
Startups Born of Flint’s Water Crisis - snazz
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/04/flint-small-business-startups-water-crisis-economic-recovery/587986/
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pizzazzaro
On the one hand, this makes sense - nobody is coming to save us, and we have
to do it ourselves. Whats the best mechanism for this? Business isnt a wrong
answer.

But lets be honest here - these businesses havent finished the job. We can
celebrate "capitalist innovation" starting to attempt to address a problem
functioning government would have had fixed a decade ago.

We need to make a choice - either quit pretending that government can only
work when it is in someone's pocket, or we can become a third world country.
We need to understand it as an active choice.

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ptah
absolute madness that the water is still contaminated

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ElonsMosque
What's even more maddening is that the population of flint Michigan is
majority Black. Hard to spin that race hasn't got anything to do with the lack
of effort in fixing the issue.

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dtwest
This problem is widespread throughout the Rust Belt/Midwest and very costly to
fix. Because many of the repairs fall on local governments, poorer
neighborhoods struggle with this. So you can point to the water in a poor
black neighborhood in Michigan and say it is proof of racism. But why are you
ignoring the poor white neighborhood in Appalachian Pennsylvania that has the
exact same problem?

To paint this as racism is either dishonesty or ignorance.

Many of the neighborhoods with this problem have been areas of severe
deindustrialization. When a city like Flint shrinks because the main factory
shuts down, they no longer have the tax revenue to support their own
infrastructure, let alone build new infrastructure. They are stuck in a slow
decay, and would need Federal assistance to get out.

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waterbox
waterbox providing clean water
[https://www.501cthree.org/](https://www.501cthree.org/)

