There Is So Much Wrong With Nestlé: Next Time You Think About Buying A Nestlé Product, Think About This
Why is a multi-billion dollar corporation being allowed to take publicly owned water out from under the Southern California San Bernadino mountain range?
This is southern California, the place that is suffering under an historic drought that has lasted nearly five years already and shows no signs of abating anytime soon.
And what’s even more appalling is that Nestlé, which owns a huge slice of the global bottled water market paid $524 last year for the 36 million gallons of water it took.
What’s wrong with this picture? Well, once you start looking closely at Nestlé, pretty much everything. Here’s a short list to get you started.
• The San Bernadino Mountains – as mentioned above, Nestlé extracts an appalling amount of water from beneath a drought-stricken region and proceeds to bottle the bounty and sell it back to the people a few miles downhill for an obscene profit. The U.S. Forest Service is of course culpable here too, given that it awarded this outrageous contract in the first place. And corporations are not humans; they are money-eating machines or even more accurately, metaphorical sinkholes whose sole purpose is to devour anything and everything they can get their hands on. But the contract Nestlé is flogging in court now as it wrangles over this water expired 30 years ago, although Forest Service rules dictate that it remains in effect despite this until it is re-awarded or rescinded. Given the realities of this very different world we live in, one that is already showing signs of alarming water scarcity, the company should do the right thing and allow the contract to be renegotiated at the very least. On the other hand, the U.S. Forest Service should do the right thing and rescind the cursed thing.
• Corporate attitude – In a telling giveaway a couple years back, Nestlé Chairman and former CEO Peter Brabeck-Letmathe stated in soothing, sociopathic tones that his belief and that of the company is that water is not a basic human right, and that companies like his are actually a boon to humanity by selling us water. This statement coincided with a huge campaign the company ran in which paid Nestlé internet sock puppets swarmed various chat rooms, comment boards and websites to promote the company.
• Fake greenwashing – anytime you see something positive with Nestlé in the name, you can be certain that it is a story placed there by the corporate PR division. They have been busy little beavers lately: a google alert for Nestlé turns up all sorts of stories on grants and initiatives that purport to help people–all with the Nestlé brand prominently displayed. Meanwhile they are taking our water and further impoverishing the poorest by charging them for it.
Given this company’s malfeasance, it’s clear agenda to control as much of the world’s water supply as it can and sell it back to us for profit, and it’s record of greenwashing its anti-environmental, misanthropic activities, Nestlé should be just as poisonous on everyone’s tongue as say Monsanto or Dow Chemical.
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http://truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/nestle-shouldn-t-continue-profiting-from-pumping-water-from-public-lands