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.
Help us Prepare for Trump’s Day One
Trump is busy getting ready for Day One of his presidency – but so is Truthout.
Trump has made it no secret that he is planning a demolition-style attack on both specific communities and democracy as a whole, beginning on his first day in office. With over 25 executive orders and directives queued up for January 20, he’s promised to “launch the largest deportation program in American history,” roll back anti-discrimination protections for transgender students, and implement a “drill, drill, drill” approach to ramp up oil and gas extraction.
Organizations like Truthout are also being threatened by legislation like HR 9495, the “nonprofit killer bill” that would allow the Treasury Secretary to declare any nonprofit a “terrorist-supporting organization” and strip its tax-exempt status without due process. Progressive media like Truthout that has courageously focused on reporting on Israel’s genocide in Gaza are in the bill’s crosshairs.
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We’re preparing right now for Trump’s Day One: building a brave coalition of movement media; reaching out to the activists, academics, and thinkers we trust to shine a light on the inner workings of authoritarianism; and planning to use journalism as a tool to equip movements to protect the people, lands, and principles most vulnerable to Trump’s destruction.
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