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August 11, a mistrial was declared in a case seeking to hold the world’s largest private water corporation, Veolia, liable for its role in the ongoing Flint water crisis. This marks yet another roadblock in the far-too-long path to justice for the 100,000 people who call Flint home.

no lnx Why did a Democratic AG kill the Flint water RICO case?

Why did a Democratic AG kill the Flint water RICO case?

Dana Nessel

Kenny Stancil and Common Dreams January 18, 2022

Prosecutors investigating Flint's contaminated water crisis were pursuing a racketeering case against public officials whose austerity-driven policies caused the health catastrophe, but after newly elected Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel took over in 2019, those charges were dropped.

That's according to investigative journalist Jordan Chariton and Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Charlie LeDuff's explosive new story, which was published Monday in The Guardian and sparked fresh questions about holding perpetrators responsible for the ongoing calamity.

The Flint water crisis began nearly eight years ago when an unelected emergency manager appointed by then-Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, made the cost-cutting decision to switch the city's tap water source from Detroit's municipal supply to the Flint River, whose highly corrosive water caused aging pipes to leak lead into thousands of homes.

From 2016 to 2018, prosecutors working under Michigan's Republican Attorney General Bill Schuette were reportedly preparing to use a federal anti-organized crime statute—the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act—against state and city officials who, along with JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, played a role in the poisoning of Flint. But after those investigators were dismissed and the probe resumed under a new team, the RICO case never materialized.

Environmental justice defender Monica Lewis-Patrick said Monday that "water warriors NEED to know" why Nessel "dropped the RICO charges in the Flint water crisis."

When Republican Schuette was running for governor against then-Democratic candidate Gretchen Whitmer in 2018, Nessel, a Democrat, characterized the term-limited AG she was aiming to replace as "an opportunist who has used the crisis to further his political ambitions via a series of politically charged show trials" and vowed to revamp the investigation.

Soon after winning and taking office, Nessel fired the lead prosecutors and investigators working on the Schuette-launched probe, and restarted the inquiry with a new team.

"At that point," Chariton and LeDuff reported, "the prosecution team assembled by Schuette had been working for nearly three years—and filed criminal charges against 15 Michigan state and Flint city officials, including four officials charged with financial fraud that prosecutors said triggered the water crisis."

"But when Nessel relaunched the investigation," the pair wrote, "her office dropped charges against top state and city officials, citing flaws in the Schuette-era investigation. In 2021, Nessel's office recharged several of those defendants—with a new round of indictments that included involuntary manslaughter, misconduct in office, obstruction of justice, extortion, and perjury. But gone were the financial fraud charges."

Last November, a federal judge approved a $626 million settlement for thousands of lead poisoning victims in Flint, but Chariton and LeDuff wrote Monday that "the disappearance of the financial fraud charges is significant because the bond deal that allowed the city of Flint to switch its water supply had been heavily investigated by the Schuette-era prosecution."

According to The Guardian:

In 2014, Flint needed to borrow nearly $100m to join the proposed Karegnondi Water Authority (KWA), a new regional system that Flint would join as both a customer and part owner. But at the time, the city was broke and at its borrowing limit.

A state-issued environmental order allowed the city to get around its debt limit and access $85m in funding, money earmarked for an "environmental calamity"—in this case, the cleanup of a local lime sludge pit. But the prosecution under Schuette alleged that the money supplied by this order for the cleanup was redirected for other purposes instead allowing Flint to issue tens of millions of dollars in bonds to join the KWA.

The allegedly fraudulent environmental order also mandated that the city of Flint use the Flint River as its water source while the KWA pipeline was under construction. It outlined tens of millions of dollars in upgrades needed for the city's water plant so that the plant could safely treat Flint River water for residents to drink. The problem: updates were nowhere near completed when the city switched its water supply to the Flint River in April 2014. In addition, a failure to add proper corrosion control chemicals into the Flint River water supply resulted in lead leaching off Flint's older pipes and poisoning residents' drinking water.

Peter Hammer, a Wayne State law professor who authored an extensive civil rights report on the Flint water crisis, told The Guardian that he "never understood why the attorney general disrupted the initial investigation, dropped the initial charges, or set a different direction in her new charges that chart a course away from the issues of financing the KWA pipeline."

"Her decisions mean that some of the most important questions relating to the crisis—the political and economic forces driving the KWA pipeline—are not being addressed," said Hammer. "This adds a new tragedy for the people of Flint who deserve to know the root causes of their suffering and to hold any financial wrongdoing accountable."

Responding to the new reporting, progressive podcast host Krystal Ball tweeted that "political corruption poisoned Flint and political corruption shielded the wrongdoers from accountability."

According to Flint City Council Chair Eric Mays, who closely followed the criminal probe before and after 2018, "Nessel let it go."

"Was it a lack of political or legal will? I cannot say," Mays told The Guardian. "But it bothers me to this day her team hasn't addressed it."

see snyder crime

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/flint-michigan-water/

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan:{/2021/01/14/:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:arraignments-begin-lyon-faces-involuntary-manslaughter-charges/4156464001/

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snyder, 8 others charged in Flint water probe: 'There are no velvet ropes'

Beth LeBlanc

Craig Mauger

Leonard N. Fleming

The Detroit News

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel's office revealed 41 charges Thursday against nine former state and city officials resulting from the Flint water crisis, arguing the cases were about justice, truth and accountability.

The state and Flint officials were in power when the water crisis unfolded, including former Gov. Rick Snyder, top aide Rich Baird and the governor's two lead health officials. Prosecutors called their probe the largest criminal investigation in Michigan history and said Snyder was the first governor to face misdemeanor charges over decisions made while leading the state.

Former Gov. Rick Snyder walks past the media after his video arraignment on charges related to the Flint water crisis on Thursday, Jan. 14, 2021 outside the Genesee County Jail in downtown Flint.

"Let me be clear, there are no velvet ropes in our criminal justice system," Solicitor General Fadwa Hammoud said. "Nobody, no matter how powerful and how well connected, is above accountability when they commit a crime."

Hammoud's comments came at a press conference after nine former officials appeared in court in Genesee County. Michigan's former state health director Nick Lyon faced nine charges of involuntary manslaughter, while Baird was charged with extortion as Nessel's office on Thursday filed new allegations against former top state officials for their handling of the Flint water crisis.

The charges are tied to the lead contamination that resulted from Flint's water source switch to the Flint River in April 2014 and a 2014-15 Legionnaires' disease outbreak that was blamed for more than 90 cases, including 12 deaths.

Several of the nine people charged Thursday were close to the former Republican governor and were charged in a series of court arraignments Thursday morning.

The new charges come nearly a year and a half after other charges were filed against some of the same defendants re-charged Thursday. Nessel's office dropped the charges authorized by her Republican predecessor Attorney General Bill Schuette and started the investigation anew.

Schuette defended his investigation on social media Thursday, but said it would be improper for him to comment on the most recent charges.

"People in Flint deserve justice," Schuette said. "Their water was poisoned — 12 people died. Our independent team conducted an investigation by the book. I stand by the charges filed during my terms as Attorney General of Michigan."

Noah Hall, a Wayne State University law professor who was on the Schuette Flint investigative team, said there was initial frustration “that all the work we had done to hold government officials accountable was being tossed off and I was skeptical that anything new was going to come.”

But Hall said he was surprisingly pleased with the results of Nessel's prosecution team.

“Coming from the guy who got fired, I hope this means something," he said. "...Both seeing the charges and a little bit of factual allegations those charges are based on, it’s clear the attorney general’s team has done exactly what they promised.”

Hall said the new team has found additional evidence and they “put together an even stronger case against more defendants, and it looks like they’ve brought some more significant charges.”

Hall said he understands that people in Flint and elsewhere are frustrated that the former governor is only being charged with misdemeanors “when people died.

"I absolutely get that frustration, and I very much get the legitimate sense of injustice behind it that the loss of human life needs to be protected with something more than a $1,000 fine," he said.

But he added that he is “satisfied that the truth will get a chance to come out in court.”

The Thursday arraignments come more than six years after Flint's water source was switched under Snyder-appointed state emergency managers in 2014. The switch caused lead contamination of residents' drinking water when the river water wasn't properly treated with corrosion controls.

It's also been suspected to have been involved in 2014-15 outbreaks of Legionnaires' disease in the region that sickened more than 90 people and killed at least 12.

A more than $640 million settlement over Flint water-related civil litigation was reached last year and awaits court approval.

Former Gov. Rick Snyder

The most high-profile among the officials appearing in court Thursday was Snyder, who faces two charges of willful neglect of duty. Snyder appeared before 67th District Judge Christopher Odette at about 9:40 a.m., pleading not guilty.

Rick Snyder

Snyder and his attorney, Brian Lennon, both wearing masks, appeared over a video feed from a Genesee County jail booth. Lennon said Snyder was not guilty of the charges.

Snyder himself said only three words during the brief hearing. Odette asked him if he still lived in Michigan, and the former GOP governor responded, "Yes, your honor."

Odette set his bond at $10,000 for each of the two charges. He didn't require Snyder to surrender his passport but told him that he couldn't leave the state without the permission of the court.

The former governor's next court hearing will be Jan. 19 before Judge William H. Crawford II.

Former Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder appears in the 67th District Court of Genesee County on Thursday, Jan. 14, 2021. He faces two charges of willful neglect of duty for his handling of the Flint water crisis.

Snyder's charges, Hammoud said, are a result of his willful neglect of "his mandatory legal duties under the Michigan constitution and the Emergency Management Act, thereby failing to protect the health and safety of Flint's residents.

In a statement Thursday, Lennon said spending taxpayer dollars to pursue the "bogus" charges against Snyder would be a "travesty."

“We are confident Gov. Snyder will be fully exonerated if this flimsy case goes to trial," Lennon said. "Today’s charges do nothing to bring justice to the people of Flint. These unjustified allegations do nothing to resolve a painful chapter in the history of our state. Today’s actions merely perpetrate an outrageous political persecution.”

Nick Lyon

Each of Lyon's manslaughter charge carries a maximum penalty of 15 years and/or $7,500 fine. Lyon was originally charged with two counts of involuntary manslaughter under the special prosecutor appointed by Republican then-Attorney General Bill Schuette, but Nessel's office dropped the charges in June 2019 as it rebooted the Flint probe.

Booking photo of Nicolas Leonard Lyon from the Office of Genesee County Sheriff, Thursday, January 14, 2021.

Lyon also was charged with a 10th count of willful neglect of duty, a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine. Lyon pleaded not guilty on all counts.

The charges, Hammoud said, are related to his "failures and grossly negligent performance of his legal duties while director of MDHHS."

Lyon's bond was set at $200,000 cash surety, and he is next scheduled to appear in court on Feb. 18.

Lyon's attorney Chip Chamberlain said his client did not make the decision to switch the city's water supply and made his decisions within the health department based on the advice of public health experts.

Former health department director Nick Lyon, appears in court, Thursday, January 14, 2021.

"Our hearts go out to Flint citizens who have endured the fallout from that decision," Chamberlain said in a statement. "But it does not help the people of Flint – or our criminal justice system — for the state to charge innocent people with crimes. Mr. Lyon is innocent."

Richard Baird

Baird, one of Snyder's closest advisers who was also in charge of Flint's recovery effort, was charged with perjury during an investigative subpoena investigation, misconduct in office, obstruction of justice and extortion in relation to the Flint water case.

Booking photo of Richard Lewis Baird from the Office of Genesee County Sheriff, Thursday, January 14, 2021.

The perjury count carries up to 15 years in prison, while the misconduct charge has a penalty of up to five years in prison or $10,000 fine. The obstruction charge carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison and or a $10,000 fine, and the extortion charge carries a maximum penalty of up to 20 years and or a $10,000.

Baird improperly used state resources and personnel, Hammoud said, and "gave false statements under oath." He also attempted "to interfere or influence ongoing legal proceedings related to the Flint water crisis," she said.

Baird's extortion charge, Hammoud said, stems from a threat to "a state-appointed research team during their investigation into the source of the Legionnaire's disease outbreak in Genesee County."

Baird, a Chicago resident, is on the Eastern Michigan University Board of Regents.

Baird’s bond was set $15,000 10% bond on the perjury count, $75,000 personal recognizance on the misconduct charge, $75,000 personal recognizance on the obstruction charge, and $50,000 cash surety on the fourth count of extortion.

Rich Baird, former top aide to ex-Gov. Rick Snyder, appears in court, Thursday, January 14, 2021.

In a press release, Baird's attorney, Randall Levine, called the claims against his client "baseless."

"Mr. Baird is innocent of any wrongdoing and is being unfairly prosecuted by the state’s Democratic attorney general," Levine added.

Jarrod Agen

Booking photo of Jarrod Peter Agen from the Office of Genesee County Sheriff, Thursday, January 14, 2021.

Jarrod Agen, Snyder’s former chief of staff and Vice President Mike Pence’s former communications director, was charged with perjury during an investigative subpoena investigation.

Agen, lead spokesman for defense contractor Lockheed, pleaded not guilty to the charges. Agen is also Snyder's former director of communications.

His charge stem from "giving false statements under oath," Hammoud said.

Jarrod Agen, former chief of staff and communications director for former Gov. Rick Snyder, appears in court, Thursday, January 14, 2021.

Agen's bond was set at $35,000, 10% bond and he will appear in court next Feb. 18.

Dr. Eden Wells

Booking photo of Eden Victoria Wells from the Office of Genesee County Sheriff, Thursday, January 14, 2021.

Prosecutors also charged Dr. Eden Wells, former chief medical executive for the state Department of Health and Human Services. She now faces 12 charges, including nine counts of involuntary manslaughter.

Each of the involuntary manslaughter charges carry a maximum penalty of 15 years and/or $7,500 fine.

In addition, Wells was charged with two counts of misconduct in office and one count of willful neglect of duty. Wells pleaded not guilty.

former State Medical Executive Eden Wells appears in court, Thursday, January 14, 2021.

The charges, Hammoud said, are related to "two separate incidences of preventing or attempting to prevent the distribution of public health information about Legionnaire's disease in Genesee County."

Darnell Earley

Booking photo of Darnell Earley from the Office of Genesee County Sheriff, Thursday, January 14, 2021.

Former Flint finance director and state-appointed emergency manager Darnell Earley was arraigned on three counts of misconduct in office, punishable by up to five years in prison and/or $10,000 fine. Earley pleaded not guilty on both counts.

“This is an individual who’s a family man, he’s a lifelong resident of the state of Michigan who is in the twilight of his career but has served in government throughout the entire part … of his working life,” said Todd Russel Perkins, Earley’s lawyer.

Earley's charges relate "to city of Flint's finances as well as misinformation about the quality and safety of the Flint water supply," Hammoud said.

Darnell Earley, top left, appears before Judge Elizabeth Kelly, Thursday, January 14, 2021

The former emergency manager was given a $75,000 personal recognizance bond and is next due in court on Feb. 18.

Gerald Ambrose

Booking photo of Gerald Winfield Ambrose from the Office of Genesee County Sheriff, Thursday, January 14, 2021.

Former state-appointed emergency manager Gerald Ambrose was charged with four counts of misconduct in office, a felony punishable by up to five years and/or $10,000 fine.

Ambrose's charges stem from "acts related to the city of Flint's finances as well as Flint's water supply source," Hammoud said.

Bond was set at $75,000 personal recognizance. Ambrose is next scheduled to appear in court Feb. 18.

Howard Croft

Booking photo of Howard Dowell Croft from the Office of Genesee County Sheriff, Thursday, January 14, 2021.

Former Flint Public Works Director Howard Croft, who faces the same charges as Snyder — two counts of willful neglect — appeared before Odette at about 9 a.m. Thursday.

Croft's charges, Hammoud said, stem from a willful neglect of "his duty to ensure the safety and quality of the Flint water supply."

Odette set $10,000 personal bonds for each count faced by Croft.

Nancy Peeler

Booking photo of Nancy Ann Peeler from the Office of Genesee County Sheriff, Thursday, January 14, 2021.

Nancy Peeler, who was the state's director of maternal, infant and early childhood home visiting for the health department, was charged Thursday with two felony counts of misconduct in office and one misdemeanor count of willful neglect of duty. The felonies carry a penalty of up to five years behind bars and a fine of up to $10,000.

Peeler's charges, Hammoud said, are related to "concealing and later misrepresenting data related to elevated blood lead levels in children in the city of Flint" and the failure to act on those blood lead levels.

Peeler allegedly buried a 2015 internal report on blood lead level data in Flint kids. In the initial round of charges, she faced five-year felony misconduct and conspiracy charges, along with misdemeanor neglect of duty. Those charges were dropped when Nessel's office restarted the Flint investigation.

eleblanc@detroitnews.com

cmauger@detrotnews.com

see snyder crime

121 intercept:

....When the criminal team asked Dan Wyant, MDEQ’s director, about a governor’s briefings that mentioned Legionella, he became emotional, according to multiple sources — potentially indicating he had seen the document before. Wyant did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

A briefing memo like this would have been unlikely to get past Snyder. He received most materials directly to his iPad and was, according to sources, an information sponge who read everything sent to him.

Seven days later, on October 29, Wyant traveled to Flint to meet with Earley, the emergency manager, and other city officials. Daugherty Johnson, a Flint water plant official, told investigators that Legionella in Flint was discussed in the meeting, according to multiple sources. Johnson also shared that Stephen Busch, an MDEQ drinking water supervisor, went into full-on damage control mode, reportedly warning that the Legionella issue “may blow” and become a public PR nightmare for the Snyder administration.

Two days after the meeting, Earley sent a thank-you email to Wyant for coming to Flint to discuss the city’s water issues. Earley then forwarded the email he sent to Wyant to Snyder’s right-hand man Richard Baird, offering to debrief him on the meeting. Baird responded boisterously, “Very good! Let’s get together after the election. Great work!”

Baird, who allegedly attempted to pay off sick Flint residents in order to silence them, is one of the officials set to be charged by the state attorney general, according to news reports. Baird did not respond to request for comment.

IN APRIL, the Flint water crisis enters its seventh year. Despite news headlines declaring Flint’s water safe to drink, residents who The Intercept has spoken to challenge such proclamations.

Melissa Mays, a Flint resident and leading water activist, challenged the state’s claims that Flint’s water is safe. “As of right now, the damaged City’s distribution mains still remain in the ground and our corroded interior plumbing, fixtures and appliances have not been replaced,” Mays said. “As long as our water flows through these pipes up into our taps, it will continue to be contaminated.”

While charges against former Gov. Rick Snyder, former health director Nick Lyon, Richard Baird, and others appear imminent, the finalizing of a $641 million civil settlement negotiated between Nessel and attorneys representing Flint residents also appears imminent. On Monday, nearly two dozen Flint residents held a press conference to opposethe settlement, believing it is insufficient and won’t be allocated fairly.

In response to news reports that Snyder will be charged with willful neglect of duty, Mays didn’t hold back. “The rumors that former Governor Rick Snyder is only going to be charged with a misdemeanor is BEYOND disgusting and insulting,” Mays wrote. “The Attorney General choosing to charge the man who made himself the unilateral dictator over my City, poison us, lie to us and watch us suffer with a small misdemeanor just proves to us in Flint that if you are a rich white man, it’s not considered an ACTUAL crime to poison poor, black and brown communities for profit, it’s only a minor fine and a slap on the wrist.”

https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/rick-snyder-flint/

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Republican Governor Rick Snyder of Michigan, whose actions led to the Flint water crisis that flowed poisonous water in to 100,000 homes and businesses, will be charged after an investigation by that state's new Attorney General, Dana Nessel.

"Snyder, his health director and other ex-officials have been told they're being charged after a new investigation of the Flint water scandal, which devastated the majority Black city with lead-contaminated water and was blamed for a deadly outbreak of Legionnaires' disease in 2014-15," The Associated Press reports.

The AP's Michigan government/politics correspondent David Eggert:

The disaster was headline news for months. It started when Gov. Snyder decided to appoint his own manager to run the city, a tactic MSNBC's Rachel Maddow was among the first to decry as dangerous and possibly unconstitutional. In what was called a cost-saving measure Flint's water supply was switched to a different source, and contaminated water that subsequently also destroyed water pipes, leeching lead into drinking water, flowed.

"The outbreak was announced by Snyder and Lyon in January 2016, although Lyon conceded that he knew that cases were being reported many months earlier," the AP notes.

Flint youth activist Amariyanna Copeny, known as Little Miss Flint, points out years after the disaster began Flint's water system is still not fixed.

NBC's Geoff Bennett weighs in:

Physician who sounded the alarm over rise in lead levels in children's blood:

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Detroit cops handcuffed black police commissioner for asking tough questions at public hearing

Matthew Chapman / Raw Story

great: environmental justice for the win as Detroit shuts down nation’s largest municipal trash incinerator

Environmental justice activists in Detroit have fought for decades to get a polluting trash incinerator named “Detroit Renewable Power” shut down.
Their efforts succeeded earlier this year, when the plant finally shut down, on March 27, although the site still operates as a garbage transfer station.
“Most of the waste” — one million tons of solid waste from 13 southeastern Michigan counties — “[came] from whiter, more affluent communities, placing the burden of disposal on a mostly African American, lower-income community — classic environmental racism,” Kim Hunter, an environmental justice activist with Breathe Free Detroit, told a reporter.
Air pollution from the incinerator has caused spiking asthma rates and lung health problems in nearby African American neighborhoods, which also have endured daily life amid nauseating garbage odors.
A 2016 state report found that asthma rates for Detroit adults are nearly 30 percent greater than those in the rest of the state.
U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the congresswoman representing the neighborhoods near the incinerator, wants local residents to have “legal recourse” and “include the community in conversations about what will happen next with the property surrounding the incinerator.”
Read all about it in Midwest Energy News.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/prosecutors-throw-out-charges-in-flint-water-crisis-cases-in-perplexing-and-disturbing-move/

Prosecutors throw out charges in Flint water crisis cases in perplexing and disturbing move

JESSICA CORBETT / COMMON DREAMS

14 JUN 2019 AT 01:58 ET

In a move that elicited fresh concerns and demands for justice, the Michigan prosecution team investigating the Flint water crisis announced Thursday that it was dismissing all pending criminal charges against eight former and current officials and launching a new probe, citing concerns with the initial one.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel appointed Fadwa Hammoud as the state’s solicitor general in January and assigned her to take over the criminal cases related to Flint’s water crisis, which started five years ago when a governor-appointed emergency manager switched the city’s water supply to a polluted river.

“We cannot provide the citizens of Flint the investigation they rightly deserve by continuing to build on a flawed foundation. Dismissing these cases allows us to move forward according to the non-negotiable requirements of a thorough, methodical, and ethical investigation,” Hammoud and Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy, who has been assisting with the cases, said Thursday.

The prosecutors dismissed charges against former Michigan Department of Health and Human Services director Nick Lyon; Eden Wells, the state’s former chief medical executive; former emergency managers Gerald Ambrose and Darnell Earley; DHHS officials Nancy Peeler and Robert Scott; Michigan Department of Environmental Quality official Patrick Cook; and former Flint Department of Public Works Director Howard Croft. Because the charges were dismissed without prejudice, “we are not precluded from refiling charges against the defendants,” the prosecutors emphasized, “or adding new charges and additional defendants.”

Mary Grant, Public Water for All Campaign Director at Food & Water Watch, said in a statement that the decision “can only be acceptable if the prosecution team refiles and aggressively pursues new charges swiftly.”

“Flint residents deserve a comprehensive and just investigation that results in appropriate restitution. We are outraged to hear about the political influence that muddied the previous cases through failure to seek all evidence,” Grant added. “We know one thing for sure: the Snyder administration and his emergency managers made the disastrous decisions that caused the Flint water crisis. We must hold them accountable and everyone who aggravated this public health calamity. There is no more time for dubious foot-dragging; it’s time for Flint to see some justice.”

Flint residents, as BuzzFeed reported Thursday, “are still dealing with the crisis’ fallout: childrenwhose neurological development may have been irreversibly damaged; pregnant women who had miscarriages after drinking the contaminated water—the number of miscarriages spiked by 58 percent after the water was switched; people whose trust in their elected officials and reliance on the infrastructure that runs through their city has been turned upside down; and corroded lead pipes on the main water lines and in peoples’ homes that are yet to be replaced.”

Some Flint residents and activists, such as Melissa Mays, expressed skepticism about the prosecutors’ move. Mays told the New York Times, “My heart breaks for the families that have lost loved ones.”

“This is not justice for them. It just seems like a political ploy,” she said. “The only thing it tells me is our lives don’t matter.”

Nayyirah Shariff, director of the grassroots group Flint Rising, called the announcement “a slap in the face to Flint residents.”

Shariff told the Detroit Free Press, “I’m very disappointed with Dana Nessel’s office because she ran on a platform that she was going to provide justice for Flint resident, and it doesn’t seem like justice is coming.”

Others welcomed the announcement as a step toward accountability. Nurse Julia Pulver, who was defeated by a Republican opponent in a state Senate race last year, applauded the move, tweeting that “the people of Flint deserve real justice.”

@VotePulver

@dananessel & her team realized after taking over that the #FlintWaterCrisis investigation was set up to fail & designed to let those prosecuted off the hook.

I applaud the AG & co for deciding to start over & do it right. The people of Flint deserve real justice #JusticeForFlint

Michigan Attorney General

@MIAttyGen

Nessel, the state’s attorney general, said in a statement backing the prosecutors’ decision, “I want to remind the people of Flint that justice delayed is not always justice denied, and a fearless and dedicated team of career prosecutors and investigators are hard at work to ensure that those who harmed you are held accountable.”

Democratic state Senate Minority Leader Jim Ananich—who represents Flint—issued a statement expressing his disappointment “that justice continues to be delayed and denied to the people of my city.” Vowing to continue to fight for his constituents, he said that “the people of Flint believe that they will never see justice, and sadly, so far they’ve been proven right.”

Hammoud and Worthy, in a statement Thursday, explained what led to the decision to launch a new investigation:

Upon assuming responsibility of this case, our team of career prosecutors and investigators had immediate and grave concerns about the investigative approach and legal theories embraced by the [Office of Special Counsel], particularly regarding the pursuit of evidence. After a complete evaluation, our concerns were validated. Contrary to accepted standards of criminal investigation and prosecution, all available evidence was not pursued. Instead, the OSC entered into agreements that gave private law firms—representing Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, the Department of Treasury, and the Executive Office of former Governor Rick Snyder—a role in deciding what information would be turned over to law enforcement.

Authorities recently executed search warrants for new materials after a trove of evidence was discovered in the basement of a state-owned building. Hammoud and Worthy disclosed Thursday that “this week, we completed the transfer into our possession millions of documents and hundreds of new electronic devices, significantly expanding the scope of our investigation.”

Through investigators’ efforts to seek out more evidence, “our team has already identified additional individuals of interest and new information relevant to the Flint water crisis,” Hammoud and Worthy said. “These investigative leads will be aggressively pursued. Additionally, we will evaluate criminal culpability for all Legionnaires deaths that occurred after the switch to the Flint River, which was never done by the OSC.”

“We understand this decision will not bring immediate remedy or relief to the citizens of Flint, who remain victims of one of the worst man-made environmental disasters in United States history,” they added. “However, we recognize the only acceptable remedy is the vigorous pursuit of justice, which demands an uncompromising investigation of the Flint water crisis and professional prosecution of all those criminally culpable. Accordingly, our team will move forward unrestrained by political motivations, prior tactics, or opportunities for financial gain.”

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/federal-judge-says-flint-water-lawsuit-actually-can-target-the-former-governor-meaning-he-may-finally-be-held-accountable/

A federal judge on Monday—who agreed that allegations of “conscience shocking” conduct claimed by plaintiffs were “plausible”—reinstated Michigan’s former Governor Rick Snyder as a defendant in a class action lawsuit by the victims of the water crisis in the city of Flintthat first captured national headlines in 2014.

After earlier removing Snyder from the suit, brought by city residents harmed by the poisoning of the municipal water supply, U.S. District Court Judge Judith Levy reversed that decision as she noted the plaintiffs had shown the allegations against Snyder and his fellow co-defendants “plausibly describe ‘conscience shocking’ conduct” as thepeople of Flint were stripped of 14th Amendment protections from bodily harm or injury.

The plaintiffs in the suit, Levy wrote in her ruling,

"plausibly state that the Governor acted indifferently to the risk of harm they faced, demonstrating a callous disregard for their right to bodily integrity. This indifference manifested itself in two ways.Initially, the Governor was indifferent because instead of mitigating the risk of harm caused by the contaminated water, he covered it up. In private, he worried about the need to return Flint to DWSD water and the political implications of the crisis. But in public, he denied all knowledge, despite being aware of the developing crisis.”

As a result, plaintiffs were lured into a false sense of security. They could have taken protective measures, if only they had known what the Governor knew. Instead, the Governor misled them into assuming that nothing was wrong. Governor Snyder’s administration even encouraged them to continue to drink and bathe in the water."

The legal team representing the plaintiffs welcome the judge’s determination.

“We are grateful that the Court agrees former Governor Snyder should be held accountable for his role in the Flint water crisis,” said attorney Theodore J. Leopold, co-lead for the plaintiffs.

“The citizens of Flint were both forgotten and mistreated by those involved in the Flint water disaster,” Leopold added. “To this day, residents continue to suffer because of the reckless decisions of senior state and local officials, as well as private contractors, and we hope to provide a measure of justice and some much-needed relief to those still struggling to recover.”

According to a statement from the plaintiff’s legal team, the complaint submitted to the court alleged that Snyder and his staff were aware of the health risks associated with the city’s transition to Flint River water, including the risk of Legionnaires’ disease, for months before an official announcement was made and that they concealedthis information from the public. Overall, the lawsuit charges that officials from the state of Michigan, the city of Flint, Genesee County, and two private engineering firms created the public health crisis and did so while making calculated decisions that “deliberately exposed” residents of Flint to the harmful health effects of lead and other toxins.

“Rather than moving swiftly to protect the children and families of Flint, the state engaged in a cover-up which tragically led to preventable injuries and deaths of innocent Flint residents,” added Michael L. Pitt, the other co-lead in the case. “Those responsible for creating and prolonging the Flint Water crisis will be held accountable.”

BookTV talked to journalist Anna Clark about the water crisis in Flint, Michigan.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?453821-22/interview-anna-clark

AUGUST 2, 2018

The Poisoned City

Journalist Anna Clark chronicled the water crisis in Flint, Michigan.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?448935-1/the-poisoned-city

gubmint bureaucrat scapegoat?

Judge Orders Michigan Health Director to Face Trial Over Flint Water Crisis Deaths

Michigan Department of Health and Human Services Director Nick Lyon will be the highest ranking official to go to trial so far as a result of an investigation into the Flint water crisis, The Associated Press reported Monday.

Judge David Goggins ruled Monday there was probable cause for Lyon to stand trial for involuntary manslaughter in the deaths of Robert Skidmore and John Snyder that prosecutors say were due to a Legionnaires' disease outbreak that Lyon was aware of a year before he alerted Michigan's governor, Michigan Live reported. Lyons is also charged with misconduct in office.

...

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/08/05/flint-water-crisis-dayne-walling-mayor-state-representative-2018-219078

https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/what-do-the-koch-brothers-have-to-do-with-the-flint-water-crisis/

Clean drinking water *:{is:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:*:{ a right.:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: Not a privilege.

Unfortunately, a predominantly poor, black community north of Detroit, Michigan lost that right when people in power prioritized short-cuts and special interests over basic survival needs of the people they are supposed to serve.

What happened to Flint’s drinking water is just the most recent example of people in power trampling over the rights of those without that power.

The Problem With the Water in Flint

If anyone asks whether you would rather drink water from a beautiful lake, like Lake Huron, or from a city river with industrial runoff and sewage, like the Flint River, choose the lake. Every time. Of course, the people of Flint were not given that option. They probably would have said “no thanks” to the industrial sewage.

What makes the Flint River such an atrocious source for water is its high levels of chloride, making it “corrosive” and extremely difficult to sanitize. Further, the corrosive quality of the water acts like a magnet to lead. LEAD. What you once thought was an environmental and health nightmare from the 70s and 80s showed up in the drinking water, the homes, and devastatingly, the children of Flint.

Lead poisoning — even at low levels of exposure — is highlydangerous, causing severe cognitive and development issues in children. There is a reason that people do everything in their power to keep lead the hell away from them. Those in charge of protecting the people of Flint ended up poisoning the city’s children with lead.

To be exact, :{Michigan’s health officials say that :(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}::{every child under six :(style="box-sizing:border-box;font-weight:700"):}::{in Flint should now be considered lead-exposed:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:.

In Flint, the warning signs were immediate. Mere months after the city’s water started coming from the Flint River, General Motors decided that Flint’s water wasn’t good enough for auto parts so the company struck a deal to have its manufacturing facility receive water from Detroit instead.

Car parts: 1. People of Flint: 0.

Whose Idea Was It to Switch the Water?

Governor Rick Snyder of Michigan, elected in 2011 and a former CEO of a computer company with little governing experience, had tapped several “emergency financial managers” across the state in cities that had no money, including Flint.

As a way to save money, one of the managers in 2014 chose to switch Flint’s water from Detroit’s source of Lake Huron to the Flint River. To ensure that this switch would not poison people and forever change the lives of thousands of children, a system to sanitize the water would need to be in place. It was not. The “emergency managers” appointed by Governor Snyder made the switch anyway, opening spigots of poisonous water across the city like some alternate plot in a Batman movie. In this version, however, the villains are not masked lunatics and dark-alley criminals, but those in charge of managing a city.

The switch was supposed to save $1 million.If trading the health and safety of children to save money seems like a deal with the devil, it’s pretty close.

The infamous Koch brothers are not the only family that has used its gargantuan fortune to impact policy for the worse. In Michigan, another family has been throwing its money around to support an ideological agenda that led to the Flint water crisis.

Who Gave Them That idea?

Behind the decision to switch Flint’s water source is a political concept from a think tank funded by a family determined to turn their extremist government-sabotaging ideas into policy. Policies that make government so dysfunctional that it leads to the poisoning of an entire community of children.

The think tank in question here is the Mackinac Center of Michigan funded by the powerful and defiantly conservative DeVos family. In Jane Mayer’s recent book “Dark Money”, she claims that “few played bigger roles than the DeVoses in bankrolling the conservative movement” that the Devoses. The family owes its fortune to the ownership of Amway marketing, which sells everything from household cleaners to nutritional supplements. A fraction of their enormous wealth has been used to fund conservative think tanks like the Mackinac Center, a conservative Michigan think tank and offshoot of the DC-based Heritage Foundation. Along with Charles and David Koch, the DeVos family and their foundations are some of thebiggest financial backers of the Mackinac Center and Dick Devos served on its board. Devos made a failed bidfor the governor of Michigan in 2006.

In 2011, Snyder was elected governor. In coordination with conservative state legislators, Snyder quickly moved to enact the emergency manager law, which allowed appointed — not elected — city managers to privatize city services, cancel union contracts, and dissolve local governments. Snyder had done so under the influence of the Mackinac Center, and includedall of the recommendations from the think tank regarding the power and ability of these emergency managers.

And then one of those managers chose to cut costs by giving the people of Flint untreated water that would later end up poisoning them with lead, a move from which the community may never recover.

So, Flint is no accident. It is the gruesome outcome of systematic racism and people must be held accountable. It is the logical result of an ideological agenda that deliberately sabotages well-functioning government services and basic infrastructure in the name of fiscal austerity.

The same story is being played out — in different ways — all over the country. Government functions that help keep communities healthy — including basic environmental rights and public health services — have been weakened and tossed in the name of bloodless bureaucratic budget cuts. Recalling a few politicians and firing a few bureaucrats — while necessary — is not enough to solve the problem or keep it from happening over and over. The poisonous policies that Devos and Koch-funded groups like the Mackinac Center have been pushing must be exposed and expunged at the same time. And candidates running to replace the toady politicians that serve these social saboteurs need to demonstrate an understanding of the bigger backstory and offer an agenda that treats the causes, not just the symptoms.

This weekend, our Democratic presidential candidates will debate in Flint, Michigan. More than 80,000 people have asked the CNN debate moderatorsto push the candidates on issues of environmental justice and institutional racism. We expect them to answer that request, telling everyone how they plan to hold those accountable for poisoning a city and how to ensure it never happens again.

For more behind what caused the Flint water crisis, and several other social, racial and environmental injustices in the state of Michigan, please follow We the People of Detroit.

https://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/03/13064/flint-casualty-right-wing-government-experiment

arn p

Flint Is a Casualty in the Right Wing's War on Local Democracy

Submitted by Arn Pearson on March 31,

This month's hearing in Congress about the crisis in Flint, Michigan shed more heat than light on the decisions that poisoned the water more than 100,000 residents rely on to drink and bathe, including nearly 30,000 children and teens. Democrats focused their ire on Governor Rick Snyder, while Republicans predictably tried to deflect blame onto the Environmental Protection Agency as part of their long-standing campaign to eliminate the agency responsible for regulating polluters.

But two Members of Congress honed in on the real culprit in the debacle: Governor Snyder's "emergency manager" law that stripped Flint of any local democratic control and put its fate in the hands of unaccountable executives hand-picked by Snyder.

"Did that emergency management system fail under your leadership in this matter?" asked Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ), demanding a yes or no response from Snyder.

"That would be a fair conclusion," Snyder eventually conceded.

"This is a failure of a philosophy of governance you advocated," said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA). "A city in America... is on its knees because of your emergency manager's decision to save $4 million. And now it's going to cost a lot more to clean up."

Is this really happening in the world's leading republic?

Funding the War on Local Democracy

Governor Snyder's controversial emergency manager law is a cornerstone of the Right Wing's war on labor and local democracy in Michigan, which has been orchestrated by a network of "think tanks" and committees backed by the billionaire DeVos family, the Michigan Chamber of Commerce, the Kochs, and other politicos.

Thanks to record spending by outside groups in 2010 and $6 million of Snyder's own fortune, the Republican Party in Michigan joined 11 other states in capturing the governor's mansion from the Democrats and flipped the Michigan House, giving the party a lock on political power for the first time since 2002.

The Republican Governors Association Michigan 2010 PAC dominated the playing field to become the "largest political action committee in the history of Michigan politics," according to the Michigan Campaign Finance Network.

Through an elaborate shell game, 98 percent of the $8.4 million raised and spent by the RGA MI 2010 PAC came from outside Michigan, while Michigan donors gave the national Republican Governors Association (RGA) $8.6 million, including $5.4 million from the state Chamber of Commerce.

The RGA MI 2010 PAC then contributed $5.3 million to the state Republican Party, and sent off $3 million to back Rick Perry's bid for a third term as governor of Texas, while the national RGA spent $3.6 million on sham issue ads attacking Snyder's Democratic opponent. Still with me?

All in all, the RGA raised and redistributed $114 million to PACs in at least 15 states, helping to elect a slate of right-wing governors, including Wisconsin's Scott Walker, who moved quickly to attack public sector unions.

Right-wing billionaires and their corporations played a big role in raising all that money. Records on Open Secrets show that the DeVos family, Amway, and its parent company, Alticor, pumped $1.9 million into the RGA's 2010 political operation.

David Koch personally gave $1 million, while his brother William chipped in $100,000 and Koch Industries another $50,000. The Kochs have since become RGA's #1 source of cash, bankrolling the RGA to the tune of $5.3 million during the 2014 election cycle.

Paul Singer also ponied up $1.4 million. Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson gave a million that year, and News America, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. that owns the pro-Republican outlet Fox News, sprung another $1.3 million.

DeVos Dynasty Targets Michigan

Although Snyder—a business executive and venture capitalist—campaigned as a moderate Republican who promised to run the state like a business and create jobs, the deep pockets driving the Republican surge had more ambitious ideas.

Their goals: break the unions, scrap public sector labor contracts, and privatize government services.

Dick DeVos, son of billionaire businessman and Amway co-founder Richard DeVos, took a first crack at this agenda when he spent $35 million of the family fortune to run for governor in 2006. He lost badly, but he didn't let up.

In 2009, DeVos helped his close ally, Ron Weiser, get elected as chair of the Michigan Republican Party, where he was able to coordinate the party's 2010 landslide victory. By 2014, political observers were calling the DeVos family Michigan's "most potent interest group," and their spending on in-state candidates and political committees had increased to $4.9 million.

After Snyder's election, DeVos-backed groups like the Mackinac Center for Public Policy were poised to help move his legislative agenda forward.

Launched in 1987, the Mackinac Center is one of the nation's largest state-based, right-wing pressure groups promoting "free market," pro-business policies. It is an active member of the State Policy Network (SPN) and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), two important cogs in the Koch machine.

Mackinac has long been one of the key groups leading the Michigan charge for the big ticket items on DeVos' right-wing wish list, including breaking the back of organized labor.

Ronald Reagan may have once said, "[w]here free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost," but that's just crazy-liberal talk as far as the Mackinac Center is concerned.

As a Mackinac staffer told a state legislator in 2011: "Our goal is [to] outlaw government collective bargaining in Michigan."

Mackinac's activities have been fueled by DeVos as well as money from the Koch network of billionaires. Between 2010 and 2012, the Mackinac Center received $1.5 million from the DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund, preferred investment vehicles of the Koch donor network, and four DeVos foundations kicked in another $560,000 between 1998 and 2011.

However, those totals public do not reveal how much billionaire cash Mackinac has received through checks from personal trust accounts or from corporations, which are not publicly reported.

Mackinac at the Root of Sweeping Emergency Manager Powers

Once sworn in, Snyder wasted no time in making one of the most audacious power grabs in the country.

On March 16, 2011, while thousands protested outside, he signed Public Act 4 into law, giving him the ability to take near-total control over financially struggling municipalities through appointed "emergency managers."

Few could have been more pleased than the DeVos family and their confederates at the Mackinac Center.

The provision for emergency financial managers dates back to a 1988 Michigan law, but those managers wielded limited power.

Mackinac's Louis Schimmel called for loosening limits and expanding managers' powers as early as 2005, and the group reprinted his article in January 2011. They argued that: "The state's policy prescription for fiscally floundering cities should be to appoint[] far more powerful emergency financial managers than they have in the past."

Mackinac pressed for sweeping authority for emergency managers to assume the powers of elected city councils and mayors, break union contracts, and revise municipal charters, while getting legal immunity from any liability for the results of their actions.

Snyder's emergency manager law included all four of those changes, and the Mackinac bunch patted themselves on the back while singing the law's praises.

Concerned citizens and critics, however, denounced it as "financial martial law."

Other cities around the country have had emergency managers, including New York City in the 1970s, but their powers were limited to financial matters.

The Snyder-Mackinac approach to the law was dramatically, exponentially different. It gave unelected and unaccountable managers chosen by the governor near total control over all city decisions—including things like where a city gets its water.

Snyder's First Emergency "Tyrant"? A Mackinac Guy

Snyder chose the architect of the expanded emergency powers—Mackinac's Louis Schimmel—to be the first person he appointed as an emergency manager, installing him as the potentate for Pontiac, Schimmel's home town.

Within months, Schimmel had fired key city officials and privatized the entire public works department. The Pontiac City Council still held their weekly meetings, packed with angry citizens, but they had no authority to make any decisions.

When asked by a local radio station if the emergency manager law made him a dictator, Schimmel replied: "I guess I'm the tyrant in Pontiac then, if that's the way it is."

Schimmel didn't get any argument from state court judge Rae Lee Chabot, who reversed the manager's action to cut Pontiac's pension board in half, a decision that ignored the legal requirements of Michigan's Open Meetings Act.

"[I]t looks like a dictatorship," Chabot said.

State-Controlled Pontiac Outsources Water to Indicted Corporation

Shortly before Schimmel took control of Pontiac using the law he helped create, his predecessor as emergency manager of Pontiac, Michael Stampfler, flexed his muscles under Snyder's new law and outsourced the city's water treatment to United Water Services.

Watchdog Chris Savage broke the story on Eclectablog.

"This is big news," he wrote, because the giant for-profit water company had just been indicted by a federal grand jury in 2010 on 26 felony counts of conspiracy and Clean Water Act violations for its mishandling of water services in Gary, Indiana. (The company's workers have since been acquitted of criminal charges in the Gary case, but United Water paid $645,000 in civil fines under a consent agreement in 2014.)

Schimmel completed the outsourcing process in November 2011 by firing key public works employees and turning full control over to United Water.

Before long, consumer complaints over water quality, outages, and sewer backups started piling up. It took nearly three years before Oakland County, where Pontiac is situated, announced that it was taking over operations.

All the warning signs were there for Flint.

Savage summed up the problem well:

Emergency Financial Managers are generally good at what they do. They are typically trained as accountants and business optimizers. They know how to trim and cut and lean out organizations to squeeze every last drop of profits out of them. Unfortunately for the residents of Michigan, things like parks, public safety and the protection of natural resources don't produce profits and generally are presented as 'costs'…When we begin to put a price tag on the very things that make our cities, society and state good, safe, livable and lovable, while putting CPA-like EFMs in charge, you can expect that these things will suffer in order to save money, even if it puts our citizens at risk."

Democracy? What Democracy?

Citizens and public employees in Michigan were not having it.

Following extensive protests, opponents sprang into action and quickly gathered more than 200,000 signatures to qualify a voter initiative, Proposal 1, for the November 2012 ballot to repeal Snyder's expanded emergency manager law.

Stand Up for Democracy, the ballot committee backing Proposal 1, received 91 percent of its funding from the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Michigan Council 25, according to the Michigan Campaign Finance Network.

Opposition to Proposal 1 was led by Bob LaBrant, Senior Counsel at the Sterling Corporation, a leading Republican PR firm, and the former director of political and legal campaigns at the Michigan Chamber of Commerce for 34 years. LaBrant's ballot committee, called Citizens for Fiscal Responsibility, focused its strategy on a court fight to bump Proposal 1 off the ballot. That effort ultimately failed, and the group spent little on campaigning against the measure.

On November 6, 2012, 53 percent of Michigan's voters cast ballots to repeal Snyder's emergency manager law. But that didn't stop Governor Snyder and his backers.

Barely one month later, Snyder pushed a slightly revised bill through the lame duck legislature and restored the sweeping powers of his emergency managers.

Only this time, he added an appropriation which, under Michigan law, prevents it from being subject to referendum. Check and mate.

Kevyn Orr, who later became emergency manager for Detroit, sent an email to the Detroit Free Press saying, "Michigan's EM law is a clear end-around the prior initiative that was rejected by the voters in November. ...[A]though the new law provides the thin veneer of a revision it is essentially a redo of the prior rejected law."

The new law did contain what critics call a "choose your poison" provision, allowing municipalities to choose between an emergency manager, bankruptcy, arbitration, or a consent agreement.

Not on the table for cash-strapped cities reeling from the collapse of the auto industry and the impact of free trade agreements: any state largesse like the 86 percent corporate income tax cut that Snyder handed Michigan businesses in 2011, worth an estimated $1.7 billion per year.

The resurrection of Snyder's emergency manager law wasn't even the most dramatic thing to happen in the 2012 lame duck session.

According to Mother Jones, DeVos and his close allies—who led a $23.2 million campaign to defeat another voter initiative, Proposal 2, aimed at enshrining collective bargaining in the state constitution—had devised a plan to ram through "right-to-work" legislation before anyone knew what hit them.

They pitched the plan to legislative leadersand a Snyder aide on November 20, and by early December unleashed an ad campaign using a new group, the Michigan Freedom Fund, closely tied to Dick DeVos.

Snyder surprised the public by calling the measure to a vote on December 6, and five days later the birthplace of modern industrial unions became a "right-to-work" state.

The following May, at the State Policy Network's annual meeting in Oklahoma City, Dick DeVos and the Mackinac Center were recognized for their leadership in the legislative fight to win passage of the "right-to-work" law in Michigan. As reported by PR Watch, Dick's wife Betsy DeVos personally presented SPN's highest award to Mackinac's president, Joseph Lehman.

Mackinac's blog noted that it had been pushing for "right-to-work" since 1990 and had posted more than 500 "articles, blog posts, special essays and news [clips] generated by Mackinac Center analysts" backing the legislation.

The victory didn't come cheap.

The big players of Michigan's right wing had spent millions to defeat Proposal 2, an attempt to protect union rights in the state.

That funding included $9.2 million from the Michigan Chamber of Commerce, $5.5 million from the Michigan Alliance for Business Growth, $2 million from the DeVos family, and $2 million from Sheldon and Miriam Adelson.

The Michigan Freedom Fund spent another $1 million on the post-election ad campaign leading up to legislature's adoption of the "right-to-work" law.

The Mackinac Center had an annual budget of $4.4 million as of 2012. Aside from checks to groups that do not disclose their major donors, the DeVos family spent more than $44 million in publicly reported funding on the Republican Party, party committees, and candidates in Michigan between 1997 and 2013.

Expanded Emergency Management Comes to Flint

Plagued by the loss of 90 percent of its industrial workforce, disinvestment, and depopulation, Flint was facing a severe financial crisis by the time Governor Snyder took office.

Since then, Snyder has appointed four emergency managers to seize control of the city's assets and run Flint's local affairs.

Flint voters elected a new mayor on November 8, 2011, but a state review panel declared a "local government financial emergency" the same day, and Snyder had installed his first emergency manager, Michael Brown, by December 1.

The next day, Brown dismissed more than half a dozen key city administrators and Flint's elected officials had their pay and benefits removed.

In January 2012, angry Flint residents joined a protest near Governor Snyder's home. AFSCME filed suit and managed to get a restraining order on Brown, but Brown was back by April in time to unveil his budget, which included cuts in nearly every department and a tax hike.

Jack McHugh at Mackinac claimed in a March 2012 column that municipal budget problems were a "cancerous fiscal malpractice," and he argued that Snyder's emergency manager expansion provided the "rigorous 'chemotherapy'" needed "to sustain the necessary functions of tapped-out school districts and local governments."

In Flint's case, the cure turned out to be worse than the disease.

Frustrated with expensive water service from Detroit and frequent rate increases, Flint and surrounding Genesee County had joined nearby cities in 2010 to form the new Karegnondi Water Authority.The plan was to obtain water directly from Lake Huron once a new pipeline was complete. (That is now projected to be June 2016.)

The Flint City Council voted for the new water source in March 2013, albeit symbolically as it had no power, and the emergency manager and state treasurer approved a plan to switch water supplies a few weeks later.

That's when the trouble started.

"Flint Residents Can Taste History"

In April 2014, the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) notified Flint that its contract would be up in a year and offered to negotiate a short-term contract while the city waited for the new pipeline.

However, Flint's second emergency manager, Ed Kurtz, hired a private engineering firm to develop a plan to switch to the polluted Flint River for the interim period instead, in order to save money.

Come March 2014, Darnell Earley, now Snyder's third emergency manager for Flint, wrote to DWSD that "there will be no need for Flint to continue purchasing water to serve its residents and businesses after April 17, 2014," despite DWSD's renewed offers. Why Earley couldn't work out an agreement with DWSD remains a mystery, as Detroit was also under the complete control of another emergency manager, Kevyn Orr.

Governor Snyder's Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) gave its blessing to the change on April 9. The changeover was expected to save Flint $5 million over two years.

On April 25, 2014, Flint officially made the fateful switch to the Flint River for its water in a ceremony attended by local and state officials. "This is indeed the best choice for the city of Flint going forward," Emergency Manager Earley said.

"It will take two days before Flint residents can taste history," reported the press, M-Live.com.

Flint's otherwise powerless mayor pressed the button to switch the water feed, and officials raised glasses of treated water in a toast.

Unfortunately, Flint residents tasted history pretty quickly.

Complaints started flooding in about the water's taste, smell, and color by June, and people said it was making them sick. Residents endured two "boil" advisories due to high coliform bacteria levels and faced unsafe levels of a carcinogenic chlorine byproduct before the University of Michigan-Flint was the first to find high lead levels in its water on January 9, 2015.

Flint's City Council voted to return to Detroit water in March 2015, but Emergency Manager Earley said no. In fact, a $7 million emergency loan from Governor Snyder's state government in April 2015 was conditioned on Flint not rejoining the DTWS.

Even as the findings of lead contamination piled up over the ensuing months, the state insisted there was no problem.

The Rachel Maddow Show and Amy Goodman's Democracy Now were the only two major national television news outlets to sound the alarm and persistently cover the disaster unfolding in Flint, while Snyder and others said there was no story, no crisis to tell—despite the pleas from Flint residents.

It took more than nine months after the state university found high lead in the water before Governor Snyder finally conceded, on September 30, 2015, that "mistakes were made."

The next day, Genesee County declared a public health emergency for Flint.

Emails since released by the governor's office show that "nearly every person in the governor's inner circle was aware of alarming concerns about the city's water" as early as October 2014. And a task force appointed by Snyder found that individuals and scientists who sounded the alarm about Flint's water were met with "aggressive dismissal, belittlement, and attempts to discredit [their] efforts."

A week later, Governor Snyder announced that Flint would switch back to Detroit water at a cost of $12 million. But by then the damage was done.

The children of Flint face permanent damage.

And, after a closed-door meeting with Snyder, Flint's mayor said that the cost of replacing pipes corroded by Flint River water could reach $1.5 billion.

Snyder's role in the Flint scandal led native son Michael Moore to call for his arrest, and the Board of State Canvassers has approved two petitions to put a voter recall of Snyder on the ballot.

Poisoned by Hubris

Flint's water disaster serves as an urgent warning of the dangers communities face when they lose their democracy.

Flint's City Council never voted to use the Flint River while it waited for the Karegnondi pipeline to be completed. That decision was made by Snyder's hand-picked managers with the power to override all elected officials, local contracts, and even the city's charter, with no way for local citizens to hold them accountable.

Howard Croft, former director of Flint's public works, told the ACLU of Michigan that the decision to use the Flint River "went up through the state...all the way to the governor's office."

The decision to use Flint River, in turn, was signed off on by Snyder's pick for director of the DEQ, Dan Wyant, who had helped business owners grow their companies and had managed the Department of Agriculture, but who had zero environmental experience.

Wyant resigned in December 2015 after a state task force blamed DEQ for failing to ensure that Flint residents had safe drinking water.

What happened to the other communities in the same position as Flint but living under actual local democracies?

Flint Township and Genesee County are also leaving Detroit water for the new Karegnondi pipeline, but they negotiated interim contracts with the DTWS and kept clean water for their residents.

Only the powerless residents of Flint were poisoned.

Racial Bias

The racial implications of Snyder's emergency manager law and the Flint scandal are hard to overlook.

While Snyder's law is neutral on its face, it has had a dramatically disparate impact on blacks.

By 2013, half of Michigan's black population had been placed under emergency managers or consent agreements, and no longer had any meaningful right to vote or redress their grievances at the local level.

Only 2 percent of white Michigan residents were subjected to rule by emergency managers.

Flint has a majority black population, while the rest of Genesee County is majority white and considerably wealthier.

When the mostly white communities of Handy Township and Livingston County experienced a financial crisis, their Republican state representatives went to bat for them and fought for a state bailout. State Rep. Cindy Denby (who is white) was quoted as saying the emergency manager law was "not intended for places like Livingston County."

One of the top black elected officials in the state, U.S. Congressman John Conyers, asked the Justice Department to review the emergency manager law for violation of the Voting Rights Act and the U.S. Constitution.

A coalition of civil rights groups also filed a federal lawsuit, Phillips v. Snyder, arguing that the law violates multiple state and federal constitutional rights.

In December 2014, U.S. District Court Judge George Caram Steeh ruled that part of the case can move forward on the grounds that the emergency manager law disproportionately impacts African Americans, saying that the law gives "enormous discretion to state decision makers and creates a significant potential for discriminatory decisions." The plaintiffs have filed an appeal to the 6th Circuit challenging the judge's decision to dismiss the rest of their constitutional claims.

It's Not Just Flint

The same emergency manager, Darnell Earley, who mishandled Flint's water situation went on to become Snyder's pick as emergency manager for Detroit's school system in January 2015. The results have been pretty comparable.

Darnell's tenure has been marked by widespread news reports of deteriorating and unhealthy conditions in the schools, including leaking roofs, mold, broken windows, and bullet holes in classroom walls. Detroit teacher protested those conditions with a series of "sickouts" in January 2016.

After earning a $221,000 salary for his appointment to oversee Detroit's schools, Earley resigned his Detroit position under fire in February. But he walked away with an $83,000 consulting contract and signed an agreement holding the Snyder Administration harmless from any claims relating to his actions as emergency manager. One school board member called it "hush money."

Critics point out that, after 16 years of state control, the Detroit school system is in much worse shape now than it was before, with a significantly larger deficit.

That's interesting, given that when an earlier emergency manager for the school system, Roy Roberts, resigned in 2013, he said his initial instructions were to "blow up the district and dismantle it," but that he spent the first few months on the job convincing state officials it was worth saving.

The International Business Times recently reported that the Department of Justice and the FBI are investigating Snyder administration officials for alleged corruption—receiving bribes from contractors—in the Education Achievement Authority and Detroit Public Schools agencies created by Snyder.

Even some early supporters of Snyder's law have had a change of heart.

Former emergency financial manager Michael Stampfler, the guy who outsourced Pontiac's water, eventually concluded that Snyder's expanded emergency manager (EM) law doesn't work:

I do not believe EMs can be successful—they abrogate the civic structure of the community for a period of years then return it virtually dismantled for the community to attempt to somehow make a go of it. The program provides no structure for long term recovery, and that is why most communities slide back into trouble, if they experience any relief at all—a vicious cycle. The Public Act is not sufficient and the state bureaucracy isn't up to a performance offering any significant success—as can be noted from the communities repeating."

Snyder's law is not just anti-democratic, it is producing poor results.

Michigan residents were promised increased efficiency from "running government like a business" and an end to corruption. The emergency manager law has failed on both counts.

"We still have incredibly bad decisions being made," says Chris Savage, one of Snyder's most vocal critics. "[A]nd we very clearly still have corruption and criminal activity going on."

"The emergency manager law is just one in a long line of failed government experiments imposed on the people of Michigan," said Senator David Knezek (D-Dearborn Heights). "Cities and schools are left in worse shape than they were before the emergency managers came to town, and now taxpayers are left footing the bill for Earley's payout. For shame."

Mackinac Remains Unapologetic

The Flint debacle and troubles in Detroit and Pontiac haven't fazed anyone back at the Mackinac Center, the special interest pressure group that scripted Snyder's emergency manager law.

Despite its deep involvement in pushing for "enhanced" powers for managers, Mackinac has declined to admit even the possibility that the policies it pushed for played any role in the Flint water crisis.

Without a hint of irony, Mackinac's Michigan Capitol Confidential recently posted an article lauding the ACLU and Michigan Radio for their work exposing how Michigan state officials attempted to ignore or cover up Flint's water crisis, folding Flint's problems into Mackinac's constant narrative of supposed government incompetence and corruption.

But perhaps worst of all, Mackinac's spin could be seen as discouraging people from looking at the root causes of the Flint crisis. "Which Is Better: Finding Fault or Providing Help?," asked communications director Dan Armstrong in a December blog post, as if the two were mutually incompatible. Armstrong's article didn't even mention emergency managers.

Snyder to Local Democracy: Drop Dead

Snyder's emergency manager law stands as a testament the corporate right's disrespect for local democracy, both in terms of how it strips away all local democratic powers of self governance, and because the voters of Michigan went to the polls and voted it down, only to have Snyder bring it right back. It embodies the idea that a state "CEO" knows better than the people what works best for their communities.

A task force appointed by Snyder released its report on March 23, 2016, concluding that the emergency manager law contributed to the Flint crisis by removing the checks and balances at the heart of American democracy, and calling for a review of the law and a search for alternatives.

But the emergency manager law wasn't the right's last shot at local democracy in Michigan. In June 2015, Snyder signed into law legislation barring municipalities from passing ordinances to improve the lives of workers by raising the minimum wage or requiring family leave.

Such "preemption" laws are an increasingly popular tool being promoted by ALEC and other Koch-funded organizations, and something the Mackinac Center had lobbied for as far back as 2003.

In January 2016, Snyder signed another bill into law prohibiting local governments from providing voters with factual information about ballot measures, including local tax increases. Republican legislators had crammed that (and many other) provisions into a non-controversial campaign finance measure without notice or public hearing, and sent it to Snyder's desk.

DeVos' Michigan Freedom Fund praised Snyder for signing the bill.

Governor Snyder may have conceded to Congress that his dictatorial emergency manager law failed the people of Flint, but he continues to push a right-wing "philosophy of governance," as Rep. Connolly put it, that is profoundly undemocratic.

Snyder says he wants to run government like a business, but a corporation is not a democracy and, at this rate, Michigan may not be one much longer either.

https://www.ecowatch.com/michigan-drinking-water-flint-2558239374.html

Michigan Gov. Declares Flint Water Safe, Stops Free Bottled Water, But Residents Aren’t So Sure

Declaring Flint's drinking water now safe, the Michigan government announced Friday that it would stop providing free bottled water to the city's residents, Reuters reported.

A statement from the office of Republican Governor Rick Snyder said that tests taken over the past two years had shown the water to be just as safe as or safer than the water of other Michigan cities.

"The scientific data now proves the water system is stable and the need for bottled water has ended," Snyder said in a statement reported by Reuters, adding that the water now meets national safety standards.

The Flint water crisis began in 2014 when the city switched its water source from Lake Huron to the Flint River in a money-saving move that ended up costing at least 12 lives by causing an outbreak of Legionnaires' disease.

The Flint River's more corrosive water also caused lead to leach from the pipes into the drinking supply, which is especially harmful for the cognitive development of children.

Flint switched back to Lake Huron water in 2015, but the crisis has led to a breakdown in trust between local residents and government officials.

In January 2017, more than 1,700 Flint residents sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for damages, accusing the EPA of failing to inform them of the crisis and failing to force city and state officials to act.

Michigan Department of Health director Nick Lyon was charged in June 2017 with involuntary manslaughter for his role in at least one Legionnaires' death by failing to inform Flint residents of the danger.

Community members and advocates now say it is too early for the state to stop supplying bottled water.

CNN reported that Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, one of the first to sound the alarm about the crisis when she noticed the rising lead levels in the blood of children she treated, tweeted disapproval.

"This is wrong. Until all lead pipes are replaced, state should make available bottled water and filters to Flint residents," she wrote.

Michigan State Representative Sheldon Neeley, a Democrat whose district includes Flint, agreed, calling the decision cruel according to Reuters.

"Governor Snyder has failed to address the psychological trauma that his administration put the people of Flint through. The fact is, the people of Flint don't trust the Snyder administration or the science they pay for—science that previously allowed our city to be poisoned," Neeley said in a statement .

...

RU solani

https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-november-24-2017/ JP morgan sold bad morts, but said did not when make $, deneid when cost $, then forgave loans that led to zombie foreclosure sometimes years after. jamie dimond timed 100M$ to detroit so not conflict with zombie morts.

https://movetoamend.org/corporate-rule-examples-5

Other recent news reveals that the lead investigator into Flint’s water crisis, appointed by the State Attorney General, is none other than a $10,000 donor to AG Bill Schuette’s campaign coffers.⁴(https://movetoamend.org/corporate-rule-examples-5#4) The appointee, Todd Flood is an attorney with Flood Law and a former Detroit/Wayne County assistant prosecutor. Could this possibly be a return on Flood’s generous campaign donation? His “electoral free speech” at work?

The story of Flint is yet another wake-up call from our American nightmare brought to us by illegitimate corporate power. In this so-called “self-governing” country we’re realizing that “democracy” is largely charade, a drama written largely by corporate authors and acted out by corporate puppets on the people’s stage.⁵(https://movetoamend.org/corporate-rule-examples-5#5)

Move to Amend invites all those who have awakened from this bad dream to join in engaging the work of building real self-governance through commitments to solidarity and deep grassroots organizing.

Sources:

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=President+Obama%2C+Please+Come+to+Flint
http://www.freep.com/story/opinion/contributors/2016/01/18/legislature-should-repeal-emergency-manager-law/78974808/
http://motorcitymuckraker.com/2016/01/23/gov-snyder-lied-flint-water-switch-was-not-about-money-records-show/
http://www.mlive.com/news/index.ssf/2016/01/republican_donor_appointed_by.html
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/flints_water_crisis_is_a_warning_to_us_all_20160127

ref http://www.mlive.com/news/index.ssf/2016/01/republican_donor_appointed_by.html

By Emily Lawler

LANSING, MI -- Attorney General Bill Schuette on Monday appointed former Wayne County Assistant Prosecutor Todd Flood to lead an investigation into the Flint water crisis, but some are questioning his impartiality due to past political donations, including to Gov. Rick Snyder.

"We're still investigating and what we're finding is that Todd Flood has made large campaign contributions to politicians including the governor and that raises serious questions about conflicts of interest," said Melanie McElroy, executive director of anti-corruption group Common Cause Michigan.

Michigan campaign finance records show Flood donated $3,000 to Snyder during the 2010 and 2014 election cycles.

Flood said at a press conference Monday morning he had a reputation for integrity.

"I don't have a bias or prejudice one way or the other," he said.

Flood said he had given to both Democratic and Republican candidates. Campaign finance records show he gave $1,200 to former Gov. Jennifer Granholm, a Democrat, and also $1,360 to former Democratic Rep. Ellen Cogen Lipton. He's also given to a smattering of local judge candidates.

However, in statewide elections his donations have trended Republican. Aside from Snyder he gave monetary support for former Michigan Supreme Court Justice Maura Corrigan, who was nominated by Republicans, and $8,350 to former Republican Attorney General Mike Cox. He also gave $13,519 to a PAC associated with Stu Sandler's Decider Strategies, which lists the Michigan Republican Party among its current and former clients.

While Michigan’s Republican Governor is busying retaining outside counsel over the poisoning of Flint’s water supply, Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee is quietly blocking federal funding to the city— the lone senator daring to do so in Congress.

Lee, who in recent days has been publicly promoting his Article One Project (A1P) to help Congress reclaim its status as “the first branch,” has been privately holding relief funding for the city of Flint hostage,according to a new report from the Daily Beast.

A bipartisan bill to send $250 million to Flint to help repair drinking water infrastructure and $50 million to the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Health and Human Services to monitor for lead contamination is currently being “held” by Lee, according to frustrated Senate staffers who reached out to the Daily Beast. The bill also allocates an additional $100 million in relief for Flint specifically, and $100 million for water infrastructure projects across the country, including potentially Flint.

A “hold” is a Senate procedure that allows an individual senator to secretly stall legislation. When the legislation was first introduced by Democratic Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow and Oklahoma Republican Senator Jim Inhofe, the bill had 10 senators placing “holds” in opposition, including Lee’s friend and fellow Tea Party Senator, Ted Cruz. But now, as the magnitude of the crisis in Flint has become clear and outrage across the country has grown, Lee stands alone in his crusade to block relief to residents of Flint — even Cruz has quietly slinked away. From the Daily Beast:

Privately the Utah Republican has relied on three reasons to justify his opposition to the legislation, all of which are procedural or philosophical.

Lee doesn’t like that the proposal is not being put through the ordinary and time-consuming gamut of Senate procedures known as ‘regular order’; has objections on how money from the stimulus is being repurposed for water infrastructure; and is concerned about the federal government getting involved in what he views as a local issue.

“We hear members of Congress complain about it almost as if we’re victims,” Lee recently told The Atlantic, in an interview promoting his new pet project, A1P. “We are not. We are the perpetrators,” he said, insisting that Republicans have failed to remain faithful to their vow to uphold conservative principles in Congress. With his latest maneuver to deprive Flint residents of federal relief funds after their public water supply was poisoned due to Republican cost-cutting measures, Lee is practicing his conservative principals — even if privately, and even if those conservative principles inadvertently hurt his own constituents. Again, from the Daily Beast:

The Utah senator’s objections may not play well at home, where he is running for reelection this year. Utah requires $3.7 billion for drinking water infrastructure over the next 20 years to meet minimum requirements in human health and safety, according to an EPA report presented to Congress in 2013.

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/tea-party-senator-single-handedly-holding-federal-relief-funds-flint

Sophia Tesfaye is the Deputy Politics Editor at Salon.

big-ish data: http://grist.org/grist-50/profile/tiffani-ashley-bell/

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/flint-lead-poisoning-america-toxic-crisis

Juan Cole | (Informed Comment)

Perhaps it is inevitable but it is a shame that some people are gaming out how to profit politically from the lead poisoning of the children of Flint, Michigan (pop. 99,000).In the state capital, the Establishment is trying to blame the crisis on “government” or “bureaucracy,” to reinforce the Reaganite message that government is the problem, not the solution.

In his state of the state address, Gov. Rick Snyder said that the people of Flint had been let down by their government at all levels, city, state and Federal. State workers were furious, perceiving that the governor had in effect blamed them for the debacle.

In fact, Flint’s water had been fine under non-colonial, elected government. It was supplied by the Detroit Water and Sewage Department from Lake Huron and was treated.

But Snyder’s rather arrogant state government delights in using the prerogative established in Michigan lawto take over a city and set aside its elected officials. In highly racially segregated Michigan society, this measure typically entailed white politicians from the center and west of the state appointing mini-dictators to take over cities with a big African-American and working class population, with the Victorian implication that the latter couldn’t properly govern themselves. [By 2013 half of Michigan’s African-Americans lived under an appointed Emergency Manager.]

So Snyder staged a coup in Flint and appointed a city caretaker,or Emergency Manager, one Ed Kurtz, depriving the citizens of their voting rights. And Snyder’s appointeedecided that a little money could be savedby switching the city’s water source from the Detroit Water and Sewage Dept. to the local Flint River. DWSD complained bitterly about Kurtz setting the two cities against one another. [The decision was implemented by Kurtz’s successor as EM.)

[Emails just released admit that the decision was ultimately signed off on by then State treasurer Andy Dillon, but I can’t imagine he initiated the policy:

Ed Kurtz and Andy Dillon were both appointees of the Governor. So I don't see how this helps Snyder too much. https://t.co/8q5W4Fbej7

— Nick Krieger (@nckrieger) January 21, 2016

]

Flint River is full of highly corrosive chemicals and would have needed to have a purification plant operating for it to supply safe tap water. But since the whole policy was to save money, the small amount needed to put in water purification was not spent for that purpose. When the corrosive waters of the Flint River flowed through the city’s old, lead pipes, they ate into the pipes and released lead into the drinking water.

It is really bad to drink a lot of lead. It is especially bad for children. It can affect intelligence, cognition, self-control– for the rest of their lives.

Even when evidence began getting back to the state that there were high levels of lead in the bloodstreams of Flint children, nothing was done, what with all the money being saved on water and all. The Emergency Manager called a Flint city council vote to go back to Detroit-provided water [“incomprehensible”]

So this is a story of arrogance and then stonewalling and foot-dragging. It is a story of how democracy was set aside in favor of a kind of colonialism, where the governor appoints an unelected viceroy. It is a story of how technocrats from Lansing thought they knew what was best for locals. It is a story of Neoliberalism, of exalting the market as a golden calf that must be worshiped even if the people have to be sacrificed to it. Reducing the cost of government by appeal to market ways of saving money has been taken to the point where it sickens the people being governed; they just aren’t the important element of this equation.

But what is really interesting is the language around these dire mistakes. Many news reports have said with a straight face that “the city” of Flint switched the source of water to the Flint River. But while the Flint mayor went along with the Emergency Manager, it was Kurtz who was the decision-maker here.

The “city” of Flint had been overthrown in a coup and wasn’t in a position to make such decisions.

Then in his address, Gov. Snyder said that Flint had been failed by “government.”

But “government” did not make the decisions here. Snyder’s appointee did. Elected

government of a local sort was abrogated by Snyder. Now he is blaming “government” for doing a bad job.

Government in fact generally does a good job, and is as efficient or more than most large corporations. Moreover, unlike the private sphere, government is typically responsive to the voters. Except where it has been set aside.

The GOP in Lansing is therefore trying to spin their own mistakes as the mistakes of ‘big government’ or of ‘the bureaucracy:’

“Senate Majority Leader Arlan Meekhof, R-Olive Township, used the speech as an opportunity to push for government reforms, saying in a prepared statement released after Snyder’s speech, “Bloated, unresponsive bureaucracy does not meet the needs of our citizens.”

Senator Meekhof needs to understand that Flint needs more and better government now, not less. The city’s pipes have to be re-done. And its children will need special medical care and education measures for years.

What Flint needed was not a slimmer government but the right to make its own decisions via its own elections. Government was not the problem– the penny-pinching of an appointed viceroy was the problem.

Government *can* be the solution to some problems, and must be in this instance.

Former emergency manager Darnell Earleysays he's not to blame for the decision to use the Flint River as the city's source of drinking water.

Earley, who served as Flint's emergency manager from September 2013 until January 2015, said in an email to The Flint Journal-MLive on Tuesday, Oct. 13, that the water source decision was made months before he was appointed to run the city by Gov. Rick Snyder.

The Michigan Democratic Party called Tuesday on Snyder to fire Earley from his current position as emergency manager of Detroit Public Schools based on his position in charge in Flint when the switch in water source was made.

Earley said he had no reason at the time to second-guess what appeared to have been a consensus decision.

"The decision to separate from (the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department) and go with the Karegnondi Water Authority, including the decision to pump Flint River water in the interim, were both a part of a long-term plan that was approved by Flint's mayor, and confirmed by a City Council vote of 7-1 in March of 2013 — a full seven months before I began my term as emergency manager," Earley's email says.

Although the Flint City Council voted in March 2013 in support of moving to the KWA pipeline — a new pipeline that would serve the region with Lake Huron water — there is no record that the council voted to use the Flint River as a short-term drinking water source.

Earley, who toasted the switch to the river with city leaders in a ceremony in April 2014, said it was his "responsibility to implement the previously accepted and approved plan" since the city's contract with the Detroit water system expired during his term as emergency manager.

"It did not fall to me to second guess or to invalidate the actions that were taken prior to my appointment," his statement says.

The state Democrats said in a news release that Earley was in charge of Flint "when the decision was made to switch the city to unsafe drinking water."

While Earley oversaw the switch, the decision to switch was signed by Flint's previous state-appointed emergency manager, Ed Kurtz.

Sara Wurfel, a spokeswoman for Snyder, said in a statement Tuesday, Oct. 13, the decision to use the Flint River "was pushed or supported by the city and community" and said the city had no choice but to find another source of water after the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department terminated Flint's contract to continue purchasing water under the terms of its expired contract....

http://www.occupydemocrats.com/after-poisoning-entire-city-with-lead-republicans-swiftly-vote-to-gut-obamas-clean-water-rule-2/

ot would seem inarguable that one of the government’s basic responsibilities is to set standards ensuring that people in the United States have safe drinking water. So in May 2015 when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released its final version of the Clean Water Rule, “the agency cheered the broad reach of the rule, arguing that it would protect the drinking water of some 117 million Americans, or roughly a third of the population.”

But then along came Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA), who promptly introduced a resolution to kill the EPA’s Clean Water Rule that was passed in November – ostensibly to protect “farmers and ranchers”, who coincidentally only comprise two percent of the population. Yesterday, the Republican-led House similarly voted 253-166 for a resolution to overturn the EPA ruling. President Barack Obama has, all-along, threatened to veto the resolutions should they pass Congress.

The agencies and their supporters say the safety of drinking water and stream health are threatened because of weak state and local regulation and a lack of enforcement. The rule is meant to make it clearer which waterways the EPA and the Corps of Engineers can oversee under the 43-year-old Clean Water Act, which covers “navigable waters” such as the Mississippi River and Lake Erie, but is vague on how far upstream protections must go to keep those water bodies clean.

Considering that just a few days ago it was disclosed that Michigan’s Republican Governor Rick Snyder knowingly poisoned residents of Flint, Michigan by not placing an anti-lead preventive in Flint’s water supply as required by federal law in order to save money in an attempt to balance the city’s budget –the callousness of the vote in the Republican House should not go unnoticed. However, almost two years ago, in an attempt to save money under a financial state of emergency, Michigan switched the source of its water supply from Lake Huron (one of the Great Lakes) to the polluted Flint River, notorious to the people of Flint for its filth. As Flint resident Rhonda Kelso said:

“We thought it was a joke…People my age and older, thought ‘They’re not going to do that…The water would come in brown and my daughter was like ‘Mom … why is the water brown? “

Kelso actually thought the brown color came from sewage, but no, it was iron, which was 19 times more potent than the Lake Huron supply. The mineral chemically reacted with lead lining old plumbing in many homes. Because the governor did not add the anti-lead preventive, the chemical soup started poisoning many of the residents – resulting in Kelso and four other families filing a class-action lawsuit.

CNN noted that “Flint residents say they were kept in the dark for 18 months until a local doctor, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha a physician in a local medical center pediatric ward took things into her own hands. “When (my research team and I) saw that it was getting into children and when we knew the consequences, that’s when I think we began not to sleep…at first, the state publicly denounced her work, saying she was causing near hysteria. They spent a week attacking her before reversing their narrative and admitting she was right.” Ironically, adding that agent would have cost about $100 a day, and experts say 90 percent of the problems with Flint’s water would have been avoided.

It should be noted that in the last couple of days, the Michigan National Guard began arriving in Flint to help with the drinking water crisis, including distributing bottled water to the municipality’s residents.

This EPA rule pertained to clearing up the ambiguity brought about “because a pair of Supreme Court rulings left significant waterways with unclear protections, including ones that sometimes lead to sources of drinking water.” In developing the Clean Water Rule, the EPA and the Corps relied on a synthesis prepared by EPA’s Office of Research and Development of more than 1,200 published and peer-reviewed scientific reports; the synthesis discusses our current scientific understanding of the connections or isolation of streams and wetlands relative to large water bodies such as rivers, lakes, estuaries, and oceans.

We know, through their well-established litany of ignorant utterances, that Republicans don’t care about science – only about the corporations and greedy oligarchs that pull their strings. Consider the list of backers who lobbied against the EPA rule: The US Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers have joined the ranks of the American Farm Bureau Federation, Dairy Farmers of America, pesticide manufacturers, mining companies, home builders, and the Koch-owned-and-run timber industry, to name but a few.

Now consider that the citizens of Flint are mostly poor, with 40 percent of the population living below the poverty level. So when House Speaker Paul Ryan writes: “The Obama administration’s sweeping new rule, dubbed Waters of the United States (WOTUS), could upend the way water is used across the country,” for whom is he speaking? Clearly he is not concerned about ensuring clean drinking water for the 117 million Americans or the poor residents of Flint.

Should it ever be necessary in this country in the 21st century to call out the National Guard to distribute drinking water because a Republican governor or any official elected or otherwise decided to poison a city of people to save $100 a day?

People living in this country use water without a second-thought in everything from drinking and cooking – to growing the crops we eat – to the animals we raise – only in a Republican world is ensuring the safety of the waters of the United States ‘upending the way water is used in this country.’ He’s not wrong – the way corporations pollute water and then sell it back to consumers is being upended, and that’s a win that’s long overdue.

http://www.desmogblog.com/2016/01/19/flint-michigan-suffers-republicans-attack-clean-water-act

It isn’t often that a state of emergency is declared over a disaster that is 100% man-made and intentional, but that’s exactly what has happened in the city of Flint, Michigan. As residents in the city struggle to find drinkable water, the National Guard has been deployed to help distribute bottled water to residents.

The crisis actually began about 18 months ago when Republican governor Rick Snydermade the decision to balance the city’s budget at the expense of the health and safety of residents of Flint.

The governor and his appointed “budget experts” decided to save the city some money by switching their water supply from the city of Detroit’s supply to the Flint River, and according to Occupy Democrats, this river was known to be both highly polluted and carried an unusually high salt content.

The high salinity of this water caused the city’s pipes to begin eroding, which then leached lead into the city’s water.

Again, the governor and state officials were aware of the lead problem the entire time it was happening, according to internal emails between the governor and officials.

In spite of that knowledge, they waited 18 months before declaring a state of emergency. And the public would have remained in the dark had it not been for medical professionals coming forward to explain what was happening to Flint residents and their children.

The entire problem could have been avoided at a cost to the city of less than $100 per day.

In the midst of this crisis, and just days before the state of emergency was declared,Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan wrote an op-ed attacking the EPA’s Clean Water Rule. In the op-ed, Ryan declares that the stricter rules (finalized by the EPA this past summer which gives the agency authority to regulate smaller bodies of water to limit pollution) are a prime example of government overreach and that the only goal of the agency is to micromanage how citizens use water.

EPA

While Speaker Ryan claims that he objects to the rule because it does damage to small farmers and ranchers, his real goal is to protect the corporate powerhouses who lobbied against the new rules. Those wealthy interests include the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, mining company owners, and several businesses owned by the Koch brothers.

These groups have little to no interest in farming activities, but they are all either major polluters through their dirty energy businesses, or they represent the interests of polluters from both the energy and industrial manufacturing sectors. And according to a guy like Paul Ryan, the desire of companies to pollute entire towns is more important than the health and safety of American citizens.

Those health concerns are not hypothetical, either. Thanks to medical professionals in the city of Flint, we know exactly what kind of adverse health effects we’re looking at as a result of Republican-sponsored pollution: impaired cognitive development, behavioral problems, and nervous system damage.

These are not short-term effects either, these problems will plague the residents of Flint — especially young children exposed to high amounts of lead — for the rest of their lives. Lead exposure and consumption at such a young age is also linked to increased crime among the exposed, and anti-social behavior.

The crisis in Flint, Michigan will likely repeat itself if corporations continue to influence the behavior of our elected officials. It could become the new normal.

Flint is the largest city and county seat of Genesee County, Michigan. Located along the Flint River, 66 miles (106 km) northwest of Detroit, it is the largest city in the Flint/Tri-Cities region of Michigan.^[9][10] According to the 2010 census, Flint has a population of 102,434, making it the seventh largest city in Michigan. The Flint metropolitan area is located entirely within Genesee County. It is the fourth largest metropolitan area in Michigan with a population of 425,790 in 2010.^[11]

Founded as a village by fur trader Jacob Smith in 1819, Flint became a major lumbering area on the historic Saginaw Trail during the 19th century, and incorporated as a city in 1855. It later became a leading manufacturer of carriages and other vehicles earning it the nickname "Vehicle City".

In 1908, William Crapo Durant formed General Motors in Flint, and it was later the home of the Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1936–37 that played a vital role in the formation of the United Auto Workers. After World War II, Flint became an automobile manufacturing powerhouse for GM's Buick and Chevrolet divisions, both of which were founded in Flint. However, by the late 1980s the city sank into a deep economic depression after GM closed and demolished several factories in the area, the effects of which remain today.

In the mid-2000s, it became known for its high crime rates.^[12] Since this time, Flint has been ranked among the "Most Dangerous Cities in the United States", with a per capita violent crime rate seven times higher than the national average.^[13] The city was under a state of financial emergency from 2011 to 2015, the second in a decade.^[14][15] It is currently in a public health state of emergency due to lead poisoning (and possibly Legionella) in the local water supply.^[16]

On November 3, 2015, Flint residents elected Karen Weaver as their first female mayor.^[17]

History

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (January 2016)

The Saginaw Valley, particularly the vicinity of Flint, is considered by some to be the oldest continually inhabited area of Michigan.^[citation ^needed] Regardless of the validity of this claim, the region was home to several Ojibwa tribes at the start of the 19th century, with a particularly significant community established near present-day Montrose. The Flint River had several convenient fords which became points of contention among rival tribes, as attested by the presence of arrowheads and burial mounds near it.

19th century: lumber and the beginnings of the automobile industry

In 1819, Jacob Smith, a fur trader on cordial terms with both the local Ojibwas and the territorial government, along with his Ojibwe wife founded a trading post in Flint itself. On several occasions, Smith negotiated land exchanges with the Ojibwas on behalf of the U.S. government, and he was highly regarded on both sides. Smith apportioned many of his holdings to his children. As the ideal stopover on the overland route between Detroit and Saginaw, Flint grew into a small but prosperous village, and incorporated in 1855. The 1860 U.S. census indicated that Genesee County had a population of 22,498 of Michigan's 750,000.

In the latter half of the 19th century, Flint became a center of the Michigan lumber industry. Revenue from lumber funded the establishment of a local carriage-making industry. As horse-drawn carriages gave way to the automobiles, Flint then naturally grew into a major player in the nascent auto industry. Buick Motor Company, after a rudimentary start in Detroit, soon moved to Flint. AC Spark Plug (now part of Delphi) originated in Flint. These were followed by several now-defunct automobile marques such as the Dort, Little, Flint, and Mason brands. And Chevrolet's first (and for many years, main) manufacturing facility was also in Flint, although the Chevrolet headquarters were in Detroit. For a brief period, all Chevrolets and Buicks were built in Flint.

Early and mid-20th century: the auto industry takes shape

Main article: Flint, Michigan auto industry

In 1904, local entrepreneur William C. Durant was brought in to manage Buick, which became the largest manufacturer of automobiles by 1908. In 1908, Durant founded General Motors, filing incorporation papers in New Jersey, with headquarters in Flint. GM moved its headquarters to Detroit in the mid-1920s.^[18] Durant lost control of GM twice during his lifetime. On the first occasion, he befriended Louis Chevrolet and founded Chevrolet, which was a runaway success. He used the capital from this success to buy back share control. He later lost decisive control again, permanently. Durant experienced financial ruin in the stock market crash of 1929 and subsequently ran a bowling alley in Flint until the time of his death in 1947.

...

Second financial emergency: 2011–

On September 30, 2011, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder appointed an eight-member review team to review Flint's financial state with a request to report back in 30 days (half the legal time for a review).^[33] On November 8, 2011, Mayor Dayne Walling defeated challenger Darryl Buchanan 8,819 votes (56%) to 6,868 votes (44%).^[34] That same day, the Michigan State review panel declared the City of to be in the state of a "local government financial emergency" recommending the state again appoint an Emergency Manager.^[35] On November 14, the City Council voted 7 to 2 to not appeal the state review with Mayor Walling concurring the next day.^[36] Governor Snyder appointed Michael Brown as the city's Emergency Manager on November 29, effective December 1.^[37] On December 2, Brown dismissed a number of top administrators including City Administrator Gregory Eason, Human Resources Director Donna Poplar, Citizen Services Director Rhoda Woods, Green City Coordinator Steve Montle and independent officials including Ombudswoman Brenda Purifoy and Civil Service Commission Director Ed Parker. Pay and benefits from Flint's elected officials were automatically removed.^[38] On December 8, the office of Obudsman and the Civil Service Commission were eliminated by Brown.^[36]

On January 16, 2012, protestors against the emergency manager law including Flint residents marched near the governor's home. The next day, Brown filed a financial and operating plan with the state as mandated by law. The next month, each ward in the city had a community engagement meeting hosted by Brown. Governor Sydner on March 7 made a statewide public safety message from Flint City Hall that included help for Flint with plans for reopening the Flint lockup and increasing state police patrols in Flint.^[36]

On March 20, 2012, days after a lawsuit was filed by labor union AFSCME, and a restraining order was issued against Brown, his appointment was found to be in violation of the Michigan Open Meetings Act and Mayor Walling and the City Council had their powers returned.^[39] The state immediately filed an emergency appeal, claiming the financial emergency still existed.^[40]On March 26, the appeal was granted, putting Brown back in power.^[41] Brown and several unions agreed to new contract terms in April.^[36] Brown unveiled his fiscal year 2013 budget on April 23. It included cuts in nearly every department including police and fire, as well as higher taxes.^[42] An Obsolete Property Rehabilitation District was created by Manager Brown in June 2012 for 11 downtown Flint properties. On July 19, the city pension system was transferred to the Municipal Employees Retirement System by the city's retirement board which led to a legal challenge.^[36]

On August 3, 2012, the Michigan Supreme Court ordered the state Board of Canvassers to certify a referendum on Public Act 4, the Emergency Manager Law, for the November ballot. Brown made several actions on August 7 including placing a $6 million public safety millage on the ballot and sold Genesee Towers to a development group for $1 to demolish the structure. The Board certified the referendum petition on August 8, returning the previous Emergency Financial Manager Law into effect. With Brown previously temporary mayor for the last few years, Brown was ineligible to be the Emergency Financial Manager. Ed Kurtz was once again appointed Emergency Financial Manager by the Emergency Financial Assistance Loan Board.^[36]

Two lawsuits were filed in September 2012, one by the city council against Kurtz's appointment, while another was against the state in Ingham County Circuit Court claiming the old emergency financial manager law remains repealed.^[36] On November 30, the State Treasurer of Michigan Andy Dillon announced the financial emergency is still ongoing, and the emergency manager is still needed.^[43]

Michael Brown was re-appointed Emergency Manager on June 26, 2013, and returned to work on July 8.^[44] Flint had an $11.3 million projected deficit when Brown started as emergency manager in 2011. The city faces a $19.1 million combined deficit from 2012, with plans to borrow $12 million to cover part of it.^[14] Brown resigned from his position in early September 2013, and his last day was October 31. He was succeeded by Saginaw city manager (and former Flint temporary mayor) Darnell Earley.^[45]

Earley formed a blue ribbon committee on governance with 23 members on January 16, 2014 to review city operations and consider possible charter amendments.^[46] The blue ribbon committee recommend that the city move to a council-manager government.^[47] Six charter amendment proposals were placed on the November 4, 2014 ballot with the charter review commission proposal passing along with reduction of mayoral staff appointments and budgetary best practices amendments. Proposals four through six, which would eliminate (4) requirement for certain executive departments, (5) the Civil Service Commission and (6) Ombudsman office were defeated.^[48] Flint elected a nine-member Charter Review Commission on May 5, 2015.^[49]

With Earley appointed to be emergency manager for Detroit Public School Detroit Public Schools on January 13, 2015, city financial adviser Jerry Ambrose was selected to finish out the financial emergency with an expected exit in April.^[50] On April 30, 2015, the state moved the city from under from an emergency manager receivership to a Receivership Transition Advisory Board.^[4]

On January 22, 2016, the Receivership Transition Advisory Board unanimously voted to return some powers, including appointment authority, to the mayor. ^[51]

Water State of Emergency

Main article: Flint water crisis

In April 2014, Flint switched its water supply from Lake Huron (via Detroit) to the Flint River.^[52] After two independent studies, lead poisoning caused by the water was found in the area's population.^[53][54] This has led to a federal lawsuit, the resignation of several officials, and a public health state of emergency for all of Genesee County. ^[55][56][57]

Brown came to Flint after his civil engineer father accepted a Buick plant job.^[1] Brown attended St. Michael Catholic School in Flint.^[2]

Career

He attended Western Michigan University then later University of Stockholm in Sweden earning his master's degree. In 1970, he was married^[1] to Linda.^[2] He worked with youth as a counselor.^[1]

Public service

In 1983, Brown was elected to the Genesee County Board of Commissioners. Flint mayor, Matthew S. Collier, appointed Brown as the City's director of governmental relations and later in the 1980s as director of Flint's Community and Economic Development department.^[1][4] Brown was the executive director of the Genesee area Red Cross chapter^[2] from 1994 to 1996.^[4] He moved on to be president of the United Way of Genesee and Lapeer Counties from 1996 to 2002.^[2][4] In 2002, after the recall of Flint Mayor Woodrow Stanley, Brown took out petitions to run for mayor but failed to collect sufficient signatures to be on the ballot.^[1]

Hired as president of Capital Area United Way in Lansing, Brown stepped in to straighten operations out after a $2 million embezzlement occurred in 2002.^[2][4] Brown left that position in November and was hired by the Genesee Regional Chamber of Commerce in November 2009 as executive vice-president.^[2][4]

He was appointed city administrator on Wednesday, February 4, 2009. Effectve at midnight on February 15, 2009, Brown as city administrator became temporary mayor in accordance with the City Charter following the resignation of Don Williamson for health reasons.^[5]

In 2009, he founded the Flint Area Reinvestment Office. He concurrently became president of the Prima Civitas Foundation and served in both position until December 1, 2011.^[4] The Michigan Governor, Rick Snyder, appointed Brown as the city's emergency manager on November 29, 2011, effective December 1.^[6]

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/who-poisoned-flint-michigan-20160122

...

. It was the city that tried to rescue itself with an auto-themed amusement park (hilarious!), had one of the highest per-capita violent-crime rates in the country (scary!), frequently finished near the top of worst-cities-in-America lists (true!), and so on.

Some 30 years later, I can't say I was surprised when my high school best friend, Gordon Young, a chronicler of Flint's slide in his book Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City, texted me that Flint, now in receivership and run by an apparatchik appointed by the austerity-mad GOP governor, was switching over from the Great Lakes to the Flint River for its drinking water. All to save some bucks. I thought this was preposterous. Only in Flint – a city that makes Youngstown, Ohio, look like Miami – could this be a viable solution.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/who-poisoned-flint-michigan-20160122#ixzz3yBsk2uER

...

seemed so promising back then. On April 25th, 2014 – coincidentally, the 34th anniversary of my family's move to Flint – town leaders gathered at the cavernous Flint Water Treatment Plant for a celebration. After a countdown, then-Mayor Dayne Walling pushed a black button, and Flint's water supply switched from a Detroit-based system to the Flint River.

There were some from the very beginning who thought this was a terrible idea, notably Flint's congressman Rep. Dan Kildee. "My first thought was, 'Are you kidding me?'" Kildee told me one morning in his office. He threw his palms up in the universal sign of exasperation. "We go from the freshest, deepest, coldest source of fresh water in North America, the Great Lakes, and we switch to the Flint River, which, historically, was an industrial sewer."

...

The reason Walling didn't get all the information is simple: He was only sort of mayor. Elected in 2009, Walling took over a city that had hemorrhaged half its population over the past 50 years, and once contemplated taking a part of the city off the grid to save on infrastructure costs. There was a $20 million budget deficit, as Flint was having difficulties meeting the pension requirements of union retirees who had worked in a more prosperous time and with a much larger tax base.

In 2011, Gov. Rick Snyder, a white-haired accountant who ran on the slogan "one tough nerd," took office. He quickly ordered the state to take over the management of cities like Detroit, which had become economically insolvent. Part of the state's reasoning for the takeovers was that it needed to step in to provide for the safety and welfare of citizens. Walling and the city council were stripped of their power, and their salaries were cut. Not surprisingly, the powerless city council attracted less than stellar talent. In 2013, Flint elected two convicted felons and two others who had declared bankruptcy.

...

The transfer from Detroit to Flint water was just another bottom-line move. Flint was switching over in 2017 to a new pipeline that would serve the middle of the state with water from Lake Huron. (The city council cast a symbolic 7-1 vote in favor of the new pipeline. The state would later try to use this as a protective fig leaf to claim the city had approved drinking river water.) Detroit's emergency manager asked the state to intervene in the switch, and when that failed, the utility told the city of Flint that its contract would be terminated in one year. The problem then was what to do between 2014 and 2017. Snyder's Flint emergency managers – four cycled in and out like scrubs in an AAU hoops game – chose the Flint River rather than renegotiating with the petulant Detroit water utility. The initial results were not promising. One resident described her water to me as "the color of morning pee." When an aide to Ananich complained to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, she says she was told, "It's called the Clean Drinking Water Act, not the Tasty Drinking Water Act. We're doing our job." Acceptable water standards had become a fungible term in Flint.

...

anything more than 5 micrograms per deciliter in the blood is considered highly damaging. Gavin's came back at 6.5.

Walters told me the story with her hands clasped together so tightly I could see her knuckles whitening. We went out on the porch so she could smoke. The city offered to fix her pipes and in return asked her to sign a no-harm agreement. Appalled by the horse trading over her kid's health, she fired back.

...

That Friday, 150 protesters traveled to Lansing and stormed Snyder's office, calling for his resignation and criminal prosecution. (Snyder did not respond to requests for comment on this story.) The same afternoon,Michigan State Attorney General Bill Schuette, a Republican crony of Snyder's, announced he was launching an investigation into the water crisis. "The purpose of the investigation is to determine what, if any, Michigan laws were violated in the process that resulted in the contamination crisis," Schuette said in a press release.

His announcement was met with rolled eyes from Flint citizens. Schuette's response was likely a reaction to the announcement the previous week that the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan was working with the EPA on a Flint investigation. (The feds provided no details of the scope of their probe.) Way back in September, state Rep. Sheldon Neeley had asked Schuette to get involved and start an investigation. Schuette didn't get back to him until shortly before Christmas, saying there were plenty of folks already looking into the Flint water crisis. Schuette only reversed course as pressure mounted and his political future came into question.

"Without fear or favor, I will carry out my responsibility to enforce the laws meant to protect Michigan families and represent the citizens of Flint," he said.

Did I mention Bill Schuette wants to be Michigan's next Republican governor?

....

Flint has seen a spike in the number of cases of Legionnaires' disease, a severe type of pneumonia usually spread by bacteria in water vapor. The number of cases in Genesee County, Flint's home, has gone from six to 13 a year to 87 from June 2014 to November 2015, roughly the same time Flint began using water from the Flint River. There have been 10 deaths.

Earlier in the fall, Congressman Kildee traveled to New York to hear the pope speak before the United Nations' General Assembly. He heard the pontiff say that every human being should have access to clean drinking water. Kildee's heart sank.

"I'm a citizen of the United States," he told me, "the richest country on the planet, at the richest moment in its history, and what the pope was referring to were poor children in Africa, not realizing that my kids in Flint don't have clean drinking water."

...

http://www.alternet.org/investigations/what-happens-when-oligarchs-and-vigilantes-take-over-public-safety-big-city

What Happens When Oligarchs and Vigilantes Take Over Public Safety in a Big City

In Detroit, safety is a privilege enjoyed by the white and wealthy.

By Patrick Sheehan / AlterNet

June 25, 2015

In late 2011, the impoverished little municipality was so deep in debt to its public electric company, DTE Energy, that the local government was forced to decommission all streetlights on its residential streets. Not only did DTE cut the power to street lights in Highland Park, it sent out workers to physically nearly 1,000 light-poles from the neighborhood. Highland Parkers now live in permanent, debt-induced darkness.

Six miles away, in Detroit’s rapidly gentrifying downtown area, DTE Energy runs a very different public policy. The same company that repossessed 1,000 streetlights from Highland Park, condemning its residents to permanent darkness, has recently launched a pro-bono security program in the increasingly white area.

On its own dime, DTE operates a public “bait car” program. It buys and sets booby-trap cars out on the downtown streets, outfitted with up to 18 hidden cameras, to lure and ultimately deter potential car theft. A partnership with downtown police assures that cops will be on the scene within 90 seconds of when the bait car is entered.

“We want to be part of something good about changing perceptions of the city of Detroit,” DTE’s chief security officer boasts of the bait-car program, “We want to be part of the revitalization of the city.”

Safety is a privilege in Detroit. Like all privileges, it gravitates toward the white and wealthy.

Decades of budget cuts to public safety services alongside concentrated investment downtown has created two Detroits: downtown, white and professional, bathed in state-of-the-art private security; and the “neighborhoods,” poor and black, where public safety has become a do-it-yourself endeavor.

Turning out the Lights

In Detroit’s black neighborhoods, public safety has been sacrificed to the gods of austerity. With the city government too poor provide basic security, safety has become a private commodity, accessible to the wealthy, but far out of reach for the majority of Detroiters.

The slow but massive exodus of capital and residents over the last half-century has left the Motor City broken down and overgrown in municipal debt. By the time Detroit faced its financial day of reckoning in bankruptcy court, years of budget cuts had already dismantled its most basic public services—police, fire, even streetlights—to barely functional levels.

The steady, long-term disinvestment in public safety shows through in crime rates.

In a given week, Detroit averages seven murders, 226 burglaries, 92 robberies, 169 aggravated assaults, 228 cars stolen, 331 larceny thefts, 12 rapes, and 279 violent crimes — the vast majority occurring in the neighborhoods and leading to no arrests. These dark accolades have earned Detroit the most dangerous city in America honor five out of the last seven years.

Absurdly underfunded emergency services are unable to keep up with the city’s record crime. In 2013, the same year Detroit led the country with 333 homicides, its police department took a $75 million— or 18% — overall haircut. Emergency Medical Services has taken similar hits. In 2005, Detroit had 303 paramedics working the streets. By 2010, the working paramedic count was cut to 188 to match a shrinking budget. The result: 911 response times.

UN PO'd about water cut offto poor ppl

richard wolff as harbinger?

You could be forgiven for thinking Detroit’s current situation couldn’t get much more grim: poverty, unemployment, abandonment and vacancy, civic bankruptcy, rampant crime and tax evasion, an inability to deliver basic services. What other plagues could possibly hit the city?

Well, brace yourself, because things will be getting much worse. Climate change will mean more extreme weather for Detroit: more powerful storms, more heat waves, more extreme cold and heavy snow. In fact, it has already begun, with unusually severe winter weather the past two years and flooding last summer caused by massive downpours.

Cities throughout the U.S. will suffer from more extreme weather due to climate change, of course, but the impact will be particularly severe in Detroit because it has a population with greater needs and a local government with fewer resources to meet them. “Poverty amplifies everything,” says Guy Williams, CEO of Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice (DWEJ).

Take heat waves. Detroit has many poor, elderly people in old, decaying houses. As the houses have aged, they’ve developed cracks and leaks that make them even worse at regulating temperatures. Low-income homeowners often don’t have air conditioners, so when a heat wave of several days above 90 degrees strikes, they’re going to be miserable, and their lives might even be endangered.

Like other low-income inner-city residents, Detroiters have elevated rates of asthma. “Roughly 13.7% of all Detroiters suffer from asthma,” the Sierra Club noted in a report in 2013. “The Michigan Department of Community Health has found that Detroit adults suffer from asthma 50% more than the state of Michigan as a whole.” With higher temperatures, there will be more production of ground-level ozone, which causes asthma rates to increase further and triggers more asthma attacks for those who already have the disease.

Even those without asthma will suffer from the heat. Average temperatures in the Great Lakes region are expected to be 3.6 to 11.2 degrees F higher by the year 2100, the Sierra Club reports, which will lead to a “considerable increase” in what public health experts call Excessive Heat Event (EHE) days:

Detroit is projected to experience 4,109 additional EHE mortalities by mid-century and 17,877 by the end of the century. EHE days can provoke or exacerbate life threatening illnesses, such as kidney diseases, cardiovascular disease, heat exhaustion and heat stroke. …

The populations most vulnerable to heat waves are the elderly, the infirm, young children, the poor, as well those comprising minority ethnic and racial demographics. Residents of city centers are more vulnerable to the effects of heat because paved surfaces and infrastructure magnify the heat’s intensity (the urban heat island effect). As Detroit is an urban center lacking tree cover, it is particularly vulnerable to this type of excessive heat buildup.

Detroit has suffered such massive abandonment that two-thirds of its peak population is gone. The remaining population isn’t evenly distributed; the more affluent neighborhoods are still fully inhabited, while the poorest may have entire blocks with only one occupied house remaining. Many of the poor people in these mostly empty areas do not have cars. Nearly 30 percent of Detroit households are car-free, largely for economic reasons. The city sets up cooling centers on the hottest days, but can those without air conditioning actually get to them? Walking miles in the heat, or standing outside waiting on unreliable bus service, could be even more dangerous than staying inside.

“The flip side is even more pernicious in the wintertime,” says Williams. “Last year we had record-breaking snow piling up. This year we had record cold. It got passé to see a minus temperature when I got up in the morning.” Heavy snow is a hugechallenge for Detroit because it has been left with such an enormous network of streets to plow relative to its small and shrinking tax base. Record cold temperatures, meanwhile, threaten the health and safety of the elderly — especially the poor and car-less — just as heat waves do.

Williams, who has a bespectacled look and understated manner vaguely reminiscent of the comedian Larry Wilmore, drives me around Detroit and points to spots where extreme weather is likely to wreak havoc. On the city’s East Side, he notes that the Fox Creek canal overflowed up into the adjacent houses last summer. Some basements filled with as much as eight feet of water, ruining furnaces that cost thousands of dollars to replace. Some people are still cleaning mold out of their basements. “With climate change, we’re projected to get the floods we had in August three to four times per summer,” says Williams. These costs and hassles worsen the already dubious value proposition of living in Detroit and threaten to push some homeowners out of the city. “We’ve lost a few numbers, people who felt they couldn’t rebuild,” says Joshua Elling, executive director of Jefferson East Inc., an economic development corporation on Detroit’s East Side.

Going down the freeway toward Downtown, Williams points to a dip in the road: “There were puddles several feet high here,” he says. Flooding a highway in the middle of town brings traffic, and thus commerce, to a halt. In the case of last summer, the disruption lasted for days.

Detroit, despite all its vacant property, suffers from a dearth of pervious surfaces, so a heavy rain backs up quickly. The Detroit area has an unusual water system, in which the street storm drains send water directly into the sewers that also receive household waste water. So what happens when a powerful enough storm hits? The drains get backed up, the streets flood, and home basements fill with sewage.

Eddy Lester is the president of Creekside Community Development Corporation, which works in the Jefferson-Chalmers neighborhood of Detroit, where Lester has lived since the 1940s. “Now the harder rains are more frequent,” he says. In August he got two feet of water in his basement. “We had to tear up the hardwood floor and carpeting, because it was a finished basement,” says Lester. “If you tried to drive some of the streets, your car would flood out, so you had to stay home.”

But Detroit doesn’t have to just suck it up and take all the coming abuse. There is a lot the city can and should be doing to reduce the effects of extreme weather. In 2011, the DWEJ convened business, philanthropic, and environmental organizations into the Detroit Climate Action Collaborative (DCAC). They have a set of working groups focused on issues from parks to energy. Through meetings with community members, they are trying to develop a climate action plan for adapting to the effects of global warming and reducing the city’s greenhouse gas emissions. Although their final recommendations have not yet been released, there are some elements that will clearly be included, such as:

Tree planting. More trees along sidewalks and on abandoned land will soak up rain, reducing flooding, and also mitigate the urban heat island effect, lessening the impact of heat waves. Plus they act as carbon sinks.

Rainwater catchments. The city can prevent flooding with relatively simple measures such as digging basins into empty lots.

Assistance for residents during heat waves. The city should set up a system for identifying the Detroiters who are most at risk from rising temperatures and transporting them to cooling centers.

Energy-efficiency upgrades. Low-income homeowners need energy audits and help paying for the recommended upgrades. This is also good economics for a city in the throes of a major foreclosure crisis, since it saves money on heating and electric bills. A University of North Carolina study found that owners of more energy-efficient homes are less likely to default on their mortgages. “Old, inefficient Detroit homes have $1,500 or $2,000 per month heating bills,” says Eric Douglas, a fellow with DCAC. “That’s pushing people making $10 an hour into foreclosure.”

Closing Detroit’s trash incinerator. Detroit has the country’s largest municipal waste incinerator, a major source of the local air pollutants that cause asthma. And it emits more CO2 per unit of electricity than a coal-fired power plant. Meanwhile, Detroit only just started curbside recycling last year — and the program is optional, doesn’t accept many recyclable items, and doesn’t cover the entire city. Local environmental justice advocates want the whole city to have a comprehensive mandatory recycling program to reduce waste, and they want to shut down the incinerator.

Efforts in many of these areas have already started, in both the private and public sectors. Hantz Farms, for example, is a tree farm business started on a collection of previously empty lots and abandoned houses bought from the city of Detroit in 2012 by John Hantz, a local financial services mogul. His employees tore down the abandoned houses, cleared the brush, and started planting trees in neat rows. Those trees will ultimately be sold to nurseries, but they will better serve Detroit’s environment than decaying houses with exposed wiring. The Detroit Water and Sewerage Department has instituted stormwater fees on businesses based on the amount of impervious surface on their land, in the hopes that it will spur them to expand greenspace. Now some parking lot owners are looking to put grass and trees on part of their grounds to reduce the fees they have to pay.

When it comes to preparing for and adapting to climate change, vacant properties could actually be an asset for Detroit. But in many other ways, the city’s abandonment and poverty will make climate disruption harder to deal with. That’s why one of the best ways to protect Detroit from climate change would be to bring back up its population and economic might. But that’s a whole other challenge.

http://grist.org/cities/think-detroit-has-it-rough-now-just-wait-til-climate-change-gets-ahold-of-it/

Just as Iraq’s infrastructure has been destroyed, Detroit residents now live without basic services which ought to be regarded as the right of every human being. In the United States, a country which boasts of its high level of advancement, residents of a major city must plead to the international community for the right to access water.

In a city already on the brink, the powers that be chose to pressure struggling people to pay increased fees for water. They have also used harsh and sometimes improper methods to deprive even those who have paid their bills. No one can survive at all without water to drink, and one cannot survive very well without water for cooking, cleaning and sanitation. Very powerful people in boardrooms and government offices made decisions that turned Detroit into an Iraq in America’s midst and now sneer at pleas for mercy.

Desperate Detroiters represented by the Blue Planet Project, the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization, Food & Water Watch and the Detroit People’s Water Board, have made their case to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Right to Safe Drinking Water. They issued a report which outlines the latest scheme to destroy Detroit as a city and as a home to poor and working people. The plan will ultimately privatize the water system and make Detroit another location for prime real estate and riches for the few.

nyder, 8 others charged in Flint water probe: 'There are no ...

www.detroitnews.com › local › michigan › 2021/01/14

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:{2 days ago — Rick Snyder, top aide Rich :{Baird:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: and the governor's two lead health officials. ... and how well connected, is above accountability when they commit a :{crime:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:. ... :{Baird:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, one of :{Snyder's:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: closest advisers who was also in :{charge:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: of Flint's ... Booking photo of :{Richard:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Lewis :{Baird:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: from the Office of Genesee County ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

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How a Flurry of Suspicious Calls Set Investigators on Rick ...

theintercept.com › 2021/01/13 › flint-michigan-rick-sn...

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Gov. Snyder puts former "Transformation Manager" linked to ...

www.eclectablog.com › 2016/01 › gov-snyder-puts-for...

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“He was just there to shut me up:” Flint water crisis victim ...

www.abc12.com › 2021/01/15 › he-was-just-there-to-shut...

2 days ago — Fmr. top Snyder aide Richard Baird is one of nine indicted this week ... Crime · Health · Recalls · Politics · Regional · State · National ... At that point, Webber cut off contact with the man she referred to as then-Governor Rick Snyder's fixer. ... all the way to the top, naming the former governor's right-hand-man.

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