The Third World in Detroit?

For a moment, just for a moment, you wonder if you have had a bad dream. You are tuned into the "Tavis Smiley TV show," a hard hitting interview program, and the subject this week has been Detroit. Remember? Before globalization Detroit used to be known as the home of the automobile industry. Now thousands of poor residents face losing their supply of drinking water.

“And basically, what we have right now,” explained Lawyer Alice Jennings, “I just talked to two women, one with eight children in the home, no water with eight children. A woman on oxygen with immune deficiency, water cut off last Wednesday. This is an ongoing problem. It is a health crisis of the highest level and I would hope that our mayor, Mayor Duggan, is listening.”

You can’t believe your ears. You’ve just read a report from Spectrem Group, a consulting and research firm, which asserts that the number of U.S. households with a net worth of $1 million or more, excluding primary residence, rose to 9.63 million in 2013. That's more than a 600,000 leap up from 2012, and the highest number on record.

And Detroit too sees its skyscrapers embrace the sky exuberantly—but only in a very exclusive ring because 83% of the city’s population is Afro-American and the privileged whites live in the suburbs.

Not surprising that on the Tavis show Malik Yakem, of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, asserted with conviction: “access to good, clean water and access to good, clean food are human rights, period, regardless of someone’s economic standing. Just because you’re a human being on this earth, you have the right to have access to water. You have the right to have access to food.”