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<\/p>\n\u201cWhere\u2019s your water termination notice?\u201d Charity demanded, after staggering to the contractor\u2019s truck. A widely-respected African-American community leader, she has been at the forefront of campaigns to ensure Detroiters\u2019 right to public, accessible water.<\/p>\n
The contractor\u2019s answer was to drive away, knocking Charity over and injuring her leg. Two white policemen soon arrived\u2014not to take her report, but to arrest her. Mocking Charity for questioning the water shut-offs, they brought her to jail, where she spent two days before being released without charge.<\/p>\n
Welcome to Detroit\u2019s water war\u2014in which upward of 150,000 customers, late on bills that have increased 119 percent in the last decade, are now threatened with shut-offs. Local activists estimate this could impact nearly half of Detroit\u2019s mostly poor and black population\u2014between 200,000 and 300,000 people.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are people who can\u2019t cook, can\u2019t clean, people coming off surgery who can\u2019t wash. This is an affront to human dignity,\u201d Charity said in an interview with Kate Levy. To make matters worse, children risk being taken by welfare authorities from any home without running water.<\/p>\n
Denying water to thousands, as a sweltering summer approaches, might be bad enough in itself. But these shut-offs are no mere exercise in cost-recovery.<\/p>\n
The official rationale for the water shut-downs\u2014the Detroit Water Department\u2019s need to recoup millions\u2014collapses on inspection. Detroit\u2019s high-end golf club, the Red Wing\u2019s hockey arena, the Ford football stadium, and more than half of the city\u2019s commercial and industrial users are also owing\u2014a sum totaling $30 million. But no contractors have showed up on their doorstep.<\/p>\n
The targeting of Detroit families is about something else. It is a ruthless case of the shock doctrine\u2014the exploitation of natural or unnatural shocks of crisis to push through pro-corporate policies that couldn\u2019t happen in any other circumstance.<\/p>\n
The first shock was the slow disaster that struck Detroit over the last four decades: the flight of corporations toward cheaper, overseas labor; the movement of white, wealthier Detroiters to the suburbs, draining the city\u2019s tax base; a Wall Street-driven financial crisis that left many homeless or jobless; and the deliberate starving of the city of funds owed them by the Republican state legislature.<\/p>\n
On its heels has come a round of economic shock therapy. Taking advantage of the severe decline in revenue from Detroit\u2019s first shock, the media, corporations and right-wing politicians drummed up a crisis of fear about financial debt. This has become the pretext for a swift assault on Detroit\u2019s public resources: an attempt to dismantle its schools, to slash its pensions, and to transfer its parks and art and land into the hands of private corporations.<\/p>\n
The public water system, a prized resource worth billions and sitting on the Great Lakes, is now the latest target\u2014and the water shut-offs are a way to make the balance-sheet more attractive in the lead up to its privatization.<\/p>\n
As Detroiters like Charity Hicks have taken a stand, they have been met by a third shock: literal blows of police force and violence, intended to dampen any resistance.
\nTaking full advantage of Detroit\u2019s plight required the removal of another obstacle: democracy. No Detroit politician, subject to the pressures of an electorate, could imagine going after the city\u2019s water. But in 2013, using Detroit\u2019s debt as his excuse, Michigan\u2019s Republican governor Rick Synder imposed an \u201cemergency manager\u201d\u2014a trustee to govern Detroit unilaterally. When Detroiters overwhelmingly voted in a referendum against the \u201cemergency manager\u201d law, Synder passed a new one overnight\u2014with a provision rendering referendums meaningless.<\/p>\n
Having made his reign democracy-proof, Detroit\u2019s emergency manager has proceeded to drive the city toward bankruptcy. With the bankruptcy dominating media headlines across the country, the real nature of Detroit\u2019s crisis has been obscured and ignored. It has left the banks and corporations free to pursue a liquidation of the city\u2019s assets. And nothing is off the table.<\/p>\n
There is one other way the situation in Detroit would never have come to pass: if this was a city predominantly of white people instead of black. Too many in the US view Detroit like the policemen viewed Charity\u2014as deviant, inferior and beyond repair. This racism has meant decades of block-busting, red-lining, police brutality and the legislative punishment of the city. And it has done something more insidious: it has written off the people of Detroit.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery day, we\u2019re shown that black lives, black quality of life, black communities, don\u2019t matter,\u201d says Charity.<\/p>\n
The attitude was expressed in a recent statement of L. Brooks Patterson, the elected executive of the mostly white Detroit suburb of Oakland: \u201cI made a prediction a long time ago, and it\u2019s come to pass. I said, \u2018What we\u2019re going to do is turn Detroit into an Indian reservation, where we herd all the Indians into the city, build a fence around it, and then throw in the blankets and corn.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
The US banks and corporations who now have Detroit on the hook want these ugly truths to stay submerged. They haven\u2019t flinched while the water has been shut-off. Nor did they flinch when Detroiters\u2019 heat was cut\u2014in 2013, before the worst winter on record, 169,407 households were disconnected. But they loudly protested when organizations proposed a tour of the city for the US judge who will rule on Detroit\u2019s bankruptcy\u2014that, they insisted, would be too \u201cdangerous.\u201d<\/p>\n
The view the judge would see is in radical contrast to Detroit\u2019s prevailing image: a city with a flowering network of community gardens, more than any in the US, feeding residents and nurturing solidarity; a rich artistic and musical culture; and neighborhoods organizing for meaningful education and to restore local democracy. No one denies Detroit is racked by crime, poverty and unemployment\u2014but it is also hard to miss its vibrant renewal.<\/p>\n
It is from this incredible web that a challenge to the water shut-offs is emerging. Community organizations have filed a human rights complaint to the United Nations, demanding Michigan state impose a moratorium on the shut-offs. UN experts have already responded critically. There are daily acts of civil disobedience: cars being parked over water valves to prevent shut-offs; neighbors teaching each other to turn the water back on. A new initiative called the Detroit Water Brigade\u2014an Occupy Sandy-style response to disaster zones created by the deprivation of water instead of its excess\u2014is accepting supplies from around the country, opening local service hubs, and coordinating calls to action.<\/p>\n
And the Detroit People\u2019s Water Board, a broad coalition co-founded by Charity Hicks, continues its work of raising consciousness about water justice and conservation, setting out a vision for water as a public trust, not a commodity\u2014a source of life, not of private enrichment.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a test being looked at by cities across the US\u2014even the world,\u201d Charity says. \u201cWe will not let water be used as a weapon to remake the city in a corporate image. We will re-establish what it is to live in a democracy, with a water system that is part of the commons, that affirms human dignity and that ensures everyone\u2019s access.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It was six in the morning when city contractors showed up unannounced at Charity Hicks\u2019 house. Since spring, up to 3,000 Detroit households per week have been getting their water shut-off\u2014for owing as little as $150 or two months in bills. Now it was the turn of Charity\u2019s block\u2014and the…<\/p>\n