{"id":17368,"date":"2016-02-03T21:50:07","date_gmt":"2016-02-04T02:50:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=17368"},"modified":"2016-02-03T21:50:07","modified_gmt":"2016-02-04T02:50:07","slug":"the-terror-of-flints-poisoned-water","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=17368","title":{"rendered":"The Terror of Flint\u2019s Poisoned Water"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Terror of Flint\u2019s Poisoned Water\u00a0<\/a><\/h3>\n
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(Linda Parton \/ Shutterstock<\/a>)<\/small><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Less than one month after the attacks of Sept. 11, a senior FBI official, Ronald Dick, told the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, \u201cDue to the vital importance of water to all life forms … the FBI considers all threats to attack the water supply as serious threats.\u201d In 2003, a UPI article reported that an al-Qaida operative \u201c(does not rule out) using Sarin gas and poisoning drinking water in U.S. and Western cities.\u2019\u201d Where the terrorists have failed to mount any attack on a water supply, the Michigan state government has succeeded. In the city of Flint, lead-poisoned water has been piped into homes and offices since 2014, causing widespread illness and potentially permanent brain damage among its youngest residents.<\/p>\n

Michigan has one of the most severe \u201cemergency manager\u201d laws in the country, allowing the governor to appoint an unelected agent to take over local governments when those locales or institutions have been deemed to be in a \u201cfinancial emergency.\u201d Republican Gov. Rick Snyder pushed for and obtained two bills that strengthened the law, and has used it aggressively to impose his version of fiscal austerity on cities like Detroit, Benton Harbor, several large school districts and, now most notoriously, on Flint. In every case but one, the emergency manager has taken over cities that are majority African-American. The emergency manager is granted sweeping powers to override local, democratically elected governments and to make cuts to budgets, sell public property, cancel or renegotiate labor contracts and essentially govern like a dictator.<\/p>\n

In April 2014, Darnell Earley, the fourth of five Flint emergency managers appointed by Snyder, unilaterally decided to switch Flint\u2019s water source from Detroit\u2019s water system, with water from Lake Huron that they had been using for 50 years, to the long-contaminated Flint River.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Terror of Flint\u2019s Poisoned Water\u00a0 (Linda Parton \/ Shutterstock) Less than one month after the attacks of Sept. 11, a senior FBI official, Ronald Dick, told the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, \u201cDue to the vital importance of water to all life forms … the FBI considers all threats to attack the water […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[12205,12206,11077,11078,11621,8738,866],"class_list":["post-17368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-amy-goodman","tag-denis-moynihan","tag-flint","tag-michigan","tag-rick-snyder","tag-truthdig","tag-water"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17368"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17368\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17369,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17368\/revisions\/17369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}