Guess Who Responded to Flint Water Crisis Months Before Anybody Else?

This is community action.  This is public service.  This is dedication.  This is simple humanity in the face of disaster.  This. Is. Planned Parenthood.

Think Progress:

The Planned Parenthood in Flint, in a modest brick building off a lonely stretch of highway, might not seem like an obvious first stop for a resident concerned about the strangely colored, bad smelling water that started coming out of taps in the city in early 2014.

But for those who work inside, tackling the issue of access to potable water was a no brainer once patients began voicing concerns. As a preventative health organization with deep roots in the local community, the conversation came naturally.

After hearing reports from their patients about chemicals in the water, the clinic sprang into action months before any state of emergency was declared, handing out water filters and teaching people how to use them.

“We’re more than just a reproductive health organization, we work for reproductive justice,” explained Christina Soliz, field organizer with Planned Parenthood of Mid and South Michigan. “Having access to clean, safe water is a reproductive justice issue. It affects your health. Families deserve better than this.”

“It fits right in,” agreed Sabrina Boston, the health center manager. Water is “a basic human right.”

SNIP

As the crisis continues to unfold — residents are still being tested for lead exposure, and the effects might not show up for years — Planned Parenthood will continue to focus on educating patients. But years of political attacks and austerity have gutted the resources it has at its disposal. Conservatives’ fixation on its abortion services has turned the organization into a political football. Presidential candidate Ted Cruz, who led the charge in the Senate to shut down the government over Planned Parenthood’s funding, launched his campaign’s water distribution efforts at Flint’s crisis pregnancy centers, which seek to divert women from Planned Parenthood with misleading or outright false information.

Michigan funding for pregnancy prevention — some of which goes to Planned Parenthood — has dropped from more than $7 million in 2001 to just a bit over $600,000 as of 2012, with the most dramatic cut in 2009 when it was reduced by more than 75 percent. The cuts came as Planned Parenthood has been specifically targeted by Michigan lawmakers: last year, the state House passed a bill banning the organization from receiving state funding, even though it doesn’t allocate any dollars to Planned Parenthood as it is.

“We’re seeing the effects of [austerity measures] in a lot of different places,” Tunde Olaniran, outreach manager, said. “In Flint, there was a drastic cut and we’re trying to slowly rebuild.”

SNIP

“People who walk in the door — they’re people, so we wanted to address something that was a huge issue,” Olaniran said. “We’re trying to make sure we care about the entire lives of people who come into our doors.”

How many dead people in a "hoped to?"

From TPM, re the damn-near-successful effort by the repug governor of Michigan to permanently poison the mostly black and poor residents of Flint: 

Genesee County sheriff's Capt. Casey Tafoya has said volunteers and police hoped to get (clean water and water filters) to 500 to 600 houses a day in a city of about 99,000 residents with an estimated 30,000 households.

Let's see:  30,000 households divided by 600 houses visited per day is 50 days.  A healthy, strong person can live without water for no more than THREE days.  Somebody better tell the Flint funeral homes to ramp up for big business.

Cutting Off Water Is Murder

The only reason we are not paying by the minute for the air we breathe is because corporations haven't figured out how to corner the supply.

Yet.

Think Progress:

As the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department moves to shut off water to thousands of residents who are delinquent on their bills, a coalition of activists is appealing to the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights to intervene on behalf of the bankrupt city’s most vulnerable citizens.

Their report, filed Wednesday with the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Human Right to Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation, alleges that the DWSD crackdown is part of an effort “to sweeten the pot for a private investor” to take over the city’s heavily-indebted water and sewer system as part of Detroit’s broader bankruptcy proceedings.

One of the activist groups behind the report, the Detroit People’s Water Board, notes that city residents have seen water rates more than double over the past decade at the same time that the city’s poverty rate rose to nearly 40 percent, putting the cost of basic running water beyond reach for tens of thousands of households. Earlier this week, city lawmakers voted to raise water rates by a further 8.7 percent.

SNIP

One key piece of the activists’ complaint has to do with allegedly disparate treatment of residential and commercial clients by the DWSD. The People’s Water Board claims that delinquent business entities “have not been targeted in the same way as residential users,” a claim the department strongly disputes.

You will be stunned to learn that this is really all about turning a public service - and one that is literally life and death - over to private corporations for their profit. Companies all over the world are slavering over Detroit's municipal corpse, sharpening their claws to fight for the most lucrative pieces.
 
I will never understand how anyone can think our austerity-starved government presents any kind of threat when we are losing everything we have to monster corporations every day.

Michigan Guilty of Pre-Meditated Murder of Detroit

Because this is what elected repugs do.

Crooks and Liars:

This is one way to kill a city -- short its tax revenue by millions. On purpose.

MLive:

Michigan communities have missed out on some $6.2 billion in statutory revenue sharing payments over the past decade as lawmakers and governors diverted funds to fill holes in the state budget, according to a new report from the Michigan Municipal League highlighting losses by community.

Detroit, the state's largest city, lost out on $732 million in revenue sharing between 2003 and 2013, according to the report. Twenty two other cities -- from Grand Rapids to Wyandotte -- saw the state divert at least $10 million in sales tax revenue that local leaders believe they should have been entitled to.

[...]

However, local leaders say the state has not honored a statutory provision (see: law) that requires it to appropriate additional sales tax dollars to communities based on a standard formula. Over the course of the past decade, those "raids" have added up.

“You can look at pretty much any Michigan community and see where they might be today if the statutory revenue sharing had been fully funded,” Samantha Harkins of the Municipal League said in a statement.

“For example, look at Flint, which is now under an emergency manager. Flint will have lost $54.9 million dollars by the end of 2014. The deficit in its 2012 financial statements is $19.2 million. Flint could eliminate the deficit and pay off all $30 million of bonded indebtedness and still have over $5 million in surplus. In Detroit, a city facing the largest municipal bankruptcy in history, the state took over $700 million to balance the state’s books.”

Over $700 million. Think of what Detroit could have done with that money. Investments in the city could have been made that would have attracted more business. Instead they cut back on every service there was, closed schools, and effectively closed shop while the state balanced its books on the backs of desperate cities there.

Pathetic management. I don't care who is responsible, Republican or Democrat. There's no excuse for a state failing to abide by its own laws.

The Next Victim of Racist City-Killing

Still think getting murdered like Detroit can't happen to your favorite not-white-enough city?

Zandar:

The latest example of the post-Katrina permanent minority underclass in Bobby Jindal's Louisiana?  The rich, white area of Baton Rouge is proposing seceding and taking the city's tax base with it to form a new city.

The predominantly white and wealthy residents of the southern area of Baton Rouge have proposed seceding from the city proper and incorporating into a new one to be called “St. George.” 

The movement began as an effort to create a new school district, but after the state legislature repeatedly mothballed its proposals — claiming that they could not approve an independent school district that was unaffiliated with a city — organizers shifted their energies to the creation of “St. George.” 

The new city would be the fifth largest in the state, with over 107,000 residents, and would include two of the largest tax revenue bases in the state: Perkins Rowe and the Mall of Louisiana. A study by the Baton Rouge Area Chamber concluded that Baton Rouge residents “will be disproportionately paying taxes to the proposed municipality,” given city governance’s reliance on sales tax revenues. 

If the succession were successful, the study claimed, it “could entail the dissolution of the present system of governance.”

But this is exactly what Jindal's plan to cut property taxes and raise sales taxes was intended to do:  shift the tax burden from the wealthy (with their wealth in property, stocks, and savings) and shift it to the poor (who have to pay sales taxes on everyday consumption).  The proposed St. George municipality would mean that Baton Rouge residents would be paying sales taxes at the shopping district in St. George, and all of the benefit would go to the resident of St. George.

SNIP

Taxpayer money went to create the improvements in southern Baton Rouge for everyone in the region.  Now they want to take those improvements and tell "those people" to get the hell out.  That's the way it's worked in America for 400 years.

Literal Dictatorship in Detroit a Test Run For the Rest of the Country

Under a "law" rammed through by repugs, elected officials in Detroit have no authority to stop Wall Street from stripping every public asset - including utilities and the retirement checks of police and firefighters - and leaving the citizens of what is no longer a democracy to starve naked in the dark.

John Nichols at The Nation concludes his must-read article with:

Too many American cities face financial challenges similar to those that have destabilized Detroit. Snyder’s anti-democratic “answer” could well become the model for a response to those challenges that begins by blaming the victims and ultimately denies them a full and effective franchise.

“I believe Detroit and Michigan are ‘test cases’ for certain right-wing agents who want to do all they can to control future elections for this nation’s highest office and other posts,” says Watson. “Voter suppression, including the Supreme Court’s role in gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965, are not incidental to the myriad of malevolence in Michigan.”

There is a lot more at stake in Detroit, and in Michigan, than one city’s balance sheet.

Our understanding of democracy, itself, is being subverted.

The voters of Michigan sent a clear signal last fall. They rejected emergency-manager authoritarianism.

Unfortunately, a federal bankruptcy judge has sided with a governor who could not win an election in Detroit and an approach that Detroit voters rejected.

This has nothing to do with budgeting, debt or broader fiscal matters. Those issues could, and should, be addressed by an elected mayor and city council.

This has everything to do with allowing unelectable and unelected officials—and the interests they serve—to achieve political results that could not be secured at the ballot box.

You really think a repug governor couldn't do this to Louisville or Lexington or Covington? You really think the white, rural legislature would even try to stop him?

Disenfranchising Democracy

Think what the Corporatocracy is doing to Detroit can't happen in your state?  To your town?

Not forty years ago, Detroit was arguably the most powerful city on the continent. Headquarters of the three richest and biggest manufacturing companies in the world, home of the most popular music in the world, center of the strongest unions in the world, location of some of the richest suburbs in the world, stronghold of the most powerful political party in the world.: who could ever have imagined that barely a generation later it would be at the mercy of a pissant, Koch-sucking, cowardly repug worm like Rick Snyder?

John Nichols at The Nation:

But what happens when elections are held but those who are elected are not allowed to govern? Can we tell ourselves that democracy has been maintained if it is not respected in any realistic sense by state and federal officials?
That’s a question that the voters of one of America’s great cities, Detroit, are in the process of answering.

Detroit voters trooped to the polls Tuesday to nominate candidates for the city’s top posts in one of the more unsettled—and unsettling—elections in American history.

The voters selected candidates for mayor, city clerk and the city council—all the officials who normally would guide the affairs of one of America’s largest municipalities.

The chosen candidates are running serious campaigns. They will compete in traditional fall contests, with some elected and some defeated. The winners will take office shortly after the election results are certified.

And, then, the new leaders of Detroit will in all likelihood be forced to sit in official chambers and watch as their city is dismantled by an appointed—not elected—"emergency manager" and a federal bankruptcy judge.

They will not do so willingly. The candidates that initial returns suggest Detroit voters have nominated to replace outgoing Mayor Dave Bing—Wayne County Sheriff Benny Napoleon and, with a surge of write-in votes being counted for him, former Detroit Medical Center CEO Mike Duggan—have made it clear that they are ready and willing to govern. Summing up the sentiments of most Detroit candidates this year, Napoleon, a former Detroit Police Chief, says that “the mayor should be able to set the priorities."

But that won’t happen because Michigan Governor Rick Snyder has taken control of Detroit, using an “emergency manager” law that he cobbled together late last fall.

SNIP

The new mayor and the new city council will not have the authority to “check and balance” the emergency manager—or to guide the process that Watson argues “has clearly been crafted in a right-wing playbook to seize assets, dismember electorate voting powers, dismantle unions and the families/neighborhoods supported by union jobs, disable local elected officials, smear and tarnish the image and viability of Black elected leadership, and broadly claim that the legacy costs related to retiree pensions are largely to blame for the city’s debt crisis.”

Watson’s frustration is real. And appropriate.

Detroit’s greatest challenge has not been municipal governance. It has been deindustrialization, which has shuttered hundreds of factories and left hundreds of thousands of city residents unemployed or underemployed. And that great challenge extends beyond Detroit.

Too many American cities face financial challenges similar to those that have destabilized Detroit. Snyder’s anti-democratic "answer" could well become the model for a response to those challenges that begins by blaming the victims and ultimately denies them a full and effective franchise.

“I believe Detroit and Michigan are ‘test cases’ for certain right-wing agents who want to do all they can to control future elections for this nation’s highest office and other posts,” says Watson. “Voter suppression, including the Supreme Court’s role in gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965, are not incidental to the myriad of malevolence in Michigan.”

There is a lot more at stake in Detroit, and in Michigan, than one city’s balance sheet.

Our understanding of democracy, itself, is being subverted.

Are you really so sure that there is not a wannabe governor in your state legislature or maybe the Chamber of Commerce casting covetous eyes on your prosperous town and figuring if it could happen to Detroit, why not to your town?