{"id":225767,"date":"2016-02-18T03:20:55","date_gmt":"2016-02-18T03:20:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/behind-flints-lead-poisoned-water\/"},"modified":"2016-02-18T18:18:10","modified_gmt":"2016-02-18T18:18:10","slug":"behind-flints-lead-poisoned-water","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/latest-news\/behind-flints-lead-poisoned-water\/","title":{"rendered":"Behind Flint\u2019s Lead-Poisoned Water"},"content":{"rendered":"<div readability=\"564.44966322407\">\n<p>Largely abandoned by auto manufacturers who shifted factories to low-wage areas, Flint, Michigan, suffers from a powerlessness that allowed Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder and other officials to ignore the city\u2019s lead-poisoned water, as Dennis J Bernstein reports.<\/p>\n<p><span id=\"more-17249\"\/>By Dennis J Bernstein<\/p>\n<p>The lead-poisoned water of Flint, Michigan, is a national scandal that bears on multiple American problems, from poverty and race, to the impact of industrialization and deindustrialization, to political attacks on the Environmental Protection Agency and other regulators who then fail to do their jobs protecting citizens from hazards.<\/p>\n<p>Columbia University Professor David Rosner, a leading expert on the deadly history of the use of lead by U.S. corporations, most notably General Motors, has documented how lead in various ways\u00a0was mainlined into the blood streams of Americans, throughout the Twentieth Century, as a result of corporate greed.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_17251\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" readability=\"32\"><a href=\"https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Rick_Snyder_Michigan_Clean_Energy_Prize_Competition_RickSnyder-thumb-590x392-70672.jpg?82332e\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-17251\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-17251\" src=\"https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/plugins\/lazy-load\/images\/1x1.trans.gif?82332e\" data-lazy-src=\"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Rick_Snyder_Michigan_Clean_Energy_Prize_Competition_RickSnyder-thumb-590x392-70672-300x199.jpg\" alt=\"Michigan's Republican Gov. Rick Snyder.\" width=\"300\" height=\"199\" srcset=\"https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Rick_Snyder_Michigan_Clean_Energy_Prize_Competition_RickSnyder-thumb-590x392-70672-300x199.jpg 300w, https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Rick_Snyder_Michigan_Clean_Energy_Prize_Competition_RickSnyder-thumb-590x392-70672-560x372.jpg 560w, https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Rick_Snyder_Michigan_Clean_Energy_Prize_Competition_RickSnyder-thumb-590x392-70672-160x106.jpg 160w, https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Rick_Snyder_Michigan_Clean_Energy_Prize_Competition_RickSnyder-thumb-590x392-70672.jpg 590w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\"\/><noscript><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-17251\" src=\"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Rick_Snyder_Michigan_Clean_Energy_Prize_Competition_RickSnyder-thumb-590x392-70672-300x199.jpg\" alt=\"Michigan's Republican Gov. Rick Snyder.\" width=\"300\" height=\"199\" srcset=\"https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Rick_Snyder_Michigan_Clean_Energy_Prize_Competition_RickSnyder-thumb-590x392-70672-300x199.jpg 300w, https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Rick_Snyder_Michigan_Clean_Energy_Prize_Competition_RickSnyder-thumb-590x392-70672-560x372.jpg 560w, https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Rick_Snyder_Michigan_Clean_Energy_Prize_Competition_RickSnyder-thumb-590x392-70672-160x106.jpg 160w, https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Rick_Snyder_Michigan_Clean_Energy_Prize_Competition_RickSnyder-thumb-590x392-70672.jpg 590w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\"\/><\/noscript><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Michigan\u2019s Republican Gov. Rick Snyder.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>Co-author of seven books on industrial and occupational hazards, including <em>Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution<\/em> and <em>Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America\u2019s Children<\/em>, Dr. Rosner was interviewed by Dennis J Bernstein.<\/p>\n<p>DB: Let\u2019s begin with the micro and work our way out to the macro. What\u2019s your best understanding of what happened in Flint? How did it come to pass that the people of Flint, mostly black and Latino, a bit less than half of them living under the poverty line, were poisoned by their own government?<\/p>\n<p>DR:\u00a0Well, it\u2019s government, and its industry, and it\u2019s all of us, in some sense. The short story is that the water in the Flint River corroded pipe, and leeched out of those pipes lead, into the faucets, and into the water the children were drinking. And that this was essentially something that was identified literally a couple of years ago, and the problem was never addressed, and was depicted as kind of a public relations problem, rather than a public health problem.<\/p>\n<p>So children were ingesting this lead, and they were accumulating lead in their blood. And a young physician, Mona Hanna-Attisha, discovered that she was seeing in her hospital that&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/2016\/02\/17\/behind-flints-lead-poisoned-water\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Largely abandoned by auto manufacturers who shifted factories to low-wage areas, Flint, Michigan, suffers from a powerlessness that allowed Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder and other officials to ignore the city\u2019s lead-poisoned water, as Dennis J Bernstein reports. By Dennis J Bernstein The lead-poisoned water of Flint, Michigan, is a national scandal that bears on multiple [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519,18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-225767","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire","7":"category-latest-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225767"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225767\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}