You Don't Have a Right to Safe Drinking Water, US Court Rules (motherjones.com)

These headlines is just press fodder for the helplessly incompetent to cry about how the gov is incompetent

> The Jackson plaintiffs alleged that their city government deliberately withheld information about the water’s toxicity, and exacerbated the problem through a series of boil-water notices - a practice that can eliminate some bacterial contamination, but also concentrates lead in water. Engelhardt stated there is no “constitutional right to truthful information from officials during a public health crisis”

The constitutional question (and note that state Constitutions, e.g. Massachusetts, may instead cover it) is just one piece of the mess.

Nah, headline is optimistic actually: no right to clean water, to water tests, or to the truth about the tests if they occur. No right to healthcare, schools, or even deliverable mail either. But surely some of these are just the kind of thing you might expect as an absolute minimum everywhere if you have to pay taxes.

I think the bigger deal is that the people of Jackson were lied to and this sets the precedent that there is no recourse. It's not like someone in Flint knowingly drank contaminated water, the city withheld the fact that their water was contaminated with unsafe levels of lead.

> lawsuit against the city of Jackson, Mississippi, which alleged the city knowingly let residents drink lead-contaminated water.

The "right" here is about other people not contaminating your well for their profit. You don't have that right. They can contaminate your well for their profit and you have to find another source of water at your own cost.

> (…) alleged the city knowingly let residents drink lead-contaminated water.

Knowingly let residents drink unsafe water. Surely you can see an issue there? Can we please make a collected effort to comment beyond the title?

If you don’t know what “a right to safe water” means, then could you please do a web search to try to be minimally informed about the matter before commenting? Took me two seconds to find a UN page.

https://www.unwater.org/water-facts/human-rights-water-and-s...

Again, on the first sentence, in bold:

> Access to water and sanitation are recognized by the United Nations as human rights – fundamental to everyone’s health, dignity and prosperity.

And on the second paragraph:

> Governments must take a human rights-based approach (HRBA) to water and sanitation improvements

There’s your right to water. It means that because it’s something fundamental to human life, nations have an (at a minimum moral, often legal) obligation to provide it or protect access to it to everyone under them that lacks it.

Just for good measure, here’s the Wikipedia page on Human Rights too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights

Again, the first sentence already explains a lot.

Right to safe water. It means that the water in your kitchen faucet is expected/guaranteed to be safe to drink.

It must not have: noxious bacteria causing diarrhea, or liver parasite eggs, or mud, or mercury/heavy metals, or remains of faeces, or fracking methane, or pesticides, or medicines, or obesogens [1].

It must had been professionally filtered and treated to assure that none of those reach your home.

If you pay for water classified as "drinking water", you should not receive grey water, oily mud or anything else. This is the standard in all first country nations and I assume that it should be the same in US.

[1] And if in your small town everybody is obese, before to blame everybody for eating too much, or being lazy couch potatos, look for chemicals in the drinking water, leading to a broken satiety system, causing people to eat huge amounts of food. This is why the right to have safe drinking water is so important.

America voted for unrestrained rabid turbocapitalism not just once but twice. They knew what MAGA and Project 2025 were about, both announced their intentions clear as day, and now they're getting unrestrained rabid turbocapitalism - a world where corporations can do whatever the hell they want and people either have no rights at all or the rights they have on paper are de facto meaningless.