FIXING FLINT MICHIGAN’S SELF INFLICTED WATER WOES BY DANIEL GREENFIELD
http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/262865/fixing-flint-tough-love-daniel-greenfield
You’ve probably never heard of Sebring, Ohio. Despite tainted water, which the EPA knew about for months before the public did, shipments of water bottles for the angry residents, two EPA employees being put on leave, and all the other elements of a scandal, it was missing something.
Sebring is 98% white. Ohio governor John Kasich is a Republican, but currently favored by the media. So talk of Sebring being the next Flint remained just that.
St. Joseph, Louisiana might have been the other “next Flint,” but before long Louisiana had elected a Democratic governor. St Joe’s is mostly black and there are no Republicans in sight to blame for its water crisis. Plenty of villages, towns and cities have tainted water. The cause is usually local, but the media is only interested if it has the right victims and the right villain for its manufactured drama.
The closest counterpart to the media’s wildly dishonest coverage of Flint’s water troubles was its Katrina reporting. Even though New Orleans had an incompetent Democratic mayor, who would be sent to jail, and a Democratic governor, all the blame was directed at the Republican president. The crisis coverage was filled with hyperbolic exaggeration in which Brian Williams’ own lies garnered no attention. New Orleans was a post-apocalyptic hell on earth where the residents had devolved to cannibalism. All because of Bush. The Flint coverage is the old Katrina coverage with Snyder swapped out for Bush.
If Romney had won the last election, Flint would be his fault. But with Democrats in the White House and in Flint, the media chose the lone Republican in the middle. It had no interest in asking questions about the EPA’s slow response to the crisis or in investigating local Flint politicians.
These included Councilman Wantwaz Davis, a convicted killer, whom the media celebrated as the hero of the Flint crisis, while dismissing his time in jail for murder. Davis was expert at getting media attention by playing up his background and denouncing the tainted water as “genocide”.
But, like much of Flint, Davis wasn’t paying his water bills. The media is still playing up Flint’s high water rates. What it doesn’t mention is that they’re so high because Flint is full of water deadbeats.
Flint’s Democratic mayor, city council and emergency manager made the transition which caused the crisis. But the media chose to overlook all of them and blame Governor Snyder. It cheered the election of a new mayor, Karen Weaver, who, like Wantwaz, was an “activist” fighting for the people of Flint.
Mayor Weaver claimed that the crisis happened because, “The people weren’t put first, the health of the people was not put before profit and money.”
Now Mayor Weaver has been hit with a lawsuit accusing her of funneling donations for Flint’s water crisis into her own SuperPAC. Instead of going to help Flint residents get safer drinking water, the money was being redirected to a group named after Weaver’s cheesy campaign slogan. Karenabout Flint.
Weaver, not Snyder, had been allegedly putting profit and money ahead of the health of the people. Karen didn’t care about Flint. Like the city’s previous mayors, she only cared about Karen.
The media is treating the lawsuit as a Snyder conspiracy, even though former administrator Natasha Henderson, who filed the whistleblower lawsuit, had just as shaky a relationship with Governor Snyder as she did with Mayor Weaver.
For decades, Flint has been going through a cycle of corrupt mayors and state takeovers. Democrats spend Flint dry forcing the state to step in. And then the state is denounced for spending cuts that were inevitable because there was no money. Weaver follows in the footsteps of great Flint politicos like Woodrow Stanley, who was kicked out of office after running up a $30 million deficit, and Don “The Don” Williamson who lied blatantly about the deficit. That deficit will now hit nightmarish proportions.
Flint’s water bills will double and a sizable portion of its residents, about a quarter of whom are already felons, will go on not paying them. Michigan has been forced to spend millions dealing with Flint’s mess. But the problem goes back to the simple question of whether Flint can run its own affairs. And it can’t.
Michigan is faced with a Catch 22 problem. Either it keeps taking over Flint’s affairs and getting the blame. Or it lets Flint go to hell on its own while getting the blame for an even worse situation.
This crisis did not happen to Flint. It happened because of Flint.
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