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Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Flint

AlterNet: Paul Krugman: The Flint Water Disaster Was No Accident - "What we see in Flint is an all too typically American situation of (literally) poisonous interaction between ideology and race," Krugman writes.
It’s easy to come up with examples. Kansas, which made headlines with its failed strategy of cutting taxes in the expectation of an economic miracle, has tried to close the resulting budget gap largely with cuts in education. North Carolina has also imposed drastic cuts on schools. And in New Jersey, Chris Christie famously canceled a desperately needed rail tunnel under the Hudson.

2 comments:

Glynn Kalara said...

Not just ideology and race. What your also seeing is how the Conservative/Libertarian ideology of less Gov't oversight works out. No need for the EPA the magic of the market will take care of it! Opps maybe not.

Jim Sande said...

I just listened to an interview with Jane Mayer who wrote Dark Money on the billionaires especially the Koch's who have been whittling away at democracy for decades. She told an interesting story about how the father of the four brothers used to beat them all the time. Charles grows up rebellious and ruthless. Here in Flint we have this tragedy which is inexcusable but it's this playing out of deregulation, no money for the people as it were, and a disregard for the electorate's health even, so much chattel to be abused and consigned to misery. Flint is the culmination in a way where the overlords have reduced society to the billionaires and their little governor puppets and then at the bottom the peons. It's interesting how there is this theme of degradation, like the beatings, that starts as the impetus for a conservative libertarian movement and ends in the degradation of ordinary people, now all these children with lowered IQs and lifelong problems. It's a simplistic analogy but it has some general consistent unfortunate attributes