Europe? I want Europe, but still
I sometimes get desperate about it and just now
the French European Commissioner for domestic affairs, M. Barnier
wants to facilitate the privatisation of public water supply.
Water is still a common good, a good for everybody,
but that shall be changed.
Multinational corporations are already standing in line, this is a business
worth billions of dollars and double-digit return percentages.
However, Mr Barnier says that we should not be afraid about the water getting more expensive or worse
because it will all be regulated by the market. The market? Hey, water is
life, it is a human right, it is a common good and common property
and property entails obligations, at least it says so in the German "Grundgesetz" (= German Basic Law)
and using this property shall also happen to public benefit,
this is also in the "Grundgesetz". And if water is no longer public property, but property of
multinational corporations, then we can all guess whom
a market-listed corporation might feel obliged to, to the common well-being
or to the well-being of its stockholders and of the markets.
80% of Europeans do not want privatised water supply,
but still they want a Europe without frontiers
and without wars and Nazi-shit, they want peace,
they want food, they want water and they want to piss off this water on the toilet,
they want jobs, good jobs, and on Sunday, Europeans would like to relax
in the sunshine, play checkers while cultivating their prejudices,
and listen, if Europe fails, it won´t fail because of the Euro
neither because the European citizens are fed up with it,
it might simply fail because Europeans
are fed up with non-democratically elected EU Commissionners
who, during their visits to knocking shops in Brussels are bought by lobbyists who tell them the markets will fix anything.
One moment! I want Europe, I adore Europe and it is great that there are now
European citizens´ initiatives and now there is one initiative who wants to
prevent exactly that, privatisation of water supplies.
They need one million online signatures until autumn, it will not prevent privatisation completely but at least
it would mean that the EU Commission would have to discuss this topic again. So now I wanted to show the Internet address
of this initiative here, at the bottom of the screen, but
our internal lawyers said that serious public broadcasting stations like ours
must not show private or foreign Internet addresses.
This is neither censorship nor bad will, there are laws about this, but no problem for me,
because there is no problem for public broadcasting stations
when you show cars in the picture.
The problem is solved now!
Cheers! As to water.