In February 2015, almost a full year before the news of widespread lead poisoning in Flint, Michigan, gained headlines, the world’s largest private water corporation, Veolia, deemed Flint’s water safe.
They were hired by the city to assess the discolored water that many residents had been complaining about—a General Motors plant had even stopped using Flint’s water because it was rusting car parts.
Running government like a business is to blame. Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder is a former corporate executive and venture capitalist with little government experience prior to being governor. Snyder talks about “outcomes” and “deliverables,” calls residents “customers,” and has sought to “reinvent” Michigan to make it business-friendly.
The ethos of austerity is also to blame. The tragedy in Flint is a symptom of a larger shift in American political economy. Today, it is normal to blame government deficits for society’s problems, and to scoff at raising government revenues (taxes) to fund much-needed investments in critical infrastructure and social programs.
The resulting philosophy is: markets good; government spending bad. Which really means: market competition, which favors the already powerful, good; democracy, which has the potential to help everyone, bad.
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