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’s 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 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.
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 was mainlined into the blood streams of Americans, throughout the Twentieth Century, as a result of corporate greed.
Michigan’s Republican Gov. Rick Snyder.
Co-author of seven books on industrial and occupational hazards, including Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution and Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America’s Children, Dr. Rosner was interviewed by Dennis J Bernstein.
DB: Let’s begin with the micro and work our way out to the macro. What’s 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?
DR: Well, it’s government, and its industry, and it’s 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.
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…