Ever since the City of Detroit started shutting off water to low-income residents last summer in what United Nations investigators denounced as a human rights violation, city officials have maintained that they are simply responding to Detroiters’ failure to pay their bills.
Now it’s looking like that’s not the case.
The independent investigative outlet Motor City Muckraker recently revealed that the city had shut off water to residents with up-to-date bills, including a Detroit Free Press editor. When called on it, the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) told Muckraker that a clerical error resulted in 11 such shutoffs.
But that story didn’t hold up, either. In a follow-up Facebook post, Motor City Muckraker charged that DWSD and Mayor Duggan “lied to us” about the mistaken shutoffs and apologized for passing on misinformation, saying that “the numbers are much higher than the administration wanted the public to believe,” and promising another story.
The truth is that Detroit’s officials don’t know exactly whose water they’re shutting off – and the economic elites pulling the strings don’t care. It’s worth remembering that at the height of the recession, the major banks engaged in millions of wrongful foreclosures, committing fraud and breaching their own contracts in their frenzy to seize people’s homes. This period witnessed the most “wealth destruction of people of color … in American history,” according to the AFL-CIO’s special counsel. Not coincidentally, it has also seen record corporate profits.
Unpaid bills aren’t the problem – they’re the pretext. For Gov. Snyder and his corporate allies in the business community, Detroit’s neighborhoods are more profitable with the current residents gone. Policies like the water shutoffs and mass tax foreclosures will effectively make life unlivable in certain areas of the city, driving out long-time residents and clearing the way for more “development” and its attendant influx of young white professionalsF. It’s urban colonization, pure and simple.
And it’s not just a Detroit problem. Twenty-five thousand households in Baltimore will have their water cut off this week in a similar attack on low-income people, according to Think Progress. But until progressive activists grapple with the financial considerations underlining these battles over water rights, they will remain on the defensive.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.