The 150,000 residents of Jackson, the Mississippi state capital, are still without access to safe drinking water this week following water and sewage systems collapsed under the pressure of severe flooding late last month.
Jackson’s water supply has been restored, but July’s ban on boiling water remains in effect. According to reports, the water is still impure and undrinkable. Residents once more stood in long lines outside distribution centers around the city on Tuesday to pick up bottled water for cooking and basic hygiene. Around 600 National Guard soldiers were deployed by Republican Gov. Tate Reeves to oversee the distribution.
In the richest country in the world, tens of thousands are forced to buy bottled water or use buckets to fetch water from wells. Jackson gets his water from the Ross Barnett Reservoir, Mississippi’s largest source of drinking water.
From the power outages in California and the grid outages in Detroit to the water pollution in Flint, the Jackson crisis is one of many disasters in America. Under conditions of climate change favoring extreme weather events and pandemics, systematic planning is required to face the dangers. But capitalist governments are responding to the challenges with indifference.
In just a few months, the Biden government has poured tens of billions of dollars into the Ukraine war once morest Russia. In the last twenty years alone, trillions have been spent on wars and rearmament. And whenever Wall Street got into trouble – from the financial crash of 2008 to the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 – the government stepped in and bailed out billions of dollars to companies and banks to protect the profits of the rich.
The current catastrophe in Jackson has been in the making for years. It was preceded by systemic errors. Public water infrastructure has been looted by corporations and criminally neglected by local, state, and national governments.
In 2012, the outgoing mayor signed a $90 million deal with Siemens to upgrade the city’s water and sanitation infrastructure and introduce an automated billing system. But the new billing and water metering system failed to send bills to residents, resulting in more than $43 million in unpaid water bills and plunging the city’s water fund into a crisis. After a 2020 court settlement, the city was able to recover the $90 million from the company, but by that time the aging water system had continued to deteriorate.
In 2016, it became known that increased concentrations of lead had been discovered in the water. The state also advises that children under the age of five and pregnant women should not drink unfiltered tap water. Lead in water is particularly harmful to children as it can lead to serious developmental disorders.
In 2017, a 10-year, $109 million deal was signed with another corporate giant, Veolia, to operate and manage the city’s three wastewater treatment plants. Between December 2018 and May 2019, the company diverted four billion liters of water into the Pearl River in violation of the Clean Water Act and an agreement the city signed with the state government in 2012.
A severe winter storm in February 2021, also triggered by the effects of climate change, brought unusually cold temperatures to the Deep South, causing water mains to freeze and burst, cutting off water supplies to the entire city and surrounding suburbs. The severe storm damage paved the way for the current disaster in Jackson.
While Democratic Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba estimates that repairing the city’s water system would cost regarding $1 billion, the Biden administration’s most recent bill has earmarked only regarding $500 million over the next five years for statewide water infrastructure problems. Federal aid will do little to solve the problems in Jackson and Mississippi. A 2015 Environmental Protection Agency assessment found that the state needs $4.8 billion over 20 years to ensure safe drinking water, with much of the infrastructure having reached or far exceeded its design lifespan.
Although dramatic underfunding at all levels led to this crisis in the first place, it is now hitting Wall Street Journal and Governor Reeves proposed full privatization of the public water system as a solution to the problem. This aims to complete the corporate heist that began 10 years ago.
That explained on Monday Journal in an editorial, the water crisis was the result of the “failure of the local authorities”, which is why the city should be placed under state administration. The authors drew a comparison to Flint and Detroit, Michigan, where emergency managers were involved in lucrative deals involving those cities’ water systems, which in Flint’s case contributed to the catastrophic lead crisis. In line with that Journal Reeves said at a press conference the same day that the privatization proposal was “on the table”.
Locally, Democrats have their share of the responsibility, having spurred the deindustrialization and systematic impoverishment of predominantly African-American urban areas like Jackson over the past four decades. The election of black mayors and councilmen has done nothing to halt the dramatic decline in working-class living standards.
The general social crisis is exacerbated by the effects of climate change, leading to increasingly severe weather events worldwide. The historic floods in Pakistan have already claimed thousands of lives and displaced over 100,000 people. China is hit by a massive heat wave. Recent studies by scientists have warned that climate change will cause sea levels to rise by almost a meter even if immediate action is taken. At the same time, rising temperatures will destroy the lives of millions of people in the Middle East and Africa.
Capitalism has no solution to these problems. The subordination of all society to private profit and the division of the world economy among rival capitalist nation-states block a rational response to crises like that in Jackson, Mississippi, while preventing the coordinated global planning that would be necessary to combat the causes.
The only solution lies in the expropriation of the corporate oligarchs and big banks to free up trillions of dollars that must be channeled into rebuilding and developing infrastructure and tackling climate change through globally coordinated emergency response. But this is only possible if the working class transforms society on a socialist basis and puts the needs of the people before private profits.
