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<h1 id="reader-title">10 Things They Won’t Tell You About the
Flint Water Tragedy. But I Will. | MICHAEL MOORE</h1>
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<p>News of the poisoned water crisis in Flint has reached
a wide audience around the world. The basics are now
known: the Republican governor, Rick Snyder, nullified
the free elections in Flint, deposed the mayor and city
council, then appointed his own man to run the city. To
save money, they decided to unhook the people of Flint
from their fresh water drinking source, Lake Huron, and
instead, make the public drink from the toxic Flint
River. When the governor’s office discovered just how
toxic the water was, they decided to keep quiet about it
and covered up the extent of the damage being done to
Flint’s residents, most notably the lead affecting the
children, causing irreversible and permanent brain
damage. Citizen activists uncovered these actions, and
the governor now faces growing cries to resign or be
arrested.</p>
<p>Here are ten things that you probably don’t know about
this crisis because the media, having come to the story
so late, can only process so much. But if you live in
Flint or the State of Michigan as I do, you know all to
well that what the greater public has been told only
scratches the surface.</p>
<ol>
<li>
<div><b>While the Children in Flint Were Given
Poisoned Water to Drink, General Motors Was Given
a Special Hookup to the Clean Water.</b>
<p style="display: inline;"
class="readability-styled"> A few months after
Governor Snyder removed Flint from the clean fresh
water we had been drinking for decades, the brass
from General Motors went to him and complained
that the Flint River water was causing their car
parts to corrode when being washed on the assembly
line. The Governor was appalled to hear that GM
property was being damaged, so he jumped through a
number of hoops and quietly spent $440,000 to hook
GM back up to the Lake Huron water, while keeping
the rest of Flint on the Flint River water. Which
means that while the children in Flint were
drinking lead-filled water, there was one — and
only one — address in Flint that got clean water:
the GM factory.</p>
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</li>
<li>
<div><b>For Just $100 a Day, This Crisis Could’ve Been
Prevented.</b>
<p style="display: inline;"
class="readability-styled"> Federal law requires
that water systems which are sent through lead
pipes must contain an additive that seals the lead
into the pipe and prevents it from leaching into
the water. Someone at the beginning suggested to
the Governor that they add this anti-corrosive
element to the water coming out of the Flint
River. “How much would that cost?” came the
question. “$100 a day for three months,” was the
answer. I guess that was too much, so, in order to
save $9,000, the state government said f*** it —
and as a result the State may now end up having to
pay upwards of $1.5 billion to fix the mess.</p>
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</li>
<li>
<div><b>There’s More Than the Lead in Flint’s Water.</b>
<p style="display: inline;"
class="readability-styled"> In addition to
exposing every child in the city of Flint to lead
poisoning on a daily basis, there appears to be a
number of other diseases we may be hearing about
in the months ahead. The number of cases in Flint
of Legionnaires Disease has increased </p>
<b>tenfold</b>
<p style="display: inline;"
class="readability-styled"> since the switch to
the river water. Eighty-seven people have come
down with it, and at least ten have died. In the
five years before the river water, not a single
person in Flint had died of Legionnaires Disease.
Doctors are now discovering that another
half-dozen toxins are being found in the blood of
Flint’s citizens, causing concern that there are
other health catastrophes which may soon come to
light.</p>
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</li>
<li>
<div><b>People’s Homes in Flint Are Now Worth Nothing
Because They Cant Be Sold.</b>
<p style="display: inline;"
class="readability-styled"> Would you buy a house
in Flint right now? Who would? So every homeowner
in Flint is stuck with a house that’s now worth
nothing. That’s a total home value of $2.4 billion
down the economic drain. People in Flint, one of
the poorest cities in the U.S., don’t have much to
their name, and for many their only asset is their
home. So, in addition to being poisoned, they have
now a net worth of zero. (And as for employment,
who is going to move jobs or start a company in
Flint under these conditions? No one.) Has Flint’s
future just been flushed down that river?</p>
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</li>
<li>
<div><b>While They Were Being Poisoned, They Were Also
Being Bombed.</b>
<p style="display: inline;"
class="readability-styled"> Here’s a story which
has received little or no coverage outside of
Flint. During these two years of water
contamination, residents in Flint have had to
contend with a decision made by the Pentagon to
use Flint for target practice. Literally. Actual
unannounced military exercises – complete with
live ammo and explosives – were conducted last
year inside the city of Flint. The army decided to
practice urban warfare on Flint, making use of the
thousands of abandoned homes which they could drop
bombs on. Streets with dilapidated homes had
rocket-propelled grenades fired upon them. For
weeks, an undisclosed number of army troops
pretended Flint was Baghdad or Damascus and
basically had at it. It sounded as if the city was
under attack from an invading army or from
terrorists. People were shocked this could be
going on in their neighborhoods. Wait – did I say
“people?” I meant, </p>
<i>Flint people.</i>
<p style="display: inline;"
class="readability-styled"> As with the Governor,
it was OK to abuse a community that held no
political power or money to fight back. BOOM!</p>
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</li>
<li>
<div><b>The Wife of the Governor’s Chief of Staff Is a
Spokeswoman for Nestle, Michigan’s Largest Owner
of Private Water Reserves.</b>
<p style="display: inline;"
class="readability-styled"> As Deep Throat told
Woodward and Bernstein: “Follow the money.”
Snyder’s chief of staff throughout the two years
of Flint’s poisoning, Dennis Muchmore, was
intimately involved in all the decisions regarding
Flint. His wife is Deb Muchmore, who just happens
to be the spokesperson in Michigan for the Nestle
Company – the largest owner of private water
sources in the State of Michigan. Nestle has been
repeatedly sued in northern Michigan for the 200
gallons of fresh water per minute it sucks from
out of the ground and bottles for sale as their
Ice Mountain brand of bottled spring water. The
Muchmores have a personal interest in seeing to it
that Nestles grabs as much of Michigan’s clean
water was possible – especially when cities like
Flint in the future are going to need that Ice
Mountain.</p>
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</li>
<li>
<div><b>In Michigan, from Flint water, to Crime and
Murder, to GM Ignition Switches, It’s a Culture of
Death.</b>
<p style="display: inline;"
class="readability-styled"> It’s not just the
water that was recklessly used to put people’s
lives in jeopardy. There are many things that
happen in Flint that would give one the impression
that there is a low value placed on human life.
Flint has one of the worst murder and crime rates
in the country. Just for context, if New York City
had the same murder rate as Flint, Michigan, the
number of people murdered last year in New York
would have been almost 4,000 people – instead of
the actual 340 who were killed in NYC in 2015. But
it’s not just street crime that makes one wonder
about what is going on in Michigan. Last year, it
was revealed that, once again, one of Detroit’s
automakers had put profit ahead of people’s lives.
General Motors learned that it had installed
faulty ignition switches in many of its cars.
Instead of simply fixing the problem,
mid-management staff covered it up from the
public. The auto industry has a history of
weighing the costs of whether it’s cheaper to
spend the money to fix the defect in millions of
cars or to simply pay off a bunch of lawsuits
filed by the victims surviving family members.
Does a cynical, arrogant culture like this make it
easy for a former corporate CEO, now Governor,
turn a blind eye to the lead that is discovered in
a municipality’s drinking water?</p>
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</li>
<li>
<div><b>Don’t Call It “Detroit Water” — It’s the
Largest Source of Fresh Drinking Water in the
World.</b>
<p style="display: inline;"
class="readability-styled"> The media keeps saying
Flint was using “Detroit’s water.” It is only
filtered and treated at the Detroit Water Plant.
The water itself comes from Lake Huron, the third
largest body of fresh water in the world. It is a
glacial lake formed over 10,000 years ago during
the last Ice Age and it is still fed by pure
underground springs. Flint is geographically the
last place on Earth where one should be drinking
poisoned water.</p>
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</li>
<li>
<div><b>ALL the Children Have Been Exposed, As Have
All the Adults, Including Me.</b>
<p style="display: inline;"
class="readability-styled"> That’s just a fact. If
you have been in Flint anytime from April 2014 to
today, and you’ve drank the water, eaten food
cooked with it, washed your clothes in it, taken a
shower, brushed your teeth or eaten vegetables
from someone’s garden, you’ve been exposed to and
ingested its toxins. When the media says “9,000
children under 6 have been exposed,” that means
ALL the children have been exposed because the
total number of people under the age of 6 in Flint
is… 9,000! The media should just say, “all.” When
they say “47 children have tested positive”,
that’s just those who’ve drank the water in the
last week or so. Lead enters the body and does
it’s damage to the brain immediately. It doesn’t
stay in the blood stream for longer than a few
days and you can’t detect it after a month. So
when you hear “47 children”, that’s just those
with an exposure in the last 48 hours. It’s really
everyone.</p>
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</li>
<li>
<div><b>This Was Done, Like So Many Things These Days,
So the Rich Could Get a Big Tax Break.</b>
<p style="display: inline;"
class="readability-styled"> When Governor Snyder
took office in 2011, one of the first things he
did was to get a multi-billion dollar tax break
passed by the Republican legislature for the
wealthy and for corporations. But with less tax
revenues, that meant he had to start cutting
costs. So, many things – schools, pensions,
welfare, safe drinking water – were slashed. Then
he invoked an executive privilege to take over
cities (all of them majority black) by firing the
mayors and city councils whom the local people had
elected, and installing his cronies to act as
“dictators” over these cities. Their mission? Cut
services to save money so he could give the rich
even more breaks. That’s where the idea of
switching Flint to river water came from. To save
$15 million! It was easy. Suspend democracy. Cut
taxes for the rich. Make the poor drink toxic
river water. And everybody’s happy.</p>
<p>Except those who were poisoned in the process.
All 102,000 of them. In the richest country in the
world.
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