Tom Waller: Hopefully many of you have already attended several of these events and there will be several yet to come of course and tonight's is and very excellent and exciting part of this series on water, I also want to just while I am speaking of that draw your attention to survey sheets that should have been on to that during the presentation but for those of you who are in attendance live this evening, you get the benefit of seeing this. Good evening and welcome to today's meeting of Common Wealth club of California. My name is Tom Waller, I am chair of the club as business and leadership forum and your host for today. Today's program is entitled the Privatization of water, we also want to welcome our listener's on the radio, we invite our audience to visit us on the internet at common wealthclub.org. To learn about the many fine program events held here at the club. And now it's my pleasure to introduce our very exciting and excellent program this evening. Drought, global warming, pollution, and population growth are making water the oil of the twenty first's century. Well most water resources and services are in the public domain, global corporation hope to profit from water scarcity. This program, this evening will focus on the clash between public stewardship and private profit in the battle to control our most precious natural resource. The speakers are Deborah Kaufman and Alan Snitow, prior to her work as a film maker and writer, Deborah Kaufman founded and was for 14 years, director of the Sanfransisco Jewish Film Festival, the first and largest festival of its kind. An activist for human rights and social justice issues, Kaufman is also an attorney and member of the California state bar. Prior to finding Snitow Kaufman productions, Allen Snitow was a news producer of bay area Fox affiliate, KTVU-TV, for 12 years, as news director of the bay area Pacifica, radio station KPFA-FM, he won a corporation for public broadcasting Gold award for best local news cast. He is a graduate of Cornell University. Snitow and Kaufman are documentary film makers, whose films for PBS include Blacks and Jews, Secrets of Silicon valley and most recently Thirst. Their follow up book co authored with Michael Fox, Thirst, fighting the corporate theft of our water, was published in March of this year. Please join me in welcoming Deborah and Allen.
Deborah Kaufman: We want to thank you Tom and thank the Common wealth club for doing this very important series on water and though it's title to cool clear water, to night it's going to be hard water that we are stepping our toes into. The format will be little bit of a tag team Allen and I will take terms talking a little bit about some of the issues that we have discovered in our research and then we are going to open it up to the audience for questions and answers and comments we hope. I would like to take a little trip into the past about a 150 years ago, when water in the United States was privately owned. Pipes may be under ground out of sight and of course out of scent but even sewers have a history, author Norris Huntley has written about the Chaos in the late 19th century when America was growing and entrepreneurs made promises to deliver clean water. But those dream deals became night mares of pollution, leaking pipes and oscillating threats of fire. There are incredible stories about Aaron Burr's Manhattan Company which later became the Chase Manhattan bank, which was one of the most corrupt incompetent and disastrous experiments in privatization on record. People couldn't get water or if they could it was fetid, fire hydrants failed and finally a devastating cholera epidemic broke out followed by the great fire of New York, which destroyed most of the cities, Down town and commercial center. This in privatization efforts in other cities was part of the back ground for the push towards public water in the United States, as populations grew, citizens demanded more modern public water systems offended by bonds, operated by engineers and accountable to Local governments. So that by the mid 20th century our water systems ranked among the best in the world, serving 85 percent of Americans as they do today. For several generations, the Americans have treated water as a public trust and as we all know you can turn on the faucet any where in this huge country and get clean water 24/7 But in recent years, our convergence of problems has led to startling challenges and changes, an ideology favoring the idea of small government, starve the best as we have all heard, has resulted in the failure to invest in infrastructure and has meant that our water works are just ageing, they are failing. Pollution - the demands of population growth and chronic mismanagement have also contributed to the problem and now with the global climate crisis, it's going to mean increasing floods and drought accelerating water scarcity. Scarcity of an essential resource translates into potential for profit. This has all created an opening for corporations to come in making the same promises that the entrepreneurs made in the 19th century with their talk of efficiency and the economies of scale and flexibility that could come with private investment funding. It fits very neatly into a world view shared by most Americans which favors the free market over public works, as film makers and journalists interested in current social issues Allen and I were entreat by stories that we heard about the crazy schemes that addressed and dramatize the scope of the new problem. The water wars of the 21st century were not the old battles between countries over the river and the fate of the river. But the new water worse were increasingly between faceless mega corporations on the one hand and passionate citizens groups on the other hand over control of the most precious resource on the planet. Giant fortune 100 companies were teaming up with billionaire investors and private equity firms to take control of a limited resource that no one can live with out, creating an angry visceral response irrupting from the grass roots. The private water world of the future is a far cry from Aaron Burr and the colorful scoundrels of the past. We are talking about people who were seriously thinking out side the box and mean it when they say they want to go to scale. We are talking about companies that want to drag polar ice caps to the Middle East. They want to suck water from the great lakes and ship it in super tankers to China and they want to ring Australia with nuclear power desalination plans that will sell water to the highest bidder. It's kind of a science fiction future, a dystopic vision of unregulated resource extraction and environmental destruction where water is no longer a human right but just another commodity to be traded for profit and if only the rich can afford so be it. Allen and I had heard that before its collapse Enron was a giant in the water business with its international subsidiary aserics doing business in Argentina and we had read news about Bechtel's disastrous water privatization in Bolivia, but as we focus more closely on our story, we started to hear about new water wars much much closer to home like in Atlanta the biggest water privatization in the United States at its time where the French multi national Sues through its subsidiary US, united water was under attack caused over runs, ruptured pipes, brown water alerts and finally what they called fecal fountains brought the whole thing down in 2003. In Felton California, RWE the German Enron had brought the water system and created rate shock by raising fees by 74 percent in one fell swoop. The money that might have been available for reinvestment in the local system was now been send as corporate profits to the pockets of executives and share holders in Europe. In western Massachusetts, we were hearing about one bidder contract so much for competition and an astonishing pattern of revolving doors between local politicians and corporate executive Sues. Closest to home for us in Stockton California, there were people asserting that sky rocketing rates and performance problems were only the tip of the ice burg that our democratic system and any hope for a sustainable future was being under mined by intentional violation of environmental loss. Corporate campaign contributions and a total lack of transparency, all of which made for good story telling and resulted in our producing the PBS film thirst that we were looking at a clip of a few moments ago and then our follow up book "Thirst" and Allen will speak more to this.
Alan Snitow: Thank you all for coming. I wanted to make a few more general comments about some of the problems that we are facing as a as a country in the united states on the question of infra structure which water is one major component but recently we have seen a bridge collapsing in Minneapolis, little earlier than that city was destroyed by collapsing levees a bursting steam pipe recently stopped every thing in the center of Manhattan. Few years ago a quarter of the country went dark when there was a power grid failure in Ohio. These events may surprise us but what's reprehensible about this crisis of American infra structure is that it's always been completely predictable and its always been predicted to happen, and in recent years under the Bush administration its not only just been predictable its been intentional that we have this crisis and that we don't address it. This squandering of a budget slur plus and the refusal to raise taxes even for basic public purposes is intended to starve the beast to governed force governments to privatize their services from prisons to energy, to water to schools, to high ways to bridges and there is now under way in united states a kind of fire sale of these public assets. The city of Chicago leased its major highway, Indiana leased its toll road a democratic governor in New Jersey now wants to do the same thing for its major highway. Ports are being handed over to private companies, and water systems are being sub contracted out. Major financial institutions from Goldman Sachs to the Australian bank Macquarie have billions of dollars from investors and even from union pension funds, to buy these facilities. Even in the federal government, public employees are now out numbered by private contract workers for the first time in American history. For many republican politicians, the agenda has become a kind of fundamentalist belief that trumps order conservative commitments like local control, support for small business, and nationalism in favor of control of our own resources. For the current republican leadership, the private sector means giant multinational corporations, American or foreign based. It's an ideology that inform the quote reconstruction unquote of Iraq using an entire country as a test bed for an experiment in private control or virtually all government structures, of generous government subsidies to private companies to make it happen and of course with out the interference of government regulation which was viewed as simply bureaucratic red tape. How ever democratic politicians, as well our - as republicans, have been buying into this agenda. The democrats, often for political convenience, or because of budgetary pressures. But many Clinton era democrats, share the belief that the private sector is more efficient, better, faster, cheaper, more flexible than the public sector. And that government should facilitate the private sector to take over the private sector, to take over public assets and public responsibilities. The result of this consensus is been failure to invest in infrastructure by both political parties, when it comes to water, we think that in our book and you know our film, that the access to water to clean affordable water is and should be considered a human right. And that water itself has to be part of the public trust. Our infrastructure short fall, the gap between what we have and what we will need to invest as a nation, when it comes to water, that gap is estimated variously at 300 to 500 billion dollars over the next 20 years. That figure refers only to water treatment and pipes for drinking water, sewage treatment and waste water plants and the cleaning of stream water run off. It doesn't even include the environmental restoration projects that have been discussed or the dams and peripheral canal projects that are now being debated by governor Schwarzenegger and democratic leaders in Sacramento in California. The total infrastructure short for United States water included and a number I have seen is estimated I think it by the Urban land institute at $1.7 trillion, which sounds like a lot but an economy the size of the United States it's actually not an impossible obligation and commitment for us to need as a country. What is lacking however is the political will to do so? As result the crisis revealed by the problems we have with the infrastructure is much deeper that what leaders now portray as just a practical decision on what should be public or what should be private. We live in a country with the public sectors leaders and deciders, our own - really we are in in collusion with major corporations it's often difficult to figure out where one ends and the other begins. And so we think that we are lacking some big questions as a result, what is public space and the public trust? What is the role of government? What should the people control and how should they control it? What resources and services that are essential to life, should therefore be the right of the community or the right of nature itself? When we made our movie and our book "Thirst", we decided to look at the growing response to these questions on the local level, which is largely out of site of the major media. This is the level of city civil society of community action of local participation in government affairs and what we found again and again were spontaneous local correlations that cross normal political lines to oppose the whole sale auctioning of the key public commitments. We found a desire to a new citizen participation in government in the face of globalization of control over the assets that really determined how we as citizens interact. We found a crucial issue, it was the sense of the part of many people that if they could not have sovereign deal over their basic assets and services like water. They asked what do they really control when they went to the ballot box, government they were saying is being emptied out and citizens are more and more being left to vote for Tweedle Dum or Tweedle Dee who no matter, what their good intensions or their party affiliations wouldn't really have any power any more over the services that guarantee our quality of public life. Instead that power would now be under private control of companies located in other cities, states or countries, information about basic services would be so quested in cooperate board rooms and particular facts would be chosen endowed out only when they supported a particular agenda which often has more to do with private interest and profits than with the public good with the role of citizens. The current melt down in credit markets that has been going on for the past week may slow this fire sale of public assets sum, since many multinational purchases and contracts are highly leveraged based on debt to be paid back by higher rates for rate payers and for people for, in the public and by service cut backs and lay offs that so called efficiency touted by the advocates of these buy outs. Perhaps that reprieve can be used to reassert that there is such a thing as the public interest and citizen rights but there is a long way to go in that uncertain battle. And here are couple of reasons why we - why we think so that we follow in our book, some just a few other examples, we found example - examples in which corporate water companies use every one of their massive financial legal lobbing and campaign finance resources to take command and win the day against poorly financed volunteer citizens groups. They didn't always succeed in spite of this mismatch but some times they did. To list just a few case studies in Stockton and Monterey California, Lexington Kentucky, was so Felton here in California and in did rural Michigan. Water companies put in the kind of money that has never been seen before in local political campaigns to finance into influence the out come of election or an opinion poll And a number of cities that companies created front grass root groups called Astro Turf groups to get their message out without it seeming that the message was coming from a a profit making enterprise. In Michigan the son of the key anti bottled water organizer was threatened to what called a slap suite, a suite aimed at shutting up oppositions when the campaign against Nestle got heated. In Atlanta the former mayor now in jail was charged with returning favors to a private water company in return for a nice all expenses paid trip to Paris with his Mistress. He was acquitted on that charge but the company was thrown out of Atlanta any way. In California we are seeing what some activists now calling regulatory capture in which companies yield enormous influence over their supposed regulators and recently here in California a water company and water association pushed legislation deem to be technical only that would have extended the length of water and other infrastructure contracts from 35 years maximum to 99 years. And it also got rid of requirements that such contracts require environmental impact statements. This kinds of stealth legislation pass the state assembly unanimously as a mere technical bill until the CRA club food and water launch and other groups noticed it and fought to have a change to defeat it and that legislation AB1261 is still being battled out in Sacramento. Finally there is the fear that appears well founded because if all of these efforts that once water companies are able to get enough leverage and control of our water utilities and other services, they will be able to do pretty much what they want with prices and supplies. Some thing that California experienced to our regret in energy with Enron.
Deborah Kaufman: The recent battle over water in Stockton California certainly was raising all these issues that have just been mentioned and answering them in some pretty decisive ways and that's true - of course was central to our film and our recent book. Like in other cities there was a visceral bipartition response to a perceived take over of a public asset which should be built and paid for by the people of Stockton over many years in fact their water utility was award winning in the black served the people of the delta very well and people were very shocked when mayor Gary Podesto decided that it might be a good idea to consider privatization of the utility, it turned out he had been part of team within the united states conference of mayors the Urban Water Council, which had been lobbied heavily by the private water industry to promote the privatization of urban water utilities and as a business man, he was inclined towards free market solutions to whatever budget problem city might if had within the city they were unrelated to water. He succinctly summarized his point of view at a state of the city conference that we filmed by saying, "it's time to Stockton enter the twenty first century and think of our citizens as customers". The Mayor wanted to streamline government and get his award winning municipal utility off the books and he believes that rushing it into privatization was the way to go. The citizens did fear private company collision with government, they hired independent consultants that differed with the city's consultants on the estimated price savings that the mayor was talking about. The citizens organized to take the issue to the voters, but literally, right before the city wide election that was supposed to take place, the Mayor scheduled a city council vote and that vote a four to three decision resulted in a twenty year, six hundred million dollar contract with consortium -- global consortium OMI-Thames which was the largest water privatization in the west huge. The city was very divided, but there was a little problem a nagging little problem, the contract exempted the private companies from doing an environmental impact report and according to the citizen's coalition of Stockton the Sierra club and the league of women voters who all banded together, that was illegal and they began to challenging the courts. None or less in 2003 the privatization began and here is what happened between 2003 and now, rates that had been stable increased, and it was kind of a stink wafted over the south side of the town because chemicals that caused too much were being used. There was a sewage spill into the river that people swam in during the summer, there was a major fish kill and generally there was something called run to fail which is the private company's failure to do preventive maintenance which was necessary to keep the pipes from leaking so that, there were a lot of increased leakages reported and then on top of it all there was the court case that was the based on the failure to undertake the environmental impact report. The citizen's groups won in the court but the return to public control was stole by continuous appeals. Then last July, just really a few weeks ago the city, after intense negotiations voted unanimously to cancel the private contract that they had worked so hard to create, apparently after all these problems enough was enough even Gary Podesto now, out of office mayor and still active though in California agreed with the cancellation of the cancellation of the contract. You could say the conclusion of the Stockton's story was to over determined, the citizen's groups, law suits the company's failures to live up to performance standards and the growing sense of democracy was being under minded were simply too much to bear.
Alan Snitow: I wanted to show you all the people here and our audience and I suppose may be people in the radio audience can imagine what I have here, a kind of of technology that is largely being ignored now a days. It's called a pitcher sometimes refer to as a carafe if you want to go upscale and we found that this particular technology has enormous uses and it also goes back a long ways they found them in ancient Sumerian and virtually prehistoric civilizations. One of the first things that people conceive of for holding water and for and for giving it out and this brings us to another conflict area in our battles over privatization that we are dealing within our book "Thirst" and that is the growing effort by some what different set of companies to tap in to local water supplies to bottle water. In our book we focus on several community efforts in Wisconsin and Michigan to stop the bottling of local spring water by Nestle, which is the largest water bottler in the world. But Nestle has now been joined by companies that use largely tap water including Pepsi and Coke for example. And the market for water in plastic rather than in glass or what ever else the pitcher you want has now grown in United States alone to 11 billion dollars, world wide 100 billion dollars and that's whole sale. Retail prices often make a bottle of water much more expensive than a gallon of gas and we hear recently that a bottle of water in some cases is more expensive than a bottle of beer. So and you know that sort of the basic payer of potential drinks in England. It is become such a fad drink bottle water that every celebrity had his or her own brand there is SLY water by Stallone, Trump water you know who, now Jennifer Aniston's got her picture on bill boards that you may see if you got another brand there is at the even the forty - sometimes at 60 dollar plus brand Hollywood wannabes called bling H2O. We found that even environmentalists were carrying around their clear plastic bottles we went to one environmental conference in Marine County for example where there was a sign outside saying, no food or drink in the auditorium bottled water only. We also encountered growing irritation of city workers that they are public service and the water they are putting through the tap was being disparaged by enormous advertising campaigns about bottled water's purities leaving the slight suggestion that tap water isn't, it got so far that in Cleveland there was an ad for Fiji water and which the ad ended "it's so good, it's not bottled in Cleveland", and the reaction from Cleveland's public water officials, they took umbrage so they took a bottle oh Fiji water and they tested it against Cleveland tap water and they found that Fiji water had unacceptable levels of Arsenic beyond what tap water could have. And then a local TV station took up the cause and when started interviewing people you know man on the street interviews, women on the street interviews, and found that either people couldn't tell the difference between Fiji water and Cleveland tap water or they preferred the tap version in Cleveland. When we launched our book on World Water Day this passed March here in San Francisco, we wanted to point out some of these things and we brought together the head of the San Francisco public utilities commission in charge of the tap water in the region and also Alice Waters from Chez Panisse restaurant that is very well known as it sort of the basis of California Cuisine and they each testified about how they were trying to eliminate the us of bottled water in their own daily lives in favor of the tap, we also brought in people from food and water works and from corporate accountability international groups which have campaigned against the use of bottled water and against the water privatization around the country. And since then the issue has exploded with mayors in San Francisco, Salt Lake city and Minneapolis calling on other mayors around the country to eliminate spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on bottle water as wasteful excess in a time of tight budgets. There have been stories about the battle some citizens in Northern California near the McCloud River are waging against Nestle which has successfully so far pressed for a 99 year renewable lease of water from a river known as one o the great fishing rivers in the West. There has been a lot of press coverage on the issue and an interesting change in public consciousness seems to be under way, when our publisher first released the book we were telling people that when they went to a restaurant, they should no longer feel cheap and ashamed when they ask for tap water, they should feel virtuous instead. Now it's got in to such a state that the Sunday New York time style section headlined an article "water - water every where but guilt by the bottle full". About people now feeling guilty when they carry round a plastic bottle of Aquafina, Dasani, Poland Springs and the like, but consumer guilt is not really the reaction that we were looking for. Yes 40 million plastic water bottles are discarded every day in the United States alone. Most of them ending up in land fills, sometimes floating down rivers. Yes thousands of gallons of carbon causing gasoline is used to transport what can be obtained from a near by tap, yes bottled water costs a thousand, even ten thousand times what tap water costs, yes its less well regulated and less tested than tap water, yes local springs are being exploited especially in a time of drought but guilt isn't what this is about. The real problem we worry about with bottled waters best seen in other parts of the world, where strong public water systems don't exist. In places like India, where bottled water now cost more than milk, the middle and upper classes often drink bottled water; relieved of the fear that public water may not be pure they are less concerned with making the political effort to demand universal access to clean affordable water for every one in India. Here in United States the same political and environmental message comes free inside every plastic bottle. We need billions of dollars to upgrade universal affordable water service for every one, but will tax payers and rate payers be willing to support the relatively inexpensive effort to strengthen public water services when they are spending much more for water bottles. A New York Times editorial from August 1st titled in praise of tap water put it concisely. The more the wealthy opt out of drinking tap water the less political support there will be for investing and maintaining America's public water supply. That would be a serious loss access to cheap clean water is basic to the nations health and the editorial concludes that consumers are realizing that they can save money and save the planet by turning in their water bottles and turning on the tap. Now the bottle water industry is on the defensive and they are responding with full page ads in the New York Times and in the San Francisco Chronicle last week emphasizing the idea of consumer choice is just the latest effort in what is a growing green washing campaign by water industry companies to suggest how environmentally responsible green and conscious filled they are. Dow chemical companies sponsoring blue planet run, are non profit efforts to have runners circle the planet to raise money for poor people in other countries to improve their water supplies, it's a nice idea, but Dow isn't doing it out of the kindness of its heart. Dow has invested heavily in the water business and wants to head off charges that it is profiting from a public resource. An international water week being held in Sweden in the near future is being sponsored by Nestle which is also giving grants to groups in areas where it pumps water hoping to - in hearts and minds as well as springs and streams. Coke is sponsoring water projects in Africa and India where it is under attack for pumping water so hard that local farmer's wells are dropping or running dry, one could go on and on but I I think its Deborah's turn.
Deborah Kaufman: Well my last remarks are going to try to place the stories that we have heard just with in the context of globalization you know, being kind of the great equalizer that what was meant to be a corporate project emanating out of the United States is actually some thing that's affecting every in the same way every where and that it has you know really come back to haunt us in a way. For years the World Bank had been involved in an extremely controversial practice of making its loans conditional on the privatization of essential resources like water and the classic case that I am going to close with is the story of Bolivia which is little bit of harbinger for the future The first water war of the 21st century was called it took place in 2000 where the World Bank demanded privatization as a condition of a loan to that very very poor country. A multi national consortium headed by our very own Bechtel based here in f San Francisco came in to take over water services but they were a little too overzealous and reports that Bechtel wanted to own the rain circulated through out the world when it was announced that the rain water collected in peoples back yard wells was part of the consortiums privatization. The questions that this raised and the rates that were immediately about to go up and the access that was about to be denied to people cut across all income levels and what happened was that you saw coco farmers out on the streets with very affluent hotel owners who were outraged by the rates they were about to have to pay to the new consortium. The result wasn't any thing like you would expect in the United States it was total civil insurrection. There were riots, there was martial law there were tragic fatalities and the Bolivian government finally had to take the private consortium out, because life in Bolivia had stopped. And the people went back their right to control their own water supply, which doesn't mean they are living in a perfect harmonious system, with their water, they still need financing for their infrastructure. But they owned that they control it, and the rain is free to any one. To put this in perspective, Bechtel's annual recedes were larger than Bolivia's gross national product. Since then privatization efforts have encountered growing resistance through out the developing world, and now we are starting to see where the resistances in places like Felton and Stockton and Atlanta, a change and awareness happening here in our own country. You can understand that there is disparity of power here and why average people whether they are in Bolivia or the bay area might be skeptical about the privatization enterprise and begin to try to make some changes.
Alan Snitow: And one thing I just that are we against the private sectors as a whole and some thing that we some times come up and asked of us and one of the key things that we respond on that is that there is an enormous role for the private sector in water. Not only pumps and pipes and construction and membranes and filters, this is a huge huge industry. And what we are talking about here is control, is ownership of the resource and control over the supply of this basic resource that should be a government government responsibility and a public trust. So what are the alternatives then to the idea of all of these problems that we are facing in infrastructure. All the weaknesses of our own public sector, because the battle is in the public sector not just sort of against a private effort to take over public water. One proposed solution that we are hearing a lot about these days, is desalination of water, there are hundreds of proposals from cities and towns around the country to build desalination plants to take salt water from the ocean or brine from aquifers and make it pure again. It's the kind of solution that industry likes, it's extremely expensive, it is centralized, it gives private companies actual access to direct control of the water supplies for homes and for development. It's also a very energy intensive which has, let some countries from Argentina, to Jordan to Libya to Australia to consider building strings of nuclear power plants to drive their desalination plant. It's a form of insanity, desalination plants produce several gallants of extra salty brine for every cleaned gallant of water, where does that salty water go? Will that go into near by estuaries the areas that are environmentally already some of the most challenged on the planet, it's another experiment with our environment. This time the oceans which as large as they are are being affected by human activity we are seeing that right now with global warming. Answer to those questions that one about were the nuclear wastes will go and the dangerous inherent nuclear power and the proliferation of desalination plants as well as nuclear plants, we have a very scary scenario. There are how ever alternatives to such centralized high tech approaches. Many of them are decentralized low tech approaches, that is also called soft path and some of the leaders in using these ideas are already at work in the developing world. In India and we went we went to Rajasthan a desert area in North western Pakistan - North western India and there we saw that, there were thousands and we saw many of them all over the place, of small ponds which were being used to capture the run off from the monsoons. Those ponds then kept the water rather than having it take the top soil away and the water then had to time to percolate down into the aquifers, as a result, water in the wells which should have been dropping few feet a year, many of them becoming dry, the well water was suddenly rising again. We not only with the wells being replenished, but rivers that had been dry in that section of India for almost a hundred years started running year around for the first time. So this is a way that very local people and world back - you know back desert area, that had been written off as being economically impossible to be sufficient could actually organize them selves to take control and actually change the not only change their own situation, but actually change the environment, change the actual look of the landscape an amazing kind of transformation. Similar kinds of work is going on from Beijing to Austin Texas to Berlin Germany there are lot of experiments both with urban rain water harvesting as well as the rural variety, but the rural of variety is what really offers hope to the many many people billions, hundreds of billions - hundreds or millions of people who live in rural areas, where - which can't be reached by gigantic water systems. In the United States there is a proposal, of different kinds being pushed by food and water watching, water associations in Washington, for what's called a federal trust fund for water. There are already such trust funds for high ways and airports, why not clean water? Although the giant water industry companies that want city utility contracts oppose such a trust fund the American public overwhelmingly supports the idea. Our republican pollster named Frank Luntz - you may have heard of him. He is actually the leading pollster for the Bush administration and republican party testified before house committee - sub committee and about a poll that he had done, that found that 86 percent of Americans he poled across all political lines across the country in all regions supported the idea of a federal trust fund for water and Luntz told the committee that he found that hard to believe, and here is a quote that we put in our book "I have been a professional pollster for almost 20 years" Luntz testified "and I can tell you from personal experience that such an overwhelming consensus about the role of Washington, does not happen often, but exists here in the case of water". Finally and most importantly there is the question of what is often called water conservation. When local water utilities have called on the public to conserve water, they usually get a response even greater then what they call for? People do respond very positively to cause for conservation especially when they are supported by conserving toilets and other technology that can be used in the home. Agriculture and Industry are often another question however, their water is much more subsidized that water for homes with low cost water from tax payer funded pipe lines and dams. Peter Glick of the pacific institute in Auckland has outlined ways that industry and agro business should be called on to save much more water and to begin to pay more of their share of the bill. Glick also points out some thing else. He doesn't use the word conservation much any more, and that's because it sounds a old fashion as if we were all going to be policing one another's water use or as if we all are going to be expected to turn off the shower before we soap up every time, instead Glick likes to term the word efficiency, commandeering a term that ideologues of water privatization like to reserve for the private sector rather than some thing that defines public virtue at a time of corporate excess. So I think we will end it there and we will be very happy take your questions thank you very much.
Deborah Kaufman: Thank you.
