Biden recently announced his intention to rerun for president in 2024. During the course of his administration, Biden has accomplished little to nothing for American working people. It would be convenient to equate his lack of results with failure. But Biden’s domestic agenda for Americans, if one can even relate his legislative history to Americans rather than to a tiny fraction of America’s ruling elite, is not a failure but the reflection of the successful implementation of policy measures designed to contribute nothing beyond a line below the absolute bare minimum.
His domestic legislation boasts, for instance, of bills passed for the improvement of critical infrastructure but none of these bills have had an impact on any aspect of America’s infrastructure. They are, for all intents and purposes, primarily pro forma. Water is a perfect example. Apart from the complete absence of a government report on the metrics of results arising from these bills, America’s crisis of drinking water is worse now than at the start of his administration.
It might be unfair, however, to yoke his administration with an inherited burden. Quality issues, for instance, in drinking water, the majority of which were well known prior to Biden’s inauguration, have begun to appear regularly since the 1960s due to America’s extremely antiquated community water systems.
The clearest and most recent examples of which is from Flint, Michigan. Samples revealed large quantities of lead. The large quantities of lead have made water undrinkable there. The “large quantities of lead” found in Flint, Michigan, however, is seven times less heavy than those found in South Bend, Indiana. In Compton, California, residents have complained of an altogether different problem. The residents have complained about how their water is brown since 2018. In Martin County, Kentucky, the water supply regularly exceeds the EPA maximum for cancer causing disinfection. It also exceeds those levels for coliform bacteria.
It is clear that from one end of the country to the other, the drinking water is neither potable nor drinkable. In the places where the drinking water may be either potable or drinkable, the water is so full of chlorine that many people no longer need to add the chemical to their pool or spa. They just turn the hose on.
With the problem so widespread, there can be nothing but an expectation that the crisis of American drinking water is a current, omnipresent problem, a Presidential problem, no matter its ultimate origin in Biden’s administration or any other. At least Biden himself admitted it to be one of his longstanding problems, as early as February 03, 2023, when he announced how he had received “a copy of a speech that [he] made about 30 years ago, saying we need an infrastructure bill to deal with water.”
In respect to the results he has achieved over the past 30 years, another quote from the same rambling speech fits. “Nothing. Nothing.”
In an issue from December 2020, Newsmax, an intellectually debased monthly targeting conservative, elderly, retired, non-working members of America’s population, published an article with the title, “40% of Homes Have Contaminated Water.”
One might be immediately thrown off by the article’s choice of the term “homes” in its title. It is almost as though the title seeks to shift blame from the dilapidated utility’s infrastructure to the outdated plumbing in homes but the article is actually a review of drinking water in general. Whereas one might expect to find a disinformation campaign, there is actually an exposition, despite the publication’s history.
The article starts with a statement issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDCP as early as 2020 stated of our supply of drinking water that it is “one of the safest” in the world. The CDCP, however, doesn’t drink water from Flint, Michigan, Martin County, Kentucky, Compton, California, or South Bend, Indiana.
Upon further examination of the CDCP’s declaration, however, authors explain how the claim simply does not hold water. Reports compiled by a leading nonprofit environmental advocacy group, who have spent years analyzing drinking water, however, tell an entirely different story.
In a report compiled by the Natural Resources Defense Council, the authors studied drinking water from June 1st, 2016 to May 31st, 2019. The report found that more than 40% of water systems throughout the United States violate the Safe Drinking Water Act.
Passed in 1974, the SDWA provides a set of national guidelines water treatment systems must to follow to ensure the safety of drinking water. Even though the authors of the study reviewed community water systems that serve no more than 130 million people, the authors found more than 170,959 violations of the law in over 24, 133 community water systems.
It is shocking to bear witness to these statistics, especially from a publication whose primary duty is to ensure that objective consciousness among the elderly, retired, or non-working populations continues to stagnate. The number of violations are not in the hundreds, thousands, or ten thousands. They are in the hundreds of thousands. The number of community water systems is not hundreds or thousands but tens of thousands of community water systems. America’s water infrastructure is not reflective of America’s wealth.
During Biden’s term in office, which continues now from January 20, 2021, the President chose to ignore almost completely a major manifestation of the crisis of America’s drinking water in Jackson, Mississippi, the capital and largest city in the state.
On August 30, 2022 Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves (R) declared a state of emergency as more than 180,000 residents from Jackson were left without clean running water. Forbes, the insider publication for America’s wealthy, reported that the crisis left the city on “the brink of collapse.” Here the consortium of interrelated problems from contaminated drinking water, a crumbling water treatment facility, to ignominiously organized waterways all contributed to the crisis.
The residents, who were already on notice to boil water, were asked to endure weeks of dirty water, as as the main pipes in the main water treatment facility were being fixed with smaller replacements. The Pearl River in Northeast Jackson crested near 35.4 feet (i.e., 10.78 meters), causing the river to fall below the “flood stage.” As a result the Pearl River Valley Water Supply District decreased discharge from the Ross Barnett Reservoir to 45,000 CFS (cubic feet per second), resulting in a heavy loss of incoming water to the reservoir. The result in the displacements of reservoir water to river water resulted in the almost complete loss of water pressure for Jackson residents.
The resulting loss of water pressure covered nearly every aspect of water’s usage in and around homes. Apart from the lack of water for sinks, drinking fountains or dispensers, the lack of water pressure literally deprived residents of the ability to utilize fire hydrants, toilets, hoses, or any thing, ranging from hygiene to medicine.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) visited the facility last year, which the agency said was an example of a longstanding environmental justice issue in a historically marginalized community, according to an article published by the Post.
The fallout over water in Jackson, Mississippi, is significant for its relation to America’s waterways, which is a separate, albeit related, problem in the crisis of America’s drinking water. In Flint, South Bend, Martin, or Compton, the problem appeared to restricted to contamination. The displacements of reservoir water to river water which caused the loss of pressure on an already strained community water system subject to a notice for boiling, encapsulates the overall crisis of American drinking water as a systematic problem in a single event.
In regards to waterways, however, little to nothing is being done. Recently, the U.S. EPA announced over $6.5 billion on April 4th, 2023 for states, Tribes, and territories for essential drinking water infrastructure upgrades across the nation through the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund (DWSRF). The amount, which is hardly enough to repair more than a couple of the facilities for community water systems, is wholly inadequate to address with resolution the crisis of America’s drinking water. The paltry sum of $6.5 billion highlights the fact that the amount is designed to contribute nothing beyond a line below the absolute bare minimum. To put those numbers in perspective, a recent report by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), no less than $45 billion is required to fix dams, $123 billion to fix bridges, $80 billion to fix levees. These structures, which the ASCE designates as at a state no greater than D+, reflects the overall state of America’s crumbling infrastructure.
There is no objective basis upon which to conclude his administration has contributed to an identifiable improvement in the lives of Americans. It is important for Americans, if not working people from around the world, to recognize the fact that during the course of his administration Biden has 1) not acknowledged that there is a crisis in the utility infrastructure of America, let alone for water, and 2) that the Biden administration has achieved absolutely nothing in terms of the improvement of America’s drinking water, let alone any other aspect of American life. The state of America’s drinking water, a critical daily resource for humankind, is likely now in a far worse state than when Biden first ran against Donald Trump in 2020.
The $6.5 billion sum allocated “for states, Tribes, and territories for essential drinking water infrastructure upgrades” pales in comparison to the more than $113,000,000,000 the Biden administration has allocated to Zelensky for dispatching soldiers to die on the fields of the mining town.
If you compare the sums of money the Biden administration allocates for disbursement to the corrupt Zelensky regime, whom Seymour Hersh has described as a ruling clique negotiating ultimately who skims from the hundreds of billions of dollars flowing to the top of the country as Ukrainians register daily triple digit losses in its morgues near Bakhmut, the failure of the Biden administration to either acknowledge or address the crisis of American drinking water is altogether staggering condemnation of his administration.
From this comparison, it is clear that Biden’s primary concern is not the improvement of domestic infrastructure, especially critical utility infrastructure such as America’s water infrastructure. No member of America’s working class should place a vote of confidence into the Presidency of Joe Biden. Members of the working class must dispense altogether with his administration for the sake of creating an alternative form of governance based on worker control.
Workers, whose everyday lives are affected by the crisis of America’s drinking water, must form rank-and-file assemblies under the First Amendment with which to petition for a redress of a grievance, namely, the failure of the government to perform even its most basic ministerial duties such as those for the provision of drinkable water. The government’s failure to perform its ministerial duties is a legitimate basis for its jurisdiction to terminate in the transfer of government control directly to workers. Together with its assertion of control over the government, workers must bring to an end the bloody fratricide of slavs the Biden administration perpetuates with haphazardly obscene amounts of money for war in Ukraine.