Yesterday I posted a diary about Flint, with a link to the TYTPolitics 50+ min long Facebook live interview with a citizen of Flint who is very knowledgeable about the horror that is still ongoing in Flint. There have been felony charges against many of the people involved with how fucked up this situation was, is and will continue to be. It got a whopping 15 comments. People in Flint are STILL using bottled water after years of continuing corruption and government neglect. When you ask why people don’t trust Dems or Reps, or the government, these are the situations that cause it. When you ask why people are pissed off, distrustful and can’t stand anyone coming from Wash DC, this is why.
People are finding chloroform in their water, people’s lead levels are increasing, people are finding a bunch of other unhealthy things in their water.
From Politifact — Dems are to be blamed for some of this too.
"Flint leaders enthusiastically endorsed joining the new regional (pipeline project) scheduled to come online later in 2016," Michigan Truth Squad, a fact-checking organization, concluded. "And though they did not make the decision to use the Flint River until (the pipeline) was ready, Flint leaders enthusiastically endorsed the Flint River decision – and toasted it the day of the water switch. … Two months after the Flint River switch, Flint Mayor Dayne Walling declared to MLive.com that ‘it’s a quality, safe product. … I think people are wasting their precious money buying bottled water.’ "
Local offices in Flint are officially nonpartisan, but Walling was a Democrat. So too was Andy Dillon, the state treasurer who signed off on the water changes (and who was a cross-party appointee of Snyder).
Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency -- during the administration of President Barack Obama -- has come in for criticism as well. A July 2015 email by a regional EPA administrator apologized for the warnings by the EPA’s own employee, Del Toral, and called them an "unvetted draft." Despite senior EPA officials’ delays in taking Del Toral’s warnings seriously, they were ultimately determined to have been accurate.
Several experts added that the problems in Flint cannot be divorced from the city’s long-term economic decline. And as long ago as 2010, the EPA expressed concern that "dramatic budget cuts" at the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality were having a "significant impact" on its water program. The governor at the time? Democrat Jennifer Granholm.
Finally, there’s the basic problem of the way governmental entities are structured. The "overlapping structure of governments, with both appointed and elected officials, makes it possible for problematic decisions to slip through the cracks and makes it easy to shift blame," Jessica Trounstine, a political scientist at the University of California-Merced, recently wrote in the Washington Post.
Jordan at TYTPolitics has a whole series of vids on this, interviewing activists and citizens of Flint that have way more background information than anything I have seen on Flint. This is the type of reporting the MSM should be doing, but they don’t. These vids are at this youtube Playlist . This is Jordan’s second trip back to Flint. How many MSM reporters can say that?
Until we break the chain of organized and fake news that under reports stories such as Flint and DAPL, among others. we will keep losing election.
I looked up the continuing studies done by Marc Edwards and Flintwaterstudy. They sample, as you will hear in the vids 150-ish homes. That seems to be an awfully small sample for a whole city and that is what the people talk about in these vids. There is progress, to be sure, but many people are wondering just who and where these homes are apparently as they are independently testing their water and finding the exact opposite results. So, who do they believe? That’s the ongoing problem and why voters are losing confidence in the system. If you look at FlintWaterstudy site, you will see the same problems Flint has had is popping up elsewhere, mainly because we never invest in infrastructure.
Yes, once again, many of these places vote Republican and you are welcome to blame it on that, but some of these states, like MI, were swing states we needed to win. So, why do they feel that Dems have failed them? What outreach or networking have Dems done to these people to show them that they truly care about these issues? They are holding Press Conferences now, but how long, and through how many Dem led administrations in these states, when they did happen, were these problem ignored? Even when people were drawing attention to them?
In essence, in places like Flint and others, the Dems need to take these people seriously, go talk to them and find the common ground of Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs. We all need food, shelter and safety. If the Dems can’t gain traction with people based on that, then we are seriously screwed.