I recently moved to rural midwest from the pacific northwest and have insisted on tap water my whole life, but I am now drinking bottled water in fear of what happened in Flint.
There are plenty of reasons to hate corporations, there is no need to invent crazy new ones.
Part of the reason municipalities are short on money for their water systems, is that companies get the same water (or at least, from the same watershed) for free.
Is it so wrong to ask Nestle to at least pay the same rate you and I and every other citizen pays for water? Why can't they pay municipal rates for municipal water, like Coca-Cola and all the beer breweries do.
Yes, it is unreasonable, unless Nestle taps into municipal supply like all other municipal customers.
I wonder if you would feel as strongly about citizens being poisoned as you do about corporations being made to reasonably compensate the state for the natural resources they use to line their pockets.
This specific corporation happen not to be a customer of a municipal water system, which means that that this specific municipal water system does not get to charge it.
Let me convert it into a non-abstract thing - I'm going to make an educated guess that you drink either coffee or tea. Why are you not paying for coffee or tea that you got from a place A to a municipal cafeteria that exists in the place A municipality even though you are not getting your coffee or tea there?
> I wonder if you would feel as strongly about citizens being poisoned as you do about corporations being made to reasonably compensate the state for the natural resources they use to line their pockets.
The citizens were being poisoned because the democratically elected, pro people, anti-corporation government decided that people of Flint, MI, did not need super clean water that much.
On the other hand, if Nestle did bottle Flint tap water in their product you can be the crisis would have never happened. They would own that municipal water department in all but name.
>Is it so wrong to ask Nestle to at least pay the same rate you and I and every other citizen pays for water?
This is a misconception, in Michigan at least. Flint is not short on water. They are short on functioning pipes for moving the water. Getting access to the Great Lakes' unlimited supply of water was never a barrier. That water is effectively as non-scarce as air.
If you want to go to the GL, and "BYO filtration" and suck the water out to drink, that is free for you too, just as much as Nestle.
Michigan municipalities charge for water because of the cost of filtering and distributing it, not because it's so scarce it has to throttle demand.
Nestle is profiting from the service of putting it in a bottle that you get to keep after purchasing, not from getting underpriced water in Michigan.
(California is a different story, where water is scarce, and Nestle is making that problem a little bit worse, but CA has a more general problem with sane incentives for water usage -- e.g. use-it-or-lose-it policies for farms -- that are mostly unrelated to the Nestle deal.)