The Great Stink of 1858

Paul Krugman's latest column is a must-read on the deep and poisonous meanness of thinking that led to the Flint water crisis. Before any of it happened, by the way, the very decision to switch from a safe drinking system to the Flint River to save a few bucks was a shocker. That river was not only corrosive, it was a well-known sinkhole. It was poison incarnate. Various companies had been dumping crud in it forever. It was visibly a way to save a few bucks and spit in the face of the poor and significantly black population of Flint. The governor and those who carried out this act (and then ignored the news of what was happening) really should be brought to court. Tomgram

"In the 1850s, London, the world’s largest city, still didn’t have a sewer system. Waste simply flowed into the Thames, which was as disgusting as you might imagine. But conservatives, including the magazine The Economist and the prime minister, opposed any effort to remedy the situation. After all, such an effort would involve increased government spending and, they insisted, infringe on personal liberty and local control.
"It took the Great Stink of 1858, when the stench made the Houses of Parliament unusable, to produce action. But that’s all ancient history. Modern politicians, no matter how conservative, understand that public health is an essential government role. Right? No, wrong — as illustrated by the disaster in Flint, Mich.
"What we know so far is that in 2014 the city’s emergency manager — appointed by Rick Snyder, the state’s Republican governor — decided to switch to an unsafe water source, with lead contamination and more, in order to save money. And it’s becoming increasingly clear that state officials knew that they were damaging public health, putting children in particular at risk, even as they stonewalled both residents and health experts...
"What we see in Flint is an all too typically American situation of (literally) poisonous interaction between ideology and race, in which small-government extremists are empowered by the sense of too many voters that good government is simply a giveaway to Those People."

http://www.nytimes.com/…/25/opin…/michigans-great-stink.html