In the past four months, more than 15,000 Detroit households have had their water shut off, generating a crisis the United Nations calls “a violation of the human right to water and other international human rights.” “When there is genuine inability to pay,” says the UN, “human rights simply forbids disconnections.” Water rates have more than doubled over the past decade while the city’s poverty rate rose to nearly 40 percent, making the cost of basic running water unaffordable for tens of thousands of families.

Yesterday, as volunteers helped unload 1,000 gallons of water brought on a truck by West Virginians to support Detroiters impacted by the shut offs, the “hot mess” was turned over to the Mayor of Detroit because, in the words of Detroit People’s Water Board representative Tawana Petty, “thousands of people have embarrassed the [emergency city manager] and Governor Snyder by standing with the people of Detroit, protesting in the streets and rallying with Canadians who stood up for families in need.”

If you’re not freaked out by what’s going on in Detroit, you should be. The Detroit water shut offs are gentrification on steroids. (“Gentrification is a profit-driven racial and class reconfiguration of urban, working-class and communities of color that have suffered from a history of disinvestment and abandonment,” explains a recent report.)

The Detroit water shut offs are where all our cities are headed unless we wake up and see the larger pattern, take our own local action, and powerfully connect all our local action together.

To understand more about the Detroit water shut offs and what all of us can do, Let’s Talk spoke by phone with Tawana Petty, mother/organizer/author/poet/activist , representative of the People’s Water Board, and an organizer with the Boggs Center and for the upcoming New Work New Culture Conference in Detroit.

Let’s Talk: What created this situation in Detroit?

Tawana Petty: The water shut offs are part of an intentional, strategic plan by bankers and corporations to uproot poor, predominantly black people from Detroit. It is a direct result of emergency management, what Detroiters Resisting Emergency Management calls a “siege of financial dispossession, massive unemployment, elimination of basic welfare supports, and suspension of democratic rights.”

Criminalizing people is key to all this: we see it in how people who are behind on water bills are being treated. We see it our schools where state-controlled schools punish thousands each year with out of school suspensions.   Everywhere we turn we are being funneled into an increasingly privatized prison system.

LT: A 15-day moratorium on shut offs was announced last week. What’s happening with that?

TP: There is no moratorium. Detroit Water and Sewage Department (DWSD) is continuing to pursue 9,000 families whose water has been turned off during what they are conveniently calling a pause. Two days ago, they shutoff a 40 unit apartment complex, Historic Palmer Park Apartments, and were forced to turn the water back on after public and activist outcry. They are also using the media to paint families as criminals and accusing most people they intended to shut off of stealing water.

Additionally, they are co-opting the words of grassroots organizers and duping the public with “water affordability fairs.” DWSD set up a water hotline with very little staffing, which keeps residents on hold for over an hour before they reach an operator, then tells people they have to go into the office to get their water turned back on.

I recently did a radio program with Darryl Latimer, Deputy Director of DWSD, and I asked him how an 80 year old, disabled woman is supposed to go stand in line at the DWSD? He couldn’t provide an answer, because he has no solution.

LT: The water department had been controlled by the city’s Emergency Manager, but was turned over to the Mayor yesterday. Can you tell me about that?

TP: Because of the constant media scrutiny and the global spotlight on the inhumane treatment of Detroiters by the Governor and Emergency Manager, the DWSD was turned over to the Mayor. Many have celebrated this as a victory for Detroit, but those on the ground working tirelessly to prevent privatization of the city’s water under emergency management see through the sleight of hand. Our demands remain the same.

LT: What needs to happen?

TP: We need immediate restoration of water to thousands of Detroiters who have had their water service cut off.   We need an end to all the water shut offs.

We need immediate enforcement of the People’s Water Affordability Plan that was put forth by Michigan Welfare Right’s Organization in 2005 and adopted by the City Council in 2006. The Water Affordability Plan caps water rates based on income.

LT: What can people outside of Detroit do to help?

TP: People can sign on to the Color of Change petition: Tell Detroit to Turn the Water Taps Back On!

Organizations can sign on to the letter to Barak Obama and Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Sylvia Mathews Burwell.

People can use social media like twitter to generate public outcry: #PeoplesWaterBoard #WageLove #StopTheShutoffs

And people can donate to the People’s Water Board Coalition!

LT: What gives you hope?

TP: If there was ever a silver lining to this, it has been the world’s opportunity to witness the resilience of Detroiters, as we combat the narrative of our city, and struggle to become more self-determinate. This has definitely been an opportunity to “grow our souls”, as Detroiter and revolutionary activist Grace Lee Boggs would say. And the support of national and international allies during this process has been invaluable.

“The mass migration of children from Central America has been at the center of a political firestorm over the past few weeks,”writes David Bacon today in In These Times. “All of this ignores the real reasons families take the desperate measure of leaving home and trying to cross the border.”

The mainstream media has run dozens of stories blaming families, especially mothers, for sending or bringing their children north. The president himself has lectured them, as though they were simply bad parents … Meanwhile, the story is being manipulated by the Tea Party and conservative Republicans to attack Obama’s executive action deferring the deportation of young people, along with any possibility that he might expand it—the demand of many immigrant rights advocates. More broadly, the far Right wants to shut down any immigration reform that includes legalization, and instead is gunning for harsher enforcement measures.

Bacon provides talking points that all of us — in every movement sector — can use to speak up in this urgent moment:

1 There is no “lax enforcement” on the U.S./Mexico border. There are over 20,000 Border Patrol Agents; that number was as low as 9,800 in 2001. We have walls and a system of large, centralized detention centers that didn’t exist just 15 years ago.

2 The migration of children and families didn’t just start recently. It has been going on for a long time, although the numbers have recently surged. The tide of migration from Central America goes back to wars that the U.S. promoted in the 1980s, in which we armed the forces, governments or contras, who were most opposed to progressive social change.

3 The recent increase in the numbers of child migrants is not just a response to gang violence, although this is the most-cited cause in U.S. media coverage. Migration is as much or more a consequence of the increasing economic crisis for rural people in Central America and Mexico, as well as the failure of those economies to produce jobs. People are leaving because they can’t survive where they are.

4 The failure of Central America’s economies is largely due to the North American and Central American Free Trade Agreements and their accompanying economic changes, including privatization of businesses, the displacement of communities by foreign mining projects and cuts in the social budget. The treaties allowed huge U.S. corporations to dump corn and other agricultural products in Mexico and Central America, forcing rural families off their lands when they could not compete.

5 When governments or people have resisted NAFTA and CAFTA, the United States has threatened reprisal. Right-wing Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) put forward a measure to cut off the flow of remittances (money sent back to Salvadoran families from family members working in the U.S.) if the leftwing party, the FMLN, won the 2004 presidential election. His bill did not pass, but the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador admitted that it had intervened. In 2009, the Honduran army overthrew President Manuel Zelaya after he raised the minimum wage, gave subsidies to small farmers, cut interest rates and instituted free education. The Obama administration gave a de facto approval to the coup regime that followed. If social and political change had taken place in Honduras, we would see far fewer Hondurans trying to come to the U.S.

6 Gang violence in Central America has a U.S. origin. Over the past two decades, young people from Central America have arrived in L.A. and big U.S. cities, where many were recruited into gangs, a story eloquently told by photographer Donna DeCesare in the recent book Unsettled/Desasociego: Children in the World of Gangs.

7 U.S. foreign policy in Central America has actively led to the growth of gang violence there. In El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, U.S. law enforcement assistance pressured local law enforcement to adopt a mano dura, or hardline, approach to gang members, leading to the incarceration of many young people deported from the U.S. almost as soon as they arrived. Prisons became schools for gang recruitment.

8 Kids looking for families here are looking for those who were already displaced by war and economic crisis. The separation of families is a cause of much of the current migration of young people. Young people fleeing the violence are reacting to the consequences of policies for which the U.S. government is largely responsible, in the only way open to them.

Armed with these facts, concludes Bacon, we “need to help families reunite, treat immigrants with respect, and change the policies the U.S. has implemented in Central America, Mexico and elsewhere that have led to massive migration. The two most effective measures would be ending the administration’s mass detention and deportation program, and ending the free trade economic and interventionist military policies that are causing such desperation in the countries these children and families are fleeing.”

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Feature photo: David Bacon