In an age that will see more and more determined resource grabs, Americans must make hard decisions about the morality and practicality of looting the rest of the world for vital commodities.
It's just begining to dawn on many of us that "water is the next oil"—even more vital than oil, and, like oil, increasingly prone to shortages—but American corporations caught on long ago. In the 1990s a subsidiary of Bechtel, the company that gave Massachusetts a flawed and ruinously expensive Big Dig, bought the public system that supplied Cochamba, the third largest city in Bolivia, with water. Replacing older, socially responsible water distribution policies with a so-called EPP (Every Person Pays) structure favored by World Bank economists, they squeezed poor Bolivians until angry riots forced the Bolivian government to cancel Bechtel's contract.
In The Secret History of the American Empire, former "economic hit man" John Perkins quotes a local Bolivian activist who told him just before the riots, "Bolivians are dying of thirst. They're told they can't even collect rain water, that their contract with [the national water company] requires them to pay Bechtel for any and all water they consume."
Can't even collect rain water? Other sources confirm that Bechtel's contract and the legislation surrounding it prohibited customers from using traditional community rain water collection tanks—a tactic more outrageous, if anything could be, than the plant patenting laws American companies have used across the world to undermine traditional agricultures based on the saving and trading of seeds.
Bechtel denied gouging Bolivians and said its subsidiary, Aguas del Tunari, hiked the water rates for its Bolivian customers by 35 percent to pay for improvements to the infrastructure in the Cochamba region. Perkins and other sources say some customers' bills spiked by 200 to 400 percent.
In 2002, after Bechtel had had to back away from the water deal, the corporation asked the World Bank to make the Bolivian government pay it $25 million to compensate it for the loss of the Cochamba contract. In 2003, Bechtel CEO Riley P. Bechtel was appointed by President George W. Bush to the President's Export Council, which advises the president on international trade policies and programs (to get an idea of what kind of club the PEC is, note that 14 years earlier, the first President Bush had made Enron founder "Kenny Boy" Lay a member).
A month later, the U.S. invaded Iraq and Bechtel got $680,000,000 worth of contracts to restore water and electrical service in the occupied country, where to this day there are life-threatening shortages of electricity and potable water. Operating on the Bush principle that the greater the screwup the greater the reward, Riley Bechtel should be a shoe-in for the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
