Privatizing water?

I find it difficult to believe this but apparently it really happened in Bolivia. Bechtel (an American corporation) somehow acquired monopoly rights to water in one area of Bolivia. So they immediately raised the price of water 300 percent. As this meant poor people were having to pay some huge percentage of their annual wages just for water there was a rebellion (can you imagine the nerve of these people complaining about the cost of water?) and the corporation had to back off. What bothers me about this is not the rebellion, or the fact that Bechtel lost, but the fact that anyone (Bechtel included) would even have imagined something as absurd as privatizing water, let alone actually trying to do it. Hurrah for the people of Bolivia! When will other people realize there are things far too important to be privatized. Certainly water is one of them. I suppose in theory if corporations could get away with privatizing water they could eventually privatize air - we would have to pay for the priviledge of breathing (don't believe for a moment some corporation wouldn't do this if they could). There are many things that should just not be privatized. Social Security, for example. Medical and dental care. Energy (look what privatization did to California energy, for example). No basic human need should be privatized. Our current obsession with privatization is no less than social Darwinism run rampant - let the poor and the weak just perish. The current situation in the United States is completely shameful. Millions without any health care, millions more homeless (including large numbers of veterans), millions just written off so Corporate Executives can make a hundred million or more per year in the pursuit of profit. Basic features of American culture at the moment are simply immoral and disgusting.

I suggest a good example of this can be seen in the military. Our troops are paid so little many are forced to borrow through "payday loans." These loans are nothing more than a racket, trapping individuals into debt they can probably never pay off. This has become such a terrible scam that Congress recently had to take some form of action. So what did they do? They capped the interest that could be charged by these vultures at 36%! Get that? Thirty six percent! I guess the concept of usury is unknown to our Congressmen. Even the rates we all pay on our credit cards are obscene. Our current credit card and interest system is no less than the functional equivalent of slavery. The only difference is that they can't physically abuse us on a day by day basis. How many Americans are trapped into a system where if they can only pay the minimum payment on their loans they will pay and pay for forty years before they can get out of debt? America is no longer the home of the free and the land of the brave. It is the home of the marks and the land of the two to take 'em.

I can't comment further on the Foley situation. It is too much like shooting fish in a barrel. But don't worry. Be happy. Bush/Cheney are protecting us. Things are going really well. If anything doesn't seem right just blame Clinton and the Democrats.