State government has turned Michigan into a cesspool

ACHTUNG: This is not a “Fair and balanced” story. It is an editorial by the editor.

“The purpose of gummint is to create a healthy bidness climate.” — The late, great Molly Ivins quoting a Texas state legislator

The news this week was that Michigan now has the highest number of PFAs in water across the nation. We’re No. 1.

There also have been recent reports that Michigan just might have the worst roads in these United States.

This gives me yet another reason to excoriate our feckless State Legislature, which has sat on its hands and done virtually nothing over the past decade in the face of increasing evidence the Mitten State is becoming a cesspool in the midst of one the greatest sources of freshwater on this planet.

For those, like myself, who haven’t known just what a PFA is: “Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a group man-made chemicals that includes PFOA, PFOS, GenX, and many other chemicals. PFAS have been manufactured and used in a variety of industries around the globe, including in the United States since the 1940s. PFOA and PFOS have been the most extensively produced and studied of these chemicals. Both chemicals are very persistent in the environment and in the human body – meaning they don’t break down and they can accumulate over time. There is evidence that exposure to PFAS can lead to adverse human health effects.”

Regional broadcast and print media have been reporting extensively lately about problems with PFAS in places like Rockford, the Gerald R. Ford Airport west of Grand Rapids and even closer to home — Otsego.

Government officials have been wringing their hands over stories about people in those communities getting sick and wondering if the culprit is “something in the water.”

Meanwhile, to the north and to the east, we’re seeing and hearing a lot about corporate giant Nestle dipping into our streams and taking our water at outrageous bargain basement prices and then selling it back to us, reaping incredible profits. This DEQ decision, despite overwhelming opposition from the public, more than 80,000 to 75.

Furthermore, residents of Flint continue to struggle with lead poisoning dealt by state-appointed managers and the Line 5 pipeline in the Great Lakes is showing its age and wear.

And the condition of our roads has been abominable for too long. Lawmakers such as Ken Yonker, Tonya Schuitmaker and Bob Geneski failed to do anything about it except pass a feckless bill a few years ago that did nothing to solve the problem.

State legislators have been on my dishonorable list for quite some time and I believe I’ve had good reasons for consistently dissing them for failures to solve problems, which is the real purpose of government.

In most all of these cases, polluting our life-giving precious resources have been done in the name of preserving a “healthy bidness climate” at the expense of the public health. And when things finally fall apart, the boys and girls in Lansing are all about protecting the polluters and assessing the damage costs onto taxpayers.

They’ve permitted privatizing profits and socializing losses, the practice of treating firms’ earnings as the rightful property of their shareholders, while treating losses as a responsibility that society as a whole must shoulder, for example, through taxpayer-funded subsidies or bailouts.

As a result, I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more. My advice for this August and November elections is, “Don’t re-elect anybody.”