This article was printed in the June 8, 2007 edition of The Parkville (Missouri) Luminary.

It should come as no surprise that Missouri American Water Company, and, by extension, their parent company, German utility conglomerate RWE AG have decided the ratepayers in this area should pony up to the tune of a 25 percent increase for their water.

As your article (in the June 1, 2007 issue of The Parkville Luminary) noted, George H.W. Bush, by Executive Order, made it legal for private enterprises to own what had heretofore been public entities, such as utilities. The American Enterprise Institute has long coveted the privatization of everything possible in the public domain. This includes such head-scratching wish list items as streams. One assumes that, if they were able to figure out a way to get hold of it, these robber barons would try to own the air we breathe.

Privatization of the public domain is the inevitable outcome of an ideology articulated perhaps most famously by Ronald Reagan, who, in his first inaugural address, said "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Such thinking brings us to a place wherein we’re viewed first not as citizens, but "consumers". This warped mindset allows some to be content with corporations calling the shots at all levels, from our schools (see the efforts to privatize education) to our government (the cozy relationship between lobbyists and our so-called representatives) to our media (it seems these days that, among media outlets, only The Luminary is free of mega-corporate ownership) to those essences which support us in the most elementary ways, like clean water.

So we allow the corporations to do the utterly foreseeable: to strip-mine (literally and figuratively) our communities, feeding their coffers while impoverishing us. It is the imperative of corporations to make profits - in fact, it is their legal obligation. By doing so, they pay dividends to their shareholders, raise the value of their stock, and earn their executives enormous bonuses for doing so. The profit motive also means that they may do the bare minimum to keep up whatever their enterprise is. In the case of utilities, maintenance of old distribution infrastructure takes a back seat to the CEO’s year-end stock options.

The same article in The Luminary pointed out that "the World Bank believes that privatization is the answer for supplying the developing world’s water needs". The World Bank, we’ve been reminded recently, is, while ostensibly set up to assist the developing world in raising standards of living, primarily a tool to promote the agenda of the pro-business hegemony espoused by departing World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz and his allies in the corporate world and the current administration, among others.

In April 2000, the citizens of Cochabamba, Bolivia, in the face of skyrocketing water bills, took to the streets. In the end, despite facing deadly force from their own police and military, the people of Cochabamba succeeded in re-acquiring their own water system, and set about reforming it. The parallel is imperfect: Cochabamba’s water distribution system was terrible, and it needed a lot of work to make it merely bad. But the World Bank-promoted privatization of the system, which was sold to a subsidiary of corporate giant Bechtel, made matters worse. They rapidly raised rates while extracting profits on what, at a basic level, should be an inalienable right - clean drinking water.

We deserve a say in those matters which affect us. That means more local control, not some corporate monstrosity in another state or on another continent. I don’t think Parkville’s citizens will end up having to fight with the police and military the way that Cochabamba’s residents did. But it would be nice if this event serves as a wake-up call. There are some things - like clean drinking water - which merit a system more fair than the corporate model.