Ex-Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder charged with willful neglect for Flint water crisis | Hacker News Reader

Ex-Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder charged with willful neglect for Flint water crisis

cnn.com

31 pointssahin6 comments

As much as I hate Snyder, it seemed like any corruption in these cases was at a much lower level - and to me the exciting deals to lowering water quality seemed suspicious to me, but I’m not an investigator :)

But let’s look at this more seriously - this is a case of negligence being bought against a governor for harm caused by what amounts to failure to adequately maintain infrastructure.

Doesn’t that apply to pretty much every state in the US at the moment? There have been collapses of dams, bridges, road ways, ... in pretty much every state for decades. Due entirely to a policy of deferred maintenance (eg “I can make the budget look good today, even if tomorrow it costs 10x as much to correct”).

Criminalizing political opponents is one of the standard dictator's toolkits. It should only be used when overwhelmingly justified, this case does not meet that bar. Yes he's a sociopath and a fuckup but politicians should not typically be able to wield state violence against each other.

This was a massive mess up on an epic scale, and I agree with you that criminalizing opponents is a very bad thing. However, the Michigan water crisis is not simply a matter of one party accusing another party of misdeeds baselessly. There was a systematic negligence of duty throughout a prolonged period of time from 2014 to 2016. Experts were repeatedly brought in to assess the situation and offered professional recommendations that were ignored by elected officials. This negligence directly lead to the deaths and permanent disabilities of people. This is not a political issue.

Officials were warned that the Flint River was not adequately treated for legionella, and they did nothing. Officials were warned that lead pipes were leaching into the water supply because of the more acidic water from the Flint River and they did nothing. Simply because they wanted to save money by switching off of Detroit's treated water.

This is negligence and the officials responsible deserve to be held accountable. The charges aren't even that steep; $1000 or up to 1 year in prison. Given that they are elected officials they'll probably get off with a slap on the wrist fine.

Sources:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/former-michigan-governor-rick-s...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_water_crisis

https://www.npr.org/2021/01/13/956592508/new-charges-in-flin...

> This is not a political issue.

It is a political issue. There are political factions that explicitly want complete negligence by government and/or want the government shut down. Small, but nevertheless valid, political actors.

Now the situations are very different, but that doesn't change the fact that bringing charges against politicians for negligence is crossing dangerous and uncivil lines. One persons negligence is literally another person's vote winner.

Furthermore, politicians can reasonably be incompetent in the face of crisis and should not be held accountable for that - they are at the end of the day just ordinary people. They don't know any more than we do what is going to happen in their term. It isn't fair to punish them for negligence if there isn't some formal standard of competence in appointing them (which is a totally silly idea and would be abused like mad in any political arena). "I don't understand water and chemistry and these experts looked untrustworthy" is a totally acceptable political defence, no matter how stupid that sounds or how damaging the outcomes. It is simply a matter of fact that politicians make decisions about things they don't understand and regularly make bad (read: horrible, horrific) decisions.

With regards to normal courses of action, I agree with you.

However, I think you would also agree that in the cases of flagrant criminal negligence, such prosecution is not just acceptable, but necessary and even mandatory.

At which point, I think this becomes an argument over whether or not the Flint water catastrophe is just such a case of flagrant criminal negligence.

Isn’t Obama too complicit in this? He even failed to acknowledge the problem exists, let alone do anything about Rick Snyder

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