If you've been sitting under a rock for the past couple of days, the state of Michigan has filed a set of indictments against former Governor Rick Snyder, as well as eight other individuals including Flint's former Emergency Manager Darnell Earley, Snyder's Chief of staff, and other former senior officials. This "news" has been met with all types of frothing jubilation by folks out-of-state who haven't been following the developments since the crisis was first exposed in 2014. /r/News had a thread with 88k upvotes for an eighteen word "article" when the news first broke. My state sub was no better, 1.7k upvotes with upvoted comments about "it took a Dem attorney general to get Flint justice" and general Dem vs. GOP bullshittery, the /r/Breadtube libs chimed in with same vague/uninformative "FINALLY" sentiment that I've seen all over social media. Even Hillary Fucking Clinton felt it necessary to put in her two cents on Twitter about the situation.

Well, I'm here to tell you, as a leftist who's been a life long resident of Michigan: These indictments are nothing more than a bunch of bullshit, the residents of Flint are no closer to justice than they were in 2014, and our piece of shit celebrity governor's administration is just as responsible for their continued anguish as Snyder is.

#Why do I say this? A couple of reasons

1. There was already a prior investigation going on looking into the water crisis before the Whitmer got into office, in that probe, Snyder was already looked at as a person of interest, as well as fourteen other state officials. When Whitmer and her admin finally took office, they dropped every single charge in that probe then relaunched the investigation due to vague allegations of mishandling (local news circa June 13th, 2019 as citation).

2. Some of the more serious charges (such as misconduct), legally speaking, will be unable to be enforced in court. According to Michigan law, felony misconduct has a statute of limitations spanning six years. The state government told Flint residents in a town hall after getting elected that they only had nine months to file any remaining charges in the investigation, despite the fact that key state officials released public statements on the 17th suggesting that the April 25th, 2020 deadline would not constrain any charges in the probe.

3. A lot of the charges in this new indictment were already in place or, are watered down version of charges that Snyder and his aides would've been stuck with in the old probe. Nicolas Lyon and Eden Wells were both already charged with manslaughter in the old probe, Howard Croft's charges were downgraded from manslaughter to willful neglect, even Snyder's charges got downgraded from corruption to "failure to manage government employees". (local news circa January 14th of this year as citation, local journalist podcast for greater depth [Charlie LeDuff isn't a leftist, but as a rustbelt radical, I appreciate most of his work since he somehow has more contempt for this state's politicians than I do and talks about the stories that most local journos don't])

4. The Whitmer administration might as well be a landing pad for folks who are either directly or indirectly responsible for the water crisis. Michigan's Attorney General Dana Nessel's newly minted comms director is a woman by the name of Kelly Rossman-McKinney (KRM), KRM is the former head of a very powerful PR firm and lobbying group in the state of Michigan, in addition to consulting Snyder's appointed emergency managers, she's advised Snyder himself. Her highlights include emailing Snyder's chief of staff and saying in reference to the water crisis: "This situation has gotten out of hand. I'm concerned that the implications of this may have racial overtones. Ugh.", calling the manslaughter charges against Nicolas Lyon "ridiculous overreach" in a tweet, and blatantly downplaying the Flint crisis ahead of the 2016 primary debates by giving the Snyder admin the playbook of: "You want to do two things. You want to showcase a substantive victory for a Republican administration … and also minimize attention to what is clearly a flaw, which is Flint,”. (this is all on top of upping a pic on Twitter showing of a matching pair of Shinola watches with Rick Snyder's wife, Sue Snyder). Then you have cretins like David Massaron, who worked as an attorney for the hedge fund backed "water authority" that enabled the water crisis to happen in the first place by arguing that Flint's 1950's era water treatment plant was unironically in good enough working conditions to treat the contaminated water from the Flint river.. He leapfrogged from that position, to Chief Financial Officer for the city of Detroit (while there, he, showing off his gigantically sophisticated and big brain, argued in 2019 that my city was "unlikely to face another financial crisis in the near future", potentially putting us on the course of a second bankruptcy when our pension bills come due in 2024 in light of the corona crisis), and was personally elevated by Whitmer herself to the office of state budget director despite very obviously not having the foggiest fucking clue of what he's actually doing.

It's impossibly incommunicable how angry it makes me that the Black population of this state are used as fucking political pawns in the grand game of politics. I mean, even though Flint is a city where more than half of it's residents are Black, EVERY. SINGLE. VICTIM. named in these new indictment charges from the state somehow just happen to be White. Living in this state as a Black man, let alone someone who's interested in radical politics, is a masterclass on what gaslighting from the "upper echelons" of political society feels like. But yet, you have utterly braindead/idiotic libs fawning at how "cool" or "good" Whitmer is online just cause she strikes the bare minimum political tone and compensates for her debilitating lack of policy success in Lansing with eyeroll-inducing pandering attempts like posing for a pic of her rocking expensive designer Buffs when she's too ignorant to know that countless locals in the hood either get beat the fuck up, or straight up killed over em on the regular.

It's so surreal to sit through capitalism's version of Chernobyl and watch literally no one give a fuck, and relegating your rage to ranting into obscure online forums that ultimately won't achieve much. Even if every single person who saw this decided that y'all would dedicate every waking hour of your lives to bullying Whitmer into firing Massaron or some shit. These people are still gonna be in power or employed at the end of the day, they aren't gonna lose any sleep or miss any meals.

I just hope this illustrates how profoundly sick and demented our country is. FUCK THESE PEOPLE. I cannot emphasize that enough.