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On the Criminality of Water Ownership: H.G. Wells, Albert Schweitzer, and the Nestle Corporation
I happened to find a copy of an obscure work by H.G. Wells, The New America, the New World (Macmillan: NY, 1935). Wells is famous among people who read–which is a diminishing number–for his many works of fiction. This little “book” is a small essay of seventy-eight pages bearing some of his most transparent thoughts about the directions of Western civilization. I have some thoughts on a few words from 1935.
In chapter four, “Readjusting the Mechanism,” he was considering the issue of private property, and wrote:
“We are not ready to recognize any sort of private property that would be seriously inconvenient to the community–private property in the air we breathe, for example, or in the rainfall…. [T]he ultimate test of the rightfulness of ownership as between private individuals and groups on the one hand, and the public administration on the other, is the collective welfare.”
That was 1935. Now it is 2016, seventy-one years later. At the time he wrote, H.G. Wells was writing from a moral point of view then current throughout all moral and civilized nations. I think this is true, at least in rough generalization.
However, what was true now also was true then. Whenever nations were at war, their leaders and peoples considered each other as enemies. One of the tactics of war is the goal of breaking down the enemy’s will and power to fight. That includes destroying or denying food and water to the enemy. There is no better way to break down the will to fight than to slay the quenched thirst, or the filled belly. Through the denial of basic means of survival, many an enemy has been vanquished over thousands of years.
So we can see right off that the idea of “moral civilization,” which grants air and water as “common property for the general welfare,” had then a restricted meaning, just as it does now. The goal of war was and is to stop the enemy from breathing, drinking, and eating, forever, or until the enemy surrenders.
Nevertheless, H.G. Wells was a moral man, and he had no use for the barbarities of war. So when he wrote of air and water as not private property but the common property of all human beings, for the general welfare, he meant this, and not on “certain conditions.”
Albert Schweitzer, the Will to Live, and “Reverence for Life”
In 1952, seventeen years after Wells wrote this little book, Albert Schweitzer was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his doctrine–and lifelong demonstration–of “Reverence for Life.” Schweitzer was trilingual. In German, this was “Erfurcht vor dem Leben” and in French, “Respect pour la vie.”
Schweitzer basically looked at all living things as having their own innate, instinctual “will to live.” Everything, from the virus and bacterium, to the dog and cat, to the human man and woman, to the elephant and whale, all these had the instinct to live out their lives. The teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, “Do to others what you would have them do to you,” Schweitzer transposed and elevated upon the Entire Realm of Living-Beings-Willing-To-Live. He believed and practiced, reverence for life.
He was not a Jain. Look up “Jainism,” if need be. He did smack and flatten blood-sucking mosquitoes. He invested most of his life in Africa, as a physician, fighting bacterial infections, cutting out tumors (which have their own life…) and, as he dug for clean water, he also surely killed a few earthworms and insects. Schweitzer was a broad idealist, but he was pragmatic, this man with three doctorates (in theology, music, and medicine).
Back to H.G. Wells. Schweitzer would have agreed that air and water were necessities for the general welfare of all living things. (We have to exclude viruses, which are odd things). He would have said that Reverence for Life included reverence for the conditions for life, and air, water, food, shelter, safety, etc., were among those conditions.
Just before Schweitzer received the Nobel Prize, the psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote a very famous essay on “human needs.” You may research graphical representations of Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Human Needs” and you will see, at the base of the triangle (either Isosceles or Equilateral), “Biological Survival” needs.
Everyone in the world has recognized throughout all time that water is a human need for survival.
The Nestle Company of Switzerland
Once again, it simply is a fact that, for some years, the Nestle Corporation of Switzerland has been buying up water rights all across the United States. In 2013, Kevin Sampson wrote an article, “The Privatization of Water: Nestle Denies that Water is a Fundamental Human Right.” Look all over the internet for stories concerning Nestle, and various jurisdictions within the United States.
Now strictly from a legal point of view, this is entirely legal. A corporation proposes to buy water rights from some civil jurisdiction. That civil jurisdiction wills to contract with that corporation. Both parties complete the contract. The contract is sound and enforceable. The courts uphold the contract if contested. Case closed.
This all sounds both legal and reasonable. After all, Americans have heard the mantra, “We are a nation ruled by Law” or “We follow the Rule of Law,” as if, fictively, all laws are just or moral. What an idiot-belief THAT is. Look at the history of law in the United States, or in Nazi Germany’s Race Laws, etc. Laws are nothing sacred. They are the consensus of legislators and jurists holding power at any given time.
So just because the Nestle Corporation legally has contracted for water rights does not “make it moral,” if that corporation takes its legal possession of what it has contracted, and raises prices through the roof “as the market will bear.” Let us pause and consider other related matters.
The Capitalist Law of the “Sacredness of Property”
One of the commonest claims of all capitalists is the “sacred right of private property.” They have made property–physical things like land, water, minerals, buildings, or also nonphysical things, like stocks and bonds or even paper currencies (which have imputed “value” to hold and posess)–something sacred, something holy. This is not an accident.
Adam Smith, the Father of Capitalism, was an atheist. He was a pure materialist. There was no God, nor spiritual reality. All that was in the world was physical. Human beings were “trading animals,” he wrote in his monumental book, On the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Book 1, Chapter 2, Paragraph 2).
Merely physical human animals traded for merely physical things. The real one true “god” of these physical beings was physical things. Therefore, with no real God, we are not surprised when we read in Smith that physical property was “most sacred and inviolable” (Book 1, Chapter 10, Part 2, Paragraph 9). Later in his discussions, he cited, as a very negative case, an instance of when the “sacred rights of private property” had been “sacrificed to the supposed interests of public revenue” (Book 1, Chapter 11, Part 2, Paragraph 25). Notice that adjects, “supposed,” regarding the public revenue.
Adam Smith had contempt for the public interest. He wrote openly that investment in the public good never did anyone much good (Book 4, Chapter 2, Paragraphs 2,9). He also wrote–now pay attention to this–that self-interest had the power to “surmount [i.e., overcome, overwhelm] a hundred impertinent [i.e., arrogant] obstructions with which the folly [i.e., foolishness] of human laws too often encumber [i.e., put barriers, restrictions] on its operations….” (Book 1, Chapter 5, Paragraph 86).
Wait a minute. What about what Americans have heard from their highest leaders for years, in solemn tones, “The Rule of Law”? The atheist Adam Smith wrote that human laws were foolish. They inhibited self-interest. But that self-interest had the power to overcome human laws. Hmmm. I think that reads, SELF-INTERESTED SUBVERSION OF THE PUBLIC LAWS.
And for What? The self-interest of the human-animal-trader was driving to accumulate its Materialistic-God: property, wealth, power.
Silence on Nestle’s Water-Buying:
The Adam Smith Capitalist Leaderships
of the Democratic and Republican Parties
Now Nestle has been buying up water rights for a very long time. Have you, the reader, ever heard a hue and cry by U.S. Presidents, Congresses, Courts, Governors and State Houses, to oppose Nestle’s legal actions, in buying up one of the most fundamental needed resources for human survival: water?
No. There is a deafening silence. This is because the overwhelming majority of U.S. leaders are Adam Smith Capitalists. What does this mean? So long as self-interest of human trader-animals are accumulating property, amassing profits, then the laws are good. They are not doing what Adam Smith mocked: “foolishly obstructing self-interest.”
However, it just so happens that the self-interest of the few–in the Nestle Corporation and its investors–are buying, controlling, and selling what is in the self-interest of the entire human species for its survival: WATER!
The deafening silence of all U.S. federal and state and local leaders on this subject is an indication that these leaders have killed their biological instinct for loyalty to other members of their own species. These leaders demonstrate they are merely “trading animals” who treat the rest of us not as members of the same family, but as “consumers” for things to sell, even water so we may survive.
If these leaders were loyal members of their own species, they would see the immoralities of being silent in the use of their legal powers, in not preventing the trafficking of human sources of survival. These all call themselves religious and moral, but their biological instincts are so benumbed by their atheistic-materialistic Father of Capitalism, they “rationally believe” that what they are doing is possible for “religious and moral people.”
Their religious clergy are, in my opinion, directly to blame. If the leaders within the public schools are ignorant of Adam Smith–and most teach on capitalism the shallowest curricular summaries approved by equally ignorant state panels of education, politically swayed–one would think that religious leaders would tell their religious followers that an atheistic-materialistic economic system could bode nothing good for theists–Jewish, Christian, Muslim–taught that there is a God; that God created all human beings; and that all human beings are to care for each other.
However, it also is merely another historical fact that, whatever “religion” to which U.S. political leaders belong, if they do, their religions either support or tolerate their anti-biological uses of political power, for the ultimate collaboration with corporations-for-profit enabling the manipulation of biological needs for survival, for profit.
The Biologically Supportive U.S. Constitution
The Nestle Corporation–and any other corporations profiting from water–would not be allowed to operate, if all the U.S. federal, state, and local officials obeyed literally the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution. Why?
The Founders wrote, the Continental Congress approved, and the Thirteen Colonies ratified, a Constitution which included biological protections for all citizens. I cite the main elements in the Prologue, which were the operative legal principles for the legal organization of the United States:
- form a more perfect union
- establish justice
- insure domestic tranquility
- provide for the common defense
- promote the general welfare
- secure the blessings of liberty
However, what we see in the case of the Nestle Corporation, is that there is universal silence, on the part of federal, state, and local officials in not protecting all of these things, when they allow this corporation to profit from legal, court-supported water control.
For myself, I think what has happened, and what will happen, is anti-biological, anti-instinctual, palpably but not actually criminal, and structurally treasonable. However, not a single one of the items in this series will be considered true, defensible, or other than reactionary, if not bizarre. Why?
From the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling, Citizens United v Federal Election Commission, the highest court in the United States ruled that corporations were “people” and that Adam Smith’s “sacred inviolable property”–expressed in currency, the U.S. dollar (or currencies of bribing internationals)–was “speech.”
When the U.S. population becomes unable to purchase water at Nestle’s prices, then the biological instinct of self-preservation will do what Adam Smith write that self-interest would do: “surmount the follow of human laws.” Perhaps the crowds of thirsty citizens will seek out their elected and appointed officials to seek a drink of water, since they will be wealthy enough to pour glasses for millions.
