Next: Bottled air!

The genius of capitalism has managed to take virtually every element of the commons (that which, by right, belongs to everyone), package it, and sell it back to consumers at a ghastly markup.

This particular version of winner-take-all capitalism takes things even further, granting giant multinationals and their armies of lobbyists absolutely free access to the "resources" in the commons. These days the idea of collecting royalties from the oil companies for drilling in public lands is not even on the table in Washington, although it was a hot issue in the Carter years. (You'd think this is typical Bush/Cheney thievery of the public coffers, but you'd be wrong—chalk that jaw-dropping giveback, the "Federal Oil and Gas Simplification and Fairness Act," to friend of the common man Bill Clinton).

Water is the latest staple of human existence to have morphed into a commodity. Here Larry Lack, a Canadian author, explains a few poorly understood facts about the bottled water industry, which has grown fifteenfold in the years 1990 to 2003, in spite of the fact that bottled water's no better, and no safer, than tap water:

Aside from its usefulness in remote areas during disasters and emergencies, bottled water is an entirely needless affectation. The fears about the safety of public water supplies that its purveyors play on are exaggerated nonsense. But the enormous global bottled water industry built on these false fears undercuts public water, disfigures landscapes and exposes trusting bottled water consumers to serious health risks.

The ordinary consumer who pays out for bottled water pays a premium somewhere on the order of 240 and 10,000 times the price of tap water! "Surprisingly," notes Lack, "despite all the current outrage over the price of gasoline, most North American consumers are casually forking over more for bottled water – about a buck a quart – than they are for gas."

And this in spite of the fact that "as much as 40 per cent of [the bottled water] sold in North America is simply municipal tap water run through filters and treated with minerals or other additives."

Rigorous Intuition, the disorienting, addictive, often creepy blog from "cautiously pessimistic" Canadian novelist Jeff Wells, cites a book called Watershed: The Role of Fresh Water in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, published in 1995, to make a pretty convincing case that the Israelis are more than a little bit interested in diverting the waters of the Litani to quench the thirst of their water-poor country. (As Watershed points out, as far back as 1919 Chaim Weizmann wrote to David Lloyd George that Lebanon “is a well watered region . . . and the Litani River is valueless to the territory north of the proposed frontiers . . . . It can be used beneficially in the country much further south.”)

Wells also suggests that the experience in the Middle East might be something we in North America might come to share sooner than we'd like:

How will nations behave when they're dying of thirst? America's giant Ogallala aquifer could go dry in two decades. Sooner or later, we'll find out.