Jan 29, 2021
Refusing Accountability: Rick Snyder’s Crimes of Capitalism in Flint
by Michael Stepniak
On January 13 and 14, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel charged disgraced former Governor Rick Snyder and a ghoul’s gallery of public leaders-turned-conspirators with crimes related to their roles in the Flint Water Crisis, from misdemeanor neglect of duty to felony manslaughter and extortion. The man at the top, Snyder, received the lightest misdemeanor charges.
Infrastructure is a redistribution of wealth in massive, physical form. Public infrastructure is a delivery system of the stuff that makes a city: people, goods, electricity, water, and internet. But what do we call the destruction, the weaponization through neglect, of the water system of the City of Flint by Rick Snyder and his cronies?
This was no tragedy, but a series of violent crimes. Snyder and his crew who poisoned the people of Flint were willing to gamble with human lives to further their agenda. These were crimes of relentless capitalism, of vicious austerity, perpetrated by the power elite against the majority-minority, working class people of a great American city.
The official state record counts 12 people dead from the outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease that sprouted from the legionella bacteria in Flint’s toxic water, but the true number is likely far higher.
Ongoing research by Marc Edwards and Siddhartha Roy of Virginia Tech, two scientists who helped expose the contamination of Flint’s drinking water, suggests that while still serious, the lead exposure was “not as bad as first feared.” The fact remains that a number of Flint’s children had elevated levels of lead in their blood. Time will tell what the consequences are.
The Karegnondi Water Authority and the EFM
Flint has had a complex relationship with the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD), and has made attempts to assert local control over the city’s water since the 1960s. In 2010, in response to high water rates and an aging infrastructure, the Karegnondi Water Authority (KWA) was formed. At the time, Flint’s water came from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department’s (DWSD) Lake Huron intake plant, which piped treated water into Genesee County. The decision was made to build a parallel pipeline that would bring raw water into Flint that could be treated on site. Soon after, in November 2011, Snyder declared a state of financial emergency in Flint, and appointed the first in a parade of Emergency Financial Managers (EFM).
Under Michigan law, EFMs are appointed by the governor and have absolute authority over the city they manage. Democracy ceases to function. Having lived through the bankruptcy here in Detroit, I will say it was surreal. City Council met. The Mayor made proclamations. And none of it meant a damn thing. The power to do things rested with one man, the EFM, who nobody had voted for.
The Lies that were Told
There’s a lot of space between what government officials said, and what actually happened. State officials repeated three main lies. The first was that they switched from Detroit water to the KWA, and the Flint River, to save money.
The second big lie was that the DWSD had refused to supply Flint’s water.
The third lie was that Rick Snyder had, as if by magic, avoided knowledge that the Flint River was the source of the 2014 outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease until January of 2016.
The Timeline of the Crime
In April 2013, Sue McCormick, then Director of the DWSD, attempted to renegotiate the municipal water contract with Flint. In an email obtained by Motor City Muckraker, McCormick is shown offering Flint a better deal than the KWA: a 48% rate reduction, which “When compared over the 30 year horizon… saves $800 million dollars or said differently — saves 20% over the KWA proposal.”
Darnell Early, Flint’s EFM, said no. Over the next year, Early rejected six DWSD offers. When it became apparent that Early was intent on switching to the KWA, Detroit offered to supply Flint with water without a contract, essentially pleading with Early not to hook up to the heavily industrialized Flint River. Early refused. Whatever his motives, saving money wasn’t the issue, and Detroit never cut Flint off.
On March 7, 2014, Early rejected McCormick’s most recent offer of temporary services, stating his intention to use Flint River water until the completion of the KWA pipeline, claiming that the switch would save $5 million. On April 25, Early hooked the city up to the intake on the Flint River.
Immediately, residents began reporting rashes on their bodies and smelly, discolored water. By June, the Legionnaires’ disease outbreak had begun. In October, General Motors’ Flint Assembly plant refused to use Flint water, as freshly washed parts corroded almost instantly. Another year passed before Flint would reconnect to the DWSD Lake Huron intake.
October 2014: What was Happening?
By mid-October 2014, claims of ignorance on the depth of the crisis coming from Snyder’s office should be treated as lies.
On October 13, Shannon Johnson, an epidemiologist at the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS), emailed James Rudrick, the Director of the Communicable Disease Division. State officials, including Nick Lyon, the Director of MDHHS, had tried to pin the Legionnaires’ outbreak on McLaren Hospital of Flint, but Johnson wrote that “the source of the outbreak may be the Flint municipal water.”
The next day, Valerie Brader, an advisor to Snyder, emailed Dennis Muchmore, Snyder’s chief of staff, and other officials. Brader wrote of General Motors’ refusal to use Flint water and resident complaints of being “lab rats.” She said that Flint should return to Detroit water as soon as possible.
Brader was told by Early and Richard Baird, Snyder’s fixer and right-hand man, that switching back to the DWSD would be too costly. After the call, Baird threatened Brader, ordering her to never again send emails about Flint’s water.
On October 16 and 17, according to phone records obtained by The Intercept, Muchmore, Lyon, and Snyder were in constant contact, in what Jordan Chariton and Jenn Dize describe as “a flurry of phone calls.” These records got investigators’ attention, who concluded that the calls were the result of Snyder learning of the Legionnaires’ outbreak, contrary to his testimony to Congress that he first became aware in January of 2016
For the next year, Snyder, Early, and Early’s successor, Jerry Ambrose did nothing. After making the switch to the Flint River, Early had sold the pipeline that connected to the DWSD intake for $3.9 million. Siddhartha Roy and Marc Edwards began their study, finding that 20% of Flint homes had elevated lead levels. By October 2015, the poison water became impossible to ignore, and Flint hooked back up to Detroit at a cost of over $15 million.
The Lead in the Pipes
The Flint River contains a heavy presence of highly corrosive industrial byproducts. Older pipes that connect buildings to water mains often contain lead. When exposed to the water of the Flint River, these pipes corroded, and the lead leached from the pipes, seeping into the drinking water.
For $50,000, the EFM could have used an anti-corrosion agent, as the DWSD does. Early decided that this cost too much. Keeping in mind that the DWSD Flint intake was on Lake Huron, a cleaner source than the Detroit River, consider this comparison: Flint River water is five times more corrosive than the Detroit River. Had an anti-corrosive agent been used, the water still would have been more destructive than the Detroit River, and far worse than Lake Huron.
Without the agent, Flint’s pipes aged 11.5 years in just 16 months. Despite reconnecting to the DWSD, Flint’s pipes were wounded, still leaching lead into people’s homes. An ongoing effort, primarily paid for by a $97 million taxpayer-funded settlement of Flint’s case with the State of Michigan, is replacing every lead and galvanized pipe in Flint. In early 2020, Governor Gretchen Whitmer signed a bill dedicating an additional $600 million to settling Flint Water Crisis lawsuits.
Refusing Accountability
Rick Snyder has lied repeatedly about what he knew and when. There is no way to fit his bullshit into any sort of truth-shaped box. His statements fall apart under the slightest scrutiny.
On September 15, 2015, Howard Croft, then Director of Flint Public Works, lied for Snyder and the EFM, saying that Detroit had cut Flint’s water off, and that Early had no choice but to use the river. When journalists Kurt Guyette and Kate Levy confronted him with Early’s written rejection of McCormick’s offers, Croft pivoted, saying that the decision had gone “all the way to the governor’s office.”
Guyette and Levy took Croft’s statement on Snyder’s role to Sara Wurfel, the Governor’s spokesperson. Wurfel, unaware that Croft had been caught lying, went full circle and repeated the same exact lie that Detroit had cut Flint off.
At the October 8, 2015 press conference at which Snyder announced that Flint would reconnect to DWSD water, he made it clear how little regard he had for the people of Flint, smiling breezily and uttering a corporate-speak word salad: “This isn’t about blaming anyone. Right now, I want to stay focused on the solutions and taking actions to solve the problems.” This, from a man whose actions had caused death, disability, and untold hundreds of millions of dollars in costs to Michigan taxpayers.
At Governor Whitmer’s 2019 inauguration, Snyder went to Karen Weaver, then Mayor of Flint, with a request. Representative Elijah Cummings, the Chairman of the U.S. House Oversight Committee, had been dogging him. Snyder, knowing that Weaver had some influence with Cummings, wondered if she could get him to “back off” from investigating him, as he wanted to move on with his life as a private citizen. Unknown to Snyder, Cummings and Weaver had already spoken and the Congressman was intent on pursuing the investigation. But Cummings died that October, and so did his investigation.
The Motive for the Crime, and the Violence of the Neoliberal Capitalist Project
Why was Snyder so reckless? It wasn’t to save money. Snyder, Early, Ambrose and other conspirators made decisions that spent millions to save a penny. It wasn’t about benefiting the people of Flint, since many of them died, were sickened, or simply had their already not-easy lives made harder.
There are allegations that Snyder wanted to use the Karegnondi Water Authority to break up the DWSD, the largest publicly-owned infrastructure in Michigan, and privatize it. There is circumstantial evidence to support this. In 2014, at the height of the crisis, another Snyder-appointed EFM was in control of Detroit, and was busily breaking the DWSD in two, splitting off major parts into the newly-formed Great Lakes Water Authority.
There are accusations that the KWA pipeline was a way to use Flint’s tax dollars to finance a new infrastructure for hydro-fracking oil and gas, and other industrial concerns. Certainly there is industrial demand for raw water from corporations like DTE, and Genesee County is populated with many oil and gas rigs.
Snyder and his crew gambled in Flint, but on what? What was it that they risked so much for? It’s not clear. It may have been water privatization or fracking. It was almost certainly a corporate giveaway of some sort. Whatever Snyder’s purpose, his gamble, it was the people of Flint who paid the price. The Flint Water Crisis was a callous game of power, wealth and capital, played by elites who made deliberate and coordinated choices to lie, to risk lives, and to commit violence against the public they were elected to serve. They must not get away with it.
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