Tag: lead
Michigan Prosecutor Charges Six In Flint Water Scandal

Michigan Prosecutor Charges Six In Flint Water Scandal

DETROIT (Reuters) – The Michigan Attorney General’s Office said on Thursday it will bring a second round of criminal charges related to the investigation into dangerous lead levels in the city of Flint‘s drinking water.

Attorney General Bill Schuette’s office said in a brief media advisory the charges would be announced on Friday morning. Office spokeswoman Andrea Bitely said she could provide no further information on the upcoming announcement, including specific charges and the identities of those being charged.

Flint, with a population of about 100,000, was under control of a state-appointed emergency manager in 2014 when it switched its water source from Detroit’s municipal system to the FlintRiver to save money. The city switched back in October 2015.

The river water was more corrosive than the Detroit system’s and caused more lead to leach from its aging pipes. Lead can be toxic, and children are especially vulnerable. The crisis has prompted lawsuits by parents who say their children have shown dangerously high levels of lead in their blood.

Three state and local officials were criminally charged in April in connection with the investigation.Flint utilities administrator Michael Glasgow subsequently agreed to cooperate with investigators as part of a deal that had him plead no contest to a misdemeanor charge while a more serious felony charge was dismissed.

Michigan Department of Environmental Quality officials Stephen Busch and Michael Prysby were charged with five and six counts, respectively, including misconduct in office, tampering with evidence and violation of the Michigan Safe Drinking Water Act. Both pleaded not guilty.

Additionally, Schuette last month sued French water company Veolia Environnement SA and Houston-based engineering services firm Lockwood, Andrews & Newnam for “botching” their roles in the city’s drinking water crisis.

(Reporting by Curtis Skinner in San Francisco; Additional reporting by Ben Klayman in Detroit; Editing by Matthew Lewis)

Sometimes, Race Is More Distraction Than Explanation

Sometimes, Race Is More Distraction Than Explanation

Dear white people:

As you no doubt know, the water crisis in Flint, Mich., returned to the headlines last week with news that the state attorney general is charging three government officials for their alleged roles in the debacle. It makes this a convenient moment to deal with something that has irked me about the way this disaster is framed.

Namely, the fact that people who look like you often get left out of it.

Consider some of the headlines:

The Racist Roots of Flint’s Water Crisis — Huffington Post

How A Racist System Has Poisoned The Water in Flint — The Root

A Question of Environmental Racism — The New York Times

As has been reported repeatedly, Flint is a majority black city with a 41 percent poverty rate, so critics ask if the water would have been so blithely poisoned, and if it would have taken media so long to notice, had the victims been mostly white.

It’s a sensible question, but whenever I hear it, I engage in a little thought experiment. I try to imagine what happened in Flint happening in Bowie, a city in Maryland where blacks outnumber whites, but the median household income is more than $100,000 a year and the poverty rate is about 3 percent. I can’t.

Then I try to imagine it happening in Morgantown, West Virginia, where whites outnumber blacks, the median household income is about $32,000 a year, and the poverty rate approaches 40 percent — and I find that I easily can. It helps that Bowie is a few minutes from Washington, D.C., while Morgantown is more than an hour from the nearest city of any size.

My point is neither that race carries no weight nor that it had no impact on what happened in Flint. No, my point is only that sometimes, race is more distraction than explanation. Indeed, that’s the story of our lives.

To be white in America is to have been sold a bill of goods that there exists between you and people of color a gap of morality, behavior, intelligence and fundamental humanity. Forces of money and power have often used that perceived gap to con people like you into acting against their own self-interest.

In the Civil War, white men too poor to own slaves died in grotesque numbers to protect the “right” of a few plutocrats to continue that despicable practice. In the Industrial Revolution, white workers agitating for a living wage were kept in line by the threat that their jobs would be given to “Negroes.” In the Depression, white families mired in poverty were mollified by signs reading “Whites Only.”

You have to wonder what would happen if white people — particularly, those of modest means — ever saw that gap for the fiction it is? What if they ever realized you don’t need common color to reach common ground? What if all of us were less reflexive in using race as our prism, just because it’s handy?

You see, for as much as Flint is a story about how we treat people of color, it is also — I would say more so — a story about how we treat the poor, the way we render them invisible. That was also the story of Hurricane Katrina. Remember news media’s shock at discovering there were Americans too poor to escape a killer storm?

Granted, there is a discussion to be had about how poverty is constructed in this country; the black poverty rate is higher than any other with the exception of Native Americans, and that’s no coincidence. But it’s equally true that, once you are poor, the array of slights and indignities to which you are subjected is remarkably consistent across that racial gap.

That fact should induce you — and all of us — to reconsider the de facto primacy we assign this arbitrary marker of identity. After all, 37 percent of the people in Flint are white.

But that’s done nothing to make their water clean.

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via e-mail at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)

(c) 2016 THE MIAMI HERALD DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Photo: The top of the Flint Water Plant tower is seen in Flint, Michigan in this February 7, 2016 file photo. REUTERS/Rebecca Cook/Files

Cain Leads The Polls, But Will He Be The Frontrunner For 30 Minutes Or Less?

A new Public Policy Polling survey has Herman Cain leading the field for the Republican presidential nomination. The poll, which surveyed usual Republican primary voters from across the country, shows Cain leading presumed frontrunner Mitt Romney by a 30 percent to 22 percent margin. In another surprising result, the poll shows former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich in third place at 15 percent — that’s 1 percent ahead of the plummeting Rick Perry.

Cain’s rapid rise in the polls was reflected by his prominent position in last night’s Republican debate; Cain was seated at the center of the table, and much of the conversation was focused on his “9-9-9” economic plan. It was the first debate in which Cain received the type of attention usually afforded to top-tier candidates. Still, a poll showing him as the national frontrunner comes as a surprise.

Now that the pizza mogul has the lead, the question is how long he will be able to hold onto it.

There are indications within the poll that Cain’s stay at the top could be short lived. Only 30% of his supporters are solidly committed to him with 70% saying they might still go on to support someone else.

This suggests that Republican voters are still less than thrilled with their choice of candidates. Herman Cain is enjoying big support from Tea Party voters — 39 percent of them support his candidacy — but these are the same voters who have already flirted with Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry before moving on. It remains to be seen whether or not Cain can succeed where they failed, and retain their support.

In the wake of last night’s debate, pundits from both sides of the aisle are rushing to declare Mitt Romney as the inevitable nominee. This poll suggests that such declarations may be premature. Even if Cain cannot maintain these high levels of support, they make one thing clear: A huge segment of the Republican electorate is still desperate to find someone — anyone — who can take Romney down from the right.