While the Children in Flint Were Given Poisoned Water to Drink, General Motors Was Given a Special Hookup to the Clean Water. A few months after Governor Snyder removed Flint from the clean fresh water we had been drinking for decades, the brass from General Motors went to him and complained that the Flint River water was causing their car parts to corrode when being washed on the assembly line. The Governor was appalled to hear that GM property was being damaged, so he jumped through a number of hoops and quietly spent $440,000 to hook GM back up to the Lake Huron water, while keeping the rest of Flint on the Flint River water. Which means that while the children in Flint were drinking lead-filled water, there was one â and only one â address in Flint that got clean water: the GM factory.
For Just $100 a Day, This Crisis Couldâve Been Prevented. Federal law requires that water systems which are sent through lead pipes must contain an additive that seals the lead into the pipe and prevents it from leaching into the water. Someone at the beginning suggested to the Governor that they add this anti-corrosive element to the water coming out of the Flint River. âHow much would that cost?â came the question. â$100 a day for three months,â was the answer. I guess that was too much, so, in order to save $9,000, the state government said f*** it â and as a result the State may now end up having to pay upwards of $1.5 billion to fix the mess.
Thereâs More Than the Lead in Flintâs Water. In addition to exposing every child in the city of Flint to lead poisoning on a daily basis, there appears to be a number of other diseases we may be hearing about in the months ahead. The number of cases in Flint of Legionnaires Disease has increased tenfold since the switch to the river water. Eighty-seven people have come down with it, and at least ten have died. In the five years before the river water, not a single person in Flint had died of Legionnaires Disease. Doctors are now discovering that another half-dozen toxins are being found in the blood of Flintâs citizens, causing concern that there are other health catastrophes which may soon come to light.
Peopleâs Homes in Flint Are Now Worth Nothing Because They Cant Be Sold. Would you buy a house in Flint right now? Who would? So every homeowner in Flint is stuck with a house thatâs now worth nothing. Thatâs a total home value of $2.4 billion down the economic drain. People in Flint, one of the poorest cities in the U.S., donât have much to their name, and for many their only asset is their home. So, in addition to being poisoned, they have now a net worth of zero. (And as for employment, who is going to move jobs or start a company in Flint under these conditions? No one.) Has Flintâs future just been flushed down that river?
While They Were Being Poisoned, They Were Also Being Bombed. Hereâs a story which has received little or no coverage outside of Flint. During these two years of water contamination, residents in Flint have had to contend with a decision made by the Pentagon to use Flint for target practice. Literally. Actual unannounced military exercises â complete with live ammo and explosives â were conducted last year inside the city of Flint. The army decided to practice urban warfare on Flint, making use of the thousands of abandoned homes which they could drop bombs on. Streets with dilapidated homes had rocket-propelled grenades fired upon them. For weeks, an undisclosed number of army troops pretended Flint was Baghdad or Damascus and basically had at it. It sounded as if the city was under attack from an invading army or from terrorists. People were shocked this could be going on in their neighborhoods. Wait â did I say âpeople?â I meant, Flint people. As with the Governor, it was OK to abuse a community that held no political power or money to fight back. BOOM!
The Wife of the Governorâs Chief of Staff Is a Spokeswoman for Nestle, Michiganâs Largest Owner of Private Water Reserves. As Deep Throat told Woodward and Bernstein: âFollow the money.â Snyderâs chief of staff throughout the two years of Flintâs poisoning, Dennis Muchmore, was intimately involved in all the decisions regarding Flint. His wife is Deb Muchmore, who just happens to be the spokesperson in Michigan for the Nestle Company â the largest owner of private water sources in the State of Michigan. Nestle has been repeatedly sued in northern Michigan for the 200 gallons of fresh water per minute it sucks from out of the ground and bottles for sale as their Ice Mountain brand of bottled spring water. The Muchmores have a personal interest in seeing to it that Nestles grabs as much of Michiganâs clean water was possible â especially when cities like Flint in the future are going to need that Ice Mountain.
In Michigan, from Flint water, to Crime and Murder, to GM Ignition Switches, Itâs a Culture of Death. Itâs not just the water that was recklessly used to put peopleâs lives in jeopardy. There are many things that happen in Flint that would give one the impression that there is a low value placed on human life. Flint has one of the worst murder and crime rates in the country. Just for context, if New York City had the same murder rate as Flint, Michigan, the number of people murdered last year in New York would have been almost 4,000 people â instead of the actual 340 who were killed in NYC in 2015. But itâs not just street crime that makes one wonder about what is going on in Michigan. Last year, it was revealed that, once again, one of Detroitâs automakers had put profit ahead of peopleâs lives. General Motors learned that it had installed faulty ignition switches in many of its cars. Instead of simply fixing the problem, mid-management staff covered it up from the public. The auto industry has a history of weighing the costs of whether itâs cheaper to spend the money to fix the defect in millions of cars or to simply pay off a bunch of lawsuits filed by the victims surviving family members. Does a cynical, arrogant culture like this make it easy for a former corporate CEO, now Governor, turn a blind eye to the lead that is discovered in a municipalityâs drinking water?
Donât Call It âDetroit Waterâ â Itâs the Largest Source of Fresh Drinking Water in the World. The media keeps saying Flint was using âDetroitâs water.â It is only filtered and treated at the Detroit Water Plant. The water itself comes from Lake Huron, the third largest body of fresh water in the world. It is a glacial lake formed over 10,000 years ago during the last Ice Age and it is still fed by pure underground springs. Flint is geographically the last place on Earth where one should be drinking poisoned water.
ALL the Children Have Been Exposed, As Have All the Adults, Including Me. Thatâs just a fact. If you have been in Flint anytime from April 2014 to today, and youâve drank the water, eaten food cooked with it, washed your clothes in it, taken a shower, brushed your teeth or eaten vegetables from someoneâs garden, youâve been exposed to and ingested its toxins. When the media says â9,000 children under 6 have been exposed,â that means ALL the children have been exposed because the total number of people under the age of 6 in Flint is⊠9,000! The media should just say, âall.â When they say â47 children have tested positiveâ, thatâs just those whoâve drank the water in the last week or so. Lead enters the body and does itâs damage to the brain immediately. It doesnât stay in the blood stream for longer than a few days and you canât detect it after a month. So when you hear â47 childrenâ, thatâs just those with an exposure in the last 48 hours. Itâs really everyone.
This Was Done, Like So Many Things These Days, So the Rich Could Get a Big Tax Break. When Governor Snyder took office in 2011, one of the first things he did was to get a multi-billion dollar tax break passed by the Republican legislature for the wealthy and for corporations. But with less tax revenues, that meant he had to start cutting costs. So, many things â schools, pensions, welfare, safe drinking water â were slashed. Then he invoked an executive privilege to take over cities (all of them majority black) by firing the mayors and city councils whom the local people had elected, and installing his cronies to act as âdictatorsâ over these cities. Their mission? Cut services to save money so he could give the rich even more breaks. Thatâs where the idea of switching Flint to river water came from. To save $15 million! It was easy. Suspend democracy. Cut taxes for the rich. Make the poor drink toxic river water. And everybodyâs happy.
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