Detroit Groups Appeal To The UN For Help – Does Our Nation Need A Nanny?

Detroit Groups Appeal To The UN For Help – Does Our Nation Need A Nanny?

Due to the severe water problem in Detroit, where the city threatens to cut off water to 45,000 people that aren’t paying their bills, non-governmental groups are calling on the UN to intervene in the problem.

It is certainly a tell-tale sign of the times when the US can’t take care of one of its own isn’t it?

Of course, conditions in Detroit are horrific and nobody wants to see families going without water – but take a look at what is happening here. As more cities and states go under when all the paper printing stops working, and it will like it historically always has, will we be calling on the UN for help more and more? Where does that stop? One fears it won’t until dependence upon the UN is achieved.

The United States should be strong enough to take care of its own, should it not? But the fact is that traditionally governmental take overs happen by problems being caused that are so large that people really don’t have a choice but to accept the ‘proposed solution’.

The UN needs to intervene in the affairs of the United States on the level of providing people with water?

If this actually happens and the UN starts ‘coming to our aid’ we will be witnessing the turn of a very dark page. There’s only so many pages in the book – and we are losing time everyday to recover our republic.

As thousands of people in Detroit go without water, and the city moves to cut off services to tens of thousands more, concerned organizations have taken the unusual step of appealing to the United Nations to intervene and protect the “human right to water.”

“After decades of policies that put businesses and profits ahead of the public good, the city now has a major crisis on its hands,” said Maude Barlow, founder of Blue Planet Project and board chair of Food & Water Watch, in a statement. “By denying water service to thousands, Detroit is violating the human right to water.”

The Submission to the Special Rapporteur was released Wednesday by the Detroit People’s Water Board, the Blue Planet Project, the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization and Food & Water Watch.

It calls for the “state of Michigan and U.S. government to respect the human right to water and sanitation” and for shut-offs to be halted, services restored, and water to be made accessible and affordable.

The report comes on the heels of the Detroit’s city council’s Tuesday approval of an 8.7 percent increase in water rates, part of a long-standing trend that, according to Food & Water Watch, has seen prices increase 119 percent over the past decade.

This rate hike follows an announcement in March by the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department that it would start turning off water for accounts that are past due.  According to a late May Director’s Report from the DWSD, there were “44,273 shut-off notices sent to customers in April 2014” alone, resulting in “3,025 shut-offs for nonpayment, and additional collections of $400,000.”

Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr, who was appointed to power by Michigan Governor Rick Snyder in March 2013, has aggressively pursued privatization and austerity measures across the city. “Nothing is off the chopping block, including water utilities, which are being considered for regionalization, sale, lease, and/or public private partnership and are currently subject to mediation by a federal district judge,” reads the report.

“The Detroit People’s Water Board fears that authorities see people’s unpaid water bills as a ‘bad debt’ and want to sweeten the pot for a private investor by imposing even more of the costs of the system on those least able to bear them,” the report continues.

Residents say the mass cut-off of this vital service is especially unjust in a city already struggling with high unemployment, a poverty rate near 40 percent, and a foreclosure crisis that has devastated and displaced people across the city, hitting Detroit’s African American community especially hard.

“When delinquent corporate water lines are still running without collection of funds, it demonstrates a level of intentional disparity that devalues the lives of the people struggling financially,” said Lila Cabbil, President Emeritus of the Rosa Parks Institute, which is part of the People’s Water Board. “Where is our compassion? Where is our humanity?”



Share

828 Comments

Leave a Reply

Pin It on Pinterest