Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
As we work for public financing and control, we can join with others around the world who are rejecting the concept of water as a for-profit commodity and organizing to reclaim their access to water as a basic human right.
Within a year of being created, Eau de Paris had cut 30 million euros in operating costs and brought the price of water down 8%. Accounting for inflation, a cubic meter of water in Paris today still costs less than it did a decade ago.
On a practical level, remunicipalisation involves bringing privatised public services back into public hands by terminating private contracts. It also means reversing the outsourcing of services and re-organising services in-house of the municipality. In other words, it is insourcing.
There is solid evidence that privatisation costs more and undermines human rights. The resistance to privatisation has turned into a powerful force for a positive cause, that of (re)municipalisation, which refers to reclaiming and creating new public services on a municipal level.
For many years the left has struggled with the question of how to bring our ideas, of equality, economic justice and human rights, to fruition. And my father’s political trajectory is instructive for the argument that I want to make: that municipalism isn’t just one of many ways to bring about social change — it is really the only way that we will successfully transform society.
Mayors across the country have vowed to deliver on the goals of the Paris climate accord in defiance of President Trump’s decision to back out. But how can they, realistically, when the national government is questioning climate science and promoting coal, fracking, and pipelines? Simply put: Make energy public.
Private companies have been working to make a profit from water since the 1600s, when the first water companies were established in England and Wales.
If money is just an IOU, why are we delivering the exclusive power to create it to an unelected, unaccountable, non-transparent private banking monopoly?
