Flint, Michigan still does not have clean drinking water.
Now, President-elect Donald Trump — whose campaign stump speech included a crude joke about the city’s water crisis — has tapped one of the people responsible for the crisis to join his Cabinet.
Betsy DeVos, Trump’s pick for Secretary of Education, and her family have a long history of using their wealth to manipulate Michigan state elections and push through “reforms” that undercut local democracy. She’s a staunch advocate of privatization measures that shift power from people to corporations — and one of those measures led directly to the poisoning of Flint’s water and citizens.
Betsy DeVos and the Law That Poisoned Flint
In trying to get to the root of the crisis in Flint, many have pointed to Michigan’s emergency manager law, which allows the governor to bypass the elected government and appoint a single official to take over a city’s budgeting. The law was actually overturned by a popular referendum in 2012, but sneakily pushed back through state legislature by Governor Rick Snyder immediately afterwards in a way that prevented it from being subject to another public vote.
And when Michigan voters said they didn’t want their local democracies hijacked, they had good reason. It was Flint’s emergency financial manager Darnell Earley who all but forced the city to switch its water source to the polluted Flint River.
Earley both overruled a city council vote that would have prevented the switch and declined an offer from neighboring Detroit to provide safe, sanitized water. But if Earley is responsible for the disastrous decision itself, those who paved his way to power are also to blame — and that’s where Betsy DeVos comes in.
Since the 1970s, the DeVos family has invested at least $200 million in far-right think tanks, media outlets, PACs, and other causes, with a particular focus on their home state of Michigan. Along with the Koch brothers, they’re major funders of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a…