Taking a HARD look at the Business of Politics

Dr. Murphy has a great post over at FireDogLake about the Politics of Water. What it says, in a nutshell, is that the US is exporting one third of our water footprint as farm subsidized crops, while people pay higher prices for bottled water than for gasoline. And Chicago is going to be one of the cities that goes dry early on. Atlanta too. This isn’t just an “out west” problem.

Think about that. The US taxpayer is PAYING Big Agribusiness to grow crops to sell overseas and they’re using our water to do so.

Just as we measure our Carbon Footprint, so should we measure our Water Footprint How? Use this water footprint tool. “Water self-sufficiency vs. water dependency - The ‘water self-sufficiency’ of a nation is defined as the ratio of the internal water footprint to the total water footprint of a country or region. It denotes the national capability of supplying the water needed for the production of the domestic demand for goods and services. Self-sufficiency is 100% if all the water needed is available and indeed taken from within the own territory. Water self-sufficiency approaches zero if the demand for goods and services in a country is largely met with virtual-water imports. Countries with import of virtual water depend, de facto, on the water resources available in other parts of the world. The ‘virtual-water import dependency’ of a country or region is defined as the ratio of the external water footprint of the country or region to its total water footprint.”

So, what can we do? Set up rain barrels and retention ponds to catch run off to use for watering gardens or flushing toilets. Stop paving over open spaces so rain water does what it’s supposed to– help growing things grow. Encourage the changing of local laws so that gray water capture and use for non food/drinking use is legal, and begin to install the systems to use that gray water for gardens, lawns and other growing things, as well as uses that do not need clean water, like toilet flushing. Conserve. Eat locally produced food. Eat less or no meat.

And the biggest thing we can do? Vote out the idiots on BOTH sides of the aisle who keep legislating to support this broken Economic System of ours. As Murphy’s article says, “Dirty Fanatical Suits from the Chicago Cult who sacrificed our economy, our health care, our food security, and our national security as offerings to the Great Ghoul Of Globalization and the megacorps who spawned the Ghoul. The Dirty Fanatical Suits who will sacrifice any community, species, or people just to get bigger quarterly profits — and hence bigger bonuses. The Dirty Fanatical Suits who kill us off with mass poisoning they call “pollution” and kill off our Republic with the corporatist power grab they call “FISA”. . . . The Dirty Fanatical Suits: traitors within our nation, our communities, and our common biosphere . . . This week we were all reminded that the Dirty Fanatical Suits own both major party Prez candidates and the majority of the Village “leaders” and media. They won’t help save our water: they’d rather privatize it.”

That point was brought home most succinctly as Bush left the G8 Summit in Japan, where the US made NO significant concessions at all. George Bush said, as he was leaving, “Goodbye from the World’s Biggest Polluter.”

Technorati Tags: Drought, Farm Bill, G8, Water, Water Footprint

BitchSlapped on 07/14/08, 9:42 AM
Big Agribusiness, Global Corporations, King Bush, The FDA, The Republican Party, USDA BitchSlapped, and Tagged: Drought, Farm Bill, G8, Water, Water Footprint
RSS 2.0, Both Slap Backs and pings closed.