Transcribing starting after some lead-in stuff not relating to the story:
Even if you know nothing else about how the USA is governed, you know that we’re a representative democracy, right? We elect our leaders at the federal level, the state level, the local level. We hold elections. The people who win the elections because they get the most votes, those people get put in charge of government. That’s the way it works.
Except in the one place where they decided to not do it that way anymore. And that place is in Michigan.
Republican Governor Rick Snyder, at the start of his first term as governor, he signed legislation that lets him OVERTURN ELECTIONS, basically wherever he wants to. Yeah, you can still vote for your neighbor or your school board member or whatever, but if Rick Snyder doesn’t like what you decided in your little election, then he has the power to step in. The state can step in and effectively VOID LOCAL ELECTION RESULTS. They can take your elected mayor or your elected city council or your elected school board and STRIP THEM OF THEIR POWER and instead install someone of the governor’s choosing to run to run things solo. By fiat. Answering to no one other than the governor.
That’s kind of a remarkable idea, right? This idea that if your town needs fixing somehow, if something’s wrong in your town, democracy is not going to be part of the solution, it’s not going to be the way you solve that problem. Democracy is the problem. Democracy has to be gotten rid of if we’re going to fix things in Michigan towns and cities.
Governor Rick Snyder knows best, so he’s going to sweep away your elected officials and install someone to run your town. To fix it without pesky democracy or voters electing people getting in the way.
It’s such a radical idea. It’s a radical idea, let alone a thing to go through with and do. I still almost can’t believe it’s real all these years after we started covering it. But very quietly, this is the radical thing that Michigan has started doing. It’s been going on for a few years now. Rick Snyder is in his second term as governor now.
It’s been going on long enough now that we can see some of how it works. Turns out, with a few exceptions, towns and school boards who get put under this “emergency management state oversight”, turns out in most cases, THEY NEVER REALLY COME OUT OF IT AGAIN.
I mean, in theory, the idea is to hit “pause” on democracy, so “real work can get done fixing places”, and then democracy can un-pause and start up again in those places once these problems have been fixed.
That’s the theoretical idea. That has not been the way in most places that it has worked. PLACES UNDER EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT JUST STAY UNDER EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT. They just stay broken, and therefore the democratic form of government just doesn’t get switched back on in those places.
That’s mostly how it works.
And, it turns out we can now say, having one non-elected overseer making basically autocratic, solo, personal decisions by fiat, we now know that is a form of governance that leads to, in Michigan’s case, some notorious consequences.
Like, for example, when the emergency manager of the school district in Detroit moves to close down that cities only school for pregnant girls and young mothers. And when the pregnant girls and young mothers protested, police ended up dragging them bodily from the building.
Or when they emergency manager in Pontiac, MI sold the Silverdome for pennies on the dollar to a company that then let the roof cave in.
Or when the emergency manager for the City of Detroit shut off the water to thousands of inhabited homes. The outrage and the outcry and the flat-out desperation of denying people drinking water, that got so loud that the people of Detroit were heard by the United Nations. Special Reporters from the UN were dispatched to study the situation as a world-class, international human rights violation.
Well now here’s another one. And this one is just astonishing and you know what? It is not a local story. It is a story about truly, unbelievably reckless radicalism in our country. A story about which it is starting to become inconceivable that nobody has gone to jail or been impeached or recalled from office.
This is the subject of our special report tonight, and this is how it starts.
This is another one of these orders by an emergency manager. You’ll see this one is dated June, 2013.
See, right up at the top there?” By the Emergency Manager.” Hire an engineering firm to get the town ready for using “the Flint River as a primary drinking water source.”
At the time, the state-appointed ONE MAN GOVERNMENT for Flint, MI, the state-appointed “emergency manager” was trying to carry out a plan that the city council had voted for back in the day, which was to try to save money by having Flint no longer buy its drinking water from Detroit. They had always bought water from Detroit but it was expensive, and they decided that Flint was broke, they needed to save money, they needed to get a better deal for Flint, and so they wanted to use a new water system, be part of a new water system that was still under construction.
In the meantime, while that new water system was still under construction, the city of Flint had a choice to make. They could make some sort of short-term deal with Detroit, which the emergency manager said was too expensive, or they could MacGyver some kind of solution for where they would get their water now that they were quitting Detroit but the new system wasn’t ready. They needed something to bridge between getting out of Detroit and getting into that new system.
Flint’s emergency manager decided NOT to try to work something out with Detroit, but instead they went with Option B. They decided to MacGyver it. He signed that order, that June 2013 order, for Flint to get ready to use the Flint River as a primary drinking water source for at least a couple of years.
A few months after that, April 2014, with Flint being run by yet another “emergency manager” Flint unhooked itself from Detroit’s water and started drinking from the mighty, mighty Flint River. The following month that emergency manager in Flint decided to sell the pipe between Flint and Detroit.
So if anything went wrong with this new MacGyver’ed solution of getting the water from the river, well now there was no going back. The emergency manager sold off–literally–the pipe that allowed them to go back to Detroit water if for any reason they needed to. He basically sold the eject button. So Flint was committed to drinking from the river. This idea they’d come up with.
The Detroit water, the water they used to be on, that was water from the Great Lakes. The water they were switching to was river water from the Flint River. And if you talk to people who know about this stuff, they’ll tell you you do not switch from drinking lake water to drinking river water as Flint did without taking certain precautions.
River water has a different chemical balance, which basically boils down to rivers being saltier than big lakes and that makes river water more corrosive. So you have to take steps to basically keep river water from EATING THE OLD PIPES, which are HELD TOGETHER WITH LEAD SOLDERING. If you let the untreated, corrosive, salty river water eat the old pipes, the lead leaches out of those pipes and gets into the water.
And lead in the water makes people really, really sick. There’s no level of lead in the water that is considered safe. But if you take in way too much lead, it’s rashes and skin lesions and hair loss and also permanent neurological damage.
Particularly if you’re exposed as a kid. It can lead to lowered IQ, emotional problems, behavioral problems. The works.
It’s not that you should never use river water for drinking water. Plenty of places do. You just have to do this one thing. You just have to do it safely. You have to treat the water first so it doesn’t corrode the pipes.
We now know that the State of Michigan, the Snyder administration, TOLD FLINT IT WAS OKAY TO SWITCH TO THAT NEW WATER SOURCE WITHOUT THE ANTI-CORROSION TREATMENT.
And so they did. They just made the switch.
And first came reports that the new water smelled bad. It stung in the shower. In some homes, if you poured it in the tap, it came out rusty-colored, or it came out looking like maybe it was light beer.
Next came news that a local General Motors plant was having problems with the new water. It was corroding the engine parts built at that new factory. GM started bringing in semi-trucks full of water to use at their plant. They knew they had to get Flint’s terrible new water away from their car parts.
Meanwhile the state, the Rick Snyder administration, the state environmental agency started to get in test results showing that the level of lead in Flint water was rising. It had started at six parts per billion. Within six months that had nearly doubled. To 11 parts per billion.
Around the same time, somebody leaked a copy of an EPA memo warning that some very very high lead levels were showing up in Flint water samples. When that EPA memo started making headlines, the State of Michigan denounced the EPA worker who wrote it as a “rogue employee.”
So, the Snyder administration knows that lead levels are rising. That EPA report shows very high, very worrying lead levels in some samples from some Flint homes.
The Rick Snyder administration at the time had an answer for an increasingly worried public who was looking at this stuff going on and starting to realize there might be a problem. And the Snyder administrations message to an increasingly worried public was: “Relax, people. Jeez.”
[Recording of radio interview] “Let me start here. Anyone who is concerned about lead in the drinking water in Flint can, can relax. There is no broad problem right now that we’ve seen with lead in the drinking water in Flint.–Brad Wurfel, Michigan Department of Environmental Quality”[End radio interview.]
So that was the word from the Rick Snyder administration in July. Literally “relax. There’s no broad problem that we have seen with lead in the drinking water in Flint.”
Turns out, there WAS a broad problem with the drinking water in Flint.
And the Snyder administration so obviously not caring about it spurred other people to action when they saw that the state did not care.
A MacArthur Genius Award-winning drinking water expert drove 15 straight hours from Virginia Tech to start testing Flint’s water. When he got the results, he went back to Flint and held a press conference on the lawn in front of City Hall to show Flint’s water eating through an iron nail. He told the people of Flint do not drink this water.
A local doctor started studying blood samples from kids in Flint. Her results were scary and stunning. The proportion of kids with elevated lead in their blood was nearly double what it had been before the town switched its water source. Just in a matter of a few months. In some neighborhoods, the danger had tripled, not doubled.
The first guy, the professor? Says the Snyder administration dismissed him as basically a huckster when he presented the results of his testing. The state described him as a magician who pulls the same rabbit out of a hat wherever he goes.
The Flint doctor who tries to tell them that Flint kids were getting lead poisoning? The Snyder administration told people not to believe her. They said that doctor’s results were spliced and diced. And in any case, the Snyder administration said those results were not related to the water supply.
So relax, people! Drink you water! Six glasses a day, they say.
The Snyder administration held that line in public until finally they could not hold that line any more. And then finally, after Flint kids had been drinking this poisonous water for seventeen months, in late September Governor Rick Snyder conceded that maybe possibly lead might be a problem in Flint, saying for the first time, “it appears that lead levels could be higher, or have increased” since the town switched to river water. There are “probably things that weren’t fully understood when the switch was made.”
You think? You think maybe some things went a little cockeyed here? And now the kids who grew up in Flint are going to have to deal with it the rest of their lives? With points irreversibly shaved off their IQs and learning disabilities and behavioral problems? Irreversibly, for their whole lives. You think maybe somebody didn’t think this thing through?
“It appears?”
On Monday, this week, the mayor of Flint, MI just personally declared a state of emergency. A state of man-made emergency, she called it, in Flint. Saying even now that the governor is acknowledging, finally, that what these emergency managers decided and what his state agencies did, now that he’s acknowledging that that might be a problem here, the fixing of this problem is a matter that needs more help than anyone wants to count on Rick Snyder to be able to give.
If you want to know where things stand now, reporters asked Governor Snyder again yesterday whether his administration is ready to help the kids who quite literally have been poisoned because of his administration in Flint. Watch this. This is just amazing:
[Reporter] “Representative Dan Kildy has called saying, looking down the road, we’re going to be needing more state resources and more federal resources to be able to help the children who might have been affected by this. Do you agree that the state will have to kick in some kind of money somewhere down the line?”
[Snyder] “Well, again, we’ve already made major contributions. Let’s get the facts, let’s keep working this, and let’s remember, um, water isn’t the only sources of lead and we need to be sure we’re encouraging people to look at other places that could create a threat.”
[Rachel Maddow] Let’s make sure we encourage people to look at anything that is not the giant catastrophe that just happened on my watch in Flint MI.
Governor, the water in Flint MI has been poisoned. And this isn’t like–let me just say here for a second, I think the resistance to this being seen as a national story is that people think of lead as being a long-term infrastructure problem. Like, “ah, things went bad in that old city that needs work.”
This is like, if you want to make an analogy to personal health? This is not like something finally coming due after you’ve had bad diet and no exercise for twenty years. This is the personal health equivalent of having been shot. This is not something that went bad over a long period of time. They flipped a switch to turn off one spigot last April and turned on a different spigot, and the spigot they turned on poisoned the kids. Those kids have been poisoned by a policy decision. All at once. The town has been poisoned.
Under your watch, Governor. Through the actions and inactions of people who report to you and the people you appointed. The emergency manager who signed that initial order to get the town ready for drinking from the river? He reported directly to Governor Snyder and to no one else. The emergency manager who sold the pipeline that should have been the escape hatch? He reported directly to Governor Snyder and no one else. The agency that did not tell Flint how to do this safely and who ignored the fast-rising lead levels in Flint’s water and disparaged first the EPA whistleblower and then the professor and then the local doctor who only wanted to help? That agency reported to and continues to report only to Rick Snyder, the Governor of Michigan.
And now Governor Snyder is like, “well, I guess we could try to do a little bit more to help you, but you know we’ve done a lot, and let’s not get ahead of ourselves, how about a task force? How about I appoint someone with a lot of experience in PR? Which Governor Snyder did this week as part of his response to this crisis. He appointed a brand new, state-paid communications professional to handle this.
This month, in Lansing, a local pastor tried to get a petition approved for recalling Governor Snyder from office. Because of this man-made disaster. Look at this, this petition, look at it. It’s a handwritten thing. Twice now he has tried with a hand-written petition to recall the governor for decisions made by him and his appointees and his administration related to this scandal. His petition has been rejected on technical grounds. For instance, Governor Snyder’s private attorney argues that the recall petition is not timely because Flint switched to the river water that poisoned the town back in the governor’s first term. And now it’s the governor’s second term and so you gotta let those bygones be bygones. You can’t recall him for that. According to Rick Snyder’s lawyers, what’s done is done. Settled. Nobody is accountable, certainly nobody in the governor’s office and certainly not the governor.
Mr. Snyder did manage to cobble together enough money to switch Flint back onto Detroit water for now, even though they sold the pipe. In Flint, though? Remember what this problem is, technically. Corrosion by that river water that came through, right? The pipes are still, in Flint, all scoured out by the untreated river water. Who knows how long they’re going to keep leaching lead?
Is Flint habitable anymore? Really? Michigan made the decisionwith Rick Snyder
a few years ago
to do something very, very radical to the way we govern ourselves as Americans, something nobody else has done.
Now we’re getting in the first results of what they have done. I did not expect those would have to be blood test results from kids, but that’s what they are, that’s what Rick Snyder did.
***
What happened in Flint is an unmitigated tragedy. But what terrifies me is that it was allowed to happen. Snyder unilaterally gave himself the power to throw democratic process out the window. If one man has the power to void election results and appoint someone who hasn’t been elected, how do we keep cronyism in check? How are we to keep these unaccountable appointees from skimming off the top? From hiring substandard contractors who cut corners–like, say, doing risk analysis before switching water sources and treating the water?
This is what Republicans stand for, people. This is what Republican leadership will get us. This is their definition of small government.
Never forget that.
Reblogging because I included the transcription.
rick snyder is the worst thing thats happened to michigan like possibly ever
Holy fuck this is horrifying
This is the story of a backwater country, right?
Flint toxic water tragedy points directly to Michigan Gov. Snyder
A Middleground 