Neoliberalism’s Deadly Experiment
In Michigan, privatization and free-market governance has left 100,000 people without water.
Over the past year, media reports and op-eds have examined the lead poisoning disaster in Flint, Michigan, from a variety of angles. Some focus on Michigan’s emergency manager laws, which the Republican-dominated legislature has used to suspend democracy in majority-African-American cities, including Flint, Detroit, Pontiac, Highland Park, and Benton Harbor.
Others focus on the larger issue of lead pipes and decaying infrastructure, or the criminal negligence of Governor Rick Snyder and his administration. Still others note that the long history of housing discrimination in Flint, and the racist application of emergency manager laws, help explain why the majority of the poisoning victims are African American (although they include many working-class whites).
Corporate media coverage, however, has ignored the relationship between the water crisis in Flint and ongoing mass water shutoffs in Detroit. More broadly, it has obscured the role of neoliberal restructuring in undermining one of the nation’s largest water systems, and in leaving over one hundred thousand people without running water in a state surrounded by the Great Lakes.
Since 2000, state-appointed emergency managers in Detroit, Highland Park, Flint, and Pontiac have outsourced key functions of their water departments to private companies, while ramping up water shutoffs on low-income households. Since 2013, when Republican governor Rick Snyder placed Detroit under an emergency manager, the Detroit Water and Sewage Department (DWSD) has shut off water for over one hundred thousand residents, provoking condemnation from the United Nations Human Rights Council.
Public health experts have also said that the mass shutoffs will increase infectious disease and infant mortality in Detroit. Meanwhile, even after its lead-contaminated water became a national scandal, Flint has continued to shut off water for residents unable or unwilling to pay for poisoned water.
Whether from shutoffs, contamination, or both, so many poor and working-class urban residents in Michigan lack water to properly bathe, clean, or flush their toilets. Why are so many people unable to use tap water in a state bordering the Great Lakes, the largest group of freshwater lakes on earth?
Michigan’s water crisis is rooted in the hollowing out of the public Neoliberalism’s Deadly Experiment | Jacobin:
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