Michael Moore, Ecowatch - A few months after Gov. 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—and only one—address in Flint that got
clean water: the GM factory.
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. “How much would that cost?” came the question. “$100 a day for three months,” was the answer. I guess that was too much, so, in order to save $9,000, the state government said f*** it—and as a result the state may now end up having to pay upwards of $1.5 billion to fix the mess.
Every homeowner in Flint is stuck with a house that’s now worth nothing. That’s a total home value of $2.4 billion down the economic drain. People in Flint, one of the poorest cities in the U.S., don’t have much to their name, and for many their only asset is their home.
Snyder’s chief of staff throughout the two years of Flint’s 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—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.
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1 comment:
It would take something to be even more like a third world republic than these examples.
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