The Easy Chain

by Evan Dara

  … Right there he sees it all: his one spark, rippling out, in flower-petal profusion, will bounce & ricochet so unstoppably that, in the engendered glow, people will see each other, & where, collectively, their dark light is leading … Lincoln feels sure … He has been given an opportunity … ’N he will take it … As an agent, becoming pure agency … I am intention. This is correct. I am intention, & I:::: Laws lead, can only go, one way … ’n must do so, ’n must be acknowledged … The First Law is first for a reason … Lincoln looks out, looks down … He goes to his chosen position & starts to dial … to where no one will answer, but where myriads will hear … preparing the open outcry that will finally bring rightness, the iron-gentle rightness that permits all the ghosts to roister & howl, down to the lastdying voice, to {Sel – Selwyn … ? Is that y} to a future otherwise promised as nightmare, permanent plutomachy, and the impossible, unspeakable contradiction of a universally retreating horizOn a treeless sidewalk, shimmery with sun and dust, in front of the Cook County Department of Corrections building, just south of Chicago’s glum Little Village district, a man sits with his leg upon a table. Ezra Taylor does his best to take this position for four hours per day, but it isn’t easy. He has to haul the table and chair from his apartment in nearby Pilsen, and the table, even with its legs folded up, doesn’t fit into his ’84 Olds all that well. Then there’s the problem of his own leg; the tendons that surround his right ankle were torn in a recent fisticuffs, so the leg is covered in plaster, from mid-instep to just below the knee. That makes it more comfortable for Taylor, who’s 57, portly, and has a thing for suspenders, to rest his leg upon the table. But the position also serves, he pointed out, to add a certain drama to the sign he drapes over the front of the table, a white, thickly magic-markered sheet that says: Free My Assailant.

  “I don’t care what the facts are,” Taylor said. “The man is innocent.”

  The man – the assailant – is a former Chicago municipal employee named Robert Scapes. For years a minor muckraker on the city scene, Scapes, now 48, and never married, began poking into headlines two years ago, when he started to oppose a move to privatize – at least partially – Chicago’s water system. Such privatizations, which involve corporations either leasing or purchasing rights to gather, treat, monitor, and/or distribute the water that pours from community pumps and private taps, have become commonplace around the world, and not without controversy, in particular in Latin America. To many, it’s just another expression of the global drive to privatize public utilities. But Scapes found the thinking all wet, and got into gear. He organized a march down Clark Street, in which four hundred like-minded neighbors, among them Ezra Taylor, carried sequential signs that read, “Water” “A Human Right” “Not” “A Human Need.” For about six weeks in the summer of 2001, he handed out four- by six-inch fliers from a corner of North McClurg Court – the corner by the building that houses Chicago’s CBS affiliate, WBBM. And when BBM finally gave Scapes some sixty-five seconds of airtime, he used it, in the studio, to take a slow drink of a short glass of water, languorously blink his eyes, then ask his interviewer, “Am I now an illegal subcontractor?”

  So it came as something of a surprise, four months ago, when Scapes was indicted for bribing eight Chicago governmental officials – including two aldermen and the chief of the Department of Public Works – to help bring about the privatization of the city’s water. By then, Scapes was an employee of the Vechten Corporation, the San Francisco-based engineering and construction company, which was the frontrunner for the Chicago water contract, and he had undergone other personal changes as well.

  But that doesn’t dissuade Ezra Taylor from hauling his protest – and his cast – out into the elements six days a week.

  “I won’t be free until he is,” Taylor said, referring to Scapes. “As free as the water should be.”

  *

  aylor’s patience may never give out, but the world’s water supply most likely will. Bountiful water is one of the defining features of our planet (as well as being a prerequisite for life), but less than three percent of the earth’s water is fresh, and most of that is contained in the polar ice caps and in glaciers, and thus, for all practical purposes, unrecoverable. Lakes, rivers, marshes, aquifers, and atmospheric vapor – by convention, the sources of fresh water – make up less than one-half of one percent of the earth’s total water (United Nations geophysical studies put the figure at .008 percent), and more than half the accessible runoff is already being used. Further, the demand for water has been growing vigorously; worldwide, it tripled between 1950 and 1990, and, already, water consumption, in many regions of the earth, exceeds nature’s ability to recharge supplies. By 2025, human demand for fresh water is expected to outstrip global supply by some fifty-six percent.

  Some of this depletion can be seen from outer space. The Aral Sea, in central Asia, was, until a few decades ago, the world’s fourth-largest lake. Then the Soviet Union dammed and diverted its source waters, mostly for agricultural uses, such as cotton irrigation. The Aral has since lost half its surface area, as well as three-fourths of its volume. Its fisheries, once legendary for their richness and fineness – the Great Khan, for one, admired the Aral’s bream – have disappeared; all twenty-four fish species native to the lake are now believed extinct. The local climate has also known upheaval; dust storms now regularly sweep the region.

  Though less apparent, aquifer depletion is a problem of even graver consequence. Worldwide, sixty times more fresh water is stored underground than is held in visible lakes and rivers. Yet the groundwater in parts of northern China, to take one example, is almost entirely depleted. In the past forty years, the water table servicing Beijing has dropped more than one hundred feet. In the United States, the Ogallala Aquifer, which extends from Texas to South Dakota, and which provides indispensable resources to farmers all through the Great Plains, is being drained eight times faster than it can recharge on its own. In vast areas of India, Mexico, the Maghreb, the Middle East, and the Central Valley of California, the story is the same.

  At the same time, more than a billion people have essentially no access to clean drinking water, and nearly three billion survive without basic sanitation. Five million people die every year from waterborne diseases, including cholera, typhoid, and dysentery, a figure that includes one child every eight seconds. It’s an incalculable, enormous, slow-moving public-health emergency, and it is, in large part, the result of unplanned, and often chaotic, urbanization in countries of the Southern Hemisphere. There, more so than elsewhere, traditional water sources have been fouled, destroyed, overtaxed, and/or abandoned.

  The rains have not halted, but rainfall need not be a measure of water wealth. Poland, for instance, gets ample rain, but its lakes, rivers, and groundwater are so polluted that it has as little usable water as parched Bahrain. Arid regions that have the means to pay, such as Southern California and the Persian Gulf States, pipe water in from wetter areas. And every day, it seems, new technologies are being developed to combat the modern drought: huge treated-fabric bags, holding millions of gallons of potable water, are now hauled by barges across the Mediterranean, and businessmen in Alaska are currently betting that the state’s earnings from water will eventually beggar its revenues from tourism – and from oil.

  They aren’t alone. In fiscal 2000, private companies owned or operated water systems across the globe that earned well over two hundred billion dollars. Yet these concerns only served some seven percent of the world’s population, leaving an enormous market as yet untapped. Fortune magazine has estimated that annual planet-wide profits from water are about forty percent of those earned from oil, and note that water revenues have already outstripped earnings from the entire pharmaceutical sector. Water, the magazine affirmed, “will be to the 21st Century what oil was to the 20th.” Indeed, next year Swiss Pectet plans to launch a global water investment fund. According to Philip Rohmer, slated to become a manager of the fund, “There’s a huge poss
ibility for growth there.”

  In North America, corporations control water systems used by over forty million people, including about fifteen percent of US waterworks; systems in municipalities such as Houston, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Lexington, Chattanooga, Jacksonville, Indianapolis, Peoria, and New Orleans have been at least partially taken over by corporations, some of which are foreign-owned.

  In 1999, such currents began washing up on Chicago’s shores. The overhaul of a pumping substation in Andersonville was three-and-a-half years overdue; pipe-cracks beneath the Loop were, typically, going unfixed for twice as long as safety guidelines recommended; citywide, boom-time privatization mania was in the air. An initial position paper was prepared for City Hall, and a copy was circulated to the Fire Department’s chief appropriations planner, for review and comment. How it came to Robert Scapes’ attention, though, is anybody’s guess.

  Scapes, then the manager of emergency medical services for the Chicago Fire Fighter’s Union Local 4, found reason to demur. “I read this thing and thought, you know, hold on a second here,” Scapes told the Beacon News, a suburban daily, in 2000. “We’re selling our birthright. All this may look good on paper, but how’s it going to play out in the real world?”

  “Will the Fire Department have to worry about paying to put out someone’s home that’s going up in flames?” he continued. “Will we start thinking about using water more efficiently, when all we should be thinking about is getting the fire under control? What about rate-hikes, and what if we have a cash-flow screw-up that month? I understood that the contracts would make provisions for this – at least, I hoped they would – but what if someone, somewhere, is looking for a promotion, and starts to get creative on us?”

  Using his new internet hook-up, Scapes began researching the issue. “It turned out that all kinds of people have been thinking about this, and they put it in a form that pretty well caught what I had in mind,” he said in the 2000 interview. “It has to do with the idea of the public trust, that certain things are just so important for us – like being necessary for survival – that governments should protect them. That’s a good role for government, to insure the commonwealth. Sure, private industry may add certain efficiencies, but the water will first go to the people who can pay for it, and not the folks who need it. The corporations only know what serves their interest, not how are we going to feed this kid over here.”

  Scapes read further. He read about how, in South Africa, the inability to pay for privatized water has led to over ten million people having their water cut off – something that had not happened even during the lowest moments of apartheid. He read about how, in Ghana, communities of people who couldn’t afford clean water were ravaged by cholera epidemics.

  Then there’s Bolivia. In 1997, the World Bank, working within the so-called Washington Consensus, which promotes free-market economic policies worldwide, refused to guarantee Bolivia a twenty-five million dollar loan to refinance water services in the city of Cochabamba unless the local government sold its water utility to the private sector. An auction was held that drew only one bidder, and, in 1999, a forty-year concession on Cochabamba’s water was sold to a consortium controlled by Vechten. The deal gave the consortium exclusive rights to all water in the district, including the aquifer, and guaranteed the company a minimum annual return on investment of fifteen percent. By contract, the company could install meters on previously-existing community-owned water wells, then charge for the water. The company could also charge the wells’ former owners for installing the meters.

  “So here it comes,” Scapes said in 2000. “The first bills went out, and the consortium massively raised people’s rates, in some cases over fifty percent. Some folks were billed over twenty-five percent of their earnings just for water. And if they didn’t pay, the consortium said they’d just turn the water off – and this for families with kids and stuff.”

  Inevitably, according to Scapes, a reaction bubbled up. “The people decided they wouldn’t take it, so they put together what they called the water war,” he said. “They organized demonstration after demonstration, and lots of general strikes, until the Bolivian government decreed the protest, quote, a national state of siege. This let them declare martial law. The government arrested all the protest leaders in their homes at night, and the fighting got so widespread that, all told, one hundred and seventy-five people were injured – I mean seriously injured. On the biggest day of the uprising, with tear gas and barricades and the power to the local TV station shut off, one kid, a seventeen-year-old boy, was shot in the face. His name was Victor Hugo Daza, and he was killed on the spot. And this just to enforce a company’s claim on a region’s – on a people’s – water.”

  Eventually, the government backed down – no doubt spurred by an unofficial referendum that saw ninety-six percent voting against the water contract – and cancelled the deal. But Scapes was stoked. “No way I wanted them to pull that stuff here – to even get close to the Fire Department,” he said to the Beacon News. “Around that time I read how Coca-Cola’d developed this new outdoor vending machine that has a thermometer and a computer, so when the temperature goes up, the machine automatically raises the price of the pop. Who knows what these guys would do if they got their hands on a fire hose.”

  Within weeks, Scapes began his actions. He became known for outlasting, at Chicago City Council Community Meets, all calls from the stage to yield the floor, until he had said his piece. Or pieces. By the time he stood down, there was, often, applause. The marches he led, though peaceful and frequently playful, took on the tones of a peasant revolt. His name was mentioned as a means to galvanize Chicago’s moribund – some say practically non-existent – Green Party.

  Then came, one Thursday last December, the thunderbolt. Vechten announced, in a two-page press release and through phone calls placed to Chicago TV stations, that Robert Scapes had joined its New Business Development Division (Midwest) as Senior Advisor. That night, the story made its way onto three evening news broadcasts. The next day, it was in all of Chicago’s morning papers.

  *

  new Robert Scapes was soon seen about town. During the busy workweek just before Christmas, he manned a stand in Chicago’s Union Station, behind a table laden with colorful foldout leaflets and underneath a banner that that read, “Common Water and Common Sense.” He appeared, in brown jacket and tie, on WLS-TV’s “Chicagoing” program, and the superimposed identifier carried the Vechten name. He attended two more City Council Community Meets, but this time sat on stage.

  A long-planned anti-privatization Christmas Day vigil, to take place on the parvis of Chicago’s landmark Water Tower, was noisily reconfirmed to the press, then quietly abandoned.

  “We were devastated – just struck dumb,” said Florence Hendrickson, a warm-faced part-time nurse who had participated in three protest marches alongside Scapes. “There were even tears. Everyone who had his telephone number called and left messages, and some of them weren’t very friendly, I can tell you that. But he never called a one of us back.”

  Randii Cowpers, a Versace-wearing office manager who once hung posters on lampposts with Scapes, said she dropped a plate of macaroni and cheese when she saw him on TV. “I felt a total – a total – sense of betrayal when he started making nice to that newslady,” she said. “For the first time in two years, I left the faucet running while I cleaned up the macaroni.”

  Both on the air and in print, Scapes spoke forthrightly about his move. “Isn’t it possible for a man to change his mind?” he said, in one of his many interviews of the period. “For over two years, I was reviewing all the literature I could get my hands on, con and pro, so I could really know the score. Initially, instinctively, I couldn’t see how privatizing water could be any good. But in order to fortify my position against private water, I made myself put my preconceptions away and really listen to what the for side was saying. I wanted to digest the other argument, so I’d be better equipped to fight it. And over
time, you know, privatization just started making a lot of sense. I mean, sure, at first it doesn’t seem so natural, based on what we’re used to. But what’s so natural about a pacemaker, either?”

  Certainly, pro-privatization forces can present an ample parcel of facts. Various published studies cite data indicating that the privatization of municipal water systems promotes the expansion and repair of water infrastructure (pipes and processors and such), which, nowadays, is often long overdue. An inquiry conducted by The Hudson Institute, the research organization founded by futurist Herman Kahn, proclaimed benefits to water quality. Before privatization, the report said, forty-one percent of the American facilities it surveyed were not in full compliance with the Federal Safe Water Drinking Act; one year afterwards, all were.

  Building on current understandings, privatization deals can include anti-disconnect provisions, and stipulate that no public-sector employees be laid off (without cause). Quotas to assure minority hiring can also be built into privatization agreements.

  All told, according to a report prepared by The Reason Institute, “a non partisan public policy think tank” headquartered in Los Angeles, “satisfaction with privatization is very high, with over 90% of communities choosing to continue privatization at renewal time.”

  Even in Bolivia, winning the water war has not meant winning the water battle. In Cochabamba, service, now returned to public control, remains inadequate. Many neighborhoods are served only occasionally by the existing water network, and the aquifer that supplies the region continues to sink. Lamentably, the poor, who, in general, are not connected to the existing water network, and who have no wells of their own, routinely pay ten times more for water than the area’s wealthy residents, who are hooked up.