do I even have the right to post the quote in the first place?  So I'll just post the link for the article from where the quote [below] originated because I think this quote is very revealing.

“Out here in Oregon Nestle some how managed to wrangle access to the Columbia river for a new water bottling facility. My husband is a Water Rights Examiner, licensed in Oregon and Washington. I know how difficult it is for citizens to obtain water. In many areas water rights are not available to them. They are hotly contested and we've had guns drawn on us when out doing Water Rights surveys. Then along comes Nestle and they procure a Water Right for billions of gallons, for profitizing?!!! Oregon and Washington citizens have been raped by Nestle. Please don't buy Nestle water. If we don't unite to show our outrage now, they will get control of all the water."

Links:

Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation

Flow for Water Advancing Public Trust Solutions to Save The Great Lakes

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Is Blue Gold the New Black Gold?

Flow the film:



"Come and listen to a story about a man named Jed; A poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed. Then one day he was shootin at some food; And up through the ground came a bubblin crude. Oil that is, black gold, Texas tea..."  Believe it or not, a case could be made the story of the Beverly Hillbillies should be each and every one of our stories, as a conservative estimate of our oil wealth states that every man, woman, and child alive in all 50 United States of America is worth a minimum of $5 million!

However, oil, even though it is a natural resource, is not considered something essential for life; therefore, in a capitalist economy, it's first come, first serve. And those few first-comers have profited so immensely that they gained the ability to deceive and control the rest of us enough to expand that wealth into a powerful cartel.

Which leads us to H₂O. Water, that is, blue gold, nexus sea... Okay, I tried. Anyway, aside from the often discussed "contamination" of our water supply, there is another issue surrounding our water, even more important,  and that is the individuals, corporations and governments preparing to take over the supply and delivery of our water through privatization and theft. And unlike oil, water is essential to human life, right after the air we breathe.

Water is a $400 billion dollar global industry already. Keep in mind that only 2% of the world’s water is fresh, and that 20% of the world’s population does not have access...that’s 1.2 billion people.

The Great Lakes contain 6 quadrillion gallons that is spread over 94,000 square miles...that's enough to cover the US in 10 feet of water. Almost 20% of the world’s fresh water supply is held in the Great Lakes.

In 1998, a company received a permit that allowed it to pump water from Lake Superior, and ship 50 freighters of the pumped water to Asia. Politicians found out and promised to craft legislation that would prevent that from ever happening again. What they didn’t say was that they were going to insert convenient loopholes, one of which would allow water shipped to foreign lands if it was contained in bottles.

Michigan does not even charge royalties for its water. Former Gov. John Engler gave the global corporation, Nestle, aka, Perrier millions of dollars in tax-breaks, only charging them $100 per year to drill, pump and pipe hundreds of gallons of water every minute.

Consider the strategic purchase of the the Bush family. In 2006, W, under his daughter Jenna's name bought 100,000 acres in Paraguay which is sitting on top of the Guarani aquifer, the world’s largest aquifer .

Then there is T. Boone Pickens, who bought up huge amounts of land in TX panhandle, that's over one of the largest aquifers in the US, the Ogallala aquifer. Under TX law, any water you can access under your property is yours, for the selling. Only there was one problem. Pickens does not own the Ogallala aquifer or the land between his property and Dallas, El Paso, and San Antonio, his targeted areas to play water god. But that's not enough to stop Pickens. He changed TX water laws by spending millions on lobbyists and politicians to transform his property, Mesa Vista, all 68,000 acres, into a water district. Now, his property is like a town with special priviliges, such as eminent domain. He can buy up people’s land in order to lay his pipeline whether the owner wants to sell or not.

So, yes, there is an emerging water cartel including industry giants such as Suez and Vivendi of France, the German-British conglomerate RWE-Thames, and more recently, the Carlyle Group, a huge global investment firm with $97.7 billion in assets, who in the process of buying Mountain Water Co.

Links:

A bid by the Shell Exploration and Production Co. for a 15 billion- gallon water right

Charity Water

Food and Water Watch

The Natural Resources Defense Council

Americans alone spend $16 million on bottled water.
Consumers of bottled water pay, on average, $12/gallon. That's 4,000 times as much as conventional tap water. And we complain about the price of gasoline?

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Bottled Water is More Wasteful Than You Think.

I am totally guilty of contributing to the enormous profits bottled water companies make and the carbon footprint they leave behind, but no more. It is utterly ridiculous to spend the kind of money we spend on bottled water when the same water comes out of our tap for the most part.

The economics of the bottled water industry in America are astounding, and there is little to suggest that the "just say no" pleadings of Mr Bloomberg or anyone else will have any impact. In 2006, wholesale revenue for the purveyors of bottled water, including beverage giants Pepsi and Coca-Cola, topped $11bn (£5.4bn). That's more than Americans pay to go to the movies every year. And the industry is set to grow at the rate of about 10 per cent annually.

One exception is Fiji water; the water they bottle does come from the remote island of Fiji, but here is still a higher price to be paid that goes beyond the price on the bottle when purchasing Fiji water, the carbon footprint.

First the bottles have to be shipped there. They are filled, trucked to port and then brought by ship across the Pacific before distribution across the US. The best way to expand your carbon footprint? Drink Fiji.

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