More Important than Gold, Water Should Not Be Traded on Wall Street ~~Avexnim Cojti

Two articles on the trading of water...

 https://www.culturalsurvival.org/news/more-important-gold-water-should-not-be-traded-wall-street

On December 8, 2020, several media sources reported that fresh water started to be traded on Wall Street as a commodity such as gold and wheat. This comes as water scarcity is increasing in California and many parts of the world and as we near a global water crisis. A water crisis is worrisome enough, yet more alarming is the fact that our Mother Water will be controlled by a privileged group of people who will determine its value to the world.  

As Indigenous Peoples of Abya Yala (the Americas), we have seen how our territories were turned into private property for the benefit of settlers and their governments. Although we might have lost our livelihoods in certain cases, we are resilient and we continue asserting our rights to collective lands and land protection. This time, we cannot stand by as Mother Water becomes one more commodity on the capitalist market. It is not right. New Zealand, Ecuador, and Bolivia in recent years have passed groundbreaking legislation giving personhood status to bodies of water as well as securing additional protection for nature. In India, there have been legal attempts to consider the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers as legal persons in an effort to combat pollution. In 2016, the Colombia Constitutional Court found that the Atrato River basin possesses rights to "protection, conservation, maintenance, and restoration." 
 

We refer to water as our Mother Water in the same way we refer to Mother Earth. They are both mothers who nurture us and all living beings at no cost. We honor water in our ceremonies and practices as it is a sacred element of our livelihoods. In the community of the Maya of Chuwila in Guatemala, people greet the water spirit and we thank it for being with us at the first touch of water in the morning every day. Offerings of flowers are done to water when it is the first time it comes to households. Mother Water needs to be protected and cared for not only by Indigenous people but by all people. We are called to protect all life in regions where water is most scarce. 
 

With climate change, overpopulation, dysfunctional consumerism, unsustainable agriculture, and multiple types of land extractivisms around the world, the scarcity of freshwater is escalating, as is the number of deaths due to illnesses caused by contaminated water sources and lack of access to water. Conflicts within and between communities are arising because of water scarcity and unequal access. One example is the depletion of lake Chad in Nigeria due to climate change that has led to conflict, violence, and the displacement and forced migration of local people. The global community cannot avert our eyes to these facts.
 

Water on the Wall Street market will benefit only those with large capital who can afford to pay the price of water. It will push people and families to pay for it or die. This will be seen especially in regions where water is already in crisis like those communities around lake Chad.  Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, Special Rapporteur on human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation rightly said, “In this context, the risk is that the large agricultural and industrial players and large-scale utilities are the ones who can buy, marginalizing and impacting the vulnerable sector of the economy such as small-scale farmers.” By affecting the price and availability of water, we are also affecting the food security of the world and the displacement of millions of people in the short future.
 

Water as a commodity on the market can also lead to its privatization and price gouging that would benefit only the most economically strong. As a consequence, people desperate to survive will fight for water rights. One outstanding example in our recent history was the water war in Bolivia in 2000. A private consortium, dominated by the Bechtel Corporation of San Francisco, took over Cochabamba's water system and raised water rates after the government of Bolivia sold this public service to them. After massive protests, injuries, and deaths, the people of Cochabamba recovered water as a public good and Bechtel Corporation sued the government of Bolivia for damages. 
 

Other examples in the struggle for water rights and water defense are the cases of the Maya Q’eqchi’ Peoples in Guatemala and Sunuwar communities in Nepal. The Maya Q’eqchi’ have fought for the protection and collective use of the Cahabón and Oxec Rivers in the northwest part of the country. They opposed private hydroelectric Oxec projects that were established without the Free, Prior and Informed Consent of Indigenous communities. As a result of the conflict, Bernardo Caal Xol has been a prisoner of conscience since 2018. Xol is one of many land and water defenders who has spoken out on behalf of Indigenous communities and opposed the projects. He was criminalized by Energy Resources Capital Corporation who acted with the support of the Guatemalan government. On the other side of the globe, in Nepal, Sunuwar communities are actively fighting hydro dams which are being built without their consent on the Likhu and Khimti Rivers. These struggles demonstrate the will of the people to fight for water rights and to protect sacred waters from development and pollution that are not unique are present in most countries. 
 

In July of 2010, the General Assembly of the United Nations, in Resolution 64/292, explicitly recognized the human right to water and sanitation and acknowledged that clean drinking water and sanitation are essential to the realization of all human rights. Access to fresh water and sanitation as a human right should not be linked to market prices. Access to fresh water and sanitation is to be respected, protected, and fulfilled as a human right by all levels of government, businesses, and civil society. Water conservation needs to be emphasized now in the agroindustry more than ever before. We can live with less meat, less soy, less almonds, less wine but we cannot live with less water.  
 

Water is essential for life, access to fresh water is a human right, and most importantly, water is sacred. Water is life.

================

Another article on trading of water in the futures market:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-06/water-futures-to-start-trading-amid-growing-fears-of-scarcity

California Water Futures Begin Trading Amid Fear of Scarcity

By 

Kim Chipman

Water joined gold, oil and other commodities traded on Wall Street, highlighting worries that the life-sustaining natural resource may become scarce across more of the world.

Farmers, hedge funds and municipalities alike are now able to hedge against -- or bet on -- future water availability in California, the biggest U.S. agriculture market and world’s fifth-largest economy. CME Group Inc.’s January 2021 contract, linked to California’s $1.1 billion spot water market, last traded Monday at 496 index points, equal to $496 per acre-foot.

The contracts, a first of their kind in the U.S., were announced in September as heat and wildfires ravaged the U.S. West Coast and as California was emerging from an eight-year drought. They are meant to serve both as a hedge for big water consumers, such as almond farmers and electric utilities, against water prices fluctuations as well a scarcity gauge for investors worldwide.

“Climate change, droughts, population growth, and pollution are likely to make water scarcity issues and pricing a hot topic for years to come,” said RBC Capital Markets managing director and analyst Deane Dray. “We are definitely going to watch how this new water futures contract develops.”

... article goes on...

Engels and Marriage

https://mronline.org/2020/11/06/engels-and-marriage/

~~Posted for Collectivist ~~

Friedrich Engels, whose 200th birthday falls on 28 November, had a very personal connection with Ireland. Soon after being sent to help run the family textile factory in Manchester in 1842 he met twenty-year-old Mary Burns, daughter of an Irish dyer. Engels’s friend the revolutionary German poet Georg Weerth wrote a poem about Mary after he met the couple. It is a rare contemporary account:

Mary

. . .

From Ireland with the tide she came,
She came from Tipperary:
“Oranges, fresh and good for sale”
So cried our lassie Mary.
And Moor and Persian and Brown,
Jews, Gentiles overwrought—
All people of the trading town,
They came and bought, and bought.

. . .

And with the money that she gained
For juicy, golden mandrines,
She hurried home determined
Her face in wrathful lines.
She took the money, safe it kept;
Treasured ’til January,
To Ireland fast and sure she sent
The money, so did Mary.
’Tis for my land’s salvation,
I give this to your coffers!
Arise, and whet your weapons.

Stir up the ancient hatreds!
The Rose of England strives to choke
Shamrock of Tipperary
Warm greetings to the best of blokes,
O’Connell, from our Mary.

• Translation by Jenny Farrell

Mary Burns was instrumental in introducing Engels to the horrendous conditions of the Manchester proletariat. As the 24-year-old Engels wrote in The Condition of the Working Class in England(1845), “The rapid extension of English industry could not have taken place if England had not possessed in the numerous and impoverished population of Ireland a reserve at command.” However, the Irish also brought a tradition of struggle. Many became trade unionists, and Feargus O’Connor was elected to Parliament in 1847 as the first Chartist.

The situation of proletarian families led Engels much later to note in The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884):

now that large-scale industry has taken the wife out of the home onto the labour market and into the factory, and made her often the bread-winner of the family, no basis for any kind of male supremacy is left in the proletarian household.

Engels understood marriage and family as directly linked to the ruling class system, in which the accumulation of wealth led to marriage, strict monogamy of women, and female submission: “. . . in proportion as wealth increased, it made the man’s position in the family more important than the woman’s . . . [and the resulting] overthrow of mother-right was the world historical defeat of the female sex.”

Engels decided never to marry. He lived first with Mary Burns and, following her early death, with her sister Lydia (Lizzie). In effect he led a double life: one as a manager in his father’s factory, the other in a suburban cottage rented under an alias for Mary and Lizzie, his real home.

In 1856 Engels and Mary visited Ireland together. He wrote to Marx following this trip: “Ireland may be regarded as England’s first colony,” and “I never thought that famine could have such a tangible reality.”

Both Mary and Lizzie were very involved with and supported the IRB’s struggle for an independent Ireland. Aged only forty, Mary died suddenly on 8 January 1863. She had been Engels’s partner for twenty years. He was deeply shaken when Marx failed to respond compassionately to his loss; it nearly broke their friendship.

After Mary’s death Engels and Lizzie became lovers and moved into a small terrace house in Mornington Street in the Ardwick district of Manchester. This is the house where Marx visited a number of times, as did his daughter Eleanor. Eleanor struck up a deep friendship with Lizzie and through her became an Irish patriot. Lizzie was a member of the Fenian Society, and there are indications that she joined the First International.

In 1867, when Manchester police captured two IRB men, Kelly and Deasy, Lizzie became involved in the unsuccessful plot to rescue them. She may even have hidden them briefly. Following their execution, in both the Marx and Engels-Burns households the women expressed their support for Ireland by wearing green ribbons with black for mourning.

In September 1869 Lizzie, Engels and the fourteen-year-old Eleanor Marx spent three weeks in Ireland. The demand for an amnesty for the IRB prisoners held in British jails had revived the liberation movement. Tens of thousands of people were out on the streets of Dublin and Limerick. Engels planned to write a comprehensive study of Ireland and began research in earnest.

Lizzie and Engels moved to London in September 1870. Their house became a centre for the socialist movement. Lizzie died on 12 September 1878. Engels wrote about her:

She was of genuine Irish proletarian stock and her passionate, innate feeling for her class was of far greater importance to me and stood me in better stead at all critical moments to a greater extent than all the pseudo-intellectual and clever-clever ‘finely educated’ and ‘delicate’ bourgeois daughters could have done.