Bottom Line [View all]

There can be no greater indictment of a system and a government devoted to exalting the market as the highest virtue, and to treating citizens as nothing more than abstractions on a balance sheet. Detroit and Flint, taken together, lay bare a brutal fact — Michigan no longer seems to have any need for a large proportion of its children.

Flint’s Bottom Line

The Flint water crisis shows the human toll of running government like a business.
by John Patrick Leary 1-27-16

Of all the horrors that have emerged from the Flint lead-poisoning scandal — and they have only begun to unfold — January 12’s “Lead Testing and Family Fun Night” at Flint’s Freeman Elementary was comparatively minor. The perversely breezy advertising for the event promised a balloon artist, raffles, face painting, and blood tests for the kids. Tellingly, the Facebook event page was filled with anxious posts from parents worried about how much the lead test part of the festivities would cost.

The lead test was free, but the parents’ concern is easy to understand. Flint is one of the poorest cities in Michigan — a state run by Rick Snyder, a former computer executive turned politician. Snyder’s mission is to “reinvent Michigan” in the image of corporate America — a mission that often entails distributing public services to the wealthy on the backs of the poor.

For well over a year, the people of Flint — who pay some of the nation’s highest water rates (water bills rival the cost of rent) — drank and bathed in water that, officials now admit, was contaminated with lead and other toxic chemicals. Snyder has offered apologies but has been quick to blame the Flint water crisis on a failure of infrastructure — “government failed you,” he said, deftly pointing the finger at the same bureaucracies he has always campaigned against.

But the disaster in Flint isn’t a result of bureaucracy. It’s the deadly consequence of treating public goods as private commodities — an increasingly dominant feature of municipal life in America today ...

Much more here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/01/flint-lead-water-crisis-michigan-snyder-emergency-contamination/