Well, this isn't corruption so much as gross incompetence and lack of accountability. I want the governor to resign. If he was a man, he'd resign. If he had any accountability, he'd be recalled. But, jail isn't quite appropriate for incompetence (it'd discourage incompetent people from running for public office, and then we'd have no governors at all). But the governor won't hold himself accountable and the state congress won't hold him accountable, so we're stuck. The bigger problem is Michigan is really suffering from their economic contraction, they have all these distress costs they can't cover, and they really can't fix the problem without the federal government. The other states don't want to pay for Michigan's problems, so they will continue in this death spiral until things get so bad that the rest of the country will have to pay. And, of course, the costs will be much much higher by then. We're shooting ourselves in the foot by standing by and watching them fail.
I disagree, JuanValdez. This is criminal negligence. To assume that the governor didn't know or didn't understand is naive. He and the managers he put in place in Flint should be in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
This is what happens when experts with scientific knowledge are ignored when making important decisions.
This ultimately ties back to the terrible emergency manager law that passed in Michigan. Essentially the governor has the power to appoint an emergency manager to run cities and gives those managers more or less complete control of the city. Even mayors and city councils are largely powerless. The intention might have been good but the problem is that these managers are only accountable to a budget and not voters so if the city of Flint chose to use river water, the whole government would have been thrown out of office. Instead an unelected bureaucrat with no ties to the city can make that decision while everyone else is powerless. The city council of Flint (which is powerless at this point) repeatedly voted to use water from Detroit instead of the river and in the end their votes were meaningless. The whole reason we have elected officials is so they can be accountable for their decisions. Rick Snyder's emergency management system runs totally counter to that logic. Even worse, the state of Michigan voted in 2012 to repeal the emergency manager law in a ballot referendum. The Republican legislature voted to override them by funding emergency managers with state money instead of local funding which took the measure out of the hands of voters (since voters cant have referendums on state funding). The whole thing is a joke and Flint is far from the only town to have disastrous cuts to essential services by unelected bureaucrats. And the qualifications for being an unelected autocrat (err emergency manager) is more or less nothing. It's solely at the whim of the state. Hell in some cases there have been flat out corrupt emergency managers who paid themselves consulting fees and contracts from the cities they were supposed to save.
Well I wasn't saying he didn't know or didn't understand. I said he was incompetent. I think to call it negligence, even gross negligence is fair. For it to be criminal though, I'm not sure what specifically you can charge him with.
I think the GMO support believe this I agree. The insulation of the uber powerful and uber rich from criminal prosecution with no other reason except . . 'it was a mistake' or 'it was incompetence' or 'it was profit driven' is complete bull**** negligent parents go to jail Ignorance of the law is not defense against the law the fact that these people are allowed to make laws so they can make sure it ISN'T against the law is doubly bad Losing his job and being embarrassed is not accountability when you have ruined the lives of alot of people Rocket River
I'll give you this -- I'll be happy to be wrong and see him go to jail. But it seems to me like the reasonable recourses are a political recall and lawsuits.
WUT? Tangent, anyone? Okay, I'll bite. I'm not a "GMO supporter," but I follow the science. There has yet to be a peer-reviewed piece of research demonstrating any health risk from consuming a GMO. But hey, Whole Foods will peddle this "non-GMO!" food stuff b/c people will pay extra $ for it. GMOs pose no demonstrated health risk, but they are emblems of bad-for-the-planet, non-sustainable forms of agriculture, so there's a lot to think about and criticize there for sure. A lot of "non-GMO" foods are pelted with even more pesticides, etc, b/c their natural immunity is lower, so in some cases non-GMOs are a net negative for the earth, with no health benefits (or even more health risks) to the consumer. Cheers.
I'm not sure if you're aware that there are people who warned him that the water is dangerous and he ignored it and also that the report he was relying on was problematic? http://www.freep.com/story/opinion/columnists/nancy-kaffer/2016/01/11/flint-lead-water/78629628/ That's not all. Just recently at the press conference when they finally acknowledged the screw up, they lied about the number of victims at the behest of the person who discovered the problem and who they ignored earlier. He certainly knew that he was taking a massive risk, and you are responsible for the predictable outcomes of your actions. It's more than incompetence. If you close your eyes and drop a bomb somewhere, you are responsible for who may die from it. This guy damaged an entire generation of children in a city. I'm sorry, if this is not a jailable offense, then it should be. Public officials should have to go to jail for something. We can't always excuse it with "they have a difficult job, I'm sure they didn't mean it." Sure, that's the case sometimes. But this is an outlier, this is an extraordinary act of disregard for human life. If he is not aware that this decision could lead to massive problems, he is as dangerous as any murderer and should be isolated from society until he's rehabilitated.
Why isn't there more outrage over this? People are more upset over the frivolous Oscars bull**** than the people that have been drinking absurdly toxic water due to governmental negligence.
We pretty much all agree. Not a lot to debate really. If you or I had any power to jail the doofus, we would do so in a heartbeat.
Couldn't prosecutors charge someone with criminal negligence? It seems to me the former Flint mayor was hell bent on saying the water was safe. Heads need to roll here.
Rolling Stone has an article about how the state and local governments *****ed the residents of Flint. It is a real long read, but worth reading it. Just google Flint and Rolling Stone. **** the bureacreauts.
