Detroit’s Water Shutoffs to the Poor Have Caught the United Nations’ Attention

© 2014 Peter Free

 

22 October 2014

 

 

A symbol for what is wrong with American society

 

From Laura Gottesdiener:

 

 

The city [of Detroit] turned off [Rochelle] McCaskill’s water despite the fact that she had been paying down her $540.10 water bill in increments and that she suffers from MRSA, a contagious infection that the NIH considers a “serious public health concern” and requires frequent bathing.

 

McCaskill was one of dozens of residents, teachers, water department employees and parents who testified to two U.N. officials, who expressed concern that the shutoffs threatened residents’ human right to water and, in a city where the population is more than 80 percent African-American, could constitute discrimination under international law.

 

The city has disconnected water from at least 27,000 households this year, with as many as 10,000 households currently without running water. Hundreds of thousands of additional households are at risk of having their tap cut.

 

“We were shocked, impressed by the proportions of the disconnections and by the way that it is affecting the weakest, the poorest and the most vulnerable,” said Catarina de Albuquerque, the U.N. special rapporteur on the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation, at a press conference on Monday.

 

“From a human rights perspective, any retrogression should be seen as a human right violation.”

 

© 2014 Laura Gottesdiener, UN officials 'shocked' by Detroit’s mass water shutoffs, Al Jazeera America (20 October 2014) (reordered extracts)

 

 

Interesting societo-ethical issues

 

Leaving aside the UN’s arguably questionable intervention into a situation less dire than others in the world, the issues raised are deeply legitimate:

 

 

Why is America’s entrenched oligarchy allowed to keep oppressing African Americans?

 

Why should a resource that arguably every human being is entitled to — at least on a survival basis — be distributed only according to one’s ability to pay?

 

And why should poor people bear the cost in suffering for the stupidity that Detroit’s government bosses indulged in for so many years?

 

 

The moral? — If the United Nations had not intervened, I doubt this story would have gotten much coverage

 

We live in a callously bigoted society. One that perceives less and less of its injustices.

 

American exceptionalism has taken the fast train to the Land of Not.

 

The reason for this, of course, is the perverse way that we have subordinated the social contract to an unworkable economic system. Corporatism and neoliberalism kill and torture people for no defensible moral reason. But we lack the imagination to see the truth of the indictment.