Flint water crisis: How the GOP governor’s brand of corporate politics set stage for disaster
Governor Rick Snyder of Michigan presents himself as a bipartisan, pragmatic accountant. His self-proclaimed nickname is “One Tough Nerd”. He has no trouble upsetting Democrats and Republicans on the same day.
He talks about Michigan residents as his “customers” and tries to run the embattled state like a turnaround business. But Snyder is much more of a political animal than his rhetoric, or lack of it, would suggest.
He does not go as far as his Wisconsin neighbor Scott Walker has done, in policies concerning public sector workers, unions , gun control, gay marriage, welfare or abortion. He prefers to talk like a company manager and occasionally makes practical decisions outside party lines.
But there is no doubt Snyder is a red-blooded Republican with free-market and socially conservative stripes – and a relish for power.
The governor’s poisoned “customers” in Flint are experiencing an unexpected side-effect of Snyder’s penchant for dispatching unelected state overseers to run struggling cities with sweeping executive powers.
No one put lead in Flint’s water deliberately . But the cost-cutting imperatives and imperious manner that laid the groundwork for the crisis were typical of Snyder’s administration.
Not long after taking the governor’s chair in January 2011, as a business executive new to politics and intent on economic reform, Snyder said he did not share Walker’s hostility to union collective bargaining or anticipate a repeat of the kind of worker protests that had brought the Wisconsin capitol in Madison to a halt.
Less than two years later, in December 2012, just after Barack Obama trounced Mitt Romney to keep Michigan as a blue state in the general election, furious workers descended on the state capital, Lansing , where Republicans and Snyder were enacting anti-union legislation.
Almost overnight, Michigan became a “right-to-work” state, prohibiting most obligatory union dues in the public and private sectors.
The legislation echoed blueprints circulated by the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec) and was supported by the like-minded, Michigan-based Mackinac Center for Public Policy , and backed by the ultra-conservative Koch brothers .
That may have come as a surprise to many in the traditionally union-heavy, industrial Flint water crisis: How the GOP governor’s brand of corporate politics set stage for disaster:
