by FRANK X. MURPHY
In April, 2014, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder’s Flint Emergency Manager, in entrepreneurial consultation with the leading lights of Flint’s Karegnondi Water Authority, switched the city’s water source from the Detroit Water and Sewerage System to the Flint River. Almost immediately, people in Flint knew there was something wrong. The water was brown or yellow, it stunk and it was full of floaters. For people forced to live under these outrageous circumstances, this was the first stage of understanding the systemic evils that underlie Snyder’s administration.
As much of the nation finally knows now – thanks to the incredibly heroic activism of Flint residents, the intrepid, brilliant, relentless and engaged journalistic interventions of the ACLU’s Curt Guyette and people’s videographer extraordinaire Kate Levy, and ultimately a couple of timely scientific studies by Professor Marc Edwards (lots of lead in Flint water) and Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha (rising lead levels in the blood of Flint children) – Snyder’s evil administration succeeded in poisoning a lot of people in Flint and creating a disaster/crisis/scandal of major historic proportions.
“They (briefly) tried to attack the credibility of these fine scientists and their data.”
Rick Snyder and his cronies have had several public reactions to these events, corresponding to stages in development of the now full-blown crisis:
First, from April 2014 until the end of September 2015, they blatantly lied, denied, and insulted the intelligence and integrity of everyone who was trying to call attention to the obvious visual, smell and taste evidence of what Snyder’s emergency management regime did.
Next, even after Prof. Edwards’ and Dr. Hanna-Attisha’s scientific thunderbolts hit them, they (briefly) tried to attack the credibility of these fine scientists and their data. Not coincidentally, at this point the media environment and political ground began to shift rapidly under their feet.
Like the cunning finaglers and scumbags they are, Snyder’s crew then tried to shift with events, initiating a cover-up (“Flint Water Task Force”) that would soon distinguish itself for clumsiness and even more obvious lies.
In the midst of such a fiasco, much more drastic action was needed to make people believe that the Snyder administration cared about the people of Flint, understood their own responsibilities to clean up the mess they made and protect public health, or at least was “only” negligent and not outright criminal. The cover-up task force issued a scathing interim report – fingering the state Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) as the primary scapegoat – a time-tested technique for trying to improve Snyder’s togs by throwing his DEQ director Dan Wyant and public relations flack Brad Wurfel under the bus.
“Snyder’s evil administration succeeded in poisoning a lot of people in Flint and creating a disaster/crisis/scandal of major historic proportions.”
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