Nestlé is Taking Water From the Great Lakes and is Looking to Purchase Hoover Dam to Privatize the Water

Nestlé has made criminal deals with the government to take water from the Great Lakes at very little cost. This water is then used for bottled water or to be shipped to China. The U.S. Government is not morally fit to deal with this situation.



May 7, 2013 - Nestlé CEO Peter Brabeck has stated that water is not a right, but an exploitable resource and commodity that should be leveraged for money. Nestlé's unabashed greed in regards to witholding water from people is well documented, and Tyrel Ventura and Tabetha Wallace discuss it in the video clip above from Buzzsaw.

We need to stop the exportation of water from the Great Lakes to China

December 19, 2010

Ann Arbor News Letter to the Editor - This letter is in regards to NAFTA (North America Free Trade Agreement). The president is now pushing for free trade with South Korea, which I am totally against.

Take a look at how things are working out with China. They export numerous cheap items to our country tainted with toxic and cancer causing substances. It seems almost every month the FDA is recalling this junk including many items made for children.

One of the most toxic was drywall which contained sulfuric acid. Wy would you put sulfuric acid in drywall? Many people were sickened from it. Every day our ports are filled with imports from China. How many of these items make it to the consumer without being tested for toxic substances? How many boats are loaded with exports to China from the United States? I dare say, very few. Many jobs have been lost due to this one-sided trading.

The only thing they do import from us, which needs to be stopped, is water. China is the biggest consumer of Nestlé, which sells several brands of bottled water from a plant based in northern Michigan. When John Engler was governor of Michigan in 2001, he made an agreement with bottle water giant Nestlé, allowing them to open a plant in Mecosta County. They have pumped more than a 1/2 million gallons of water a day, drying up streams and ponds that feed the Great Lakes.

I had no idea this was going on and always thought the Great Lakes were sacred. We need to get this stopped now by writing our governor, Congressmen and senators. I have had it up to here with NAFTA, and China. There is NOTHING free trade about this agreement.

Coca-Cola and Nestlé Are Sucking Us Dry Without Our Even Knowing

March 2, 2014

Fool.com - The droughts currently ravaging California, which will likely send food prices soaring down the road, have highlighted the importance of available freshwater supplies. As 17 communities in California are within 60 days of running out of drinking water, the ability of companies like Coca-Cola (NYSE: KO  ) Nestlé (NASDAQOTH: NSRGY  ) to effectively privatize water supplies feels awfully disconcerting. While the rains that just began to fall out West may bring some measure of relief, the fact remains that the world is coming up hard against a water crisis.

In thirsty regions of the world, Coca-Cola and Nestlé have repeatedly clashed with communities over the perception that the companies were commandeering scarce water supplies at the expense of small farmers and poor villages. While both companies have deployed aggressive water conservation campaigns, with an understanding that water is an essential input to their businesses, Nestlé and Coca-Cola have long faced accusations that they suck vulnerable communities dry in pursuit of their profit motives.

Nestlé's chairman, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, believes that water privatization is the key to solving water scarcity issues. Activists see water as a fundamental human right. What should we believe? More importantly, which approach actually improves access to water for the thirstiest among us?

Water, water, everywhere ... right?

Most people view water as an infinite, inexhaustible resource, much like air. After all, it's part of a whole natural cycle, right? For most practical purposes, though, water -- especially clean, safe drinking water -- is resolutely finite and exhaustible. It's getting worse as the global population hurtles toward the 9-billion mark, as agricultural and fuel extraction guzzle more and more water, and as climate change adds growing stress to existing supplies.

Consider a few alarming indicators:

• One in seven people around the world lack access to safe drinking water.
• The Global Economic Forum identifies water crises as the third most serious risk the world faces in 2014.
• The poorest 20% of households in El Salvador, Jamaica, and Nicaragua spend up to 10% of their income on water. 
• From 2003 to 2010, parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran lost 144 cubic kilometers of stored freshwater -- about the same amount of water as there is in the Dead Sea. Many scholars draw a solid line between water scarcity and the recent conflicts in those regions, and the U.S. director of national intelligence sees global water overuse as a potential threat to national security.
• NASA data from Jan. 17 showed California's backup groundwater reserves to be so depleted that the losses could be detected from satellites 400 kilometers above the earth's surface.

Source: California Department of Water Resources.

Water: human right or commodity? 

Because the stakes are so high -- water is perhaps the single most critical factor to sustaining human life, and no part of our economy can function without it -- the discourse around this issue has reached a fever pitch. Many people view the whole matter in moral terms: water is an essential human right, and so any attempt to commoditize it is fundamentally wrong.

Certainly, water privatization has a checkered history. There are plenty of cases where it has been done poorly, leading to rate hikes, diminished water quality, corruption, and the marginalization of the poorest and thirstiest members of communities. Activists were horrified, then, when Nestlé's chairman dismissed the right to water in a 2005 documentary as an "absurd notion."

To be fair, that was one unfortunate comment -- on which Brabeck-Letmathe has since backtracked -- in the context of a much broader, more nuanced discussion that has some merit. The point Brabeck-Letmathe and others make is that right now, the cost of vital drinking water for the poorest of the poor is the same as the cost of massive, wasteful withdrawals for non-essential purposes by wealthy interests: namely, almost free. This imbalance encourages inefficient use of our water resources, and there is no incentive for that to change.

"Americans are spoiled. We turn on the tap and out comes a limitless amount of high-quality water for less money than we pay for cell-phone service or cable television," explains Robert Glennon, author of Unquenchable: America's Water Crisis and What We Can Do About It. "Because water is so cheap, people don't value it."

Public, private, or something in between

The proposal from Glennon's ideological quarter is that while we first have an obligation to assure that people's most essential water needs are met, we need to introduce an appropriate price for water beyond that basic threshold. Price signals and market forces can lead to more efficient water allocation. Brabeck-Letmathe's argument largely tracks along the same lines.

Human beings need five liters a day for hydration and 25 liters a day for minimum hygiene. That accounts for a whopping 1.5% of freshwater extraction for human purposes. Unconventional fuel-source extraction and ever-thirstier agriculture account for a wildly disproportionate share of the rest. The thinking goes that if there were a value placed on that remaining 98.5% of the water we use, we might use it in a more appropriate manner.

There is evidence from privatization schemes around the world that there can be benefits. Many water systems in poor countries would not exist at all if it had not been for private funding. Water infrastructure across multiple countries is in need of massive investment, whether because no system yet exists or because the system has aged well beyond its functional life. Evidence also shows that consumers of all stripes tend to conserve water when it has a price.

So, then, Nestlé and Coke for president?

Does that mean that Nestlé and Coca-Cola are our water saviors? Well, no, not really. While Brabeck-Letmathe's assertions have real merit that warrant serious consideration, Nestlé itself remains a big part of the problem, as does Coca-Cola.

The companies' conflicts with communities in Latin America, Asia, and Africa are too numerous and sordid to be invented from whole cloth. Moreover, the simple fact is that sucking groundwater out of one place, bottling it, and shipping it for sale in another place that typically already has perfectly safe public water ranks high on the list of stupid things to do with scarce water.

So yes, Coca-Cola and Nestlé are indeed sucking us dry. So are our modern agricultural practices and unconventional oil and gas extraction, to an even greater extent. A blended privatization scheme may indeed be part of the solution, but if it's done right, it will only make life harder for Coke and Nestlé.

Bottled Water Blues- Battling Nestlé in Michigan

June 3, 2003  

AlterNet - The residents of Mecosta County and the surrounding areas in central Michigan regard water as central to their identity. They fish for trout and watch ospreys and eagles feeding in the streams. They spend warm days by the ponds and small lakes that dot the woodlands. And of course the Great Lakes, which hold a fifth of the world's fresh water, are a constant presence. So when a huge multinational bottled water company decided to move in and start pumping over half a million gallons of water a day out of the springs that feed their lakes and streams, the residents took it personally.  

To meet the exponentially growing demand for bottled water, in the late '90s Perrier subsidiary Great Spring Waters of America sought to open a major pumping and bottling operation in the Midwest. First the company tried to set up shop in Adams County, Wisconsin, but they were driven away by intense opposition from residents and local government.
 
So in 2001 Perrier, which has since been bought by Nestlé Waters North America, was welcomed with open arms by then-Michigan Gov. John Engler, who allowed the company to open up a plant for a licensing fee of less than $100 per year and offered millions in tax breaks to boot.
 
Construction started on the plant even before all the necessary permits had been obtained. For the past year and a half, the plant has been pumping 100 to 300 gallons per minute out of an aquifer on a hunting preserve in Mecosta County and piping the water 11 miles away to a bottling plant in Stanwood, where it is prepared for shipping and sale around the Midwest as Nestlé's Ice Mountain brand.
 
Shortly after the pumping plan was announced, a grassroots movement of local residents and activists coalesced to oppose the plan, on the grounds that not only would the pumping have harmful effects on the environment and quality of life for residents, but it would also set a chilling precedent in selling off the area's natural resources to a multinational company.
 
This coalition has used both legal and direct action approaches to raise awareness of the issue and try to stop the pumping plan. Among other things, the group Sweetwater Alliance, which has coordinated much of the grassroots opposition, staged a "canoe-in" along one of the streams fed by the spring.
 
In the fall of 2001 the group Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation (MCWC) along with four individual local residents filed a lawsuit in Mecosta County Circuit Court seeking to prevent the pumping, arguing that it was not a legally defined "reasonable use" of water and violated state and federal regulations regarding water rights. The case is currently being heard by Judge Lawrence Root, with an outcome expected by mid-June. 

The result will determine whether Nestlé can keep pumping there or even increase its withdrawals from about 150 gallons a minute to as much as 800 gallons a minute. And even more than that, the case will set a precedent for Michigan and possibly other states in deciding whether and how companies are allowed to extract water for profit.

"This is a precedent-setting case about how our common law water rights will be defined and what folks can do with those rights," said Scott Howard, an attorney working on the case. "Can folks take that water, bottle it and sell it for profit?"

In Michigan there are few regulations relating to the use of groundwater; it is essentially seen as part of the property it is on. "Ice Mountain paid $75 to $85 to the state for a permit application fee and with that it can essentially gain billions by selling [the water]," Howard said. "There's no other industry that gets to do that timber and mining industries don't get to do that."
 
Howard notes that under Michigan law, one can make "reasonable use" of water on the property they own, but the water can't be diverted. The suit argues that the pumping of water to sell all over the Midwest is clearly a diversion.
 
There is also a federal law, the Water Resources Development Act, prohibiting the diversion of water headed to the Great Lakes. Under this measure opposition from a governor of any of the other Great Lakes states could theoretically put a halt to the pumping. In court lead attorney Jim Olson argued that at the very least the pumping should be limited to 100 gallons per minute instead of 400 or more.
 
The lawsuit cites studies finding that pumping 400 gallons a minute will reduce the flow of water in lakes and streams fed by the spring; in Deadstream by a half inch during the summer and in Thompson Lake by two and a quarter inches. 

"That might not sound like a lot, but in reality that could be irreparable harm," said Rhonda Huff, vice president of MCWC. "Then you have to talk about erosion, invasive species that could come in if the water level drops, it sounds like you're throwing the whole ecosystem off."

"These streams support the wild iris that only grows in Michigan; the possum, raccoon, deer, owls and other birds that drink from them; the dragonflies and butterflies; the turtles, who are having a hard time already; and of course the fish," added Lois Hartzler, who notes that she lives in Coldwater Township about 25 miles from the plant, in a town called Lake. "All of these things depend on the wetlands."

Nestlé Goes Trout Fishing
 
In its response to the suit Nestlé argued that residents will "suffer no harm whatsoever from Nestlé's groundwater pumping" and that the water reduction in Deadstream would actually be good for trout by lowering the overall water temperature.
 
But opponents of the pumping argue that even more than the actual effect of the pumping on the local environment is the larger issue of why Nestlé should be allowed to extract billions of gallons of water a year from the area for profit without any remuneration to local citizens or even the state, beyond its permit fees and its lease with the private owner of the hunting preserve.

"At the gut level people believe water is for everybody," said Holly Wren Spaulding, a member of the Sweetwater Alliance, noting that the grassroots movement against the plant has included a wide coalition ranging from Native American tribes to Navy SEALS. "People think it's wrong for a transnational company to be allowed to come in and take water and profit from it." 

Huff, who is a resident of neighboring Osceola County, noted that Nestlé also has two experimental wells operating in Osceola and hopes to open a plant there, though it is currently prohibited from doing so by a local ordinance that is in effect through August 2004.

"I equate the plant to an octopus with tentacles going out to various springs," she said. 

"This will just open the floodgates," added Blaine Stevenson, a professor of sociology at Central Michigan University and a water rights activist. "There are these bottled water wars going on now, with Coke and Pepsi and the others battling it out. They're all going to want to come in here."

Opponents say they see this situation as even more unjust given that not far away in Detroit, about 8,000 low-income families are without running water at all because they are unable to pay their water bills or live in buildings with outstanding back bills.

"It's really frightening that our state would grant tax abatements to this plant while there are people in our cities who don't have drinking water," said Eartha Melzer, a journalist who has been documenting the whole struggle. "We're moving toward a third world model in this country." 

A World-Wide Battle
 
Spaulding, who has traveled to Brazil, South Africa and other parts of the world for her work in the water rights movement, sees the issue as part of a world-wide battle against privatization of water and natural resources. The mass extraction of water is endangering environments around the world while at the same time a huge portion of the world's population including people in the U.S. have trouble accessing clean fresh water.

"This isn't just about the environment, this is about social justice," she said. "That's the part that has really riled people up."

She notes that there is also a movement opposing a Nestlé/Perrier bottling plant in Sao Lourenco in Brazil, where people blame the plant for drying up one of the country's historic sources of mineral water. The Serra da Mantiqueira region of Brazil is famous for its Circuito das Aguas, or "water circuits," with high mineral content and medicinal properties. Four small towns, including Sao Lourenco, were built up around these water circuits in the 19th century. Now people say the mineral content of the water is being reduced by over-pumping by Nestlé/Perrier for its Pure Life brand. Non-governmental organizations were formed to oppose the pumping, and in 2001 the federal government launched an investigation into the company on the grounds it was violating constitutional prohibitions on demineralizing water.

"If it is pumped in quantities greater than nature can replace it, its mineral content will gradually decrease, bringing the change in taste that we were noticing," said Franklin Frederick, a member of the International Free Water Academy, in a recent interview with the journal Mountain Research and Development.

There is clearly a water crisis around the world, exacerbated by deforestation, drought, and lack of infrastructure in poor countries, that prevents even available water from reaching much of the population. But for the most part the U.S. remains blissfully unaware of the crisis, consuming an average 92 gallons of fresh water daily, compared to 44 gallons for Europeans and five gallons for Africans. The mushrooming popularity of bottled water in a country where tap water is safe to drink is symbolic of the drive to consume without thinking about the bigger picture. In the year 2000, according to the book "Blue Gold" by Maude Barlow, over eight billion gallons of water were bottled and traded globally, over 90 percent in non-renewable plastic.
 
Activists in Michigan see the battle against Ice Mountain as a way not only to protect their own streams and lakes but to bring the larger issues of water conservation and rights to the attention of the American public.

"I think in the last year people in the state have become much more aware that privatization is a threat to our water," said Melzer. "It's only recently that people have realized water isn't a limitless resource, and that it is vulnerable to exploitation by corporations."

~~~

Federal Agency Overseeing Water and Power is Procuring Ammunition for Nonmilitary Purposes 

http://magiclougie.blogspot.com/2015/07/federal-agency-overseeing-water-and.html

Back in 1999, the private construction contractor Bechtel took over control of the public water system in Bolivia’s third largest city, Cochabamba. The corporation then held a monopoly over this very basic human necessity and proceeded to raise rates by as much as 200 percent, far beyond what families could afford. The law even said that people had to obtain a permit to collect rainwater! (that means even rainwater was privatized!)

https://jamesptaylor.wordpress.com/2007/11/29/bolivia-bechtel-and-the-fight-for-public-water/

Suez is one of the world biggest water companies.(French).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_%28company%29

Veolia Environnement S.A. is a French transnational company with activities in four main service and utility areas traditionally managed by public authorities – water supply and management, waste management, energy and transport services.
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veolia_Environnement (French)

The privatize Water Systems as a way to fix city water, but then if they can't raise the costs and the water bill rates, they can always abandon the project and leave the city with huge problems.

The impacts of World Bank and IMF structural adjustment programs on countries in the Global South have been well-documented in the areas of health and education, food security and jobs. However, less is known about the impacts of the World Bank's latest obsession -- the privatization of water services. In country after country in recent years, the World Bank has been quietly imposing a for-profit system of water delivery, leaving millions of people without access to water.

https://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/209/43398.html

The Great Corporate and Government ('One Entity') Water Heist

http://waterbandits.blogspot.com/

Ireland Privatizes Its Municipal Water Systems

http://magiclougie.blogspot.com/2015/02/ireland-privatizes-its-municipal-water.html#more



In the video above, Dr. Dugegan reveals not just "WHAT" is intended for America and all people in the world, but "HOW" the controllers intend to carry out their plan.

Tapes one and two were recorded in 1988 and are the recollections of Dr. Lawrence Dunegan regarding a lecture he attended on March 20, 1969 at a meeting of the Pittsburgh Pediatric Society. The lecturer at that gathering of pediatricians (identified in tape three recorded in 1991) was a Dr. Richard Day (who died in 1989). At the time Dr. Day was Professor of Pediatrics at Mount Sinai Medical School in New York. Previously he had served as Medical Director of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Dr. Dunegan was formerly a student of Dr. Day at the University of Pittsburgh and was well acquainted with him, though not intimately. He describes Dr. Day as an insider of the "Order" and although Dr. Dunegan's memory was somewhat dimmed by the intervening years, he is able to provide enough details of the lecture to enable any enlightened person to discern the real purposes behind the trends of our time.

He covers topics such as:

IS there a power, A force or a group of men organizing and redirecting change? "Everything is in place and nobody can stop us now . . ." People will have to get used to change -- everything will change, constantly The REAL and the "STATED" goals Population Control Permission to have babies Redirecting the purpose of sex - sex without reproduction and reproduction without sex Sex education as a tool of World Government Encouraging homosexuality... Sex, anything goes Euthanasia and the "Demise Pill" Limiting access to affordable medical care makes eliminating the elderly easier Planning the control over medicine Elimination of private doctors New Difficult to diagnose and untreatable diseases Suppressing cancer cures as a means of population control. Inducing heart attacks as a form of assassination Education as a tool for accelerating the onset of puberty and pushing evolution and MUCH, MUCH MORE.

Transcripts can be found here:
http://globalslaves.blogspot.com/2011/09/new-world-order-plans-exposed-by.html
http://100777.com/nwo/barbarians
http://www.sweetliberty.org/nobarbarians1.htm#.VaVcPrVS_gI

Corporations sell off Great Lakes water [Excerpt]

December 17, 2013

Tampa Bay Times - "By using a little-known loophole in the 2006 Great Lakes Compact, Obama minions are allowing Nestlé Company to export precious fresh water out of Lake Michigan to the tune of an estimated $500,000 to $1.8 million per day profit. By draining the precious jewel of the Great Lakes in the middle of America, our federal water managers are allowing the export of our water out of our country across thousands of miles of oceans into the Asian basin plagued by huge population centers that are suffering from their constant lack of fresh water."

PolitiFact Ohio has previously looked at the question of water being removed from the Great Lakes and found that it was a genuine issue.

It stems from an agreement known as the Great Lakes Compact. It was negotiated by and has the force of law in eight states -- Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. (Two Canadian provinces are also involved in Great Lakes water policy decisions, but technically aren’t part of the compact.)

The most important provision for this fact-check is its prohibition on diverting water from the Great Lakes basin -- with a key exception. That exception -- the "loophole" referred to in the blog post -- is that the compact permits the removal of water in containers of 5.7 gallons or less. The existence of this provision has enabled the bottled-water industry to construct major facilities in the Great Lakes basin, including one by Nestlé Waters North America in Mecosta County, Mich.

Because the compact was designed to regulate and preserve the Great Lakes -- one of the world’s great natural repositories of fresh water -- such commercial sales have been controversial. Peter Annin, author of The Great Lakes Water Wars, told PolitiFact Ohio that the provision was one of the most emotional issues during the compact’s negotiation.

"Many people opposed the loophole during the negotiations, but each state included it anyway when they passed the legislation," said Melissa K. Scanlan, a professor at Vermont Law School who specializes in water law.

Legislative fixes have been periodically floated in Congress, but none has yet advanced.

Related:

Nestlé bottled-water company seeks to take more Michigan water (November 2016)