The deceptive corporatist rewriting of the history of the #FlintWaterCrisis is in full swing
During the time when the Flint water crisis was unfolding, right wing conservatives spent a lot of time trying to convince the country and the world that it was all the fault of the local government. They portrayed these local leaders as incompetent buffoons who poisoned themselves, countering the reality that the local government officials had literally NO POWER to do anything because their government had been taken over by an un-elected, state-appointed overseer, the Emergency Managers.
With former governor Rick Snyder now out of office and contending with a legacy of having poisoned a major American city by attempting to run government like a business, this charade of blaming local elected officials and showering accolades on the corporations who did the bare minimum to help the residents of Flint continues apace.
Robby Soave from the conservative, corporatist Reason magazine is a millennial conservative who is on the forefront of this effort. He, along with his colleague at Reason, Shikha Dalmia, have been pushing the idea that the decision made to have Flint join the Karegnondi Water Authority and build their own water pipeline from Lake Huron rather than purchasing treated water from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department was done as a jobs and infrastructure program:
Snyder’s office did not return my call, but sources close to the situation at the time tell me that it was essentially because Genesee County and Flint authorities saw the new water treatment as a public infrastructure project to create jobs in an area that has never recovered after Michigan’s auto industry fled to sunnier business climes elsewhere. And neither Snyder nor his Emergency Manager Ed Kurtz nor the state treasurer Andy Dillon had the heart to say “no,” especially since to hand Flint to DWSD would have made the whole project less viable. What’s more, they felt that just as Detroit was receiving an infrastructure boost post-bankruptcy (with the state-backed $650 million ice-hockey-arena-cum-CONTINUE READING: The deceptive corporatist rewriting of the history of the #FlintWaterCrisis is in full swing | Eclectablog
