PAUL ROSENBERG
As I noted in an earlier story, the third week in December brought two startling stories highlighting the ongoing Dixiefication of the Midwest, a key ingredient in how the GOP, with its aging white male demographic base is nonetheless strategically outmaneuvering the Democratic Party on multiple fronts.
That story dealt with what happened in Wisconsin, the signing of two laws that combined to decimate state-level democracy.
The story from Michigan, the lead poisoning of Flint through its water supply, which brought the mayor to declare a state of emergency, is much more viscerally horrifying, and has finally exploded nationally after Christmas. On Dec. 29, the state’stop environmental officer resigned; on Jan. 5, the U.S. Attorney announced an investigation, the same day that Gov. Rick Snyder declared a state of emergency.Four days later, FEMA officials arrived, but chaos still reigned as crowds of Flint protesters called for Snyder to resign and/or face criminal charges. On Jan. 13, Snyder announced Flint had experienced an outbreak of Legionnaires’ Disease, with 10 fatalities, which could be linked as well. After that, Bernie Sanders called for Snyder to resign, and Hillary Clinton blasted him in her closing statement of the Democratic debate, and every day brings additional heat and light to bear on the story.
But behind the upfront horror and outrage being felt, behind all the tragedy and drama now unfolding in Flint, what’s happening now is rooted in a state-level attack on democracy. Indeed Rachel Maddow—who first brought the story to national attention—made this very point herself, calling the law that made it all possible “the single most radical policy” in recent American history—an “emergency manager” law that essentially invalidates local self-governance.
The common theme of attacks on democracy in Wisconsin and Michigan is not an accident. The two stories are connected by virtue of being parts of a broader process—the aforementioned Dixiefication of the Midwest, without which neither of them can be fully understood, or responded to. Dixiefication is a process that’s economically regressive, culturally anti-modernist, and politically authoritarian/anti-democratic, and in that first story, I traced how Walker’s early aggressive pushing of Dixiefied anti-union agenda eventually led to a wide-ranging dismantling of the state’s good government framework of laws and regulations.
However, the Dixiefication of the Midwest itself is taking place in the context of two much wider processes—the Dixiefication of the nation as a whole, and global process of neoliberalizing economies in various different ways across very different societies. All three of these large-scale processes have been shaping regional politics as well as everyday life in the Midwest with increased ferocity since the the beginning of the Great Recession. What’s striking about the lead poising of Flint is not just how morally outrageous the story itself is, but also how it can serve to illuminate the much wider framework of corrosive harm these three social processes have produced.
Lead Poisoning Flint’s Kids
The story itself wasn’t new. On Sept. 2, researchers from Virginia Tech University led by Marc Edwards reported that Flint’s water was “very corrosive” and “causing lead contamination in homes,” but commensurate attention and action have yet to come. So, on Dec. 14, Flint’s newly elected mayor, Karen Weaver, fought back. She declared a state of emergency regarding the citywide lead poisoning that resulted from a change in the source of city drinking water, a “cost-saving” move ordered by the city’s appointed emergency manager. Water from the Flint river corroded Flint’s water pipes, leaching lead into the water even after Flint switched back to getting its water from Detroit in October.
“The City of Flint has experienced a Manmade disaster by switching to the use of the Flint River,” Weaver’s declaration said. “This damage to children is irreversible and can cause effects to a child’s IQ, which will result in learning disabilities and the need for special education and mental health services and an increase in the juvenile justice system.”
“We know that Flint is not in a position to bear this burden alone,” Weaver explainedon “The Rachel Maddow Show” the next day. “We are asking and looking for state and federal assistance, and the only way we were going to have this happen was to declare a state of emergency, and hopefully that gets it to the county, which will get it to the state, where the governor can make it federal.” Getting outside assistance was not a new idea. “We have been trying to get federal attention for a while,” Weaver said.
Lead poisoning was just the last straw, however. Earlier tests had detected E. coli and fecal bacteria in the water, and Flint’s water was found in violation of the federal Safe Drinking Water Act for high levels of total trihalomethanes, which according to the EPA can lead to “Liver, kidney or central nervous system problems; increased risk of cancer.” Flint residents had reported an ongoing litany of health problems—hair loss, vomiting, diarrhea to the point of dangerous dehydration—in addition to foul, discolored drinking water. Environmental activist Erin Brockovitch lent her support,calling broader attention to the problems. Eventually, this past March, the city council voted 7-1 to “do all things necessary” to reconnect Flint’s water system to Detroit’s, a move that emergency manager Jerry Ambrose dismissed as “incomprehensible” in a statement issued the next day.
So the news about the lead poisoning came in the context of more than a year of widespread public suffering and official obfuscation, resistance and denial. Backing up the state-appointed emergency manager, and local water officials, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality continued to insist there was nothing wrong. After Edwards said that the city’s findings that lead levels were safe amounted to “smoke and mirrors,” the MDEQ’s Communications Director Brad Wurfel wrote to the Flint Journal’s Ronald Fonger, saying, “[T]his group specializes in looking for high lead problems. They pull that rabbit out of that hat everywhere they go. Nobody should be surprised when the rabbit comes out of the hat, even if they can’t figure out how it is done.”
But the tide was rapidly turning. It quickly came out that the city’s own water testing showed that “lead levels have been rising since the city began using the Flint River for water 16 months ago.” By mid-October, the switch back to Detroit water was announced. But irreparable damage had already been done—particularly to thousands of children under 6, who are the most vulnerable.
Michigan’s Racist Emergency Manager Law
This shocking attack on the health and welfare of young children is only the most outrageous example of how Michigan’s “emergency manager” law has robbed more than half of Michigan’s blacks of the protections of democratic self-government, putting their lives in the hands of local dictators unilaterally appointed by Gov. Rick Snyder. “While the cities under emergency management together contain just nine percent of Michigan’s population, they contain, notably, about half of the state’s African-American residents,” the Atlantic reported in May 2013. Looked at another way, while Michigan’s population is 14.2 percent black, Flint is 56.6 percent black,Detroit 82.7 percent, Benton Harbor 89.2 percent, Highland Part 93.5 percent,Pontiac 52.1 percent (Hispanic 16.5 percent), and Ecorse 46.4 percent (Hispanic 13.4 percent). Crushing black political power goes to the heart of what Dixiefication is all about.
Rachel Maddow first reported about the emergency manager law in April 2011, shortly after its passage, when it was first applied full-force in Benton Harbor (video/transcript); the next day she described the story of what happened there as “the single-most telling thing in American politics right now about the difference between the two parties.” Michigan had had an emergency manager law before, as have other states, but the powers of emergency managers were limited, their purpose to restore a city’s finances to fiscal health in cases of extreme emergency.“The original Public Act 72, which had bipartisan support, was much more about creating a process to intervene when there was criminal or corrupt activity,” Flint’s previous mayor, Dayne Walling, told Eclectablog, Michigan’s leading progressive blog. “But, when you broaden it to say we’re going to use emergency managers’ tools and rhetoric to try to address long-term, structural financial problems, it doesn’t work.” he said.
Or perhaps it does work: to force the long-term costs and consequences onto those least able to pay or to resist—the very essence of Dixiefication as political economy—because the new law conferred almost unlimited power. Benton Harbor’s emergency manager, Joseph Harris, didn’t abolish the city government—he just took away all its power, with an order that said:
“[N]o City Board, Commission or Authority shall take any action for or on behalf of the City whatsoever other than:i) Call a meeting to order.ii) Approve of meeting minutes.iii) Adjourn a meeting.
As Maddow described it:
The state says we can dissolve your town now. We can wipe you off the map, give your land and assets to the next town over if we want to, just roll up the whole deal and deed it over. Your town doesn‘t get a say in the matter.
Attacks on poor black children are consistent theme in this story: In Flint, they were poisoned with lead. In Benton Harbor, they were robbed of a magnificent park, a true field of dreams. In her first report, Maddow explained the details: Benton Harbor, population just under 11,000, is almost 90 percent African-American, with a per-capita income of just $10,000, just next door to St. Joseph, population 8,500, 90 percent white with a per-capita income of $33,000. Benton Harbor—once the manufacturing center for Whirlpool appliances—has been decimated by decades of deindustrialization, but it did have one prize civic possession left: the 70-acre Jean Klock Park, abutting Lake Michigan and willed to the city in perpetuity in 1917 by former Mayor John Nellis Klock. But in recent years, a private-public partnership Whirlpool created hatched the idea of building a $500 million, 530-acre golf course and residential development, gobbling up 22 acres from the park’s center in the process.
After years of fighting Benton Harbor residents’ opposition, the local state representative, Al Pscholka, authored the new emergency manager law with its dictatorial powers. As Maddow explained:
[H]e happens to be a former vice president for one of the major entities involved in building the luxury golf development that is set to remake Benton Harbor.Until last year, he served as a member of the nonprofit‘s board of directors—the same one behind the golf course. And now, the first town in Michigan to feel the teeth of the Pscholka emergency manager financial martial law/Rick Snyder bill is Benton Harbor—very poor, almost entirely African-American, in his district, right where they‘re building the golf development that he himself has personally spent years bringing into existence.
Slamming the Overton Window Shut on Democracy
If that sounds sleazy, it’s only because it is. But it’s part of a much, much bigger picture. At the time the bill was signed into law, Andy Kroll of Mother Jones wrote about its back story: the state think tank that largely shaped the law, and the funders behind it:
Since 2005, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy has urged reforms to Michigan law giving more power and protection to emergency financial managers…. In January, the free-market-loving center published four recommendations, including granting emergency managers the power to override elected officials (such as a mayor or school board member) and toss out union contracts. All four ended up in Snyder’s legislation.
Kroll went on to identify some of Mackinac’s backers, including the foundations of Charles Koch, the Walton and DeVos families, and the parents of Blackwater founder Erik Prince, among others. He also noted that Mackinac is part of network of state-level think tanks associated with the Heritage Foundation.
What he didn’t note was that Mackinac was where the idea of the “Overton Window” comes from—a simplified model for organizing people to consistently shift the framework of policy debate in a given ideological direction. Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci first developed the broad conceptual notion of hegemonic warfare—the struggle of ideologies to establish themselves as “common sense.” Despite decades of discussion, the American left—for a variety of reasons—has never managed to seriously assimilate his insight, and organize around it. But coming out of Mackinac, a sizable portion of the right has done just that, conceiving the struggle as a long-term process of shifting the framework of “reasonable” ideas so that crazy ideas they love become acceptable, while normal, time-tested ideas they hate become crazy. Whether a given “solution” actually works or not is immaterial in this model. In practice, failure is a feature, not a bug: it can be seized on to urge an even further shift in their preferred direction.
Which is a pretty good description of what’s been happening with emergency managers and their schemes in Michigan. They’ve been failing in terms of poor preparation of emergency managers and abuse of power, as Chris Savage, owner of Eclectablog described for the Nation in early 2012. or in terms of how badly things actually turn out on the ground, as Laura Gottesdiener described here at Salon last June (“Something is rotten in Michigan”), providing a tour of five of the state’s major emergency manager disasters. One could add to her list the Detroit Public School system, which Eclectablog recently noted had seen its deficits rise under state-appointed managers from $137.1 million in 2009 to $238.2 million today. But the most basic failure is the one alluded to by Flint’s former Mayor Dayne Walling—the failure of trying to fix long-term systemic problems by treating them as if they were episodic local ones, the results of mismanagement and bad policy. “The laws right now are written to mete out punishment to local officials,” Walling said, “but there need to be clear partnership requirements for the state to address fiscal stress.”
There’s a fundamental clash of worldviews going on here, between a cooperative, reality-based problem-solving approach on the one hand—all aspects of America’s pragmatic tradition—and a moralistic crusade against designated culprits singled out for their supposed roles in causing trouble for everyone else, a hallmark of how Dixiefied politics works.
http://www.salon.com/2016/01/23/the_truth_about_flint_kids_drank_poisoned_water_because_of_the_gops_radical_anti_democratic_reforms/
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