"But I need that $350 juicer to make fresh apple juice in the morning..."

When I lived in Costa Rica there was this little rickety bridge that you had to drive over to get to my town, Escazú. The locals called the bridge something that translates roughly into 'the bridge of lovers' or 'the suicide bridge'. Mainly because people had a tendancy to jump off of this bridge to commit suicide for one reason or another. The thing about this bridge is that right below it was a dirty river lined with clusters of shacks that people lived in. Escazú was the place where the dirt-poor parents sent their kids to beg for money or for clothes, where people owned restaurants and where there was always someone with a house bigger than yours or higher up on the mountain than yours. It was a nice place to live in most senses. It was a different story for the people who lived under that bridge however. Everytime I went over that bridge, I was always so amazed at how small the physical gap between the rich and the poor was, but it was just that I got to look at things through a magnifined glass and realize how large the gap actually was. There was nothing in between: you either had everything or nothing plus dirty drinking water.

I just saw The Corporation the thing that the most emotive effect on me was water privatization and cheap labor. Everyone knows about cheap labor, just as everyone is aware of all of the really sick things people do to animals so that we can eat their flesh and use their bodies. But we just don't think about it because its really depressing I think. People seem to think that the earth was created so that we could do whatever we wish with it and to it. I didn't think there was one part of the world left that we weren't profiting from. I never thought that a collective group would try and say they owned drinking water and therefor would charge everyone to drink it. Its kind of like being forced to drink bottled water for the rest of your life. Someone owns that water and you have to pay them so that you can have water to drink, cook, shower and stay alive. According to an article I read at the Center for Public Integrity, "France could be described as the birthplace Suez now controls water services in 130 countries on five continents and has about 115 million customers. Vivendi Environnement has 110 million customers in more than 100 countries. Number three Thames Water of the U.K., owned by German conglomerate RWE, has 70 million customers." Vivendi Entertainment also owns Canal Plus, the major tv cable company in Spain. So media companies can own water now????

Apparently in Nicaragua's case, they are running out of options on how to repay their country's debt so the IMF and World Development Bank have been pushing them to privatize their water....

Isn't there some sort of higher law somewhere in the world that its inhumane to privatize one of the building blocks essential to life? How can any one collection of people decide that they are going to say they own water and if you don't pay for it, you can't have any?