Not disagreeing with you, just noting this as another chapter in the book of Engler’s legacy. Engler created the DEQ – to cut jobs! to save money! “to secure more direct oversight”! – and its first boss set the tone for cussedness (Russ Harding, climate change obstructionist and Great Lakes Basin consortium ignorer).
And:
- Create as system in which the oligarchs have less power over both the elections and the government decision by reversing the Citizen United Rulings and limiting the amount of money per donations for all the lobby organizations.
Moore seem to forgot that the Oligarchs put Snyder in office and therefore responsible for the crisis in Michigan.
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Perhaps the Rick Snyder, Darnell Early, and the obstructionists over at the MDEQ should all be made to get their drinking water from the Flint River for the duration of the crisis.
Not as a punishment you understand, but to increase their sense of urgency about the disaster, and hasten a resolution.
OTOH, if they suffered joint pain, memory loss, nausea, constipation, and insomnia, I don’t guess anyone would be terribly upset.
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Well, I doubt Michael Moore forgot that! Being from Flint himself, I think he is much more immediately concerned with the well-being of the residents in this case - treat the symptom before the cause if the symptom is fatal (or long-term disability inducing). But yes, I certainly agree that in the long run American oligarchs need to have their influence reduced to prevent more things like this from happening.
And rather than reversing citizens united, I think we should just arrest all owners of corporations for slavery. (Okay, not really, but if corporations are people…)
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There is more to life than profit.
This proves it.
This is people.
cue the soylent green jokes
Good reflection by the public editor of the NYT
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As Jon Stewart once pointed out, roughly three quarters of Chicago’s murders go unsolved. So if you live in Illinois you’re more than twice likely to wind up in prison after being elected Governor than after committing murder.
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Props to him for bringing this into the mainstream - I know I heard about this clusterfuck from him well before it hit the mainstream media. Christ, what a bunch of assholes.
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DOJ investigation & follow the money.
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That 50 gallons includes things like bathing and watering the lawn, for which 16 oz bottles really aren’t the best delivery vehicle. The plastic waste isn’t a primary concern in this crisis, but there’s also the needless expense of shipping all those full bottles from the bottling plants; there are closer sources of potable water. Distribute storage tanks and send water trucks around to refill them every week or two.
ETA: As @s2redux points out, this is a band-aid. But it’s a better band-aid than cartons of Evian.
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Identity politics.
I think the book was “something wrong with Kansas”
If there are only two choices, and you know damned well you’re not one of those people, then you dance with the one that brung you.
I’m well aware of the DEQ’s history. I’m also well aware of the rather strategic early retirement buy-out that Engler enacted. This had two primary effects: 1) drained institutional knowledge from the newly formed department, and 2) cost the taxpayers a boatload of money. The secondary effects were too numerous to really get into here.
@DocMelonhead: Fools willing to accept a guy who refused to say what his agenda was voted Snyder into office. It was painful and surreal to watch unfold in real time. He was funded by oligarchs, to be sure, and has pushed quite a bit of ALEC legislation over the last several years. To call him a Koch-sucker is more than fair.
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50 gallons per day? Seriously?
You lost me there. That kind of hyperbole is a complete turnoff, because it includes everything from laundry to landscaping. The standard emergency services water budget is two gallons per day for drinking, cooking, and bathing. I suspect that most of the affected people in Flint aren’t maintaining lavish landscapes in the summer, much less in January.
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Basically, plutocrats who never have enough money and power are taking over government and privatizing everything they can for profit. The ordinary people who go along with it (and vote for it) do so because they’ve been convinced that anything and everything to do with “government” is bad. It’s worse in the South, but the Midwest is also being purposefully, steadily “dixified”:
behind the upfront horror and outrage being felt, behind all the tragedy and drama now unfolding in Flint, what’s happening now is rooted in a state-level attack on democracy. …
the Dixiefication of the Midwest itself is taking place in the context of two much wider processes—the Dixiefication of the nation as a whole, and global process of neoliberalizing economies in various different ways across very different societies. All three of these large-scale processes have been shaping regional politics as well as everyday life in the Midwest with increased ferocity since the the beginning of the Great Recession. What’s striking about the lead poisoning of Flint is not just how morally outrageous the story itself is, but also how it can serve to illuminate the much wider framework of corrosive harm these three social processes have produced.
Source:
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My first asinine thought was “That man needs to be drinking bottled water instead of gravy.” But that was an intentionally asinine thought.
Actually, 50 gallons per day is a very reasonable amount, and does not include outdoor water usage. (But now, weasel words – I’m posting via phone, and adding several links is just too hard; -)
For an “emergency” (implying short-term duration), 2 gal. per day pbly works out – something to wash down an MRE, make the baby’s formula, keep your face and crotch rinsed off. No laundry, no boiling cabbage, no toilet flushing, no baby bath, no showers, no floor mopping, no dish washing, no fruit canning, no dog baths. For a classic “emergency” – a few days until the roads are cleared, or the storms have passed, or electrical service is restored – that’s fine.
But Flint’s “emergency” will be ongoing for at least a year (to restore protective patina in the lead pipes), and pbly more like 3+ years (to completely replace pipes, because lead). In those years, people must be able to bathe their babies, take a shower before going to prom, mop the floor, wash clothes, boil cabbage, can fruit, etc.
Bottled water helps for a week, tops (sheer quantity, access). 50-gal. drums only help for a month, maybe two (bacterial control, risks in heating, vandalism, etc.)
That’s why I get lost in the burble of noise about prosecuting officials or promoting revolution – none of that addresses the ongoing-from-today-until-2018 problem of providing safe water to Flint residents.
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The worst part is, this ‘government failure’ will reinforce the dumb republican meme that government is bad, greed is good, the government is a failure, vote republican for government.
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Yup, vote for the guys who are out to prove how bad they are. Nothing could possibly go wrong.
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