Because Markets Never Fail, They Can Only Be Failed

The Walton family, whose retail giant Walmart is the poster child for privatizing profits and socializing costs, has a proposal for fixing the drought crisis in the American Southwest, just allow rich people to speculate recklessly with the water that millions of people need to live.

It sounds like a  bad Cyberpunk novel, but so does everything coming from the American right wing these days.

BTW, the last time that a major American corporate entity tried to make a buck from privatizing drinking water, it was Enron:

The first-ever official shortage on the Colorado River has intensified a debate over how to provide water for 40 million people across the Southwest and irrigate fields of thirsty crops like wheat, cotton and alfalfa.

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A Wall Street Journal analysis shows that a charitable foundation controlled by the Waltons, the Walton Family Foundation, has given about $200 million over the past decade to a variety of advocacy groups, universities and media outlets involved in the river. No other donor comes close. Two federal officials once affiliated with the foundation have been named to key Biden administration posts overseeing the river.

Yeah, THAT'S reassuring.

Putting a monetary value on water has raised concerns among those who benefit from guaranteed access to water and those who believe markets benefit investors while hurting farmers and the poor. Water markets in Australia have been blamed for helping dry up waterways due to overuse by a handful of wealthy farmers and investors.

“Any time that the water starts becoming more valuable than the land, you end up with the possibility of outside speculators,” said Andrew Mueller, general manager of the Colorado River District, a public planning and policy agency that oversees water use in western Colorado. Mr. Mueller said his state has been seeing continued interest in agricultural water and lands by outside investment groups.

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The Nature Conservancy, a public charity focused on conservation that has received funding from the Waltons, said in a 2016 report that such markets can “secure a regular flow of water back to depleted ecosystems and sell the rest back to irrigators or cities.” An added benefit, it said, is “a material return for investors.”

You remember the Nature Conservancy, one of the largest ecological "non-profits" in the United States, for whom the bulk of their funding comes from their sales of fraudulent ecological offsets.

The Walton Family Foundation is to the public good as Ebola is to French kissing.

It's pretty clear that the first use principle of water right allocation has ill served the region, and is disastrous now, but triggering a private equity scramble for profits will be far worse.

What is needed is the public management, and ownership of water, managed by a government organization through open and transparent processes.