Sunday, January 17, 2016

The Flint Water Thing...

What a mess. It's also a primary example of what's wrong with Neo-Liberalism and why the People must take matters into their own hands and reject the outrageous and dangerous ideologies of both Neo-Liberalism and Neo-Conservatism.

They both kill people and lead to immense levels of suffering for the masses while enriching a handful of warmongers, exploiters and plutocrats.

It's insanity. Governing insanity. And it must be brought to an end.

The Flint Water Catastrophe is typical, and it's a marker, one of an increasing number of "chickens coming home to roost" things.

(I don't think I've said previously, but we recently received notice that our tap water here in Central New Mexico is officially contaminated -- you got it, with lead, copper and some chemical related to PCB. Of course we stopped drinking it a long time ago, but this is the first time the tests have said what we've long suspected...)

Several factors enter into what happened in Flint (and I wonder how many other cities are or will be affected in the same or similar ways). One, of course, is the replacement of elected governance with the appointed, dictatorial "emergency managers" whose misrule in Michigan has become one of the lesser-known scandals of the 21st century. I've noticed that most of the mainstream coverage of the Flint water crisis makes no mention the emergency managers that were assigned to Flint and their unilateral decisions in the matter. What the mainstream says instead is that "the city decided" -- but that implies public knowledge/consent to change the source of water, and there was none.  The public had no role and no authority and very little knowledge of and in that decision at all. The "city of Flint" did not make a decision regarding the water source, the emergency manager(s) assigned to the city did. And then, because of ideology, they denied there was a problem as the crisis grew worse and worse.

Saying that "the city of Flint" made the decisions that led to the current crisis is a way of blaming the victims, and it needs to stop.

The water crisis is entirely a matter of certain individuals rigid ideology that inevitably produces crisis and death and destruction -- and victims by the millions for the profit of a few.

The Flint Water Thing is one of a myriad monstrous consequences of these death-dealing ideologies, and though I doubt it will cause a necessary ideological shift in our governing classes, it will add to the pressure on them to fix what's wrong and do the right thing for once in their sorry lives.

This -- and so much else that's gone wrong over the last several decades -- must stop.

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