Reader Chiara reports that Darnell Earley got a raise after his brief stint in Flint, where he saved money by shutting off the safe water supply, which caused lead poisoning to many children.
She writes:
“[Governor Rick] Snyder gave him a a raise- he’s making $40,000 additional in the new job:
“Earley, who starts immediately, said he’ll earn a salary of $221,000 annually. He earned $110,000 in Saginaw and $180,000 per year as Flint’s emergency manager, according to his contract with the state.”
“It looks like he’s the 4th emergency manager the schools have had in the last 6 six years. Complete and utter chaos. No one has a chance to “improve” anything- they’re replaced constantly.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The autocratic oligarchs who are funding the corporate public education demolition derby for more power and profit must have a shortage of skilled frauds and liars to keep moving their republic/democratic busting agenda forward.
After all, according to studies, only 1% of the population are psychopaths so qualified workers in this field are hard to find and are a very small minority. It must be challenging to find enough psychopaths to command the corporate troops fighting the war the oligarchs are paying for.
This helps explain why we keep seeing the same names, who were caught perpetrating other frauds in this war, pop up in different locations and positions.
It must be harder than we think for the oligarchs to find enough people who are willing to sell their souls, if they had one in the first place, to do the bidding of these bloodthirsty demons at the top.
I must remind one and all after reading all available info on this subject, that no one knew if they changed the water source, the lead pipe that supply water in Flint would leach out and increase the lead content of the water. This leaching of lead was caused by the change in the chemistry of the water supply when it changed from Detroit to the Flint river. Flint river water does not contain lead.
No one saw this issue before the change is made and no one can be blamed.
One must remember the water pipes in Flint are still the old lead pipes, the only change is being the water source to reduce costs to a bankrupt city.
“A noose or the electric chair would be better than a jail cell.” is entirely inappropriate in this democracy. But it appears that it is appropriate in this blog. I thank God that the commenter is not in a powerful position.
“A noose or the electric chair would be better than a jail cell.” is entirely inappropriate in this democracy.
Raj, we are not a democracy anymore. With Citizens United, the U.S. became an oligarchy, and most of the states have a death penalty—-31 to be exact.
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/states-and-without-death-penalty
In addition, check out the list of executions for 2014 in the United States. Even if the U.S. is still a democracy, that doesn’t mean there are no executions.
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/execution-list-2014
Raj – what about the fact that when residents started to complain about the smell, taste and color of the water after the change, they were shut out and city officials tried to bury the story?
Raj, it’s a complaint, so what is stated is not yet proven but read this and see if you believe “no one knew” (or should have known) that the water would corrode the lead pipes and thereby poison those people:
Click to access may.et.al.v.snyder.et.al.-.pacer.1.complaint.for.injunctive.and.declaratory.relief.pdf
Raj, So if no one is to blame, what happened to accountability?
1. The change to the Flint River source did not happen spontaneously.
2. There is a human in charge of Flint water supply and safety.
3. Any quality expert in any field would tell you changes to a system require at the least a test case or sandbox environment before a production roll out. If that is not possible, then thorough and immediate testing should have occurred before anyone drank one drop.
Lloyd’s comment seems made from a humanitarian stand point reflecting anger that people are needlessly hurt. Your comment is chilling in that you accept this situation and dismiss the fact people are poisoned without regard to why the system failed. I think God YOU are not in a position of power! I honestly do not know who causes more human misery – the incompetent or the evil. Geesh.
And in Southern California a whole community (of now middle class American refugees) has been driven from their homes (and schools have been shut down), many saying their health has been deeply impaired by the deadly fumes from a natural gas well that So. California Gas Co. seems to have known was not capped-ready for emergency leaks. It would seem that a whole field of these old natural gas wells has not properly inspected over many years, nor has the utility provided for the eventuality of leakage. For many weeks the PR flacks have given the media and the residents false info on all of this.
So, in America, we have more lessons in Flint and in Los Angeles, that we can NEVER trust our government to fulfill it’s duty to protect the citizens and residents who pay all the bills.
Further, we in So. California also have nearby aged nuclear plants leaking nuclear materials…and now there is talk of re-opening the highly dangerous old San Onofre nuclear plant, and keeping Diablo Canyon open, when both of these were built by same group that built the highly flawed and failed Japanese plant at Fukashima which did so much deadly damage when it failed…and which the Japanese are now talking about re-opening.
Why, when it is proven that all these sorts utilities are proven to be subject to failure, do humans in charge gamble with the lives of others?
Maybe it is failed education systems…or maybe society has developed more than the brains of the general public can absorb and integrate into technical systems that non-genius workers at all levels can implement.
Think the E.M.Forester story, The Machine Stops.
Think Blade Runner…. and Clockwork Orange.
Our lives are ruled like a Kurt Vonnegut novel….by people who seem not to be very intelligent with foresight, who were trained with either private or public educations.
Raj,
You are completely ignorant about this incident. The governor and this sick emergency manager are wholly responsible for water mess in Michigan. Rick Snyder knew that Flint water was contaminated even before the manager switched water source from Detroit. It’s all in the news(both mainstream and local).
Your total ignorance is through the roof. Keep embarrassing yourself to mortal coil.
Raj, you did not do your homework. Quote from today’s Free Press, “State officials have acknowledged that lead got into the drinking water because the state Department of Environmental Quality failed to require the addition of corrosion-control chemicals to the Flint River water, which caused lead to leach into the water from pipes and fixtures.”
Correction, Quote came from Detroit News article today. I apologize for the inaccuracy.
This guy should get a jail cell, not a raise!
A noose or the electric chair would be better than a jail cell.
Words cannot adequately describe the depravity of those responsible for the words and deeds described in this and related posts.
Governor Snyder was supposedly hired because he’s a good manager. Call me crazy but I think ensuring a potable water source is Government 101.
Does he need the Peace Corps to come in, or what?
This is becoming a regular thing. State managers in West Virginia were so corrupt they poisoned their own citizens last year. Toledo, Ohio also had water that wasn’t safe to use. If they can’t provide safe water they may as well hang up this whole “government” idea.
https://www.rt.com/usa/west-virginia-chemicals-leak-510/
And NC allowed a major utility to poison a water source until it was discovered.
“If they can’t provide safe water they may as well hang up this whole ‘government’ idea.”
Well, with the exception of the Carceral State – militarized law enforcement and prisons – and the military, isn’t that exactly what many of these people want? Certainly, the Snyders and Walkers of the world, our current crop of elected Smash and Grabbers who are busy disfiguring the Upper Midwest, seem to want that.
They’re like perverted Marxists, of sorts, seeking the withering away of the state, except of course for uniformed people with guns, whom they need to keep the Proles in their place while whatever wealth they have left is extracted from them.
The emergency manager is bad, but this is really on state government:
“Hanna-Attisha, an animated and passionate young pediatrician with horn-rimmed glasses who everyone calls Dr. Mona, realized there was a way to determine whether the water was affecting kids. Medicare requires states to keep records of blood lead levels in toddlers. The comparison was astonishing. Lead levels doubled and even tripled in some cases.
“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,” Hanna-Attisha said.
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.”
http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/11/health/toxic-tap-water-flint-michigan/
This is almost unbelievable. I made a picture to tell the story: https://twitter.com/kwolfepack/status/686624686214479876
GM would not even use the Flint River water in their plant to clean parts because it was corrosive. Any decent water chemist dealing with potable water would/should have recognized the potential for corrosion of lead pipes in older houses.
But what makes this worse is that even after the lead issue was identified by state health officials, rather than acknowledging the problem publicly, they buried it until independent scientists made it impossible to deny/ignore
D–n. You could see this happening under Kim Jong-un or ISIS. But in United States?
ONE WORD: HORROR! Another word: OMG! And my last word: SCUMS!
I have plenty more words, but Diane doesn’t like them in her living room. And those words can also be directed at our resident apologist above who seems to think this was a completely unavoidable accident.
“Science Denial”
No one saw
Or could have seen
Science law
Is not germane
No science. Just politics. He’s appointing a committee:
http://www.clickondetroit.com/news/gov-rick-snyder-issues-executive-order-to-deal-with-flint-water
Is there an adult in the US who DOES NOT know that “appointing a committee” = no one will ever be held individually accountable?
“Mistakes were made”
Please everyone..sign this petition and pass it on. This is as dangerous as Flint and it is only miles from my house. I too have been smelling this rotten egg gas smell for the last few months (caused by fracking it would seem).
In So. California this natural gas storage leak is a disaster…but is not being covered by the national media. If the methane gas starts explosions, it will be far worse than that the SF earthquake that burned down SF…it could burn down the entire San Fernando, Conejo, and Santa Clarita valleys. Meanwhile the toxic smoke is polluting and poisoning the air in these valleys….and So. Ca. Gas is dragging their feet to get it capped. The Climate Hawk info below explains part of the problem.
Ellen
——————————————————————————————
“Climate Hawks Vote
I’m Richard Mathews, treasurer of Climate Hawks Vote, and I live within smelling distance of the fracked natural gas leak that has been spewing methane and toxins into the Los Angeles air since at least October 23, coming from an underground storage area above the suburb of Porter Ranch and holding fracked natural gas imported from other states. The company responsible is Southern California Gas, a subsidiary of Sempra Energy.
Sign our petition–tell President Obama to declare the site a national disaster.
I live four miles from the site of this toxic disaster—the largest natural gas leak in U.S. history—and can smell the nasty fumes. But it’s even worse for people like my 88-year-old mother, who lives with me and is suffering from headaches and nausea but who feels she is too old to handle relocation. Thousands of families have fled their homes, and many more are still getting sick. Others like my mother are on the waiting list to get air purifiers. The leak isn’t expected to be fixed until Halliburton completes drilling a relief well around March.
Methane is an extremely potent greenhouse gas contributing to rapid warming—over 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. The greenhouse impact of this leak is the equivalent of the pollution from seven million cars or six coal-fired power plants. I’ve calculated that this leak spews more gas, by volume, into the atmosphere than the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster leaked oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
That global disaster troubles climate hawks like me. But equally worrisome, methane is highly explosive, and the chemicals mixed with the methane are making people sick. These include methyl mercaptan (the rotten-egg-smell they add to natural gas), benzene, radon, hydrogen sulfide, and a mist of crude oil. While the methane spreads around the world, these toxins stay close to the ground and accumulate in our valley.
On January 6, California Gov. Jerry Brown dropped by for an hour and declared it a disaster. Now, President Obama needs to meet with affected residents, understand the havoc wreaked by his pro-fracking policy, and declare the site a national disaster area.
President Obama’s national disaster declaration will help my friends and neighbors get tax benefits, mortgage relief, and federal resources to improve health—and help this nation to start fighting back against the out-of-control fracking industry.
Again, please click here to sign our petition to declare the site a national disaster.
Richard M. Mathews, for
Climate Hawks Vote “
Since when does a school emergency manager make decisions on water? Clearly this story is garbled in the interests of someone’s political agenda!
Dr. Zelle,
Mr. Earley was the Emergency Manager for the city of Flint, Michigan. He shut off the safe water to save money. He is now the Emergency Nanager for Detroit public schools. It is not that hard to understand. Gov. Snyder gets to control whatever he wants.