How Your Town Can Keep Its Water Out of Corporate Hands: A Test Case

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http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/40778


Another Maine Town Votes to Reject Corporate Control
By Jamilla El-Shafei, organizer SAVE OUR WATER, steering committee member of the Maine Water Justice Allies coalition

On Saturday, March 14th the voters from the Maine town of Newfield said No to Nestle! Townspeople voted in a secret ballot, 228 for a Rights-Based Ordinance and 146 opposed. This is not only a victory for water justice activists and environmentalists, but for grassroots democracy. This is the second Maine community to recently reject what some would consider an assault by the largest food and beverage corporation in the world, based in Switzerland; Nestle SA, to extract water from the (protected) Vernon Walker Wildlife Preserve for their Poland Springs label. Shapleigh, Maine, was first.

This is certainly not the first time that a multi-national corporation treated Maine as if they were a colonial power entitled to our resources. In the past, international paper companies have turned our rivers brown from pollution and huge timber companies have exploited our forests. But the battle over our pure groundwater resources has become the tipping point in Maine. Community after community are now resisting corporate control.

-snip on the legal stuff history-

Across America there are communities struggling to fend off corporate assaults by such offenders as Wal-Mart, or Bio-solids (sewage sludge) companies and the like, and as long as these communities continue trying to work within the regulatory system they will ultimately lose because corporate lobbyists have written the regulations to serve the profit motive of the corporation, not to protect the community.

When communities consider writing Rights-Based Ordinances, they can look to their own state constitutions for affirmation. In all but 6 states in the country, there are “home-rule” provisions written within state’s constitutions. Laws should work for The People, and corporations are not people, they are entities which have been created but work against us. I liken them to Frankensteins! It is time to dismantle the monster! We can do it, one community at a time. Organize!
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no more Barons in the US.

[nxylas]

1. Send for James Bond

His last film was all about keeping Bolivia's water supply affordable. FFS.