Water is a very good servant, but it is a cruell maister.” – William Bullein (1562)

Credit: richardtimothy.com

A game you could play with this article would be to substitute the word “air” every time you read “water.” Commodification of water seems silly enough in the abstract. Now in the throes of artificial scarcity, U.S. cities, counties and states are running out of water even as they turn control over managing water supplies to private corporations.

At the beginning of February, as chronicled by Victoria Collier, New Jersey authorized the fast-track sale and leasing of water utilities to private corporations “without public notice, comment, or approval.” As I write this, more communities in New Jersey are “studying water privatization, while the city council of Columbia, South Carolina is resisting business interests’ pressure to privatize water there as well.

Last year, a private water utility in West Virginia poisoned the state, and afterwards fought against “disclosure of information about its preparedness for and response to a chemical spill that contaminated the drinking water for 300,000 people in its service area.”

Later in the year, Detroit, having […]