Newsweek Cover: Liquid Asset--Big Business and The Race To Control The World's Water

[Jimaz]

This relates both to the curious Bush family purchase of South American aquifer access and Michigan's natural resources/economy.

From Newsweek's The New Oil

“Water has been a public resource under public domain for more than 2,000 years,” says James Olson, an attorney who specializes in water rights. “Ceding it to private entities feels both morally wrong and dangerous.”...

... privately owned water utilities will charge what the market can bear, and spend as little as they can get away with on maintenance and environmental protection. Other commodities are subject to the same laws, of course. But with energy, or food, customers have options: they can switch from oil to natural gas, or eat more chicken and less beef. There is no substitute for water, not even Coca-Cola....

Interesting read.

[Papasito]

Companies have been selling bottled water for years now, and people have been stupid enough to buy it for years now. Every month I pay a water bill. My water is not free.
If someone bottles water and sells it, they are doing the same thing as CocaCola, Pepsico, Nestle and other companies have been doing for years. Want to stop it? Tell your friends to stop buying a plastic bottle of water for $1.00-$1.50.
Not only is it a rip-off, but on top of that every time you buy one, you are supporting throwing another plastic bottle into the environmental mix.

[Detroitnerd]

If businessmen could
They'd lasso the clouds,
Pull 'em down like cattle
And tear off their shrouds,
Boil them for water,
And sell them to crowds.
Thank goodness nobody
Can lasso the clouds.

[jiminnm]

This relates both to the curious Bush family purchase of South American aquifer access ...

Do you have a reputable source for this statement? I've searched and found a lot of discussion about it, but the only 'news' source I've seen referenced is the Cuban News Service and reference to an Argetinian bureaucrat's memo. The closest I could find was UK Guardian, which referred to it as unconfirmed rumor.

[maxx]

http://www.thenation.com/article/politics-water-bolivia
"...On January 10 the citizens of El Alto took to the streets en masse to demand that their water system, privatized in 1997 under World Bank pressure, be returned to public hands. Three days later Bolivia's president issued a decree canceling the water concession, led by the French water giant Suez, and an arm of the World Bank itself. The El Alto water revolt follows, by five years exactly, the now famous revolt against water privatization in Cochabamba, in which a company controlled by the Bechtel Corporation was ousted from the country...."