Lead in Flint's water. Who decided to change supply? Why is governor under fire?

[octopus]

@Corporal_Clegg

Hi justmeetee,

The city governmnent which was elected by the people was replaced in an undemocratic move where he fired the elected officials and installed so-called “emergency managers” who reported to him and him only. This was done supposedly because Flint had gone bankrupt. But Flint’s economic woes were much longer in the making than the tenure of any elected officals office. The installed emergency managers made the decision to draw water from the polluted Flint river instead of getting it from Detroit-processed Lake Huron water which had been fine for drinking and cooking. The untreated water from the Flint river corroded the pipes where lead had long been used at connections without incident. When scientists and doctors brought the alarm of lead contamination to the attention of the managers, they chose to defend their own decisions rather than alarm the Governor. Eventually, the Governor became aware but did little–probably also feeling defensive that his “samll governmnent conservatism” was failing a critical test that was putting children and others at peril.

Without steady media coverage by Rachel Maddow of MSNBC this story may have just gone on to much worse effect. But her dogged determination to get something done about it finally resulted in the main stream media picking up the story. It IS a politically significant matter as it is an indictment of “conservatism” itself as a governing logic. No one ever argues for “big” or “bigger” government just for its own sake. They would be laughed out of town for doing that. So, it’s perfectly valid to argue that the ideology of shrinking governmnent for its own sake without thought of potential consequences is just as ludicrous as making governmnent bigger just for the sake of making it bigger. So, in this case, when 10 people died of legionaires dsease and 80 others stricken with it, proof has never been more tangible that the underlying assertions of political conservatism are dangerous nonsense.

This is why the democrats are calling a spade a spade. It is entirely on the governor and his party ideology that the people of Flint have been poisoned and their property values shot down because the city’s water infrastructure has to be replaced at a cost far far beyond the red that the city was inititially in. You can’t undo the brain damage or bring back the dead. And the “pipe job” is estimated to cost well over $700million. If you want to understand the difference between conservative and liberal politics, here is a good case to learn from. IMO conservatives are reckless and tend to cover-up when their recklessness bears out. Liberals tend to error on the side of investment not to have something like this happen.

Please. Liberalism is why those rust belt cities are shit holes that can’t maintain their infrastructure now.

[elucidator]

Ah! So, if people get poisoned by nitwitted conservatives, that’s their fault too?

[Pearl_Clutching_Provocateur]

I question whether a bankrupt city like Detroit could sell water at 50% off. Were they making that great of profit? I realize Flint consumed 10% of the water but accounted for 21% of the revenue. Perhaps, Flint got tired of being shafted for so long and didn’t trust Detroit.

@Happy_Lendervedder

[
I think you’re convinced this is nothing but government incompetence, and refuse to see any evidence that it could be something else more serious than that.

I’ve never said that. There’s plenty of blame to go around. What I do contend is that there is a concerted effort to misrepresent the facts and find some way to blame Governor Snyder because he is a Republican. Snyder may indeed hold some blame but he is certainly not the only one. There appears to be a total breakdown from bottom to top.

[boytyperanma]

@Pearl_Clutching_Provocateur

I’ve never said that. There’s plenty of blame to go around. What I do contend is that there is a concerted effort to misrepresent the facts and find some way to blame Governor Snyder because he is a Republican. Snyder may indeed hold some blame but he is certainly not the only one. There appears to be a total breakdown from bottom to top.

The real tragedy is the Republican Governor and Republican controlled legislature stripped all the Democrats of power so they don’t have Democratic scapegoats left to lay this on.

There doesn’t have to to a concerted effort to blame Republicans. This happened under their watch. The only thing left to do is to determine whether it was incompetence or maleficence.

I’m not really following this current narrative. Snyder had an Emergency Manager controlling both Flint and Detroit, thus Detroit water. He could have decided whatever outcome he wanted in the negotiations. He can certainly distance himself saying he let people in lower levels of government work things out.

The concept of privatizing Detroit Water isn’t some new revelation, they’d been looking to sell off the asset since Detroit filed for bankruptcy. It’s one of the reasons they’d been increasing rates across the board.

Maybe if we had access to those emails we could get an accurate picture of what happened rather than trying to piece together what occurred.

[Pearl_Clutching_Provocateur]

@boytyperanma

I’m not really following this current narrative. Snyder had an Emergency Manager controlling both Flint and Detroit, thus Detroit water. He could have decided whatever outcome he wanted in the negotiations. He can certainly distance himself saying he let people in lower levels of government work things out.

This is totally irrelevant. It’s like blaming my wife because she insisted I go to the store to buy milk and on the way, I get into an accident. Yeah, if I hadn’t gone to get milk, I wouldn’t have been in accident, but she isn’t to blame.

Everything would have been worked out fine if the City of Flint Water Department had properly treated the water before it entered the system with a relatively inexpensive chemical. This is gross incompetence since it is a widely known protocol.

Unless you have evidence that Snyder or his minions vetoed the use of the anti-corrosion process, the primary blame rests with the Flint Water department which is fully staffed with public union employees who are most likely Democrats too.

[Happy_Lendervedder]

@Pearl_Clutching_Provocateur

I question whether a bankrupt city like Detroit could sell water at 50% off. Were they making that great of profit? I realize Flint consumed 10% of the water but accounted for 21% of the revenue. Perhaps, Flint got tired of being shafted for so long and didn’t trust Detroit.

Too bad Flint wasn’t allowed to make that decision. The Emergency Manager did. And when the elected leaders of Flint DID vote to go back to Detroit’s water in March, the Emergency Manager called that idea “incomprehensible” and kept them on the poisoned water.

What I do contend is that there is a concerted effort to misrepresent the facts and find some way to blame Governor Snyder because he is a Republican.

No one is misrepresenting the facts. You’re willfully ignoring ones you don’t like because it doesn’t fit your narrative that Republicans could have possibly fucking poisoned a city of 100,000 people, 60% of which are black, 40% of which are living in poverty, and that they did absolutely nothing about it for months even when they knew what they had done.

Not only that, but this isn’t even the only public health crisis falling on Snyder’s head right now. The Detroit Public Schools are full of black mold, rats, broken windows, water-warped floorboards and kids who have to wear winter coats in their classrooms for half the day-- all this after the DPS has been under state control for the past seven years, five years under Snyder.

Everything would have been worked out fine if the City of Flint Water Department had properly treated the water before it entered the system with a relatively inexpensive chemical. This is gross incompetence since it is a widely known protocol.

Wrong. The MDEQ was responsible for treating the water, and has admitted it failed to do so.

Unless you have evidence that Snyder or his minions vetoed the use of the anti-corrosion process, the primary blame rests with the Flint Water department which is fully staffed with public union employees who are most likely Democrats too.

Wrong, see above. Nice try blaming the unions though. Your desperate attempt to somehow shift blame to Democrats in a situation entirely controlled by Republicans is laughable.

[Pearl_Clutching_Provocateur]

[quote=“Happy_Lendervedder, post:86, topic:743637”]

T

Wrong. The MDEQ was responsible for treating the water, and has admitted it failed to do so.

Do you know the difference between “TESTING” and “TREATING” the water? Feel free to read your own citations. I did.

The MDEQ is responsible for TESTING the water not TREATING the water. As I have posted before, the water is fine coming from the treatment plant where MDEQ tested, once it entered the system is where the lead leeched into the water coming from the taps.

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

The head of the MDEQ (who has since resigned) was a Snyder appointee, so even there he gets some blame. That said, it does seem like there is more than enough of it to go around.

[Happy_Lendervedder]

@Pearl_Clutching_Provocateur

@Happy_Lendervedder

T

Wrong. The MDEQ was responsible for treating the water, and has admitted it failed to do so.

Do you know the difference between “TESTING” and “TREATING” the water? Feel free to read your own citations. I did.

The MDEQ is responsible for TESTING the water not TREATING the water. As I have posted before, the water is fine coming from the treatment plant where MDEQ tested, once it entered the system is where the lead leeched into the water coming from the taps.

Well see, I’m not talking about testing for lead. The MDEQ was supposed to test the water *before *it got to the treatment plant,…for corrosiveness. And had they done that, they would have told Flint (which was still under state control, by the way) to tell their Democratic union city workers to add anti-corrosive chemicals to the water, which would have prevented this lead debacle from ever happening.

Or do you suggest the Democratic union city workers should have, on their own, bought some anti-corrosive chemicals and added it to the water? Making it their job to treat it even though the state is the one who was supposed to test the water and give them an action plan?

But yes, I concede that I misspoke and that the state-run city was supposed to have been the government entity to actually treat the water…after the state tested it and gave them a plan for making it safe.

Good read.

[puddleglum]

@Corporal_Clegg

Hi justmeetee,

The city governmnent which was elected by the people was replaced in an undemocratic move where he fired the elected officials and installed so-called “emergency managers” who reported to him and him only. This was done supposedly because Flint had gone bankrupt. But Flint’s economic woes were much longer in the making than the tenure of any elected officals office. The installed emergency managers made the decision to draw water from the polluted Flint river instead of getting it from Detroit-processed Lake Huron water which had been fine for drinking and cooking. The untreated water from the Flint river corroded the pipes where lead had long been used at connections without incident. When scientists and doctors brought the alarm of lead contamination to the attention of the managers, they chose to defend their own decisions rather than alarm the Governor. Eventually, the Governor became aware but did little–probably also feeling defensive that his “samll governmnent conservatism” was failing a critical test that was putting children and others at peril.

Without steady media coverage by Rachel Maddow of MSNBC this story may have just gone on to much worse effect. But her dogged determination to get something done about it finally resulted in the main stream media picking up the story. It IS a politically significant matter as it is an indictment of “conservatism” itself as a governing logic. No one ever argues for “big” or “bigger” government just for its own sake. They would be laughed out of town for doing that. So, it’s perfectly valid to argue that the ideology of shrinking governmnent for its own sake without thought of potential consequences is just as ludicrous as making governmnent bigger just for the sake of making it bigger. So, in this case, when 10 people died of legionaires dsease and 80 others stricken with it, proof has never been more tangible that the underlying assertions of political conservatism are dangerous nonsense.

This is why the democrats are calling a spade a spade. It is entirely on the governor and his party ideology that the people of Flint have been poisoned and their property values shot down because the city’s water infrastructure has to be replaced at a cost far far beyond the red that the city was inititially in. You can’t undo the brain damage or bring back the dead. And the “pipe job” is estimated to cost well over $700million. If you want to understand the difference between conservative and liberal politics, here is a good case to learn from. IMO conservatives are reckless and tend to cover-up when their recklessness bears out. Liberals tend to error on the side of investment not to have something like this happen.

This is untrue. Flint had gone bankrupt, no supposedly about it. The emergency manager who made the decision to transfer the water source was a Democrat. He did this because that was the backup plan for decades before he was appointed. If the water department had added the correct anti-corrosive to the water it would have saved a bankrupt city millions of dollars a year. When the contamination of the water was first suspected the MDEQ covered up what was happening and misled the city manager who was told that the water safe by the people whose job it was to test the water. The EPA knew that the water was contaminated but did nothing. When the city manager was presented with evidence that the water was contaminated he finally acted.
It was not small government ideology that made the MDEQ falsify their findings or the EPA sit on its findings. It is the liberal ideology that tells us that the government regulatory agencies will keep us safe. It was those regulatory agencies and the city department of water that failed the citizens.

[Happy_Lendervedder]

Wow, so Michigan, whose state government has been controlled by Republicans-- from the governor’s office to the legislature to the Supreme Court to the attorney general and secretary of state-- since 2010, is responsible for poisoning an entire city, but yet this just proves that liberals are idiots for expecting that the government won’t poison us?

Let’s just keep de-funding public infrastructure projects and ignoring public welfare, and blame it on government ineffectiveness so we can privatize everything, then our profit-driven corporate gods will finally take care of us! Hooray! Did I get that right, puddlegum?

[boytyperanma]

@puddleglum

This is untrue. Flint had gone bankrupt, no supposedly about it.

You have a cite for that claim? Should be an easy one to find on Google yet I can’t find any evidence Flint filed bankruptcy.

[puddleglum]

@boytyperanma

You have a cite for that claim? Should be an easy one to find on Google yet I can’t find any evidence Flint filed bankruptcy.

They did not file for bankruptcy, but they were bankrupt in that they had a 10 million dollar annual deficit and were trying to get the state to approve a 20 million bond sale so they would be able to make payroll.

[puddleglum]

@Happy_Lendervedder

Wow, so Michigan, whose state government has been controlled by Republicans-- from the governor’s office to the legislature to the Supreme Court to the attorney general and secretary of state-- since 2010, is responsible for poisoning an entire city, but yet this just proves that liberals are idiots for expecting that the government won’t poison us?

Let’s just keep de-funding public infrastructure projects and ignoring public welfare, and blame it on government ineffectiveness so we can privatize everything, then our profit-driven corporate gods will finally take care of us! Hooray! Did I get that right, puddlegum?

Right, liberal dogma is that government monopolies are the best way to deliver services. Conservative dogma is that the free market is the best way to deliver services. In Flint, they had a city government monopoly on providing water, a state agency whose job it is to make sure the water is pure, and a federal agency whose job it is keep pollutants out of the water supply, but yet the poisoning still happened.
If there was a free market in water, when the water was found to be contaminated they could have switched water companies and this never would have happened.
A solution that only works win Democrats win every election is not a solution.

[boytyperanma]

@puddleglum

They did not file for bankruptcy, but they were bankrupt in that they had a 10 million dollar annual deficit and were trying to get the state to approve a 20 million bond sale so they would be able to make payroll.

So unlike you athoritive statement there is a supposedly about it. They were not technically bankrupt. In bad economic shspe sure.

Do you consider the US to be bankrupt? We sell are selling bonds to pay our bills.

[BobLibDem]

City water is by its nature a commodity that can only come via a monopoly or a government agency. In this case, an incompetent governor appointed an incompetent dictator who was forced to make hasty, incorrect decisions due to an incompetent dictator running Detroit who was going to stop selling water to them. Couple that with a state agency covering up for the corrupt governor and the underfunded and understaffed EPA not being able to identify the issue quickly and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. You could make a case that this shows how private industry works better than government, but you’d be wrong. The problem is corrupt and incompetent government.

[boytyperanma]

@puddleglum

A solution that only works win Democrats win every election is not a solution.

What does this mean? Did you really just admit only Democrats can keep a function of government running. If you let the Republicans take over a government program that has been working for decades they can’t help but fuck it up?

[puddleglum]

@boytyperanma

What does this mean? Did you really just admit only Democrats can keep a function of government running. If you let the Republicans take over a government program that has been working for decades they can’t help but fuck it up?

No Republicans have been in charge of municipalities, cities, and states for decades and the water is fine. Flint and Detroit have been run exclusively by Democrats for over 50 years and are bankrupt, poor and crime ridden.
What I am saying is that a government program that only works when one party is in power is not a good program since in most places the other party will be in power at some point.

[septimus]

@Happy_Lendervedder

Wow, so Michigan, whose state government has been controlled by Republicans-- from the governor’s office to the legislature to the Supreme Court to the attorney general and secretary of state-- since 2010, is responsible for poisoning an entire city, but yet this just proves that liberals are idiots for expecting that the government won’t poison us?

Let’s just keep de-funding public infrastructure projects and ignoring public welfare, and blame it on government ineffectiveness so we can privatize everything, then our profit-driven corporate gods will finally take care of us! Hooray! Did I get that right, puddlegum?

Thank heavens. I get sick of this liberal board where nobody understands modern conservative philosophy.

Oh, you were being sarcastic? Go back to North Korea or France, you Marxist!

[BigT]

Appealing to the free market is silly. It has a lousy track record when it comes to self-regulation, only doing a decent job when it is afraid the government will step in.