'Can't Be Allowed': Alarm as Mississippi Gov. Floats Privatization of Jackson Water System

"The response to a water crisis can't be turning the city water supply into a for-profit industry."

KENNY STANCIL

September 6, 2022

Water pressure has been restored in Jackson, but residents of Mississippi's capital still lack safe drinking water and now must contend with the threat of privatization—an idea floated by Republican Gov. Tate Reeves and denounced by critics on Monday.

Although "the risk with respect to quantity of water has not been eliminated, it has been significantly reduced," Reeves said at a Labor Day press conference in the city. "People in Jackson can trust that water will come out of the faucet, toilets can be flushed, and fires can be put out."

While the immediate, flood-induced emergency appears to have been contained, Reeves made clear that when it comes to addressing the Jackson water system's longstanding issues, he is "open" to allowing a profit-maximizing corporation to take over a life-sustaining public good.

"Privatization is on the table," the governor said. "Having a commission that oversees failed water systems as they have in many states is on the table. I'm open to ideas."

The underfunded and understaffed O.B. Curtis Water Treatment Plant is now "pumping out cleaner water than we've seen for a very, very long time," said Reeves, citing local health officials. The governor expressed hope that the boil-water notice affecting more than 150,000 people since July 29 could be lifted within "days, not weeks or months."

"We know that it is always possible that there will be more severe challenges," he added. "This water system broke over several years and it would be inaccurate to claim it is totally solved in the matter of less than a week."

Flooding—made more common and intense by the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency—was the proximate cause of the recent loss of water pressure in Jackson, but disinvestment, the ultimate cause of the city's ongoing water crisis, can be traced back decades.

As Judd Legum noted Tuesday:

The integration of public schools in the 1960s prompted an exodus of affluent whites from Jackson, eroding the city's economic resources. Jackson's declining economic fortunes also prompted the departure of middle-class Blacks, causing an overall population decline. The city went from over 200,000 people in 1980 to less than 150,000 people today. More than a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line. Mississippi is the poorest state in the nation, but Jackson is even poorer than the state as a whole. Per capita income is just $21,906.

But while the city's population and tax base shrunk, it still has 114 square miles of aging water infrastructure to maintain. The state, dominated by Republicans, has been largely unwilling to help a city populated by Black Democrats. In 2021, for example, intense storms left Jackson residents without drinking water for a month. The city asked the state for $47 million in funding for emergency repairs. Mississippi allocated $3 million.

On Monday, Reeves acknowledged that "there are indeed problems in Jackson that are decades old, on the order of $1 billion to fix." The governor failed to mention, however, how the GOP's refusal to provide financial support at the scale required has helped perpetuate the dangerous status quo.

Reeves' privatization proposal, first reported by the nonprofit outlet Mississippi Free Press, was quickly met with condemnation on social media.

"This can't be allowed to happen," tweeted Josh Potash, an educational strategist at Slow Factory, a social and environmental justice NGO. "The response to a water crisis can't be turning the city water supply into a for-profit industry."

Civil rights attorney Sherrilyn Ifill wrote on social media, "Beware privatization." She pointed to a 2019 report by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which found that the growing privatization of water infrastructure impedes "the human right to affordable, clean water."

According to Mississippi Free Press: "Jackson Mayor Chokwe Lumumba has repeatedly said he opposes totally privatizing the water system by selling it to a private company. But on August 8, he said that he would consider a 'maintenance agreement' with a private company for operations and management of the system to alleviate staffing shortages."

Reeves, meanwhile, repeatedly criticized the city in his Monday remarks, "citing its longtime water billing issues, staffing issues at the water plant, and a failure to provide the state or the federal government with a plan to fix the water system," the outlet added.

This is familiar territory for Reeves. Following the February 2021 freeze that left Jackson residents without safe water for a month, the governor said that the city needs to do a better job "collecting their water bill payments before they start going and asking everyone else to pony up more money."

However, Legum pointed out, Jackson's struggles to collect fees for water and to raise enough revenue to pay for routine maintenance can be attributed to Siemens, a multibillion-dollar corporation of the kind that Reeves has baselessly suggested could alleviate the city's water crisis.

As Legum explained:

In 2010, Siemens began pitching Jackson officials to hire the company to install all-new automated water meters and a new billing system. Siemens would also "make repairs to the city’s water treatment plants and sewer lines." Where would cash-strapped Jackson get the money for such a project? Siemens assured Jackson that the project would more than pay for itself. Jackson would have to pay Siemens $90 million—the largest contract in city history—but Siemens promised the new system would generate "$120 million in guaranteed savings" in the first 15 years, according to a lawsuit later filed by the city.

[...]

According to the city's lawsuit against the company, "[m]ore than 20,000 water meters were installed incorrectly or were unable to transmit meter readings to the system." That was about one-third of all meters in the city. Worse, the new meters "were also incompatible with the new billing system." Siemens, it seems, "had never paired the water meter and separate billing systems together, using Jackson as a '$90 million test case for an unproven system.'"

"In the end," Legum wrote, "Jackson was stuck with a $7 million annual bond payment [through 2041], a $2 million monthly shortfall in water fees, and a system of water meters that was not working."

Reeves, for his part, appears poised to forge ahead with little regard for history or democracy.

"I think there is an overwhelming desire for the leadership, those who represent Jackson and those who do not, to take action," said the governor.

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This article originally appeared at CommonDreams.org. Originally published on September 6th 2022. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. 

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BLACK AUGUST REMINDS US THAT COINTELPRO DIDN’T END…

words by Charles Brooks

For the last forty-three years, the month of August has been observed as Black August to serve as a remembrance of George and Jonathan Jackson, the Black Prison movement and to highlight political prisoners. Black August is solidly connected to the Black prison movement that began behind the walls of San Quentin prison and to COINTELPRO that targeted George Jackson. George Jackson entered the California prison system as a prisoner and transformed into not just an imprisoned intellectual, but as a political prisoner.  Jackson, not only became politicized in prison but he became radicalized by his newfound reality, a sentence of one year to life…for a $70 robbery.   

Behind the walls, Jackson organized the prisoners and became a leader of the Black prison movement in San Quentin. His role there enabled his unique installation as the Field Marshal in the Black Panther Party’s Central Committee. It is Jackson’s political and radical transformation that brings our attention to the state’s response to his prison activism. 

His organizing activities were criminalized to justify COINTELPRO activities that viewed Jackson as a target for state violence. Just as radical Black political activism was deemed a threat and criminalized outside the prison walls, George Jackson pointed us to the criminalization of organizing activities behind the prison walls.

COINTELPRO not only enabled the murder of George Jackson but the increasingly number of political prisoners being incarcerated behind the walls as well. The FBI’s counterintelligence program commonly known as COINTELPRO, was in operation from 1956 to 1971: “The purpose of this new counterintelligence endeavor is to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist organizations and groupings and their leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters.”  

COINTELPRO included an overarching range of illegal activities to achieve their goals; there was a

FBI relationship with local police along with network of informers and infiltrators who engaged in tapping telephones, fabricating mail correspondence, burglaries, along with a tactical campaign of disinformation, propaganda, surveillance, and harassment.  They targeted a long extensive list of organizations and activists in the civil rights movement, the student movement, and anti-war movements who were targeted for “neutralization”.  But the harshest and cruelest of COINTELPRO was reserved for members of Black radical organizations such as the Black Liberation Army (BLA), and Black Panther Party. 

Because of COINTELPRO, organizational financial resources were depleted due to the repeated arrests and convictions based on fabricated or withheld evidence. There was also the murder, exile and incarceration of political prisoners who languished behind the walls for over 20, 30, 40 and yes, 50 years.  Political prisoners were created by the state’s response of state repression, violence and incarceration to their political positions and actions of the late sixties and early seventies. As activists and organizers, they exercised a relentless pursuit of self-determination with a clear analysis of their current political, economic and social condition. They were committed to transforming an American apartheid society with their political activism and organizing.  As a result, their political activities were criminalized and were subsequently rendered, enemies of the state.   

Fifty years later, their status as political prisoners are denied by the government. Instead, they’re branded as criminals and/or domestic terrorists while disregarding COINTELPRO’s illegal activities that secured their incarceration.  Not only is their existence in denial by the United States government but on a broader level, there’s also the denial of human rights abuses on US soil and their disregard for certain international laws and treaties around human rights and political prisoners. 

Although, COINTELPRO officially disbanded operations in 1971, political surveillance continued under apparent ongoing COINTELPRO-like activities. For instance, there’s the historic Handshu case on NYPD’s surveillance and intelligence-gathering activities on political groups as well as the revelations of a NYPD police unit, known as the Black Desk, assigned to surveilling Black radical organizations.      

These COINTELPRO-like activities continued with targeting former political prisoners, such as Imam

Jamil Al-Amin in 1995, and Abdul Haqq  in 1996. Then, in the years after 9/11 there was the expanded

surveillance state launching widespread political surveillance and racial profiling of Muslims and Arabs. And, in more recent years, the implosion of Black Lives Matter anti-police protests triggered yet another round of targeted political surveillance best illustrated in a 2017 FBI report, “Black Identity Extremist.”  

But more recently, an early dawn FBI raid on the African People’s Socialist Party has been denounced widely by activists and organizations who quickly recognized the COINTELPRO-like pattern here. The African People’s Socialist Party is known for their extensive work in the Black community in St. Louis, and international work. They’ve been branded as pawns of the Russian government in the ongoing global game of chess, under the hollow pretext they were involved in Russia’s influence and role in undermining American elections.  

This early morning raid was conducted on the very same premise afforded only for those on the forefront of struggle for Black liberation. Black August reminds us, the FBI raid is yet another example of targeted Black folk who are under far more intense political surveillance for their constitutionally protected advocacy of exercising self-determination and black liberation. During Black August, we’re not only reminded of political prisoners, and their sacrifice but we’re also reminded of why they’re political prisoners. Most importantly, Black August presents another opportunity to amplify the fight to release political prisoners as central any movement advocating for human rights and anti-racism. 

Additional Reading:

How we found out about COINTELPRO,  Monthly Review

Race, Survelliance, and Empire, International Socialist Review

George Jackson FBI files

Books taken from cell of George Jackson, 8/21/71

Speaking Truth to Power: Political Prisoners in the United States, Dhoruba Bin-Wahad

True history of Black August, Mama Ayanna Mashama

Free the Spirit, August 1979 issue,

Imprisoned Intellectual: America's political prisoners write on life, liberation & rebellion, (Introduction), Dr. Joy James

New York Times Interview with George Jackson, June 13, 1971

Book: Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson

On 13th Anniversary of Last Minimum Wage Hike, Dems Urged to Raise 'Deplorable' $7.25 Floor

"They must immediately raise the federal minimum wage to at least $15 an hour. Our country cannot afford to reach a 14th anniversary of $7.25."

JAKE JOHNSON

July 24, 2022

Marking the 13-year anniversary of the last federal minimum wage increase in the U.S.—a meager boost from $5.15 to $7.25 in 2009—progressive campaigners on Sunday urged congressional Democrats to make another push to raise the national pay floor as inflation continues to diminish workers' purchasing power.

"Congress must act to raise wages for the tens of millions of workers who are struggling just to get by."