The privatization of the public's natural resources: The Great Lakes as Commodity: "It was under the reign of Governor John Engler [R] in the late 1990s that the French company Perrier [now the Swiss multinational Nestle] was allowed to come into the state and drill a massive well into an aquifer in the center of lower Michigan. No fees, nothing at all for the state, just a free pass for a foreign corporation to come in and sell for private gain an aquifer upon which a whole region depends."

"The well that Perrier [now Nestle] put in pumps up to 400 gallons a minute out of the ground-24,000 gallons an hour, and over a staggering half million gallons a day, day in, day out. Millions upon millions of gallons a year pumped out of an aquifer that is part of a larger ecology, and upon which many people depend for their water. We all know what will happen-and for what? So that a foreign corporation can make a million and a half dollars a day from a public resource, while paying nothing back to the people, nothing to compensate for the environmental damage upon which their profit is based? Worst of all, though, is the precedent. Those millions of gallons pumped in a pipeline across a dozen miles of countryside to a bottling plant represent only a minuscule fraction of what may happen. Fresh water is in increasingly short supply across the United States."

The privatization of the public's natural resources: The Great Lakes as Commodity: "It was under the reign of Governor John Engler [R] in the late 1990s that the French company Perrier [now the Swiss multinational Nestle] was allowed to come into the state and drill a massive well into an aquifer in the center of lower Michigan. No fees, nothing at all for the state, just a free pass for a foreign corporation to come in and sell for private gain an aquifer upon which a whole region depends."

"The well that Perrier [now Nestle] put in pumps up to 400 gallons a minute out of the ground-24,000 gallons an hour, and over a staggering half million gallons a day, day in, day out. Millions upon millions of gallons a year pumped out of an aquifer that is part of a larger ecology, and upon which many people depend for their water. We all know what will happen-and for what? So that a foreign corporation can make a million and a half dollars a day from a public resource, while paying nothing back to the people, nothing to compensate for the environmental damage upon which their profit is based? Worst of all, though, is the precedent. Those millions of gallons pumped in a pipeline across a dozen miles of countryside to a bottling plant represent only a minuscule fraction of what may happen. Fresh water is in increasingly short supply across the United States."