[Occupymendocino] [Fwd: How can you help Flint? Do not send us bottles of water. Instead, join us in a revolt.]

[agnes at mcn.org]

Sign the petition at the end of M.Moore's letter. I did.
Agnes

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: How can you help Flint? Do not send us bottles of water. Instead,
join us in a revolt.
From:    "Michael Moore" <maillist at michaelmoore.com>
Date:    Wed, January 27, 2016 1:36 pm
To:      agnes at mcn.org
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hot off the presses! My newest letter on Flint. Please read, Sign my
petition, and Share! http://www.michaelmoore.com/DontSendBottledWater

"Do Not Send Us Bottles Of Water. Instead, Join Us In A Revolt."
A Letter From Michael Moore

Many of you have contacted me wanting to know how you can help the people
of Flint with the two-year long tragedy of drinking water contaminated by
the radical decisions made by the Governor of Michigan. The offer is much
appreciated by those who are suffering through this and who have not drank
a glass of unpoisoned water since April of 2014.

Unfortunately, the honest answer to your offer of help is, sadly, you can’t.

You can't help.

The reason you can’t help is that you cannot reverse the irreversible
brain damage that has been inflicted upon every single child in Flint. The
damage is permanent. There is no medicine you can send, no doctor or
scientist who has any way to undo the harm done to thousands of babies,
toddlers and children (not to mention their parents). They are ruined for
life, and someone needs to tell you the truth about that. They will,
forever, suffer from various neurological impediments, their IQs will be
lowered by at least 20 points, they will not do as well in school and, by
the time they reach adolescence, they will exhibit various behavioral
problems that will land a number of them in trouble, and some of them in
jail.

That is what we know about the history of lead poisoning when you inflict
it upon a child. It is a life sentence. In Flint, they’ve already ingested
it for these two years, and the toll has already been taken on their
developing brains. No check you write, no truckloads of Fiji Water or
Poland Spring, will bring their innocence or their health back to normal.
It’s done. And it was done knowingly, enacted by a political decision from
a Governor and a political party charged by the majority of Michigan’s
citizens who elected them to cut taxes for the rich, take over
majority-black cities by replacing the elected mayors and city councils,
cut costs, cut services, cut more taxes for the rich, increase taxes on
retired teachers and public employees and, ultimately, try to decimate
their one line of defense against all this, this thing we used to call a
union.

The amount of generosity since the national media finally started to cover
this story has been tremendous. Pearl Jam sent 100,000 bottles of water.
The next day the Detroit Lions showed up with a truck and 100,000 bottles
of water. Yesterday, Puff Daddy and Mark Wahlberg donated 1,000,000
bottles of water! Unbelievably amazing. They acknowledged it’s a very
short-term fix, and that it is. Flint has 102,000 residents, each in need
of an average of 50 gallons of water a day for cooking, bathing, washing
clothes, doing the dishes, and drinking (I’m not counting toilet flushes,
watering plants or washing the car). But 100,000 bottles of water is
enough for just one bottle per person – in other words, just enough to
cover brushing one’s teeth for one day. You would have to send 200 bottles
a day, per person, to cover what the average American (we are Americans in
Flint) needs each day. That’s 102,000 citizens times 200 bottles of water
– which equals 20.4 million 16oz. bottles of water per day, every day, for
the next year or two until this problem is fixed (oh, and we’ll need to
find a landfill in Flint big enough for all those hundreds of millions of
plastic water bottles, thus degrading the local environment even further).
Anybody want to pony up for that? Because THAT is the reality.

This is a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. There is not a
terrorist organization on Earth that has yet to figure out how to poison
100,000 people every day for two years – and get away with it. That took a
Governor who subscribes to an American political ideology hell-bent on
widening the income inequality gap and conducting various versions of
voter and electoral suppression against people of color and the poor. It
was those actions that led Michigan’s Republican Governor to try out his
economic and racial experiment in Flint (and please don’t tell me this has
nothing to do with race or class; he has removed the mayors of a number of
black cities. This, and the water crisis in Flint, never would have been
visited upon the residents of Bloomfield Hills or Grosse Pointe -- and
everyone here knows that). We have now seen the ultimate disastrous
consequences of late-20th century, neo-conservative, trickle down public
policy. That word “trickle,” a water-based metaphor, was used to justify
this economic theory -- well, it’s no longer a metaphor, is it? Because
now we’re talking about how actual water has been used to institute these
twisted economic beliefs in destroying the lives of the black and the poor
in Flint, Michigan.

So, do you still want to help? Really help? Because what we need in Flint
– and across the country – right now, tonight, is a nonviolent army of
people who are willing to stand up for this nation, and go to bat for the
forgotten of Flint.

Here’s what you and I need to do:

1) Demand the removal and arrest of Rick Snyder, the Governor of Michigan.
When the police have an "active shooter" situation in a building, they
must first stop the shooter before they can bring aid to the victims. The
perp who allowed the poisoning to continue once he knew something was
wrong -- and his minions who cooked the evidence so the public and the
feds wouldn't find out – must be removed from office ASAP. Whether it's
via resignation, recall or prosecution, this must happen now because he is
still refusing to take the aggressive and immediate action needed. His
office, as recently as this past Thursday, was claiming the EPA had no
legal authority to tell him what to do. You know the EPA -- that federal
agency every Republican politician wants eliminated? Governor Snyder is
not going to obey the law. He has covered up the crime, and I submit he
has committed an act of voluntary or involuntary manslaughter. Last month
I posted a meme of me holding a pair of handcuffs with the hashtag
&#8234;#&#8206;ArrestGovSnyder&#8236;. It went viral, so I posted a
petition (http://michaelmoore.com/ArrestGovSnyder) to U.S. Attorney
General Loretta Lynch asking her to arrest the Governor – and asking
President Obama to send help to Flint immediately. As each day brought a
new revelation of the Governor's corruption or incompetence, and with
Rachel Maddow on a nightly tear, the momentum built. MoveOn.org and
Democracy For America joined me in circulating our petition. We are now on
our way to having a half-million signatures! Then Bernie Sanders became
the first candidate to call for the Governor’s removal. That same day,
President Obama issued his first emergency order for Flint. The next
night, Hillary Clinton fiercely called out the racist actions of the
Governor.

You want to help? Sign the petition
(http://www.michaelmoore.com/DontSendBottledWater) – and get everyone you
know to sign it. Now. Another half-million signatures could become the
tipping point we need. All eyes are on Flint.

2) Make the State of Michigan pay for the disaster that the State of
Michigan created. The Governor wants the President to declare Flint a
federal disaster zone and have him send federal money to fix the problem.
Not so fast. All relief aid for Flint currently coming from the federal
government to Michigan is going through the Governor's office to disburse.
That is literally paying the fox to fix the chicken coop he destroyed. As
a Michigan resident and voter, I think that the people who elected
Governor Snyder must show some of that personal responsibility they’re
always lecturing about to the poor. The majority of my fellow Michiganders
wanted this kind of government (they elected him twice), so now they
should have to pay for it. This year the state treasury posted nearly a
$600 million surplus. There is also another $600 million in the state’s
“rainy day fund”. That’s $1.2 billion – just about what Flint’s
congressman, Dan Kildee, estimates it will cost to replace the water
infrastructure and care for the thousands of poisoned children throughout
their growing years.

And before there is any talk of federal tax dollars being used (and, yes,
they will be needed), the state legislature must remove the
billion-dollars’ worth of tax cuts the Snyder administration gave the
wealthy when he took office. That will go a long way to helping not just
Flint but Michigan’s other destitute cities and school districts.

3) The Federal Government must then be placed in charge. The State
government cannot be trusted to get this right. So, instead of declaring a
federal disaster zone, President Obama must declare the same version of
martial law that Governor Snyder declared over the cities of Flint and
Detroit. He must step in and appoint a federal emergency manager in the
state capitol to direct the resources of both the state and federal
government in saving Flint. This means immediately sending in FEMA in full
force. It means sending in the CDC to determine the true extent of not
just the lead poisoning in the water, but also the latest outbreak that
has been discovered in Flint – a tenfold increase in the number of Flint
people who’ve contracted Legionnaires Disease. There have now been 87
cases since the switch to the Flint River water, and ten people have died.
The local hospital has also noted sharp increases in a half-dozen other
toxins found in people’s bodies. We need the CDC. The EPA must take over
the testing of the water, and the Army Corps of Engineers must be sent in
to begin replacing the underground pipes. Like the levees in New Orleans,
this will be a massive undertaking. If it is turned over to for-profit
businesses, it will take a decade and cost billions. This needs to happen
right now and Obama must be in charge.

4) Evacuate any and all Flint residents who want to leave now. They’ve
suffered long enough and, until the water is truly safe, no one should
have to stay there who doesn’t want to. The state and FEMA should move
people into nearby white townships that are still hooked up to Lake Huron
water.

5) For those who choose to stay in Flint, FEMA must create a temporary
water system in each home. One idea that has been suggested is to deliver
two 55-gallon drums to every home in Flint. Each day water trucks will
arrive to fill them with fresh clean glacial water from Lake Huron. The
drums will have taps attached to them. People can’t be expected to carry
jugs of water from buildings that are miles away.

In the end, we will need to create a new economy and bring new employment
to this town that created the middle class, that elected the first black
mayor, and that believed in and created the American Dream. They deserved
more than to be poisoned by their own Governor -- a Governor who thought
that, because the people in the town were politically weak, he could get
away with this unnoticed and without a fight. He figured wrong.

A crime against humanity has been committed against the people of Flint,
making them refugees in their own homes. Tell me honestly: if you were
living in Flint right now, and you learned that your children had been
drinking lead-filled water for two years, and then you discovered that the
Governor knew this and the state lied about it – tell me, just how fast
would your head be spinning? With your children now poisoned, and with the
poisoning continuing
 is the word “nonviolence” dominating your thoughts
right now? Are you absolutely, stunningly amazed how peaceful the people
in Flint have remained? Are you curious how much longer that can last? I
hope it does. If you want to help Flint, sign the petition, demand that
the federal government take action, and then get involved yourself,
wherever you live, so that this doesn’t happen to you – and so that the
people we elect know they can no longer break the law as they rule by fiat
or indifference. We deserve much better than this.

For a better world,
Michael Moore

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