Disclosure: I met Michael when we were both NYT bestselling authors, at a huge Random House conference of editors, VPs and publishers from the many former freestanding houses Random had gobbled up. He is and was humor filled, and a dead serious social justice activist straight from the heart. Some despise him, especially those with a power agendas to rule the world with either their money, their buddies, or their fundamentalism.
But, attacks roll off Michael’s broad back. How can one be hurt for long for running the righteous road, for dragging out the pretenders from behind their king-cosmetics and the pig suckling “queens of hearts” from their Bashmobiles.
The issue Michael Moore has taken up is about Flint, Michigan, his hometown. He and I both come from now long devastated towns in ‘the Rust Belt,’ towns that have not had the proper care for retraining, for education, for job creation since the manufacturing and hand farming industries were dismantled by big Corporates.
Currently in Michigan is a Republican governor named Snyder. That he is Republican, may not matter. But what he has done is beyond egregious. Not ‘republican.’ Rather, likely, criminal legally. Certainly beyond evil in sights Greater.
He caused by taking over Flint without respect to the citizen’s wishes, giving running of the town to his cronies, to gut the town of services in order ‘to save it,’ is how many a person back to home tells it. To kill the patient so it would not die. Clearly a deadly experiment that is more akin to Mengeles than city planning.
That he created a hierarchy that was not a citizen one, against their protests, that planted hierarchy, amongst other dementias, ordered that city water for Flint Michigan be diverted from the freshwater Great Lake Huron [I grew up on one of the Great Lakes, Michigan; they are huge inland oceans], to the incontestably filthy water of the Flint River [which took the incessant daily and nightly dumps of sludge and contaminants from the manufacturing city for DECADES without ever being cleaned up.
This is the issue. Changing the fresh water to filth, and telling the people it was ok to drink it. Is this new? NO! It is old. Brownsville Tx immediately comes to mind, and myriad other places where lying feedbags of politicos had fresh water wells in their grounds, while feeding the poor and the working class poisons.
Where I grew up near the vast St Joe River wherein all the chillplow and auto manufacturing and steel mills dumped their filth daily and for years til the river turned a dark black green and flowed like a sludge pit instead of a laughing living river– and recall we were all encouraged to FISH in that cesspool, and eat the fish who regularly bellied up in those waters so thick the sunlight could not reach the fish and they swam too close to the surface, overheated and died. Neither could the water oxygenate properly in the heavy metals gushing into it daily….
Flint Michigan is a deeply poor city of poor white, latinos and blacks, that like many a town of immigrants and migrating souls who came for the jobs, never recovered from the closing of steel mills and car factory closings over two decades ago. Some over 55 years ago, as in the sudden closing of the rich boys’ Studebaker auto manufacturing company sending hundreds of dazed men and women workers home all in one day, without notice, without job retooling prep. I still remember the men in our rural outback getting off the bus and walking slowly home with silver lunchbuckets, jacket over shoulder, hat on back of head, sorrowful beyond sorrowful to have to tell their families they had no more work.
Across the Rust Belt for decades now, including Michigan City, La Porte, and Flint and other towns as well, many businesses shuttered for good, boarded up everything that once stood as ‘the people’s town’they were proud of helping to build. People lost their homes, high-high unemployment still, and more.
Long ago, poor people relocated from the South and Mexico and the Appalachian mountains and from eastern Europe especially, after WWII and up to Flint and other towns because of the manufacturing jobs, so many availible.
They raised their families there, bought homes, paid taxes for decades, built schools, made decent wages, fought for safety in their jobs, were often needing to push back against deleterious ideas of management, including unjust quotas for production that exhausted the workers.
But, then in Flint too as elsewhere, one day, without warning, they got pink slips and were let go without ceremony. Trained to build autos, or run big fiery crucibles to pour iron, or to run mom and pop stores that fed and clothed and made music availible for the neighborhoods, and furniture and tv sets and banks and more… all went down slowly or quickly.
The corporations moved factories offshore to save more money for their already well off selves. China. Indonesia. India. Other places where there were no pesky safety policies, sanitation policies, environmental protection policies for people, creatures, land or water sources.
BACK TO FLINT: By creating the change from clean water from the oceanic Great Lake Huron to FILTHY water from the town river, and having others of his group execute this order, Governor Snyder made it so the people of Flint were drinking high lead contaminants [and other strictly regulated by the EPA contaminants NOT supposed to be in drinking water for human beings ].
Snyder made it so people of Flint were unbeknowingly drinking lead straight from their water faucets. Cooking with it, bathing in it, drinking it. Part of it came from foolish ideas of ‘cleaning’ the filthy water, apparently, that by adding those chemicals, also caused the corrosion in city water pipes to come off in the water, poisoning the water further.
The children of Flint were tested in the last many weeks and show MASSIVE lead levels in their blood. People are sickening. And there are reports of people so sick, it is unto death. It is a MASSIVE horror for the people. SO much taken from them already, now the governor and his cabal show up to take the children, the most precious treasures of all??
When this all came to light last week, Michael Moore sprung into action, having already some time back, filmed the terrible degradation of the people of Flint by the big manufacturing corps, over the decades.
The governor appears to have knowingly turned a filthy uncleaned-up river as a water source, to save money on the backs of poor people, down and out. Michael sees this as a violation of the Environmental Protection Agency Act, and although a little theatrical to gain people’s attention with the handcuffs picture on the petition site, and all, he asks that people sign a petition to arrest the Governor.
The petition to sign, if you wish, and more oversight and details are here:
I would have to agree that Snyder ought be charged and go to trial on several charges, but especially patently endangering the actual lives of thousands and thousands of people who did not know what they were drinking in the bad water.
I know you agree, and I dont want to make too fine a point on it, but No child or teen or adult or elder deserves to be poisoned because someone wanted to save money on their backs.
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A hat tip to our grandson who at age 17, just completed his Eagle Scout Project in a social justice work during which he professionally interviewed and recorded five persons with special needs, some that show on the outside and some that do not show on the outside but are truly challenging daily. On the audio, the people tell, each in their own way, how they would like the world to treat them as full human beings.
Below is grandson’s letter/appeal today to all his dearest family and adult friends which contained the link I gave you above, grandson asking that family/friends read and sign Michael Moore’s appeal: “Dear family,
I would truly appreciate if you could sign this petition calling for social change.
Love you all…”
Grandson is currently at Jesuit University.
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Michael Moore is an author and filmaker, imo, a down to earth guy most would enjoy having a beer with, and who is ferocious about putting his money where his mouth is about wrongs done to people.
For instance in his film Bowling for Columbine, when told by Admins of Columbine High School [teachers and kids were reported to have repeatedly told various that Eric Harris and Dylan Klybold [the shooters] were not seeming well, and their violent works they were handing in in class were about killing/ murdering people] that Michael Moore could not come into the school to film –months after the premeditated murders of 12 students, one teacher, and the suicides or suicide/murder of Klybold and Harris —
So, Michael instead asked one of the students at Columbine to carry a hidden camera into the school, which the young person did. Some of the film shown in movie theatres across the nation, showed the inside Columbine High School, and gave overviews of events and trauamtized students, as a result. The inside film work was done by a particular student who carried the camera secretly in their lap under a small drape. For the student is in a wheelchair for life having been shot by Eric Harris and Dylan Klybold during the massacre. Without this student-filmaker alliance, no one would have had a sense of many of the tragedy’s truths at Columbine.
MSM at the time, reported only what admins and law enforcement said [a whole other tangle of stories altogether.] I was a post trauma specialist to Columbine and community for three years following the massacre, and my heart is filled to overflowing for the bravery of the unsung teachers and students, grandparents and parents, neighbors and friends, certain first responders, helpers and healers. But my mind rejects entirely the grandstanding to this day, that is/was done by some. Michael Moore showed many hidden aspects and truths as others saw them, [not just the ‘official decrees’], all of which would have been buried forever.
He is, one could say, one of the few film-makers who deeply confronts the powerful for the sake of those without power.