Congressional Progressive Caucus: the Flint, Michigan, Water Crisis

Floor Speech

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Mr. ELLISON. Madam Speaker, this is the Progressive Caucus Special Order hour. I am so honored that Bonnie Watson Coleman leads our Caucus in this regard. It couldn't be more important tonight than to have an excellent leader guiding us in this discussion because, in my opinion, the Flint water crisis is one of the most stunning failures of the philosophy that you ought to run a government entity like a business that I have ever seen.

Tonight the Flint water crisis that is in front of us is not a tsunami, it is not a tornado, and it is not a flood. It is decisions by people who have inflicted massive harm and damage on children and the community at large.

When we say children, the damage to the children is absolutely incontrovertible, but what about our seniors? What about our people in the prime of their lives who cannot use the water in the city that they expect to use it in?

I submit to you that this problem is the responsibility of Governor Snyder, who believes in running government like a business. The former leader of Gateway Computers promised outcomes and deliverables during his campaign, but he wasn't selling computers. You are supposed to be giving public services to the people. It is very different. Apparently, the deliverables that he wanted to deliver, delivered awful, horrible outcomes for the people of Flint.

Before the Flint crisis, Mr. Snyder spent $1.8 billion in tax cuts for corporations, leaving very little for small, struggling cities like Flint. Of course, it is all based on the philosophy that if you don't regulate rich people and big companies and you give them all the tax breaks they ever want, then they are going to invest it all in the plant and equipment and wages and make it better off. What a stunning failure. It is a lie, an untruth, and a demonstrably false claim.

To save money, the Governor has been appointing political cronies as financial managers to mostly Black, mostly poor municipalities around the State. When I say that folks in Flint are mostly Black, I want to say this. They are not all Black. There is a shared harm on White communities and Latino communities as well. I don't want people across America to think: ``Well, I am not Black, so it is not really my problem.'' No, it is your problem, if you are living in Flint and drinking water, no matter what your skin color or ethnic background is.

In Flint, the emergency manager suggested switching the city's drinking water supply to the Flint River to save the city about $5 million. Thank you. It will cost billions to correct the damage that this perverted philosophy of money before people has resulted in. The conservative mantra says that cutting spending and shrinking government is the way to go. Well, he sure did that, and now we have this crisis on our doorstep.

The government and businesses do not have the same bottom line, they should not have the same bottom line, and we should treat businesses like businesses and public services and government like that. They should not confuse one for the other.

We have a crisis of democracy in Flint. Under the guise of fiscal responsibility--which we all know only applies to low-income people and never the well-to-do and the well-heeled--they are never asked to be fiscally responsible. For example, in Florida, the poor have to be fiscally responsible. They even have to be drug tested to get welfare. We give farm subsidies away--that is welfare, too--and nobody is asked to do anything. It is ridiculous. It is a double standard.

Under the guise of fiscal responsibility, Governor Snyder used the State's emergency manager law to remove local power and appoint his own personal emergency managers to run the city of Flint and numerous other committees in Michigan, including my own hometown where I was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan.

I am a proud Representative of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and its suburbs today, but I was born in Detroit. I can never--nor would I want to--disconnect my connection to this crisis. This is my crisis. This is the State where I was born and where my two older brothers and my parents and nieces and nephews live right now. My brother, Reverend Brian Ellison of Church of the New Covenant Baptist, was born in Flint.

Of the 25 times that emergency financial managers have been appointed in Michigan since 1990, Rick Snyder has appointed 15 of them. In doing so, he has denied these communities their right to representative democracy. This kind of idea that when your town is in trouble, democracy and the voice of the people cannot be part of the solution, is offensive to anybody who cares about democracy. Instead, it turns over control to an outside dictator who reports only to the Governor, not anyone in the community.

I want to talk about Flint by the numbers just for a moment:

8,657 is the number of children under the age of 16 exposed to lead poisoning--it may be more now;

$5 million is the amount of money that Flint's emergency manager was trying to save by switching the water supply to the Flint River;

$1.5 billion is estimated as what it would cost to now replace Flint's corroded water pipes;

$100 is the amount of money per day it would have cost to treat Flint's water with an anticorrosive agent;

10 is the number of Flint residents who have died from a Legionnaires' outbreak in Flint that experts suspect could be linked to waterborne illnesses;

Zero is the number of corroded pipes removed from Flint since the Governor decided to appoint this emergency manager.

Now, as I close, I just want to say that there is another group of people who I just want to bring to light today, and that is a group of people in our society who live among us who clean hotel rooms, work on farms, and who really work superhard. These are people who may not have documentation to live in the United States.

One of the stories that we have yet to really put a lot of light on is the fact that undocumented people are being, according to reports, turned away from services. You need an ID to get the water. There are cases where undocumented people have not been able to get the services that they need.

I just want to say that Flint's undocumented migrants hesitated to request help during the water crisis. On this floor and in other legislatures around this country, conservative legislators are talking about the aliens and all this kind of stuff as if these people are from another planet, but my God, you deny them water? Come on. The fact of the matter is that this is a humanitarian crisis. It deserves the full attention of our government.

The Progressive Caucus will offer an entry in our budget addressing this crisis and coming at it with the money. Yes, we think the health and safety of the children and the people of Flint are more important than somebody's tax cut. We do believe that to be true, and we are going to be standing firm for that.

We also urge all of our Members in this body to say wait a minute. Anytime public policy says the only thing that matters is cutting taxes and we don't really care about public services, you are going to get a crisis like this.

Now that we have seen what this abhorrent philosophy will bring, I think we can all say we need to slow down and ask ourselves the question: Isn't it worth a moment to spend time to deliver quality public services to all of the people of this country? Isn't it time to let government do what it is supposed to do, to protect the people?

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