ACHTUNG: This is not a “fair and balanced” story. It is an editorial by the editor.
More than a few people today have said how much they have enjoyed watching Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder squirm during the congressional hearings on the Flint water crisis.
Though I share their emotions, I also understand that it’s one thing to get a thorough and humiliating public verbal reprimand and another to actually deal with the consequences of what has been done. We’re only treating the symptoms, not the disease.
Insisting that Snyder resign doesn’t really provide us with the proper solution. What we really need to do is eliminate the wrong-headed thinking that government should be run like a business and put the brakes on the alarming trend of privatizing.
Snyder told us six years ago that he would “reinvent Michigan,” and what he meant by that was establish a system in which private companies would take over formerly public functions, a system in which publicly elected officials would be cast aside in favor of animals now known as emergency managers. This, despite the voters of this state twice rejecting such a proposal at the polls.
Though there are assertions to the contrary, its has become clear that the elected Flint City Council did not approve switching the city’s water system to the Flint River. It did not have the power to do so. That was directed by the emergency manager, Darnell Earley, an unelected hired gun whose job was to save Flint money.
This same process alarms me often when I see our local school district constantly sacrifice the good of the community at the altar of privatization to save money, as in throwing custodians under the bus in order to hire people at lower wages, but people who don’t know or really care about the welfare of our students.
The Flint water crisis should tell us, the voters, that we can’t continue to support politicians who only do the bidding of businesses and companies.
Take a hard look at our prison system. The United States, land of the free and home of the brave, locks up far more prisoners that any other country in the world, too many for non-violent crimes such as marijuana violations. One the big reasons is that many prisons these days have been privatized and like hotels, they need to be filled up in order to maximize profits.
Take a hard look at what Snyder and his ilk have done with privatized food services in the prisons with Aramark and all those health violations.
I blame him and our toady legislators for bowing to the fireworks sales and manufacturing businesses to annoy most peaceful, law-abiding citizens.
Consider what happened when regulations were relaxed on the savings and loan industry in the 1980s, resulting in the subsequent scandals.
Consider Bill Clinton’s repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 and nine years later the financial meltdown, from which I am not convinced we’ve really recovered.
Consider instances in which regulations against air and water pollution have been relaxed, and the sick people that has left behind.
My experience for too long has been that whenever we take a public service and privatize it, making money a higher priority than people, we lose the meaning of public service and sometimes even fail to protect the public from harm — which has brought us to these nasty congressional hearings.
We won’t solve the problem by throwing Snyder and those other rascals out. We will only when we come to our senses and stop letting the private sector feed at the public trough.
As Walt Kelly said so long ago in the Pogo comic strip, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” We’ve got to take our country and our state back at the polls.
