Pronounce the word
“lead” however you choose to.
While I usually try
to focus on WNY and the issues that directly affect us here, the
crisis in Michigan (Flint with water and Detroit with schools) is
relevant to Buffalo. In a way, Michigan has served as a
“laboratory” for neo-liberal (fancy way of saying unrestrained
capitalism/capitalist) policies.
First things first:
I want to make a note of something that I see/hear all too often
about this crisis. I hear people saying “government” quite a
bit. They are using the crisis in Michigan to slam the government.
The government is the problem, the big evil, the bad guy in this
situation, etc.
Key point: They are
missing an adjective. That adjective is “Republican.” Governor
Rick Snyder, a Republican, has been in charge of this situation.
The Flint water
crisis was created under his watch. The man he appointed to handle
Flint's water services was ordered to save money and he did. At the
cost of the lives of the citizens of Flint. All the evidence that I
have read/seen/heard points to the fact that he knew the river was in
rough shape. It will cost the taxpayers more now to fix up the
situation and pay for the health crisis than the money it supposedly
saved.
Flint is a city in
worse condition than Buffalo. It suffered greatly, as did all
Michigan, when the auto industry closed up shop and exported all the
jobs out of the country or to union-free states. (No thank you
President Bill Clinton for that mess called NAFTA. We got the
shaft-a on that one.) It has no other major industry to fall back
upon and is (hopelessly) trying to recreate itself with something
other than tourism and sports. Ask anyone and neither of those are
stable ways to build an economy.
The education crisis
began under a Democrat or a Republican. It depends upon when you
want to place the start. The departure of the automotive industry
began under President Clinton. However the assault on public
education began under President Ronald Reagan. No matter – both
political parties are two sides of the same capitalist coin.
BTW: According to
the Washington Spectator –
The same man who was in charge of the failing Detroit City Schools is
the man who was put in charge of the Flint water system. I will find
the article and link it to this one.
The
education crisis is one that has been building over the years. Cuts
to education budgets because of the decline of Michigan's
manufacturing based economy and government cuts to education budgets
overall have hit the city very
hard and left it in a continual case of crisis. Rats, mice, and
cockroaches in classrooms are going to make learning hard on even the
brightest students. Add to that the problems of poverty and you have
a real disaster on your hands.
The
teachers having a “sick out” to protest the sad and sorry state
of the Detroit schools is a tragedy of the greatest scale.
Independent media can say more and better than I can about the whole
situation. It is just that terrible.
So
why bring this up?
That
is the road that Buffalo is not far from. Buffalo and much of WNY
takes its water from the Great Lakes, whose levels are in decline
according to some sources. And communities in drought areas want to
pipe water from the lakes to their area in order to address the
drought that they are in. The drought is nothing more than a symptom
of the global warming from the climate change crisis that we are in.
If the lakes go down too far, where will people get their water
from?
And
Buffalo's schools are just a shade over what Detroit is in. Look at
the receivership situation (~25 schools) and the strong-handed
dictator in Superintendent Kriner Cash and Commissioner Elia in
Albany.
Detroit
and Flint have high minority populations, similar to Buffalo's. We
need to pay attention to what happens there in order to prevent it
from happening here.
New
Orleans and now Flint & Detroit have been capitalism's
laboratories for experimentation on education and government.
We
need to stop those experiments from ever getting here.
And reverse the damage that was done over there.
Update: January 24, 2016
I listened to this week's CounterSpin and it shed some real interesting light on the whole Flint situation.
More importantly: Chris Savage talked briefly about how Flint is under an Emergency Manager - Much like Buffalo and Erie County were under a control board (and in some ways still are).
The key points to me about the Emergency Manager/ Control Board were:
- They are undemocratic - They are appointed by the state and are not accountable to the people in any way.
- They can only cut. They have no real way to raise revenues.
It is a podcast (recording) and is well worth the 30 minutes it took to listen. You can stream it live or download it and listen to it whenever.
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