Michigan Governor Rick Snyder activated the National Guard to help the people of Flint, whose water was poisoned by lead contamination from the Flint River. The governor’s emergency manager Darnell Earley made a decision to cut off the safe water supply from the Detroit water system to save money. The decision saved millions of dollars but poisoned many children. The National Guard is distributing bottles of water.
Lead poisoning can cause serious and lasting damage to children’s brains. This would not have been done to an affluent white community. It is an outrage and a disgrace.
A few days ago, one of our readers chastised me for making too big a deal of the Flint water crisis. Sorry, but I think that when government saves money by putting children’s lives at risk, that’s a big deal. Governor Snyder apologized. The man who made this decision should be held accountable. So should Governor Snyder.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
As a Michigan citizen, I appreciate your coverage of the Flint water crisis. It will be an education crisis in the future as the effects of lead poisoning show up in learning difficulties for a community in crisis. Both Earley and Snyder deserve prison time (which neither will see). Snyder’s lame, one year late apology and actions are way too little, way too late. May they both experience the karma they deserve for their actions and inactions.
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Where is the federal government? There are multiple regulatory issues here that should be investigated, most notably the safe drinking water act which you would think was violated in this case??? This disturbs me on many levels and the fact that the national news media has not been actively pursuing this is extremely disappointing.
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But imagine the headline news if Earley were Arab/Muslim.
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The New York Times has been covering the story since at least last March; you can Google “flint water nyt” to find other pieces: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/03/25/us/a-water-dilemma-in-michigan-cheaper-or-clearer.html
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Rachel Maddow has done a couple of reports, and with obvious anger that this is not making headlines elsewhere.
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I so agree, Glenn: where are the Feds?! I have been so embarrassed by the lack of Barack Obama’s leadership. Where was he, that morning when Phila schools had to delay school start due to lack of school nurses & counselors? Where was he when Chicago, his home town, closed 50+ schools at one fell swoop?
And today, where is Barack Obama when Flint MI children have been exhibiting high blood levels of lead due to 18mos of cheaper public water source, by fiat of an ’emergency mgr’, who could have implemented a cheap fix to protect the public but decided even that $100/day was too much to protect the children of Flint?
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The Feds are putting down the Bundy insurrection at the wildlife refuge. Oh, wait.
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Too big a deal about lead poisoning all of the children of Flint? As a direct consequence of gubernatorial control of the city? Demonstrating willful and prolonged disregard the for the health and safety of poor children and children of color? Not by a long shot.
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Dirck- are you a feeling human being? Clean water is a human right not a commodity. Keeping clean water for all citizens is the least we should expect of government officials. Snyder & Flint’s appointed dictator are the same people who fight EPA regulations and real oversight.The buck stops with the Snyder & his succession of incompetent & neglectful decisions.
Lead poisoning is a leading cause of permanent brain damage in children. It is a direct cause of both adult and child memory loss, vision loss, dementia and many other permanent problems. Once lead enters your body it never leaves.
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jcgrim, Reread DR’s comment.
Rhetorical style; concludes “Not by a long shot.”
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I believe there is a movement afoot to call for Snyder’s resignation. He certainly deserves it. I do not know who is the worst, Snyder or our Indiana governor Pence. Toss up or maybe [forgive me] a throw up.
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Amen! This Flint Water Crisis beats anything that has happened in Indiana (that we know of). I think the AIDS crisis we had here was bad, but not as bad as poisoning the drinking water and causing irreversible damage to the mental abilities to so many innocent children.
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A public hanging of both men will do just fine for me.
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Tsk, tsk. Now, now. Let’s not be hasty.
Hanging is too quick, after all – how about drawing and quartering?
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No, Dienne.
I prefer the guillotine . . .
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Robert
What kind of laws do you abide by? I would like to know. Are you the judge, jury and executioner all bundled into one? Where do you get all this info?
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So, Raj, are you okay with Mr. Earley being judge, jury and executioner of the people of Flint? Are you okay with him knowingly poisoning their water supply in order to “save money”? Because it was known in advance that the Flint River water wasn’t safe without the anti-corrosive agent. Treatment plants to add that agent weren’t scheduled to be completed until 2016, yet he switched the water supply in 2014. All of this is *documented*. Furthermore, when residents started complaining of the taste, appearance and smell of the water, and complaining of illnesses, he and his team tried to silence them and bury the story. They blatantly and willfully lied by saying that the water had been tested and treated when they knew it had not. The fact that you continue to defend this is sickening. How about if you drink Flint water for the next year or so and then tell us how okay this whole situation is?
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Robert – the guillotine is even faster than hanging. Perhaps poisoning would be fitting….
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Dienne,
Raj should crawl back into the set of bowels he came from before someone flushes him down the toilet.
Someone spray some RAID on Raj. PLEASE.
Raj, don’t drink the water as Dienne suggests. Instead, come over to my place, and I’ll serve you up a nice freshly pressed goblet of hemlock . . . . .
Poor Raj. You could not think accurately or govern morally even if someone paid you a powerball sum . .
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Poisoning, knowingly, citizens of Flint, including pregnant women, children, the elderly and everyone in between is ABSOLUTELY CRIMINAL and they should be arrested. They had the responsibility to do the right thing, had access to specialist, and created a massive health crisis for the residents, for life.
Those of us who taught struggeling children years ago, before we removed lead from paint, had paint removal regulations, and use lead-free gasoline, research in special education frequently wrote about lead and mental retardation (older term). One of the leading causes of MR.
The criminal politicians need to be removed, arrested and stand trial, while ethical experts clean up the mess, work with residents and plan on better solutions than dropping off 24 bottle trays door to door. Life long implications.
For the residents of Flint, this is their Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, or any disasters from the long list of contamination disasters in the US.
Heartbreaking!
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I so agree. In mid-1980’s, while attempting to become pregnant in Brooklyn, I had all paint stripped & redone, & asbestos removed, at great cost. We still had the eldest of three w/health issues, but at least I knew it was not due to anything I could have mitigated. Yet all that time, I knew there were many children in Brooklyn afflicted with brain damage due to lead paint. A pox on these ’emergency mgrs’ in Mi, who visited lead brain-damage on their children to save a few pennies,
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“Diane Ravitch’s blog A site to discuss better education for all.”
Is it outrageous to demand that those responsible for poisoning children should be held accountable?
“I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; — but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.”
William Lloyd Garrison.
Thank you to the owner of this blog for remembering, and heeding, the wisdom of a true American hero.
😎
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Snyder’s apology will be accepted after he forfeits his past governor’s pay, agrees to drink lead-tainted water, for a time period, similar in length to the Flint children’s exposure and, after he resigns. The water-drinking can be concurrent with his prison sentence for callous disregard and indifference of 99% of Michiganders. Betsy de Vos can visit him in jail.
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Reblogged this on Politicians Are Poody Heads and commented:
What the hell took Snyder so long to activate the Guard to deliver water?
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An eleventh-hour attempt at best. But still better than doing-nothing-but-apologetic-excuse-through-media. The man who made the decision to switch to contaminated water-supply (and lying to the residents)–is responsible for Fukushimatizing Flint.
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Having to call out the National Guard and pass out bottled water is not saving money.
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As of today, only seven members of Michigan’s National Guard have been deployed to deliver water to the nearly 100,000 citizens of Flint.
Seven.
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This is what happens with libertarian Ayn Rand government in action, not only does it not serve the people, it hurts them by it’s disregard. Tea Party politics leads to this.
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It staggers me that “cost savings” are put above the health and safety of residents. The emergency quote-unquote manager who did this — he landed somewhere else, right? Fancy title, fancy paycheck? Meanwhile, the community must brace for the inevitable consequences of his “cost savings” — I cannot get over it. The only way it makes any sense to me at all is to look at it through a SEP (Somebody Else’s Problem) field. He MUST have known it was coming…”cost savings.” More like cost deferral.
Somebody else’s problem.
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The Emergency Manager who ordered the switch in Flint to unsafe water is now the EM for the Detroit public schools.
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While I completely agree with you that what happened in Michigan to the water supply was an outrage and disgrace, I take exception to your comment that it wouldn’t have happened in a wealthy white suburb. I find your comment divisive, inaccurate and overall unnecessary.
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Christine, do any affluent white suburbs in Michigan have emergency managers? Have any of them lost their safe water supply due to a decision by a state official? An example would make your case.
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So has it happened in a wealthy white Mi suburb? Apparently not, as far as we know. But stay tuned: there seems to be little economic support for even upper-crust MI suburbs. You too could be taken over by an ’emergency mgr’ if you don’t produce sufficient taxes.
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Oh please.
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What is so divisive, Christine? Statistically, wealthier people, in proportion to their wealth, are able to avoid encounters with a very wide variety of disasters, maladies, disadvantages, and hardships.
This indifference the EM and governor had to the low income population of Flint was something very difficult to pull off in an educated, upwardly mobile community . . . . .
Yes, Christine, the rich really are different from you and me, to loosely borrow a quote from F.S. Fitzgerald . . . . .
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Well, the important thing is you are offended.
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“Residents of Flint, Michigan, already reeling because of lead contamination in their drinking water, got more disturbing news on Wednesday.
Gov. Rick Snyder announced the number of cases of Legionnaires’ disease has spiked in Genesee County in the two years since Flint switched its water supply from the Great Lakes to the Flint River.
But the increase cannot be directly attributed to the switch, said Nick Lyon, director of the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. Not all the people who got Legionnaires’ were exposed to Flint water, he said.
From June 2014 to November 2015, at least 87 county residents developed Legionnaires’ disease, compared to between six and 13 cases in the four preceding years, Lyon said. Ten patients died, he said.”
There’s (apparently) no way to conclusively determine if the spike is caused by the water but it spreads in (misting) warm water and obviously they would have been heating the Flint River water when it’s used in homes.
I think it’s particularly galling for people in Michigan because they live so near the largest fresh water source in the world- the Great Lakes. Water water everywhere but not a drop to drink.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/13/health/flint-michigan-water-crisis/
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Now we see the Florida Scott administration loosened medical standards for child cardiac patients after a generous donation from a provider under investigation for violating those standards.
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He never should have been governor. His entire career in government is one huge conflict of interest with his private sector career.
We need some ethics “reform”. Desperately. On an emergency basis. Can we appoint an emergency manager for that?
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Although It is true Michigan’s Governor Rick Snyder activated the Michigan National Guard, only seven members have been deployed to deliver bottled water to the nearly 100,000 residents of Flint.
Yes, seven.
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The public school teacher sick-out forced the mayor to tour the schools:
“Mayor Mike Duggan saw the rodent Tuesday, during a tour of several schools with city officials looking for health and safety violations. The mayor, who also saw youngsters wearing their coats in a chilly classroom, said his building visits spurred him to seek immediate solutions to problems in the schools he described as “deeply disturbing.”
“I’ve seen a range of conditions,” he said Tuesday morning after visiting Fisher Magnet Lower Academy. “Some building were well-maintained and some were deeply disturbing and I plan to look at a few more today. What I’m dealing with is making sure every building is safe.”
Does anyone believe anything would have happened without the sick-out? How long were they complaining about this and completely ignored?
http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/detroit-city/2016/01/12/detroit-mayor-inspects-schools/78692424/
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What job of the mayor’s is more important than knowing in great detail about the conditions in which the children of his city spend a large part of their day?
Here’s what the power brokers want: be grateful for the crumbs we brush off the table after the banquet has concluded. Proof:
“DPS spokeswoman Michelle Zdrodowski responded via email late Tuesday, writing: ‘The mouse the mayor saw today was found in a trap that had been set by the district’s pest control contractor. Since school was closed yesterday and today, the custodians had likely not yet seen it. The fact that it was in the trap indicates that we were addressing the issue.’ ”
There’s dead mouse in a class and that proves they’re addressing the issue. At least it was dead. There was a period of time in Boston where they used glue traps to catch our rodents, and more than once I arrived to find a mewling coming from the corner of my room where an unfortunate critter waited to die while I taught my classes. But they were addressing the issue.
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“Terror on the Range”
We search for terror and its fans
In Paki- and Afghani- stans
But terrorists are here at home
In Michigan, where Snyders roam
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One significant rationale for Michigan’s emergency manager law was to improve accountability, with one person – the governor – in charge and accountable.
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The new ESSA allows for no more than 1% of kids to be designated SWD’s for the purposes of testing. Inquiring minds want to know: Will there be an exception for Flint?
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It is clear that Snyder is to blame for this because he is a Republican and they are heartless. Stabenow, Kildee, and Ananich are all Democrats and they are incompetent but not heartless so deserve no blame. The mayor is gone and so is the emergency manager, and the city manager, public works administrator, head of the municipal water company, the DEQ and EPA, who were the professionals and made all the errors in managing this matter and provided false reports and misinformation are civil servants and there is nothing to gain in blaming them. The current mayor, Karen Weaver, said it may take $1.5B to repair and replace the water system, or about $15,000 per resident, and allowing that the schools are terrible, unemployment is high and property values are dismal, maybe it would just be cheaper to pay everyone to move to Detroit, where housing can be had for almost nothing, and the water is probably OK, and just close Flint. Otherwise the Feds are going to have to pay for this mess, because the rest of Michigan as watch the mismanagement of Flint for decades and is in no mood to bail them out for all their bad behavior.
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