Flint, Michigan, tried to save money on water. Now its children have lead poisoning.

[LiberalArkie]

By Libby Nelson on December 15, 2015

The water in Flint, Michigan, poisoned the town's children with lead for months. Now the mayor of Flint has declared a state of emergency, saying that the elevated lead levels will have long-lasting effects in its children.

Four percent of the town's children have elevated levels of lead in their bloodstream — double the share affected a few years ago, according to tests from Flint's Hurley Medical Center and confirmed by the state.

This all came about because a struggling Rust Belt city, trying to save money, ended up failing at one of its most basic tasks, providing safe drinking water. And the city compounded the problem by ignoring months of warnings from activists who felt its water was not safe to drink.

Snip

Eliminating lead in gasoline, Mother Jones's Kevin Drum argued in 2013, might be responsible for the dramatic drop in crime in the US in the 1990s:

If you add a lag time of 23 years, lead emissions from automobiles explain 90 percent of the variation in violent crime in America. Toddlers who ingested high levels of lead in the '40s and '50s really were more likely to become violent criminals in the '60s, '70s, and '80s.

Snip

http://www.vox.com/2015/12/15/10237054/flint-lead-poisoning

[WillyT]

1. K & R !!!

[phantom power]

2. ... but totally worth it, as long as government is small and taxes are low...

[saturnsring]

3. so who's going to jail

this happening in the u.s. is unreal- the usa 3rd world junk heap

[hollysmom]

4. it was not the elected government of hte city that tried this, it was the manager

appointed by the governor over the objections of city elected officials that did this.
this is the result of another republican blunder that does not care about the people living there - want to bet the city manager did not live in the city?
that is an important part of the story.

[dembotoz]

5. excellent point

[Act_of_Reparation]

7. There's a lot of misinformation and oversimplification of the causes.

People do not know -- or seem to have forgotten -- that Flint's plan was to save money by joining the Karegnondi Water Authority, which planned to supply Flint with fresh water from Lake Huron by means of a proposed pipeline. For the past 50 years, Flint has purchased its water from Detroit, and upon hearing of Flint's plan to jump ship, Detroit announced they would be terminating their water agreement with the City of Flint in April of 2014 -- years before the pipeline would be completed.

Flint needed to make a decision: Renegotiate a new deal with Detroit and get taken to the cleaners; fight Detroit in court; pump water from the Flint river using the existing infrastructure.

This isn't about appeasing taxpayers or corporate greed or any of the typical bullshit. This is about a poor city backed into a corner by a vindictive metropolis and pushed into making a bad decision by an unelected minion of the Michigan GOP. Snyder's goon is at least under scrutiny, but no one is talking about Detroit and their move to cancel service to Flint well ahead of schedule.

[SoapBox]

10. ^ This^

[RoccoR5955]

6. But this only affects poor and middle class kids

So IOKIYAR. Nothing will happen to the manager responsible for this. Besides, what's the big deal to them if a few likely Democratic voters are dead or maimed?

[jaxind]

8. Michael Moore

Isn't Flint, Michigan where Michael Moore is from?? I'd love to hear what he has to say about this!

[raccoon]

12. You beat me to the post! Yes, he's from Flint and I too want to hear what he has to say about it. n

[SoapBox]

9. And just wait until entire water tables are poisoned by fracking chemicals.

Wake up North Dakota and other states.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

11. Wasn't this one of those "city manager" deals?