by Primo Encarnación
What the hell happened in Flint?
Water that was warned to be unsuitable for human consumption predictably corroded aged lead pipes, causing dangerous levels of lead to be ingested by some people in Flint, MI. The water may have also carried legionella, the bacteria that causes legionnaire’s disease, and may have been responsible for at least one death. That’s the basic facts. Everything beyond that is not nearly so cut and dried.
Contrary to popular belief, there is a long, long list of people who knew and did nothing, who knew and should have done more, who didn’t know but should have or who just plain didn’t want to know. Chief among the culprits is Governor Rick Snyder, whose maladministration of the state of Michigan includes the incredibly unAmerican coups of the democratically elected governments of cities like Flint and Detroit – whose bankruptcies endangered “innocent” creditors – in favor of personally appointed “emergency” managers. The chain of events that led directly to poisoned children began during this period when their parents were disfranchised.
But the chain of events that led to this chain of events stretches much further back into history the GOP would prefer remain murky. The Michigan DEQ (Department of Environmental Quality – so-named without a shred of irony) was implemented back in the 90s under Republican Governor John Engler, as a carve-out of power from the Department of Natural Resources (DNR). Via a series of executive orders, Engler transferred all responsibility for clean air, water and soil from other bureaucracies in the state and handed it all over to a group of people whose mission was the exploitation – not the protection – of those resources in a way that benefitted business. Inherent in that mission is the continued availability of these resources for business purposes, which is what Republicans mean when they say “conservation.”
Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm attempted to undo this when she re-combined DEQ and DNR, but as soon as Snyder got in, he ripped them apart again, and reconfigured Michigan government to make it “business friendly” once more. And he named as his director of the DEQ a man whose background is in “economic gardening” which is based on bad economics and has nothing at all to do with gardening. In fact, its tenets read like a how-to manual for raping the people and their land.
And this is the entire raison d’etre behind the last 40 years of GOP “governance.” The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a non-profit started to create and promote conservative legislation which would transform states into business-friendly enclaves in defiance of Federal attempts to save humanity, especially the EPA. Legislation like that establishing the DEQ has spread like kudzu among the states infested by the Illiterati. It PRETENDS like it’s trying to save the environment, but actually does the opposite.
And what young state legislators were early ALEC-acolytes? Many names you’d recognize now: Walker, Kasich, Boehner, Mitch Daniels, and… Michigan Governor John Engler, the true father of the Flint Disaster.
When the director of the state agency tasked with keeping your water safe is actually a business wolf in environmental sheep’s clothing… When anti-democratic ideologies find human life to be an inconvenience to the liberty of property… When state and local government are unable to meet their basic life-safety functions due to inane anti-tax policies… When your legislature sends big wet kisses to big donors without regard to the health and welfare of actual voters…
When people in America die because they don’t have clean water…
When government has poisoned children…
You can be sure ALEC has been there.
Yeah well, in more ways than one.