Flint's Toxic Water Crisis: Devastating Result of State Takeover

The poisoning of Flint’s children is the logical result of a state takeover. Overriding local democracy, state governments are imposing “emergency managers” with extraordinary powers from Flint, to Detroit, to Oakland and City College of SF. Corporations push elected officials to use these state takeovers to deal with now-disposable workers they no longer need, and to privatize valuable public assets like water and prime real estate. The Flint crisis is one result of a political austerity program inflicted on increasingly impoverished and marginalized communities. Today over half of Black people in Michigan are living under emergency managers.

Retired Flint autoworker Claire McClinton will speak on fighting the strategy of toxic neglect that poisoned her city’s water. Others will connect the crisis in Flint with the damage caused by the state takeover at City College. We’ll discuss how we can work in solidarity with the people of Flint and with Reverend Edward Pinkney, now imprisoned for opposing a corporate dictatorship in Benton Harbor, Michigan. We’ll discuss how to stop the Michigan Model of Toxic Neglect as it threatens to crush democracy in the Bay Area and elsewhere.

Review the recent ACLU film entitled “Here's to Flint” featured on DemocracyNow.org.


Speaking:
• Keynote: Claire McClinton from Flint Democracy Defense League Water Task Force and Speakers for a New America
• Organizers from Save City College and the student Solidarity Committee/Black Student Union
• Women’s Economic Agenda Project

Co-Sponsors (partial listing as of 4.16): Save City College Coalition; the Solidarity Committee; African American Studies; Black Student Union; LGBT Studies Department; Mechxa de CCSF; AFT 2121