Something So Simple As Affordable Drinking Water...

...Let alone that it not be full of poison even if you can afford to pay for it. And yet, according the study paper presented in Plos One (and echoed by Digg), in five years time our current rate of 11.9% of households not being able to afford potable water will increase to 35.6%, and that's using the conservative estimates.

But wait, the most important thing facing the new administration is getting rid of the Affordable Care Act; because why should the 18 million estimated to lose care when it's gone be able to afford health care either?

I mean let's get our priorities straight here. We've got some insurance providers who have had their profit margins bruised significantly (not to mention groups of folks who simply don't like the government telling them they have to do, or not do, a particular thing; unless, of course, it's paying more for everything you already can't afford). And nobody feels pain like a holder of large piles of capital who suddenly gets a smaller return percentage.

So. The buffoon about to take up residence in the White House is a problem. The fact that absolutely critical infrastructure is both literally failing, as well as failing to keep up with utilization demands, is a problem. Climate change causing increasingly severe weather is a problem. Dwindling resource availability is a problem. And the fact that all of that only serves to make the world as a whole a great deal more unstable is both a humanitarian, and military problem; all of this, and I mean all of it, currently rests on the ability of a cost based economic operating system to solve. An operating system that is patently obsolete; both because of it's own inherent contradictions, as well as its inherent corruption of the very social systems that must work in order to do much of anything, let alone fix very big, interrelated problems.

If we don't start putting our attention, as well as our actions, towards the root issue, all of the other problems will simply continue to do what they've been doing: Getting Worse!

PARCHED IN THE SOUTH

Huge Swaths Of The Country Are At Risk Of Losing Affordable Water Access