“The purist of profits is an old story” Although there was at one point a time when things that were seen as to secrete and to indispensable to human life and the public good to be seen as privatized by any given person or business. We really begin to see where this privatization has begun in the modern age if look at the 1400th and 1600th century. During that time period people and communities worked with a collective responsibility where people belonged to the land the land did not belong to the people. Stating then in Europe we began to see the enclosure of commons. Commons such as the grand land masses of the worlds which were reduced to private property. Thus we began to see the privatization of our oceans of the world where we created laws and regulations that allow counties and even corporations to claim a certain amount of water out of their country. After these we see air being privatized were it is divided and could be bought and solid buy airplane companies. With deregulations privatization is an enclosure of the commons as privatization takes hold. We begin to question what creates wealth. Is wealth is only created when it is owned by someone? In essence privatization causes a usurpation of wealth. What we now see is that we do not give so publicly owned property it to some nice person, we see it being sold to the high-test bidder and the highest bidder is in most cases an unaccountable tyranny. It sounds out idiotic to think that the world’s most powerful companies would like everything to be owned by someone but this is essential what is happening and what they want. Now I understand the reasoning for this is that if everything is owned there would be someone that was help to preserve if for their own wealth. But that leaves the question of what do those that do not own anything.
Now with this said many of you may be thinking what any of that has to do with corporate control. So what we know can speak on the idea that 2/3 of the world will not have access to fresh drinking water in 2025. An a idea such as this which has provoked a the preliminary confrontations of control over the world’s most basic resources. When Bolivia sought to refinance the public water service the World Bank required it be privatized. Thus we have the Bechtel corporations which gained control of all Copacabana’s water even the water that falls from the sky.
Now the problem with this is that citizens of Copacabana are not allowed to collect rain water or even use any type of water without paying a fee for it. Seeing most Copacabana citizens live on one dollar a day it is easy to see how this privatization of an essential human need is disastrous to the Bolivian people. Bechtel even takes it to the extreme of confiscating Copacabana’s citizen’s homes for payment of water use. When citizens decided to fight for their right to use water without being charged the government enforced Bechtel’s regulations on the city and a war brook out where citizens where being shot and killed.
This leaves on to question how far Corporate Control will go and who really wins, not the citizens of Copacabana that is for sure. “Water has been characterized as the oil of the 21st century. Blue gold. It is essential to life, and yet humanity faces a growing water crisis as a result of severe mismanagement in water and sanitation, which will be exponentially exacerbated in the coming decades by population growth combined with declining resources” (Coha). Seeing the breakdown of privatization and neoliberal policies in Latin America have taken place it should not come as a surprise that the people are objecting to the privatization of this basic human need, because what happens to those who don’t own anything at all?
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