But not necessarily through the water. Stan Goff talks about that "other" liquid of global importance, which I wrote about on July 22nd Water, Water Everywhere. I can't get the water out of my mind.
Stan says:
"Imperialism needs its stories, its pseudo-realities and pseudo-events, but it also needs its material. If the industrial-capitalist world-system needs oil as the basis of its continued capital accumulation, the human beings who inhabit and form part of this system need water.The rest is here
Oil, water, food. These are tied together more tightly than the Gordian knot. And the pressure of their convergence is highest where the resources are most scarce, or most hotly contested, or both: behold the Holy Land.
Instead of beginning an examination of Palestine and Israel with a study of religion and ethnicity (let's not forget that 40% of Palestinians are Christian), we should begin by looking at water."
A bit closer to home there is this from LiP Magazine: Drying Up: The Global Water Privatization Pandemic
"But the lifeblood is being sucked out of this area [Michigan], literally, and packaged in plastic bottles to be shipped around the world and sold, adorned with a photo of snow-covered peaks that exist only in some advertising executive’s imagination. This is Ice Mountain bottled water, a brand of Nestle Waters North America, one of the world’s largest bottled water companies. In Mecosta County, Nestle is pumping up to 400 gallons a minute from an aquifer on a hunting preserve, diverting water that otherwise would have ended up in tributaries with names like Deadstream and Thompson Lake and, eventually, in Lake Michigan."I've been feeling a drying up of sorts ... the NewsNewsNews (AKA the OldsOldsOlds) ... the blogs and other Internet sources ... the US presidential election circus, all conspiring to leave me feeling whipped and uninspired. But water I can always get worked up about. I've rarely taken it for granted. Those faucets in my house and my yard? ... that water comes from some where. Like electricity, it just doesn't magically appear at the touch of my hand. I also noticed that water was not on the docket at the convention in Boston. Curious. Are the PTB unconcerned about the water for the people on our Happy Planet? For their capital on the Capitalism Planet? I have yet to receive an answer to that question. So while everyone is tossing laurel leaves for speeches and manly smiles, I'm thinking a lot about water, and the ultimate hierarchy of needs: 3 minutes without air; 3 days without water; 3 weeks without food.
Your "Atta-Human" prize for getting through this tome is this delicious little piece from "From the Wilderness" on the Bush-Cheney Campaign Headquarters, by Wayne Madsen. It's completely unrelated to water. Or is it? ;-)
