Ramblings of an EdMan

Definitely preachy at times, but water rights are a huge issue.

We need to stop thinking the World Bank and the IMF are doing things for good.

They have both been failures. Privatization hurts not helps economies. Austerity turns recessions into depressions. Giving local utilities, especially water to private multi-national corporations is utter madness.

People deserve the right to safe, cheap drinking water. Just like in America everyone deserves the right to free health care.

Corporations in our era are all about profit margin for the “stockholders.” Forgetting of course that stockholder value is an important to a company as say how the Red Sox are doing is important to Boston.

We need to have less greed in our society. Simple businesses like Jiffy Corn Mix. Good price at forty cents a box. The CEO makes a fair wage, the workers make a good wage, the farmers get a good price, everybody wins.

In our time of greed, we will have someone like Bechdel or Suez come into a country in crisis and make the water both more polluted and substantially more expensive. We need to do better.

We also need far more sustainable agriculture and animal husbandry. It’s a big effort to make for better water. To me a big part of it is buy local, eat local, when possible.

We need to stop the big corn subsidies, which just make for large corn fields, huge chicken farms, huge fields of shit with cow and pig production, and terrible produce. We can do better, we must do better. Better food, better use of water and a better America.

Trickle up economics has been with us since 1981 with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, it just doesn’t work. Making finance a bigger industry, and worshipping Wall Street just doesn’t work. Simple way to pay off Sallie Mae, which is an utter failure, have free health care, and a basic safety net in America? Raise capital gains from 15% to 25% and estate tax over one million from 0% (how did that happen) to 10%. Also kick out the five members of the Supreme Court who made the egregiously bad decision that the preamble of the United States “We the People of the United States…” doesn’t matter by saying it’s “We the Corporations of the United States, in order to have homeland security, patriot acts, a huge prison-industrial complex, and corporate welfare…” They are: Chief Justice John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Anthony Kennedy. It’s probably the worst Supreme Court decision of all time. Here is the Wiki on it.

We all need clean water. It’s a right. Let’s not forget that. We don’t need much, but we need food, water and friends.

Let’s hope it gets better, it can’t get much worse.

edmund