Author: Tom Sullivan

Freedom’s untidy
by Tom Sullivan

So in light of recent events in Baltimore, a friend dredged up this nugget from the memory hole:

FLASHBACK #TBT Rumsfeld: Looting is transition to "freedom": http://t.co/FoTiGoQI0k @HuffPostHill @chrislhayes pic.twitter.com/UM1HdelBNP— Murshed Zaheed (@murshedz) April 30, 2015

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave that explanation for the looting in Baghdad at a briefing on April 11, 2003. He followed those remarks by saying:

… freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They’re also free to live their lives and do wonderful things, and that’s what’s going to happen here.

[snip]

The task we’ve got ahead of us now is an awkward one, because you have to go from a transition — from a repressed regime to an unrepressed regime that is free to do good things and also do bad things, and we’re going to see both.

Notice how easily the untidiness in Baltimore knocked ISIL, a.k.a. Rumsfeld’s Baby, right off the front pages? Yes, ISIL is that much of an existential threat to America.

The scary thing for Iraq and Syria, however, is that now the media-conscious ISIL will want to do some “bad things” that put them back on the front pages.

First comes the disinformation…
by Tom Sullivan

First comes the disinformation. Next come the wingnut emails.

The city of Baltimore is preparing for a Friday release of details of Freddie Gray’s injury and death in police custody. “Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said Wednesday she’s working with Freddie Gray’s family and faith leaders to clear up ‘misinformation’ that could lead to further unrest.”

Such as?

The Washington Post on Wednesday evening published an article that states that a unidentified prisoner who was also in the back of a police van with Gray claimed he could hear Gray “banging against the walls” and “was intentionally trying to injure himself.”

The prisoner’s tale comes via a police document obtained by the Post, in which the statement is included on an application for a search warrant, which is currently sealed. The prisoner could not actually see Gray, according to the report.

How it plays on Fox: Freddie Gray broke his own back. Coming Up Next: Martin Luther King shot himself.

Then there’s this:

A rumor that Gray had a pre-existing spinal injury from a car accident appears to have originated Tuesday with a blog post on the conservative website thefourthestate.co and then spread to other conservative sites like the Free Republic.

But the Baltimore Sun investigated that rumor:

Online reports are swirling that Freddie Gray had spinal surgery shortly before he died in police custody, and had collected a payout in a settlement from a car accident. Those reports — which raise questions about the injury that led to his death in April 19 — point to Howard County court records as proof.

But court records examined Wednesday by The Baltimore Sun show the case had nothing to do with a car accident or a spine injury. Instead, they are connected to a lawsuit alleging that Gray and his sister were injured by exposure to lead paint.

Paperwork was filed in December allowing Gray and his sister, Fredericka to each collect an $18,000 payment from Peachtree Settlement Funding, records show. In exchange, Peachtree would have received a $108,439 annuity that was scheduled to be paid in $602 monthly installments between 2024 and 2039.

How it plays on Fox: Freddie Gray broke his own back, killing himself as part of an elaborate, failed scheme to get arrested, injure himself while in police custody, then sue the Baltimore Police Department for millions.

And it’s all Obama’s fault, according to Sean Hannity. His channel spews inflammatory disinformation daily that plays to its audience’s worst instincts because it’s profitable and because it sells penis pills and incontinence products.

Maybe Fox News has an opening for a copy writer? It’s the American way.

Dignity matters

Dignity played a prominent part in the Obergefell v. Hodges oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday. The funny thing about dignity is who deserves it depends on who is making the argument.

To borrow climate change deniers’ popular formulation, I’m not a scientist lawyer, but I’d be embarrassed to be making the arguments Michigan’s former solicitor general presented against marriage equality before the Supreme Court on Tuesday. John J. Bursch, representing Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee, argued right out of the gate that recognizing same-sex marriage will harm the state’s interest in regulating procreation.

Regulation and Big Gummint are blasphemies in red states such as Kentucky and Tennessee. Arguing on their behalf for preserving states’ interest in regulating procreation might have been enough to call the rest of Bursch’s presentation on account of Godwin’s Law or him being a communist. But no one blinked. Bursch persisted:

The first sign of trouble for the states came in a dog that did not bark: Kennedy, whose respect for federalism is oceanic, seemed uninterested in the question of a state’s sovereign prerogative to exclude same-sex couples from the institution of marriage. But the tide of argument truly seemed to turn when Bursch tried to give shape to the phantom menace posed by same-sex marriage; the only real danger he could point to was that fewer straight couples would marry or stay married, which would lead to more children not being raised by their biological parents. “The out-of-wedlock birth rate in this country has gone from 10 percent to 40 percent from 1970 to today,” he said.

And here the trouble began. “Under your view, it would be difficult for same-sex couples to adopt some of these children,” Kennedy said. “I think the argument cuts quite against you.”

Justice Anthony Kennedy was not done. As Dahlia Lithwick notes with a grin, Kennedy is “the dignity-whisperer“:

So there is a rather extraordinary moment Tuesday morning, as the Supreme Court hears historic arguments in the marriage equality cases grouped under Obergefell v. Hodges, when Kennedy finds himself in an argument with John Bursch, Michigan’s special assistant attorney general, about whether marriage is a dignity-conferring enterprise, or not. Bursh, defending his state’s ban on same-sex marriage, is explaining that the purpose of marriage is not to confer dignity but to keep parents bonded to their biological children.

Justice Kennedy—who opened argument Tuesday morning with the observation that this whole case is about an institution whose definition has gone unchanged for millennia—looks rather shocked. The author of the majority decision outlawing sodomy bans in Lawrence v. Texas (“Adults may choose to enter upon this relationship in the confines of their homes and their own private lives and still retain their dignity as free persons”) and the decision striking down the Defense of Marriage Act in United States v. Windsor (“It seems fair to conclude that, until recent years, many citizens had not even considered the possibility that two persons of the same sex might aspire to occupy the same status and dignity as that of a man and woman in lawful marriage”) did not want to hear this. Indeed, it seems like Kennedy wanted it to be perfectly clear that he is the guy who gets to say that if marriage is nothing else, it is a dignity-stamper.

“You know, dignity may have grown up around marriage as a cultural thing,” Bursch argued, “but the State has no interest in bestowing or taking away dignity from anyone …” Which brings me back to why “dignity” jumped out at me.

Bursch’s view of dignity — Kentucky’s, Michigan’s, Ohio’s, and Tennessee’s view — contrasts sharply with marriage equality opponent Rep. Paul Ryan’s view. The Wisconsin Republican believes, “Promoting the natural rights and the inherent dignity of the individual must be the central focus of all government policy.” That would seem to align Ryan with Kennedy. Except for Ryan it depends on which natural rights and whose inherent dignity we’re talking about. As Ryan explained in a Reagan-esque, four-Pinocchios anecdote delivered at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in March, feeding poor schoolchildren lunch is counterproductive:

“What the left is offering people is a full stomach and an empty soul…People don’t just want a life of comfort. They want a life of dignity…”

Yet that’s just what the conservative hero Ryan and too many states refuse to LGBT couples. We’ll have to wait until June to see how many other Supreme Court justices share Kennedy’s interest in dignity.

“Like being in a bad marriage”
by Tom Sullivan

Something was bound to give. It’s not as if Baltimore didn’t have a reputation for brutal policing, as Digby noted last night. The Baltimore Sun investigation, “Undue Force,” was from just last fall. As Tavis Smiley asked Bill O’Reilly two weeks ago in the wake of recent deaths of black men at the hands of police, “How many isolated incidents equal a pattern?” After Freddie Gray died from mysterious injuries sustained under police custody in Baltimore days later, his funeral yesterday finally set fire to fuel that was tinder-dry:

After almost two weeks of tension over the death of Freddie Gray, Baltimore descended into chaos Monday.

Roaming gangs of mostly young men clashed with police in the streets, seriously injuring officers; tore open businesses; and looted their stocks. Gov. Larry Hogan declared a state of emergency and called in the National Guard, and state police requested as many as 5,000 reinforcements from neighboring states.

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake instituted a weeklong citywide curfew from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. starting Tuesday.

Rawlings-Blake called the rioting and destruction “idiotic.”

“This isn’t a white-black issue,” Gray family attorney William Murphy told a crowd last night. “This is an issue of how do we treat each other as human beings.” He set the rioting against the backdrop of community oppression from the days of slavery to Sundown towns to the Civil Rights era to a war on drugs that left America with more of its citizens imprisoned than any other country in the world. Murphy concluded:

“Well, we’ve spoken tonight. We’ve spoken with our feet, with our words, and most of all, with our hearts. We live here. We love it here. It’s not perfect. It’s like being in a bad marriage. But we’re not interested in a divorce. We’re willing to go into counseling with anybody that wants to make it right. But we love this city, and we’re here to work as hard as we can and as long as we can until this problem is solved.”

In predictable fashion, the usual media suspects will focus on the looters, on the rocks and bottles, and ignore what sent angry citizens into the streets across the country — in Ferguson, in New York, in North Charleston, and now in Baltimore.

Less predictably, as protests broke out over the weekend,
Baltimore Orioles COO John Angelos, son of team owner Peter Angelos, called for due process to be completed before judging the police involved. But he set the protests in a broader context:

That said, my greater source of personal concern, outrage and sympathy beyond this particular case is focused neither upon one night’s property damage nor upon the acts, but is focused rather upon the past four-decade period during which an American political elite have shipped middle class and working class jobs away from Baltimore and cities and towns around the U.S. to third-world dictatorships like China and others, plunged tens of millions of good, hard-working Americans into economic devastation, and then followed that action around the nation by diminishing every American’s civil rights protections in order to control an unfairly impoverished population living under an ever-declining standard of living and suffering at the butt end of an ever-more militarized and aggressive surveillance state.

In some more-affluent, more-privileged communities, the attitude seems to be “let them eat Freedom.” But for those paying closer attention, it’s beginning to feel like 1968 again: Baltimore, Washington, Chicago. That’s not a good feeling.

UPDATE:: Don’t miss Ta-Nehisi Coates’ commentary on the situation in Baltimore.

A whole new not-you
by Tom Sullivan

This is how crazy the world is. Designer Adam Harvey’s goal is to make your face unrecognizable by surveillance software:

His CV Dazzle designs for hair and makeup obscure the eyes, bridge of the nose and shape of the head, as well as creating skin tone contrasts and asymmetries. Facial-recognition algorithms function by identifying the layout of facial features and supplying missing info based on assumed facial symmetry. The project demonstrates that a styled “anti-face” can both conceal a person’s identity from facial recognition software (be it the FBI’s or Facebook’s) and cause the software to doubt the presence of a human face, period.

Click through to see some of the wild makeup and hair for foiling surveillance cameras and facial recognition programs. Some of the info in this Raw Story post might be a year old or so old, but it’s new to me. And not surprising. I grew up watching dystopian science fiction movies. Now it feels as if I’m living in one. But would rather not have my eyeballs replaced, thanks.

David Atkins has written here before about how technology will, inevitably, eliminate jobs in The World of Tomorrow as automation takes over. Self-driving cars, etc. The challenge is what to do with people who have become obsolete. In a lengthy article on Big Data turning you into an information source the way the Matrix turns you into a power source, Jacob Silverman writes at Salon:

This situation won’t be completely remedied by more aggressive regulation, consumer protections, and eliminating tax breaks. Increasing automation, fueled by this boom in data collection and mining, may lead to systemic unemployment of a kind we’ve never seen. Those contingent workers laboring for tech companies through Elance or Mechanical Turk will soon enough be replaced by automated systems. It’s clear that, except for an elite class of managers, engineers, and executives, human labor is seen as a problem that technology can solve. In the meantime, those whose sweat this industry still relies upon find themselves submitting to exploitative conditions, whether as a Foxconn worker in Shenzhen or a Postmates courier in San Francisco. As one Uber driver complained to a reporter: “We have a real person performing a function, not a Google automatic car. We have become the functional end of the app.” It might not be long before he is traded in for a self-driving car. They don’t need breaks, they don’t worry about safety conditions or unions, they don’t complain about wages. Compared to a human being, automatic cars are perfectly efficient.

And who will employ him then? Who will be interested in someone who’s spent a few years bouncing between gray-market transportation facilitation services, distributed labor markets, and other hazy digital makework? He will have no experience, no connections, and little accrued knowledge. He will have lapsed from subsistence farming in the data fields to something worse and more desultory—a superfluous machine.

Once that happens, will Big Data even care what superfluous machines “like” on Facebook?

The plaintive cry of the perpetually oppressed
by Tom Sullivan

A somewhat misanthropic friend once said if he ever wound up as an insider in some group he would have to create an outside just to feel like himself. Even as conservative Christians insist that they are America, inhabiting a country created by God himself just for them, and as sure as the prosperity gospel that he smiles upon and blesses them, they are most comfortable posturing as oppressed outsiders. So GOP presidential wannabes were on message yesterday in Iowa:

“The single greatest threat to all of our freedoms is the threat to your religious liberty,” Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, told the crowd in a speech that at times sounded like a church sermon. “Let me be clear tonight: I’m not backing off because what I’m saying is true. We are criminalizing Christianity in this country.”

That theme was predictably popular and reverberated throughout a five-hour-long summit hosted by the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition that attracted more than 1,200 Republicans and churchgoers. The event kicked off with a prayer calling on the Lord to “restore this country through godly leadership.”

“You know, in the past month we have seen religious liberty under assault at an unprecedented level,” said Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who announced his White House bid last month. He was also met with repeated bursts of applause.

You know the drill. If you won’t let us dominate you, then you’re oppressing us.

Louisiana’s Governor Bobby Jindal this week took to the New York Times to position himself as defender of the faith:

Our country was founded on the principle of religious liberty, enshrined in the Bill of Rights. Why shouldn’t an individual or business have the right to cite, in a court proceeding, religious liberty as a reason for not participating in a same-sex marriage ceremony that violates a sincerely held religious belief?

In an America in which over three-quarters identify as Christians, a GOP that controls both houses of Congress, 31 governorships, and nearly 70 percent of state legislatures is, according to Jindal, beset on all sides by “left-wing ideologues who oppose religious freedom” and “seek to tax and regulate businesses out of existence.”

As Heather Cox Richardson observed in Salon, Jindal laid bare Movement Conservatism’s Grand Bargain when he wrote that defending freedom “requires populist social conservatives to ally with the business community on economic matters and corporate titans to side with social conservatives on cultural matters.” And what’s really got Jindal and the religious right pissed is that after Walmart and NASCAR sided with marriage equality activists against recent “religious freedom” bills, the bargain is broken. Richardson writes:

Its end has been a long time coming. The toxic amalgam of economic and social reactionaries that Jindal identified began to mix after the Second World War. Americans in that era rallied behind the New Deal consensus. Reactionary businessmen loathed business regulation and taxation, but had no luck convincing voters to turn against the policies most saw as important safeguards against another Great Depression. Then, in 1951, a wealthy young writer suggested that social issues might be the way to break popular support for the New Deal. William F. Buckley, Jr. advanced the idea that unfettered capitalism and Christianity should be considered fundamental American values that could not be questioned. According to him, anyone who called for an active government or a secular society was an anti-American collectivist in league with international communism.

With communism a fading memory except among aging Cold Warriors, and with one-quarter of the world’s population Muslim, Movement Conservatives will have a hard time getting buy-in from multinational corporations in alienating an already huge and growing market. What the religious conservatives are waking up to post-Indiana is that their former partners no longer need them.

Perhaps capitalists should have betrayed them with a kiss?

Silenced for speaking her mind
by Tom Sullivan

We have become disturbingly accustomed in this country to police shootings of unarmed, black men. This is not another one of those:

Pakistan civil liberties activist and social worker Sabeen Mahmud was shot dead by unidentified gunmen in Karachi Friday night as she headed home from a talk on the troubled Balochistan province. She was 40.

According to the Dawn website, Sabeen left The Second Floor — she was the director of T2F which she called a community space for open dialogue — with her mother shortly after 9 pm and was on her way home when she was shot. She died on the way to hospital. Doctors said they retrieved five bullets from her body. Her mother was said to be in a critical condition.

“No one has claimed responsibility for her shooting, and police have not named any motive,” reports CNN, plus this background on Mahmud:

Her second floor cafe on a dusty industrial road was painted with dashes of psychedelic colors. And Sabeen Mahmud surrounded herself there with books, people, and discussions on technology, human rights and women’s entrepreneurship.

Introducing others to Jimi Hendrix, street art, and talking politics was not supposed to get her killed. But in Pakistan, free speech is dangerous, and Mahmud’s exuberant exercise of it made her stick out nationwide.

[snip]

In the province of Baluchistan, where separatists have fought a virulent insurgency for years, people have been disappearing regularly. There have been steady allegations of mass abduction. The Lahore University of Management Sciences planned to host the discussion on the topic, with human rights activist Mama Qadeer Baloch, but authorities shut it down.

Mahmud would not hear of it not going on.

“Despite the plurality of opinion, very little space seems to be given to the discussion in Pakistani mainstream media or academia; the debate seems to be shut down before it can even begin,” she posted on Facebook. “What is the reality? Has the media been silenced on Balochistan? What makes it dangerous for us to talk about Pakistan’s largest province at one of our most celebrated universities?”

So she hosted the talk herself. At Aljazeera, friends remember her:

“Sabeen was a voice of reason, pluralism and secularism: the kind of creed that endangers the insidious side of constructed Pakistani nationalism,” Raza Rumi, a rights activist who escaped an assassination attempt in March 2014 and now lives in the United States out of fear for his life, told Al Jazeera.

“In her work, she was neither a political partisan nor a power seeker but Pakistan’s state and non-state actors are averse to any form of dissent. This is why she had to be killed,” Rumi said.

“Her death has simply reopened my wounds. She gave me support when I escaped death and now I feel even more scared to return to Pakistan. Her death is a huge blow to Pakistan’s civil society and social change movements.”

Outside this morning, it’s raining.

Don’t fear the Reapers
by Tom Sullivan

General “Buck” Turgidson: Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks.

But who’s counting? As Digby pointed out last night, there is a lot less precision to these “precision” drone strikes than meets the monitors of drone pilots at Creech Air Force Base. The government can’t even keep count of how many Americans they’ve killed. The Guardian reports:

The targets of the deadly drone strikes that killed two hostages and two suspected American members of al-Qaida were “al-Qaida compounds” rather than specific terrorist suspects, the White House disclosed on Thursday.

The lack of specificity suggests that despite a much-publicized 2013 policy change by Barack Obama restricting drone killings by, among other things, requiring “near certainty that the terrorist target is present”, the US continues to launch lethal operations without the necessity of knowing who specifically it seeks to kill, a practice that has come to be known as a “signature strike”.

How certain is “near certainty”?

Human-rights observers see little indication, two years after Obama’s speech, that the US meets its own stated standards on preventing civilian casualties in counter-terrorism operations. Reprieve, looking at US drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan, concluded last year that the US killed nearly 1,150 people while targeting 41 individuals.

What’s infuriating about these stories is the boilerplate “fog of war” excuses given after the fact. As if, after the Reaper has lingered over a potential target for hours (or days) while the CIA cross-checks its sketchy intelligence, everything just happened so fast.

Can’t wait for these beasties to be lingering over your rooftops, can ya?

The selling of “Hillary fraud”
by Tom Sullivan

With Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race, you knew the “Clinton Rumors” would be back with a vengeance. Along with the chain emails from your dad. David Mikkelson has been collecting them at Snopes.com since the 1990s:

As he did in 2007, Mikkelson has seen a recent uptick in interest in Clinton rumors. The popular one recently was that Clinton was fired from the Watergate investigation. “It’s everything that people want to believe of her,” Mikkelson said — “she’s a liar, she’s corrupt, she’s unethical — all in one piece.” It is also important to note: This rumor is false.

Somebody once said they’ll keep doing this stuff as long as they think it works.

A few days ago we had a media blitz over Clinton Cash written by Peter Schweizer, a former Bush speechwriter and Breitbart.com contributor. The pattern is familiar:

Schweizer explains he cannot prove the allegations, leaving that up to investigative journalists and possibly law enforcement. “Short of someone involved coming forward to give sworn testimony, we don’t know what might or might not have been said in private conversations, the exact nature of the transition, or why people in power make the decision they do,” he writes. Later, he concludes, “We cannot ultimately know what goes on in their minds and ultimately provide the links between the money they took and the benefits that subsequently accrued to themselves, their friends, and their associates.”

So then, nothing. Yet again.

This morning at the New York Times we have “Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation as Russians Pressed for Control of Uranium Company” about Canadian mining financier Frank Giustra. You remember the Times. From the run-up to the Iraq invasion? Or maybe Judith Miller?

Bullshit sells. America buys. (“Oh, McFly, your shoe’s untied.”)

Just yesterday, Michael Tomasky blasted:

While I’m at it with the irony quotes, I might as well drape some around that adjective “investigative” too. The Times, it seems, has decided to debase itself by following the breadcrumbs dropped by this former adviser to Sarah Palin because Schweizer devotes a chapter to Giustra and Kazakhstan, which the Times reported on back in 2008, and the Times plans to follow up on that.

I remember reading that Times story at the time and going, “Wow, that does look bad.” But then I also remember reading this Forbes (yes, Forbes!) debunking of the Times story, which was headlined “Clinton Commits No Foul in Kazakhstan Uranium Deal.” By the time I finished reading that piece (and please, click through and read it so that you are forearmed for the coming Times hit job), I was marveling to myself: Golly, that Times piece looked so awful at the time. But it turns out they just left out some facts, obscured some others, and without being technically inaccurate, managed to convey or imply that something skuzzy happened where it in fact hadn’t. How can a great newspaper do such a thing?

How indeed? But throw enough smoke bombs into newsrooms and people will believe there must be a fire. Maybe, might be, and possibly are the stock-in-trade of rumor mongering. It works. Look how well it has worked for Hans von Spakovsky & Co. in convincing the people of River City that they’ve got trouble with a a capital “V” that stands for voter fraud, and that he’s just the guy to sell them a boys’ band photo ID laws to fix it.

By the way, it was former president Bill Clinton who explained how this stuff works to The Daily Show‘s Jon Stewart in August 2004:

STEWART: Is it – has it gotten to the point – do you believe that politics has gotten so dirty and so – that these kinds of tactics have become so prevalent – that this is the reason half the country doesn’t vote, or, this is the reason we don’t get, maybe, the officials that we deserve?

CLINTON: No, I think people do it because they think it works.

STEWART: That’s it. Simply a strategy?

CLINTON: Absolutely. And as soon as it doesn’t work, they’ll stop doing it. So I think Senator McCain, whom I admire very much, made a mistake not bashing the Bush campaign over the attacks on his service. They implied he betrayed the country when he was a POW and he made a huge mistake in not bashing them for that calling operation saying he’d adopted a black baby. It was blatantly racist. They’ll do this stuff as long as they think it works.

Judging by the headlines, it’s still working. “Oh, McFly, your shoe’s untied.”

Earth Day 2015 – Water
by Tom Sullivan

Today, Earth Day 2015, President Obama visits Everglades National Park to talk about climate change and the threat it poses to the water ecology of south Florida. On the first Earth Day in 1970, few Americans had even heard of ecology.

NPR’s Melissa Block spoke with Evelyn Gaiser, an ecologist with the Florida Coastal Everglades Long Term Ecological Research Program, about saltwater incursion into the Everglades. She’ll be reminding the president the Everglades is not just home to birds, snakes, and alligators:

BLOCK: And along with preserving biodiversity, preserving wild space and habitat, of course also you’re seeing a real threat to drinking water with what’s going on in the Everglades, right?

GAISER: That’s exactly right. So the people of Florida depend on that aquifer underneath the Everglades for their drinking water. And as we have insufficient freshwater moving into the Everglades, we see a depletion in the freshwater resources available to the growing population of South Florida.

On the Pacific coast, Californians struggle with an epic drought and reservoirs have all but dried up.

In Asia, Siberians have their own water problems. Lake Baikal, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the largest (by volume) body of fresh water on the planet, is at its lowest level in 60 years. Precipitation has been less than expected, and still the Irkutskenergo hydroelectric plant on the Angara river – the lake’s only outlet – keeps drawing down the level to generate power. Upstream, hydroelectric dams planned in Mongolia will further reduce the lake’s water level. Fishermen are finding fish stocks decreasing, and in villages on the shores of the lake, wells are drying up.

The World Economic Forum believes that “the global water crisis is now the largest risk and greatest impact to our lives and our planet.” Economically. But fear not. Where some see scarcity, others see opportunity. Take New Jersey’s water. Multinational corporations can’t wait to. Lucas Ropek writes at Americablog:

The Water Infrastructure Protection Act (WIPA), approved on February 5th, allows municipalities to sell their water facilities to private companies without public referendum. As part of Christie’s privatization task force agenda, WIPA aims to balance Jersey’s current budget crisis, while also fixing the state’s water facilities that ail from “emergent conditions,” or what the bill calls “serious risks to the integrity of drinking water and the environment.” The Protection Act has alarmed New Jersey communities and watchdog groups, however, who claim, as activist Jim Walsh has said, the bill allows “multinational corporations to profit off increased water rates with virtually no recourse for New Jersey residents.”

When it comes to ensuring water supplies for fracking or development, small-government conservatives suddenly start talking like command-economy planners. They advocate regionalization and interconnectivity of water systems with “unallocated capacity to expand.” All in the name of public health and protecting the environment, dontcha know.

And not just in New Jersey. Across the planet, the World Bank and multinational water companies such as American Water, Nestle, Suez, and Veolia are coming to rescue us from our profligate ways. Or are they?

Independent water advocates, from CAI to Anand’s group in India and others including the Focus on the Global South network, point to India today as evidence that privatized systems lead to underfunded infrastructure and unpredictable, often high prices. The IFC defends the private sector by claiming that these companies offer efficiency gains (PDF). But those gains come at the expense of lower-income households, advocates such as Naficy point out, as companies increase rates to subsidize their own profitability.

There’s a growing backlash against these projects. In 2000, headlines around the globe documented protests in Bolivia’s third-largest city in response to the privatization of the city’s municipal water supply and against the multinational water giant Bechtel, eventually pushing the company out of the country. The IFC’s own complaint mechanism reports that 40 percent of all global cases from last year were about water, even though water projects are only a small fraction of what the IFC funds. In 2013, CAI and 70 advocates from around the globe released an open letter (PDF) to the World Bank Group calling for “an end of all support for private water, beginning with IFC divestment from all equity positions in water corporations.”

But don’t they see? The only prescription is more cowbell. Those Siberian socialists wouldn’t be having these water supply problems if, as Veolia suggests, they just privatize the lake, monetize the water, exploit financial opportunities, externalize risks, optimize costs, enhance competitiveness, and price drinking water planetwide according to its “true cost,” ensuring long-term profitability.

Problem solved!