The water crisis in Flint, Michigan highlights the slashing of funds for public infrastructure to pay for war and the enrichment of the financial elite.

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This week, the head environmental regulator in the state of Ohio called national water regulations “broken,” saying that they dramatically understate the true scale of lead poisoning in American cities. As Virginia Tech researcher Marc Edwards put it, “Because of the smoke-and-mirrors testing, Flint is meeting the standard even as national guardsmen walk the street.”

Many water pipes in the United States are over 100 years old, and a large number of cities still have 100 percent lead plumbing.

The reasons are not hard to find. According to the Congressional Budget Office, public capital investment in transportation and water infrastructure, already underfunded for decades, has been slashed by 23 percent since its peak in 2003.

The year 2003 is significant as it coincides with the beginning of the illegal invasion of Iraq by the Bush administration. The “war on terror” has entailed a vast expansion of the military at the same time that spending on anything not directly related to the accumulation of wealth by the financial aristocracy has suffered from continual cutbacks.

The response of the political establishment to the poisoning of tens of thousands of people in Flint and potentially millions more throughout the United States has been characterized by indifference. The politicians responsible, from Michigan Governor Rick Snyder to local Democratic Party officials and the Obama administration, pull long faces, pretend to take responsibility or seek to shift blame, while doing nothing to address the issue.

The Trots are dead-on here. I do not necessarily agree with the CT that this and similar actions are deliberate attempts to weed-out the majority black cities, but these occurrences of criminal neglect and willful disregard for the lives of citizens result in the same outcome.

You got white settler racists taking up arms because of the last, tiny bits of the socially owned property in the US is being kept from them - while black citizens across the country are being murdered in the streets and poisoned by their government. Who should be under arms right now? At some point we will have to say "enough!" Even if it isn't a movement based upon working class consciousness, per se, it must come soon.