My Turn By Karen Johnston A mother’s rage over Flint and betrayal of the poor

There are three things every human requires to survive: food to eat, water to drink, and air to breathe. Every one of us, rural and urban, rich and poor, depend on government to ensure the purity of food, water, and air – now and into the future.

The tragic poisoning of Flint, Michigan, is only the latest outrage in a long, sad list of failures to protect public health.

Rather than spend $100 per day to treat the water supply, Michigan officials did the unthinkable – they violated federal law and allowed the stinking offal of the Flint River to flow, untreated, into the homes of trusting citizens paying for safety and purity.

Flint’s people knew the river was poisonous, but trusted that appointed bureaucrats, under mandate to save money, would keep them safe. They had to trust, like we all do, every time we turn on a faucet.

Michigan rewarded them by pumping polluted water, heavy with corrosive chemicals, into old lead pipes – allowing the deadly neurotoxin to leach into Flint’s drinking, cooking and bathing water.

When a Virginia Tech research team sounded the alarm and publicized elevated lead levels in Flint’s drinking water last August, Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) outright lied, claiming DEQ’s data was “more accurate.”

Later, Hurley Medical Center pediatrician, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, used Medicare-required testing of toddlers to show lead exposure had reached dangerous levels. DEQ attacked her integrity while ignoring kids with rashes, hair loss, and irreversible brain damage.

It’s clear from internal emails that DEQ and Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder took a gamble; counting on a legacy of disregard for the poor starting with President Ronald Reagan’s false characterization of scamming welfare mothers driving Cadillacs, which has since escalated into a war on poverty having nothing to do with eliminating poverty and everything to do with marginalizing the poor.

It’s a war on easy scapegoats. Poison rhetoric from politicians offers convenient justification to slash benefits for the elderly and children who make up the majority of this nation’s poor.

Few realize that federal authorities were unlikely to protect Flint either. The EPA, shackled by political and corporate interests, is mandated to close the barn door only when the horse says so; launching an investigation, or banning a chemical only after proven harm. Instead of protecting us, EPA largely allows polluters to police themselves; essentially trusting the fox in the henhouse to sound the alarm.

A recent New York Times exposé, for example, reveals DuPont Chemical Corporation performed internal studies proving the toxic dangers of the fluoropolymer chemical PFOA, used to make nonstick Teflon and Scotchgard. Instead of doing the right thing, it hid the results for decades.

It gets worse. DuPont tactically stalls legal proceedings in order to wait out the afflicted. This includes Jim Tennant, who originally sold DuPont his West Virginia land where the company dumped toxic PFOA sludge. Tennant had originally sold the land to pay to be treated for cancer attributed to PFOA. His brother, Wilbur, the farmer who brought the case to environmental lawyer, Rob Billot, in 2000, has since died. “That’s 14 years of this stuff continuing to be used, continuing to be in the drinking water all over the country,” explains Billot. High levels of PFOA have now contaminated American blood banks, something DuPont and 3M Company knew as early as 1976.

It seems when you become too big to fail, you also become too big to care.

Still no one is punished. Polluters are slow to pay, jail sentences rare. The 1984 poisoning and killing of thousands in Bhopal, India by Union Carbide has never been brought to trial despite the arrest of CEO Warren Anderson. Posting bail, he fled India, thumbed his nose at extradition, and never faced a jury in either India or the U.S. Exxon Corporation, found culpable in the 1989 Valdez oil spill, stalled for two decades and paid out just 10 percent of owed damages – 8,000 of the original Alaskan claimants died waiting.

Government has now adopted the duck, weave and stall tactics of their corporate allies. The case in Flint is clear. They had the evidence, knew what would happen, and chose a path of secrecy and denial. No amount of Governor “I’m sorry” Snyder’s apologies will change the fact they chose saving money over human life.

We’ll be watching as the federal investigation deepens. We’ve been betrayed, and it’s time for the horse to get rounded up, the chickens to come home to roost, and pitchforks to be sharpened.

Karen Johnston is a regular Blue Ridge Press contributor, former farmer, and proud mother of an adult with autism. © www.blueridgepress.com 2016.