Detroit Resumes Cutting Off Water to 150,000 Residents, Prompting Appeal to United Nations for Help

Detroit Resumes Cutting Off Water to 150,000 Residents, Prompting Appeal to United Nations for Help



Desperate calls for help from the United Nations aren’t just for war-torn and developing nations anymore. The city of Detroit—a city that has been on the brink in many ways—in an effort to balance its books, has begun shutting off water access to city residents behind on their payments. While that may seem like what happens to anyone when they don’t pay their bills, Detroit is a unique case—nearly half of the 323,900 residents who use the utility are delinquent, according to the Detroit Free Press. To make matters worse, Al-Jazeera America reports, Detroit’s average monthly water bill is nearly double the national average of $40. The Detroit City Council approved a 9 percent hike last week.

In response, a coalition of activist groups in the city have appealed to the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights for relief. Here’s what they’re hoping for via Think Progress:

“We are asking the UN special rapporteur to make clear to the U.S. government that it has violated the human right to water,” said Maude Barlow, the National Chairperson of the Council of Canadians and a key member of the coalition that put the report together. In addition to creating international pressure to stop the Detroit shutoffs, Barlow said, the UN’s intervention could lead to formal consequences for the United States. “If the US government does not respond appropriately this will also impact their Universal Periodic Review,” she said, “when they stand before the Human Rights Council to have their [human rights] record evaluated.”

source:   http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2014/06/23/detroit_shuts_off_water_for_residents_united_nations_asked_to_help.html

Love Always
mudra

UN Calls Detroit Water Shutdown Inhumane

see Video:   http://live.huffingtonpost.com/r/segment/united-nations-water-shutdown-detroit/53aacb8902a760bf9100038c

Love Always
mudra

The Story of Detroit, A Modern Parable Chronicling the Betrayal of America. The New Century’s War on America’s Poor and Middle Class

What has happened to America? A cautionary tale that in many ways epitomizes the onetime greatest country in the world’s fall from grace degenerating into the world’s greatest single threat to life on planet earth is told in the story of Detroit. Michigan’s Motor City was once the wealthiest city in all of the nation, a proud hallmark of “Yankee ingenuity” leading to America’s other hallmark of upwardly mobile working class affluence.

Though he neither invented the automobile nor the modern assembly line, industrialist Henry Ford’s Ford Motor Company launched in 1903 and Model T created in 1908 became both America and Detroit’s world famous icon the American car, mass producing to make it available for America’s expanding middle class to afford. Indeed the rise of America, its cars and highway system mobility during the last century catapulted Detroit to industrial prominence and unparalleled prosperity as the largest US city adjacent Canada with a current metro area population of over five million people. From the end of World War II up to the war on poverty in 1964, America cut by half its number of citizens living in poverty.

However, Detroit in the twenty-first century has clearly fallen on very hard times, losing 25% of its population in just one decade from 2000 to 2010, falling from the tenth largest city in the nation to the eighteenth. The Motor City’s municipal population peaked at 1.8 million residents in postwar 1950 when America’s manufacturing base was at its glorious height. But just sixty years later the city’s size has plummeted to little more than 700,000 with a mass exodus of over 60% of the city’s population steadily leaving since 1950.

And now Detroit finds itself amidst a growing humanitarian crisis with 150,000 people currently living without any source of running water in their homes. And with upwards of 200-300,000 people possibly effected in the coming weeks and months, nearly half of Detroit residents could soon be without access to freshwater despite its front door on the Great Lakes being the largest freshwater system on earth. Since March this year the city’s water and sewerage company has made the coldhearted decision to simply start shutting off the water supply to any people in Detroit who cannot pay their water bill. At a rate of 3000 customers per week over the last several months, the city’s residents have been losing their source of running water in our nation’s poorest city with 42.3% of its inhabitants living under the poverty level.

A year ago last July Detroit became the first city of its size forced to file bankruptcy. The urban decline of the once greatness that was Detroit is also mirrored in America’s rural decline of the nearby Great Plains. But this lack of water issue for thousands of people carries implications of a serious human rights violation being committed in the richest nation on earth. This unfolding story is but yet another sad and disgraceful symptom of the country’s urban decay reflecting how rapid USA’s vapid freefall from greatness straight into Third World despair for America’s poor has actually become in 2014.

In 2010 the United Nations declared that water is a universal human right and that people denied access to lifesaving water clearly constitutes a serious human rights violation. Detroit families that have fallen on hard times, unable to keep up with two months of unpaid water bills as low as $150, for several months now have been forced to live without water. And now moving into the July heat of another long hot, global warming summer, the humanitarian crisis is about to boil over.

Try to imagine even for one day living your life without running water in your home. Attending the morning ritual of turning on the hot and cold water to take our daily warm shower is something that if we awake tomorrow and no water pours out of our faucet or shower head, it would be a shocking discovery and rudest of wake up calls to suddenly realize how much we Americans would be missing and taking our water for granted if our daily, seemingly endless supply of it was abruptly shut off and indefinitely gone.

read on: http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-story-of-detroit-a-modern-parable-chronicling-the-betrayal-of-america/5389660

Love Always
mudra

Statement from the Detroit's water brigade

Love Always
mudra