Tag Archives: Flint

by - 0 comments

J’accuse …! Hillary’s misdirected Flint indictments

For Hillary, it’s simple enough. Blame the whole Flint water fiasco on Republican Governor Rick Snyder and environmental racism.

clintonflint1

Hillary’s not interested in dealing with facts or educating the public. Her goal is to harness public anger to her political advantage.

But in doing so, Hillary’s been fundamentally dishonest.

Consider:

  • In the spring of 2014, it wasn’t the governor, but Flint’s Emergency Manager, who decided to switch the city’s water supply from the Detroit water system’s Lake Huron water to the Flint River.
  • Although the Detroit water supply contained a low-cost corrosion inhibitor preventing lead from household pipes from contaminating the water, no inhibitor was added to the Flint River water. This sin of omission was committed by some water management worker(s), not the Emergency Manager or Gov. Snyder.
  • It was in response to a request from Lee Anne Walters, a Flint mother who had determined her child had lead poisoning, that the initial testing took place. Walters appealed to a Virginia Tech University team led by Prof. Marc Edwards to sample and test the water at her home.
  • The team found lead levels that on average contained over 2,000 parts per billion (ppb) of lead—more than 130 times the EPA’s maximum allowable limit of 15 ppb.
  • The Virginia Tech team gave the results, which showed high lead levels, to a Region 5 EPA employee, Miguel Del Toral.
  • Del Toral identified potential problems with Flint’s drinking water. In June 2015, he sent upstairs an internal memo summarizing the looming lead contamination problem, noting that Flint residents were not being protected by federal law.
  • Region 5 of the EPA, in the face of this potentially devastating water quality news, took no action and did not notify Flint residents. EPA Region 5 Administrator Susan Hedman told The Detroit News she sought a legal opinion on whether the EPA could force action, but it wasn’t completed until November.
  • But meanwhile, at the request of some Flint residents, the Va. Tech team did a more comprehensive analysis of water samples in the city and found sky-high level of lead contamination.
  • Still, as late as July 2015, after Miguel Del Toral’s memo was leaked by the American Civil Liberties Union, it was Brad Wurfel, a spokesman for Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality, not Gov. Snyder, who brushed off the memo and assured Flint residents all was safe. “…anyone who is concerned about lead in the drinking water in Flint can relax,” Wurfel said. “It does not look like there is any broad problem with the water supply freeing up lead as it goes to homes.”
  • Rick Snyder declared a state of emergency for Flint and Genesee County in January 2016 as a result of the contaminated drinking water crisis.

“It just makes me so angry that we as a society have spent the money and passed laws that say we want clean water,” Virginia Tech’s Prof. Edwards said in a Feb. 29, 2016 CNN interview. “We have civil servants out there who are supposed to be protecting us and the laws are not being followed. None of us are safe in this country until we get an Environmental Protection Agency, state primacy agencies and water utilities committed to following existing laws.”

So how about telling the truth for a change, Hillary.

 

 

 

 

 

by - 0 comments

No Deal: Kill the Flint bail-out

“I’m a victim of greed, corruption and mistakes and the blatant stupidity of our government.”

Melissa Mays, resident of Flint, before the Flint City Council, Jan. 26, 2015

flintwaterprotest

Update, Feb. 24, 2016:

Senators from both parties reached a tentative deal on Wednesday to address the water crisis in Flint, Mich.—and allow a long-stalled energy bill to move forward.

A proposal by Sens. Debbie Stabenow (D., Mich.) and James Inhofe (R., Okla.) would authorize $100 million in emergency aid to fix and replace the city’s lead-contaminated pipes, as well as $70 million in loans to improve the city’s water infrastructure. The deal also authorizes $50 million nationwide to bolster lead-prevention programs and improve children’s health. http://on.wsj.com/1QFcvy2

_______________

Unobservant and calculating politicians, bungling bureaucrats, greedy unions. You name it, everybody and their brother is responsible for the fiasco that is Flint, Michigan’s lead contaminated water.

So what do some Democrats do right off the bat? They call for the federal government to bail out the city with millions in federal aid.

The Democrats initially proposed $600 million in federal aid, with $400 million of that for drinking water infrastructure improvements and $200 million for dealing with the health fallout from lead exposure.

On Feb. 4, Senate Democrats blocked action on a comprehensive energy bill after lawmakers failed to agree on including the $600 million aid package, or even a smaller alternative, as an amendment to the bill.

The New York Times editorial page, as usual, lambasted the Republicans for their callous disregard of human suffering, particularly of children, tied their resistance to racism and endorsed the proposed bail out. As expected, the paper also laid the blame for the problem at the feet of Michigan’s Republican governor.

“The state government, whose officials caused this crisis, has been loath to commit substantial funds to long-term needs, and Congress, under the control of Republicans, is finding excuses not to rescue this poverty-stricken, majority-black city of nearly 100,000 people,” said the NY Times editorial.

And, of course, Hillary Clinton jumped in, asserting that the response to the water crisis has been “immoral” and calling for immediate passage of bail-out legislation. “This is no time for politics as usual,” Clinton said cynically. Her obvious goal – to shore up the African-American vote in states with later primaries.

Further, in an attempt to portray Republicans opposed to the amendment as heartless scrooges, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid said ,”100,000 people in Flint, Michigan, have been poisoned, and Republicans do nothing…Nine thousand little children . . . have been poisoned. Still, Senate Republicans refuse to help.”

But why should all federal taxpayers bail out Flint when it’s abundantly clear that Flint’s desperate financial situation is self-inflicted by a succession of Democratic administrations and the water debacle is a result of negligence and failure at all levels of government, local, state and federal.

It’s equally clear that the economic catastrophe that is Flint, with its high debt, high poverty rate, crime and depopulation, is the result of years of negligence by incompetent politicians.

In essence, the politicians are now asking the rest of us to cover their asses.

In 1965, in Flint’s heyday, the city had 200,000 residents.

In 20011, the city was placed under an emergency manager when a state-appointed review panel recommended a state takeover of the city.

The panel found a structural deficit, recurring cash flow shortages, an unsustainable pension program for public employees, and other financial deficiencies that left the city with a $14.6 million deficit a the end of fiscal year 2010.

By 2013, economic decay had caused the population to drop below 100,000 for the first time since the ’20s, with 40 percent of the residents living in poverty and the median income just $24,834 a year, compared with a state median income of $48,411.

The water problems began in April 2014 when Flint switched to Flint River water from Detroit’s water supply in a money-saving effort. The decision to switch was driven, in large part, by the fact Flint was swamped with debt, including an immense public employee pension burden negotiated by unions and Democratic city leaders. Pension and retiree health care obligations have grown so much that they now consume about 33 cents of every dollar spent from Flint’s general fund.

According to a team of students at Virginia Tech who conducted a comprehensive study of Flint’s water problems, contrary to popular assumptions, there’s essentially no lead in the drinking water being distributed in pipes leading up to property lines in Flint, but there is lead in many old service lines from water mains and in the plumbing systems of many older homes.

That wasn’t a big problem when Flint bought its water from Detroit because Detroit put a corrosion inhibitor in its water. But when Flint’s emergency manager decided to switch to the Flint River, without a corrosion inhibitor.

Marc Edwards, a professor at Virginia Tech who led the team of students, says the city could have addressed the problem early on for minimal cost. But now it’s gotten out of control.

“There is no question that if the city had followed the minimum requirements under federal law that none of this would have happened,” said Edwards.

___________

For a sobering and disheartening, yet inspiring, look at the Flint water debacle, I urge you to watch this video reviewing the work of the Virginia Tech Flint Water Study team: http://bit.ly/1JWRps9

VaTechWaterTeam

 

 

by - 0 comments

Flint and Hillary Clinton’s race to the bottom

Flint, Michigan’s water is contaminated with lead. It’s an environmental, political and personal calamity. So where does Hillary Clinton go first? She casts it a racial issue.

“We’ve had a city in the United States of America where the population which is poor in many ways, and majority African-American has been drinking and bathing in lead contaminated water and the governor of that state acted as though he didn’t really care,” said a splenetic Clinton at a January 17 debate.

NBC News - Election Coverage - Season 2016

Hillary Clinton at the Jan. 17, 2016  Democratic Candidates Debate (Photo by: Virginia Sherwood)

And of course that liberal bastion, the New York Times, jumped on the bandwagon, noting that the majority of Flint’s residents are black and many are poor. “If Flint were rich and mostly white, would Michigan’s state government have responded more quickly and aggressively to complaints about its lead-polluted water?” the paper said.

It’s abundantly clear that Flint’s water situation is a result of failure at all levels of government, local, state and federal.

It’s equally clear that the economic catastrophe that is Flint, with its debt, high poverty rate, crime and depopulation, is the result of years of negligence by incompetent politicians.

But the left, by framing the current water controversy as a divisive civil rights issue instead, is embracing a long-standing pattern of exacerbating division to secure and maintain political power.

The mean-spirited racism charge makes reaching solutions harder while serving to distract the target audience from thinking about larger issues. As Christopher Lasch put it, if the commitment is to fomenting division, rather than to finding common ground, “…society dissolves into nothing more than contending factions, as the Founding Fathers of America understood so well–a war of all against all.”

America is being threatened from within by this conscious effort to carve up the electorate into antagonistic special interest groups every much as it is being threatened from without by religious zealots.

Enough.