Budget Cuts with Messed up Priorities

This may be old news to many of you but I thought to carry on the theme from earlier regarding budget cuts. (see our previous blog about Capitol "for sale") It is a common theme, actually, making headlines from Newsweek to the New York Times, from Facebook to real books?

The point is, everyone understands that now is the worst economic crisis practically anyone has ever seen, especially those of us in younger generations. For students it's the "tuition increase"; for teachers it's the "raise freeze". For workers it's the "unpaid overtime"; for the unemployed it means longer lines at the unemployment office. For patients it means "preexisting condition;" for physicians it means fighting the health insurance giants. For the majority it means paying more and getting less and coming to your whit's end trying to pay the bills; for the selected few it means massive bailouts, huge bonuses, and dinners at the White House.

So today's example of messed up priorities around budgets cuts is something close to home: the Arizona Water Institute. For those of you, who do not know, it closed as of July 1st, due to budget cuts. Rather than realizing the long term significance of water research (in a state that is mostly desert!), the entire budget was cut. Only two of their projects remain and information can be found on their website regarding both of these projects: AHIS and EWSR.

But such extremes do not go without other examples of the other side of a messed up system. An article from Socialist Worker, which talks about the bottled water industry is appropriate here. "Profit in a Bottle" written by Dahlia El-Shafei talks about the documentary "Tapped." According to El-Shafei, this documentary, although sharp with its criticisms and statistics, leaves the viewer much more empowered than one would anticipate. That's quite a change of pace from some of the usual suspects.

The bottled water industry is notorious for threatening the water supply. With such brutal facts as "it takes 17.5 kilograms of water just to produce one kilogram of plastic used to make the bottles" it's truly a wonder that they have not been stopped sooner.

At a time when our natural resources are being consumed without restraint and our environments are on the bring of collapse it seems that an easy solution to "Enhancing Water Supply Reliability" would be to get big corporations like Nestle and Coke out of natural water supplies and out of the bottled water industry!