Having reduced Jackson's water supply to a fragile state by under funding it,

right-wing politicians in Mississippi now want to use that as an excuse to privatize the system.

This is the same thing that the Tories are doing to the British National Health System.

There are of course differences in detail; it is possible to privatize the NHS a little at a time by encouraging first the wealthy, then the not quite so wealthy, and eventually anyone not abjectly poor, to move one by one to private medicine, but it is not so easy to do that with the municipal water supply. But I don't think they are greatly important.

Basically, this is a standard right-wing plan of operation to achieve their goal of reducing most people to poverty so that the rich (who fund the right-wing campaigns) will get richer.