Time Magazine 

February 1, 2016

Viewpoint 

By Michael Moore

The people of my hometown, Flint,Mich., are being poisoned. Let me not minced words:This is a racial crime.If it were happening in another country, we’d call it ethnic cleansing. Flint is a very poor, majority African-American city, and the Republican governor of Michigan, Rick Snyder, knows they have no political power, no lobbyist, no money. And they didn’t vote for him. So when the residents of Flint, many of whom work two or three jobs for minimum wage, complained about the levels of lead in their water and told the governor their children were getting sick-two years ago!-he didn’t have to listen.

Everybody knows that this would not have happened in predominately white Michigan cities like Bloomfield, or Grosse Pointe, or Ann Arbor. Everybody knows that if there had been two years of taxpayer complaints, and then a year of warnings from scientists and doctors, this would have been fixed in those towns.This started when the governor turned Flint’s authority over to an “emergency manager”, ostensibly to fix the city’s finances. In order to save a few million dollars, the manager and the governor’s office came up with bright idea to unhook the city’s water supply from Lake Huron and tap into the Flint River.