The Connect- with Johnny Mitchell - Exposing Truth About The Flint Water Crisis & How The Democrat Party SOLD OUT Middle America

Episode Date: November 14, 2024

Investigative journalist Jordan Chariton discusses the shocking details behind the Flint water crisis. Dive deep into the origins of the crisis, where a switch from Detroit's water supply to the contaminated Flint River led to dangerous lead levels and life-threatening health issues for residents. Jordan exposes conflicts of interest, financial motives, and an alleged cover-up that kept Flint residents drinking toxic water for years. He shares his experience uncovering erased evidence, silenced voices, and how the mainstream media moved on—leaving behind a devastated community. This conversation sheds light on broader issues of environmental injustice, regulatory failures, and political corruption, with lessons for communities nationwide. Go Support Jordan! YouTube: statuscoupnews Book: https://a.co/d/gi2kvkU Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It really is kind of that age-old story of politicians kind of doing what they have to do to survive. If you know people are drinking contaminated water and they're giving it to their kids, clearly they should have stepped in and stopped it. People were getting sick. People were dying. Drain commissioner, unelected emergency managers, city officials, and the governor's office. They were all in on this kind of scam to basically shackle the city of Flint. But at the end of the day, it's kind of.

of nauseating that an American city was poisoned by their government. Jordan Sheridan, thank you so much for joining me. How are you today, sir? Hey, doing well. Thanks for having me. So I am particularly fascinated by your new book, We the Poisoned, you know, just like me and everybody else of my generation. We've all heard about the Flint water crisis. Something was happening in Flint, one of the poorest cities in the country, probably still. and a bunch of people were drinking poison water for a generation. Beyond that, I don't really, I don't really know the details of it at all. And I think most people don't. So this is going to be

a good opportunity for you to kind of refresh our memories, go into detail, and just kind of bring us up to speed on what's happening with it. So if you could please, like recap the beginnings of the crisis? What was it actually going on in Flint? Yeah, I think a lot of people have kind of just been fed a media narrative that's completely untrue. But basically at the turn of the century, you know, 2000s, 2010, Flint, like a lot of cities, was kind of a rotting economic corpse for a lot of reasons. But, you know, the tax base had cratered. And basically a private foundation was paying for most of government services, schools, youth programs. And the city was nearly bankrupt.

So at the time, the governor of Michigan declared a financial emergency in Flint. He declared it in other places, too, like Detroit. But he declared a financial emergency, and he waved the wand and inserted unelected emergency managers. I just call them kind of czars. So as everyone right now is being fed, like democracy is on the line in the presidential election. Like democracy was actually canceled here because unelected people were put in place and they took power over the mayor, the city council. And essentially the first order of business for the czars was to privatize the water system in Michigan. Flet had gotten its water for 50 years from the city of Detroit.

it came out of Lake Huron, which is one of the Great Lakes. A lot of people probably don't know, but the Great Lakes in Michigan and the surrounding states, they provide 20% of the world's fresh surface water. So this was some of the cleanest water Flint was getting for 50 years, but Detroit had been price gouging Flint. So local officials on the ground and the governor's office kind of used that as a justification. Well, let's just create our old. water system will save Flint money. It sounds good on the surface, but the reality was this was

actually a for-profit scheme to privatize the water system. And what happened basically in a nutshell, Flint was broke. It legally couldn't borrow any money because it had no credit rating. And to build this new water system, it was going to cost about $300 million. And the people that wanted to build it, they needed the city of Flint to be one of the cities helping to fund construction. So to get around, basically Flint couldn't borrow the money. They created a fake emergency. They basically said that there was a lime sludge pit next to the Flint water plant. It had always needed to be cleaned up, but it was never an emergency. But they created, they pointed to this emergency of cleaning up this lime pit. And they created it.

an environmental order to clean up this lime pit. And in the fine print, in that order, they snuck through that Flint was going to be able to borrow $100 million to help fund construction for this new water pipeline. And while that new water pipeline was being built, it was called the Karagandi Water Authority, KWA, they said, well, we'll just have Flint use the Flint River, which General Motors, Dow Chemical, DuPont, all the corporations have been dumping their shit into for 100 years. And we'll use the Flint water plant, which I compare to these Boeing planes that are falling apart in air. The Flint water plant hadn't been used for 50 years to treat water full time. It didn't even have the equipment necessary to treat the water.

And the rest is history. They rushed to basically switch to this polluted river, use this skeleton plant that should have never been used. And the residents were poisoned because they weren't they didn't add the proper chemicals they didn't have enough staff uh but it was the media has always reported this as some tragedy born from government trying to save money but in reality it was a for-profit scheme for a lot of people to make money uh can you go into a little more detail about how who these characters were that were these companies that were scheming to make money and how they were making money out of this yeah so essentially water has been become a cash cow for a lot of communities and cities. So on the local level in Flint, there was a guy

by the name of Jeff Wright. He was the drain commissioner, which kind of sounds like what the hell is that? Basically, we have elected positions. They have different names all over the place, but drain commissioner basically runs the water for your city or your county. So he was the drain commissioner for Genesee County, which Flint is the biggest city of. At the same time, he is the elected drain commissioner, but he was also the CEO of this new water system. So it was like this gross conflict of interest where he's supposed to be doing what's best for the community, but he was trying to build this privatized water system. So he was pushing this new water system. Then you have J.P. Morgan and Wells Fargo, Wall Street. They issued the bonds for Flint. So Flint,

I told you there was this BS emergency, so-called emergency, so that Flint could borrow money because they needed Flint to basically build this pipeline, this new water pipeline. J.P. Morgan and Wells Fargo were in on the scam to create that fake emergency. Because if they didn't get Flint to help fund the construction, the pipeline was never going to happen. They were going to miss construction. So there's emails, and it's in my book where J.P. Morgan, Wells Fargo, they're colluding with the unelected emergency manager that was put in. They're colluding with the drain commissioner. How do we get a broke city to be able to borrow this money? So drain commissioner,

unelected emergency managers, city officials, and the governor's office, officials from the environmental department, they were all in on this kind of scam to basically shackle the city of Flint with 30 years of debt for a completely unnecessary new water system. And I should say the new water system, why you know it's a scam. So Detroit, Detroit had been providing Flint for 50 years with their water. But again, Flint was saying they keep raising our rates. So at the last minute, Detroit didn't want to lose Flint as a customer because if Flint left Detroit's water system, Detroit's water system was going to go badly up. So Detroit offered Flint a half off discount to stay. So like you go to the store, everything's half off.

over 30 years Flint would have saved money by staying with Detroit, but it was never about saving money. They were trying to join this new water system because the new water system, it was going to deliver to Flint raw water. And what do you need a lot of raw water for? Fracking, the auto industry, agricultural, meatpacking, industry. I mean, they were kind of open about it. They called it the blue economy.

So most of the water for this new water system wasn't going to be used for residents to drink or bathe in. It was going to be used for business, and business was going to be able to get cheaper raw water for all its needs. But basically, Flint would have actually saved money by doing nothing and just staying with Detroit, but it was a scam to basically create a brand new unnecessary water system. And in engineering terms, you don't have to be a rocket science. it's kind of unheard of to build a completely duplicative pipeline. Like the pipeline from Detroit to Flint, they just built this second one on the same exact path, taking water out of the same exact source, the Great Lakes, for no real reason other than banks were going to make money.

There were contractors who got basically scam contracts to build this new water system at inflated prices. There were wealthy people who mysteriously purchased land along the route of this new water system before it was announced, which is also called insider trading. So there were sort of like contract fraud, bond fraud. It was all basically to make politicians, banks, landowners, money. Yeah, this is, this sounds like Michigan. This sounds like places, and places similar to it that are, you know, hugely impoverished and became, you know, basically these deindustrialized, I think Chris Hedges calls it like sacrifice zones after, you know, the outsourcing began in the 70s. Who are some of these people that, you know,

profited. I know you mentioned, you know, the guy, the guy that ran the drain, you know, the drained office or whatever. But did the corruption go beyond like local Flint politicians? Yeah. So, well, first. First of all, speaking about deindustrialization, General Motors was Flint. I mean, General Motors, Flint is where it was born. And it was so bad, so, such a cover-up, General Motors was allowed to get off of the Flint River six months after the water switch because the water was destroying its parts. But they kept the residents on the water because the city of Flint was already on the hook to pay back those bonds for the scam deal. So they should have switched back to Detroit pretty quickly after the water switched. Residents were getting brown water, residents were getting rashes, losing hair. But because they had already basically signed Flint to be on the hook for 30 years of bond payments, the unelected emergency manager wouldn't switch them back and the governor wouldn't switch them back.

And you had people that benefited financially, but there was also political. ambitions at play here. So this is 2014, and this is at a time, if anyone can remember it, before Trump ran for president. So at the time, the governor of Michigan, Rick Snyder, he was angling to run for president on the Republican side. And he was going to run on, I'm like an economic wizard. He called himself one tough nerd. And I rescue broke cities, basically, was his bumper sticker. So he was going to run that I put Detroit in bankruptcy and I got it out of bankruptcy within a year. And I save Flint all this money.

Well, probably not the best bumper sticker to run for president. A water crisis and you poisoning a city. So he, my book shows, and I got phone calls showing this. I got document showing this. Him and his top officials, they knew the water was toxic within a few weeks. And they went into real-time overdrive to cover the whole thing up. I exposed that he knew about the deadly legionaire. outbreak, which was a deadly waterborne pneumonia, he knew about it as early as October 2014,

and he didn't notify the residence for another 16 months. I got evidence that his top advisor, who in kind of mob jargon was his consigliary, he was known as the governor's fixer. He was going around Flint offering payoffs to sick residents to shut him up on behalf of the governor. there's so much. I got evidence that the governor's top officials erased their phones right before the launch of the criminal investigation. So you had the banks made a lot of money off of these bond deals, contractors who got the contracts for this new pipeline, engineering firms who got the contracts to, you know, basically make the blueprint for the pipeline. And then the governor was trying to become president. He actually on the one year anniversary of the Flint River switch, was in Vegas at the Republican Jewish conference. At the time, Sheldon Adelson, who was like the biggest Republican donor at the time, he ran casinos and stuff in Vegas. If you wanted to run for president on the Republican side, you had to go there and basically

kiss his ring. So the governor was there, basically presenting himself to try to run for president. So there was financial incentive. And then there was the political motivations where basically the governor wanted to be in the White House, and he, as such, helped cover up the poisoning of residents. So when I say poisoning, I got phone calls showing the first complaints by Flit residents to the EPA happened three weeks after the water switch. And that was the first day the governor was on the phone with his top lawyer in a year.

So the first call that they had that was listed was that day. And then the next day, the governor's chief of staff is on the phone with his top lawyer. multiple times. And I got phone call showing the governor, his chief of staff, the health director. They were on the phone like 22 times in two days. At the same time, the Legionaire's outbreak was spreading six months after the water switch. So it really is kind of that age-old story of politicians kind of doing what they have to do to survive, in this case, probably avoid criminal accountability. but it's pretty dark because obviously if you know people are drinking contaminated water and they're giving it to their kids, clearly they should have stepped in and stopped it.

So the governor basically covered it up because he didn't want to look like he was running, you know, a corrupt kind of failed state. Yeah, I think there are multiple reasons. I mean, I can't get in his head, but I think that they pushed from the beginning his administration, city officials, that this is not a health problem, this is an aesthetics problem. And I really think that they looked at it almost like, all right, we'll fly the plane and we'll fix the parts midair. Because there were emails showing, like them saying, like, yeah, we could make the river water safer or we can, while they were telling residents that it was safe. and his environmental department was, you know, basically throwing gum at the wall.

Well, we could add more chlorine in the water to kill bacteria. So they were trying all these things, but none of it was working because at the end of the day, the water plant didn't even have the equipment to add the proper chemicals. The water plant was so outdated. It needed, there had been quotes that it needed nearly $60 million before they switched in upgrades. very little of that was made. So I can't get in his head, but I think it was, number one, he's a wealthy white guy living at the Capitol and he's not in Flint.

This is a poor black city. I mean, this happens in poor white towns too. But I don't think it was as evil as he woke up one morning and said, let me poison a bunch of poor people. But I also think it was a reckless decision to build a brand new water system that was privatized, to take control away from Detroit. because they didn't want Detroit to control Michigan's water to make a lot of people money, which would have helped the governor and to climb up the ladder politically.

And then as it went on, I think it became Cover Your Ass Mode because people were getting sick, people were dying, and he wanted to cover it up and try and minimize it to avoid criminal accountability for himself and his top officials. okay so the the switch from you know lake huron detroit water to this uh flint river water which i mean you got to be so out of your fucking mind to think that's a good idea uh and i've never even been to flint but i could tell you that uh you don't want to drink water that has the name flint in it so obviously incredibly polluted contaminated with all of this runoff from the gm plant from you know it's all these other companies that are dumping into the river, right? So basically that water is now, and water,

raw water that's being imported to, for industrial purposes. This is now the water that the town is drinking, right? This is the tap water. That happens in 2014. How quickly do people start to get sick? And could you go into more details about that? Yeah. And to be clear, by the way, the media really didn't report this. It's in my book. The governor was warned a year before the water switch by his environmental department that if Flint used the Flint River, there was bacterial risks, there was cancer-causing chemicals in the water, and he let it go ahead anyway. So I can't get in his head, but it was beyond reckless. And it was pretty much right away. I mean, to paint the scene, and I have a whole chapter on this, literally two weeks before the water switch, they were switching

workers from the garbage department to the water department because they were so understaffed. I mean, love my friends who work in sanitation, but they don't know anything about water. They were mailing equipment to the plant the week that they switched. So this was just totally reckless. And workers at the plant, like six months to a year before, they were screaming, and I quote, hell no, we can't do this. One of the workers at the plant was calling his sister, like a couple days before, telling her, contact everyone you know, tell them not to drink the water. People are going to die. So this was like very, very grim, dark.

And the week before the water switch, the head of the water plant, he told the environmental department, which was under this governor, this switch is against my advice. I can't sign off on this. We're not, you know, we don't have the staff. We don't have the equipment. And they didn't respond. and based on my reporting, the environmental officials that signed off on it, it was basically above their pay grade. It was coming from the top, push this thing through.

And very quickly, we're talking like two or three weeks. Residents started getting brown water out of their taps in certain parts of the city, in certain parts of the city worse than other parts. But pretty much all residents around the city were getting brown water, smelly water. Kids were getting rashes. First time I went there in 2016, residents, some of them had plastic bags filled with their hair that had fallen out. People were losing teeth after a while because lead just destroys that. So it was very quick that residents were calling the EPA. The EPA was contacting the state environmental department and the state environmental department lied to the EPA saying,

yeah, we're adding what they call corrosion control chemicals. So by law, if you have a city over 50,000 people, you have to add phosphates, which are corrosion control chemicals, because bottom line, all our pipes, whether you're in L.A., anywhere, our pipes underneath the ground that deliver water are typically 50 to 100 years old. In Newark, New Jersey, where they have a lead crisis, they found pipes in there that were from the 1800s. So you're supposed to add these chemicals. They basically protect, like, basically create a problem.

protective wall on the pipes to prevent lead and other heavy metals from going in, like I said, they didn't even have the equipment in the plant to do that. So very quickly, there's lead going in there. You also have because they didn't add the proper corrosion control chemicals, essentially you had certain parts of the city, there was very little chlorine in the water. You add chlorine into the water to kill bacteria. So if you don't have enough chlorine in the water, bacteria is going to form, and that also happen. You also have the problem that Flint, like a lot of cities, essentially Flint's water system was built for the city when it had 200,000 people. At this time, they only had 100,000 people. So you have sections of town with abandoned homes where water is not being

used, which means water is basically moving very slowly, at some point stagnant through the system, and that soaks up the chlorine, you have more bacteria. So is this basically a mix of issues between the lead, bacteria, which became Legionaire's disease, which is waterborne pneumonia, it's deadly. You had PFAS, which are those forever chemicals that have been found in water around the country. And even without all that, like GM and everyone dumped their shit in the water for 100 years. When I first got there, residents said to me, oh, that's where they dumped the bodies. I thought they were joking.

But like the Flint River was known as like a dumping ground. Even the governor's right hand man, he grew up in Flint and he was like, yeah, my water was brown like in the 50s. So it was people were getting sick and showing up to town city hall with like jugs of brown water. And they were being gaslit by the city and the state. Oh, it's just a it's just a optics issue. It's not damaging to your health. It's just because it's the river and not the lake, so the water is a little bit more acidic. Well, you don't need to be a genius to understand that brown water is probably not great to drink or bathe in.

So, yeah, it was very quick. And we shouldn't give the EPA a pass either because the EPA knew about this within a month or two. And they didn't step in to take over. And they basically, they kept pushing the state environmental department to take it. more aggressive action. But to me, like, I don't really care what your politics is. Like, it really is no point in having a federal government if they're not going to step in in the case of something like this. Memorial Day weekend is almost here, and it's time to kick off summer right. When I'm getting ready for the first big weekend of summer, total wine and more is my

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Drink responsibly must be 21. Sure. Why else even hardcore libertarians would say the only function of a government should be to protect the people. Exactly. Yeah, that's, and then, and were there deaths related to this and like ongoing issues to this day, like cancer and stuff like that? Yeah, that's the thing that makes me most angry because, you know, remember at the beginning

of COVID, they had like the live death count on CNN and stuff. I don't really think we'll ever know how many people have died from this because they have basically buried the truth so deep. So number one, the Legionnaires disease, which is that deadly bacteria, the state put out this number of 12 people died. That's complete bullshit. I've spoken with experts and sources that said, if you exhumed the bodies, hundreds of people died from that, just from that two-year period. Then you have cancer is surging in Flint 10 years later. And NYU toxicologist did a study. She found that certain types of cancer are up 300% compared to before the water switch.

Those deaths are not attributed to the Flint water, but they certainly didn't come from the weather. Every time I go there, people are dying to liver problems, kidney problems, rare cancers. And all of this, I mean, sure, you could, you know, the doctors and people who had the motivation to minimize it could say, well, you can't prove. prove, well, lead is like a human wrecking ball to all your many organs. It could destroy your cognitive functioning, you know, multiple physical symptoms. And most of the people, you know, it's a poor city, you know, some people had health issues, but most of the people I've come across were pretty much healthy before this. And it has destroyed their systems, cancers, kidney, liver. I've met

30-somethings, 40-somethings who can't remember where they are half the time because the cognitive function is shot. Then you have the lost generation of kids. Learning disabilities surged. Autism. Behavioral issues because lead affects your mood. And now I was there for my book. I'm learning that teenagers, teen suicide is increasing in Flint. Because the teenagers were children 10 years ago.

and their brains were damaged. So I don't think there's any way of knowing how many people have died from this. I could just tell you, like, anecdotally, a couple years ago, I was knocking on doors because I was working on a story. Because as part of the cover-up, I found out that the governor's environmental officials were cheating on the water testing. They were going into people's homes and running their water and then putting the sample bottle in, which is illegal. And voila, they were getting lower lead levels because they were just running the water and flushing out lead. but I would go block after block, you know, if somebody would open the door, I'd ask like, oh, you know, very few people have opened on this block, you know, if people come home later or whatnot. And almost every block, every other block I was being told, oh, this person just died, this person just died, and not necessarily the elderly, like people in their 40s, 50s, 60s.

So I think Chris Hedges, I call it sacrifice zones too. and I think this is the quintessential sacrifice zone because it had the inciting image that excites the media, which is brown water, kids with rashes, long lines of people waiting for water, then the media gets bored, they move on, and then it kind of gets minimized and whitewashed. But the reality is between the deaths and the people slowly dying,

because lead does not kill you right away, it worsens and worsens over years. I think this probably, it's going to be one of the worst cancer clusters in America. And unfortunately, the people have not gotten, you know, free health care. They have not gotten criminal justice. That's part of the cover up. The pipes haven't even been fully replaced 10 years later. So this is a sacrifice zone.

Okay. Can you go into a little bit about the criminal liabilities and when, you know, at least on their face, the Justice Department did take some action there? Wouldn't it be nice if the Justice Department took any action? I want to make clear, I don't really care what people are politically, but this is a bipartisan cover-up. It's not like the Republicans, it's only the Republicans. So the Republican, the governor was Republican,

so you can say the actual poisoning happened under a Republican administration. But the Democrats are actually helping cover the whole thing up to this day. So essentially, in 2018, Flint residents were overjoyed because the governor, Rick Snyder, was out, and they voted for Gretchen Whitmer, who's the current governor of Michigan. She promised she was going to reopen the water stations where they got free water. She never did that. She promised, you know, justice, a big settlement for them. They got $600 million, which is really crumbs. 200 billion of that goes to lawyers, so it's really $400 million.

and they haven't seen a penny yet. And then you had the Attorney General, Dana Nessau, who ran as a Democrat. And while she was running, she started basically publicly crapping on the criminal investigation that was ongoing. She had no, like, she had no access to any of the evidence, witnesses, who was cooperating, who might be flipping on hire officials. by my reporting, the investigation that was ongoing before this attorney general got in there, they were actually building a case against the governor for involuntary manslaughter,

which would have been a first in U.S. history. Like, they were actually going to try and hold him accountable under basically based on the fact that he knew about the deadly legionaire's outbreak much earlier and he failed to act. They were also going after the money. They were like in football terms, they were on the five-yard line, I would say, of charging a massive racketeering case. And that's known as RICO. And involving who?

Involving the officials that were involved with this pipeline, this fraudulent bond thing. I don't know everyone that was going to be charged, but I do know there was several state officials, engineers, and I believe they were working their way to see if the governor was involved in it. She gets in. She does something kind of unheard of. she basically cleans house. She fired the special prosecutor, the chief investigator. She drops all the charges that they had charged. She claimed that they missed a lot of things or were incompetent.

There was really no evidence of that. Then she appoints amateurs. That's not my opinion. I got that from sources on our own team. Told me she appointed amateurs who just happened to have donated to her campaign. the person she appointed to run the thing had never actually brought a case before a jury before. So basically she fired, like one of the people she fired

was that head of the FBI office of Detroit, this guy helped bring down the Gambino crime family in New York. So like pretty serious guy, fired him. She never even did a debrief with him to see like where things were, where they were headed. So long story short, she dropped charges, including involuntary manslaughter against the head of the health department, including financial fraud against some of these emergency managers for that scam financial deal.

And a year and a half later, she recharged a lot of those officials with lesser crimes. And she charged the governor with a misdemeanor. Governor Snyder? Snyder. Okay. So she charges him with a misdemeanor. Flint residents called it a parking ticket to me. which was kind of mind-boggling because the people she fired were going after involuntary manslaughter.

And she brought the case using a one-man grand jury, not to get two in the weeds, but a one-man grand jury is basically a judge. And it's done in private. So it's all confidential. Whereas the people she fired, they did it. They did their case through public pretrials. So everything was in the public. The Michigan Supreme Court threw out her charges because they said, said her using a one-man grand jury violated the state constitution. So that happened at the end of last year. And she ended the investigation because the statute of limitations for a lot of the cases

she charged had already ran up. I mean, this happened 10 years ago. And the statute of limitations for like felonies in Michigan, like misconduct in office, is six years. So essentially, she got in in 2018. She claimed the people before her had screwed up. She overhauled the whole thing. yet she's the one who ended up getting it destroyed. And why I say this is ongoing cover-up, I had continually put in freedom of information requests to try and get documents from the criminal investigation about that racketeering case.

Because that, I always say follow the money. And basically this was a financial scam. That's why all this happened. She did not follow through with that RICO case. She basically buried the financial stuff. So once the investigation was over, I resubmitted my request. Her office told me they didn't have the documents, which I knew wasn't true.

So I publicly kind of huffed and puffed that I was going to sue them. And then they, I don't know, they saw Jesus and they told me they'll look again, which kind of never happens. I've never had that when submitting foias that they don't have it, but oh, I'll look again. Magically, they found the documents. And then they gave me a mountain of legal reasons they can't give them to me. and based on sources, I believe, I believe basically the Democratic Attorney General with the governor is working to end the crisis, end the water crisis, bury the financial scam, because the reality is if that racketeering case had gone through, if the financial fraud that caused this had gone through, and a former law enforcement official who has seen the evidence told me he's never seen this kind of fraud before. like high-level scam.

Basically, if it went through, the state of Michigan could be bankrupted because the state of Michigan, the attorney general's office was the one that signed off on that fraudulent deal. And it's basically bond fraud. So if it went forward in court, the bondholders could sue the state of Michigan for hundreds of millions of dollars because they basically signed off on a fraudulent bond deal. And the other thing, and I think this is even bigger, I mean, both parties are, in my view, purchased by Wall Street. J.P. Morgan and Wells Fargo also faced hundreds of millions of dollars in liability because they issued the bonds.

And as part of the contract, they were supposed to do the due diligence to make sure that the Flint water plant could treat the water. They didn't do that. They were actually sued in 2020 civilly. Of course, it was thrown out because it's America. But basically you have the state trying to protect itself and the state, I think, trying to protect the banks. But it's really just, we got a lot of things going on in America, but at the end of the day, it's kind of nauseating that an American city was poisoned by their government. And 10 years later, the water's still bad. I should make that clear. They don't have criminal justice. They have not seen a dime. Cancer is surging. And the government and the media have basically just said, everything's fine. They're recovering.

Are they still receiving water from the Flint River or did they switch the pipes back to getting it from Detroit? Yeah. So in October 2015, after 18 months of lying to the people, the governor finally acknowledged that the water was toxic. That's about the same time, by the way, I found out his top officials had erased their phones. But they switched back to Detroit's water system then. So you would. think, okay, that's good. The water, at least they're back to clean water. But the problem is, they have not replaced all the damaged pipes 10 years later. So you can, I mean, you could have a clean water source and the water can be clean coming from the plant. But if it's going through pipes,

those pipes essentially had like acid water going through them for two years. I've seen the inside of them. I mean, some of them, it looks really disgusting, like corroded, very bad corrosion. So if clean water is going through those pipes, you're still going to have lead and other things leaching off. And they have only replaced, you've got to think of it like three straws. So you have the main pipes that run underneath the street. They have not replaced those. And those are bursting all the time in Flint. Then you have the service lines which connect from your curb into your home.

They've only replaced about 90% of those. And then you have the interior plumbing in your home. They haven't touched that. So they've almost replaced one out of three. And I already told you that Flint's population is down to 80,000, but the water system is 600 miles long. And it's built for 200,000 residents. So you have stagnant water. So the water is not good.

And I don't listen to the EPA. I don't listen to the state. I listen to the residents. I was just there for my book. There's residents literally online to get me to sign my book, showing me their rent. ashes on their skin from the water. There's residents still telling me, there's residents who post online brown water 10 years later.

So it doesn't make any, like just common sense. You can't, if you don't replace the damage infrastructure, the water is still going to be contaminated. Right. So even if you get clean water from Detroit, you've got all this filthy runoff from these contaminated pipes. Yeah. And by the way, not to get too political,

but like we snap our fingers in the morning and send every country around the world billions of dollars. This could have been fixed. I mean, this could have been fixed with like three to four billion dollars, replace all the infrastructure in the city. Union plumbers offered to do it like half off. But it hasn't been a priority. Yep.

Yeah, that's the crumbling of the empire. Also, you know, a place like that doesn't make any money. Like, what do you think, why do you think residents in a place like Flint are particularly vulnerable to these kind of scams or, I don't know, scams makes it sound benign. This kind of fraud, we'll call it. I think, you know, a lot of people argue about, well, it's, it's about race, it's about class. I think it's about both. I mean, I'm seeing it happen in East Palestine, Ohio right now.

Norfolk Southern, a multi-billion-dollar railroad company unnecessarily blew up five cars of toxic chemicals. They basically created a... From what I'm told, like a mini Chernobyl over Ohio and Pennsylvania, residents are sick there. I got sick a few months ago going there. It's a chemical petri dish. Those are poor white people. And it's the same playbook. Norfolk Southern is a multi-billion dollar company.

Somehow they were allowed to control the emergency. response, not the EPA, not the fire department. The train company that was, that crashed, was allowed to make the decision to blow up these cars when they were told you don't have to blow up these cars, but they didn't want to lose money. They wanted the tracks opened right away. So in Flint, you got poor black people is the majority. And East Palestine, you have poor white people. I've seen communities where, you know, a lot of these, like, you know, chemical plants, for example. Right now there's a chemical fire in Georgia from this chemical plant that had a fire. There's been a chlorine gas plume going for a week. And the EPA is telling everybody,

everything's fine. Well, who lives around that part? It's a poor black community and there's some poor white people. So basically to me, most of our government, whether it's federal, state, or local, they don't live in these communities. Most of these government officials live in, wealthier suburbs. So are they all just evil people? I don't think it's as simple as that. But I think they're very disconnected from these communities. I think the government and the media, by the way,

because the media is part of this. I expose in the book, the media is actually in on the Flint cover up. And the media is basically a bunch of well-to-do, you know, northwestern graduates that live in New York City and D.C. They don't go to Flint. They don't go to East Palestine or, or name your sacrifice zone.

And when they do, it's in and out. So they're very disconnected. And maybe they say, oh, shucks, I feel for those people. But that's not, they are more interested in the day-to-day, you know, treating politics as if it's a sporting event and, you know, growing their profile. So to me, I think if you're in the wrong zip code economically, if you have the wrong skin color and your government harms you. even if it's accidental, they're not coming to save you.

They're probably going to spend more money on marketing and PR to bury it rather than do the right thing. Well, I want to get into more of that in a second. But just going back to the EPA, so this is the federal government. And, you know, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. calls that a captured branch of the government. captured, meaning it is co-opted by money from the very people that they're supposed to be regulating. So this is industry, right? This is the pharmaceutical industry. It is the chemical industry.

It's, you know, you name it, right? Big business. Did you see any signs of that? Like, is that within your wheelhouse to speak on? Like, do you see captured people that related to the Flint crisis? any of these other crises around the country now, East Palestine or, you know, in Georgia. Like, do you see that in your line of work? 100% is absolutely right on that.

Bottom line, it's not just the EPA. I mean, look at it. Everybody fights over regulation. Do we have enough regulation? The Wall Street crash in 08, we had regulation. It's just not enforced because the SEC and all the financial agencies have been purchased by Wall Street. It goes down the list, EPA, CDC. And I've spoken with people lower level at the EPA, and they're good people and they want to do the right thing.

But the tops of these agencies are oftentimes revolving doors where you have people who work at chemical companies who then come to run the EPA. Or, I mean, Trump made the Secretary of State the former ExxonMobil CEO. You have Joe Manchin, who's the head of the energy. the Democrat, he's the head of the energy committee. He owns coal companies. I mean, these are just walking conflicts of interest and revolving doors. So the EPA literally in its mission statement now, part of its mission statement is economic development. Well, you're supposed to be the environmental protection agency, not, you're not like the Chamber of Commerce.

So, yeah, a lot, I mean, you have so many companies, multi, billion dollar corporate conglomerates that spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year lobbying the EPA, the CDC, the FDA to basically water down legislation or essentially let them write the legislation. A lot of these trade deals that screwed the Midwest were essentially written by corporate America and Wall Street. So I mean, I'm covering a story in West Virginia right now where coal country, their water's been contaminated. I mean, they've had water problems in West Virginia for a long time, but specifically southern West Virginia,

they're getting fungus in their water, like white stringy type of water, smelly water. People are going, a lot of people are going to the doctor with vomiting, nausea, diarrhea, because the coal companies have been intentionally flooding the mines because they're trying to extract something called coal bed methane, which is a new natural gas. But the state environmental department in West Virginia didn't do anything because it's run by former coal executives.

So there's this revolving door, what RFK said is basically regulatory capture, where you name the agency and economic interests and donors are on equal footing with protecting the environment. it's not every agency and I'm not saying they're all evil. But at the end of the day, like in the case of Flint, if you're the EPA and you know that the Michigan Environmental Department is not adding the chemicals needed to prevent lead, then you should step in immediately. They didn't do it there. If you're the EPA and you know Norfolk Southern

is basically manipulating testing in East Palestine to say nothing to see here, you're supposed to step in, but the EPA is going along with. with it while Norfolk Southern donates to a lot of politicians and a lot of agencies. Are companies and corporations allowed to donate to these agencies? I thought it was just, you know, politicians, individual politicians campaigns. Are they actually allowed to?

They're not allowed to donate to the agencies, but their PACs are allowed to donate to politicians. But no, they're not allowed to donate directly to the agents. So then how would somebody in the EPA benefit from the coal lobby, for instance? Because there's a revolving door. You work in the EPA for 10 years. And then if you do the bidding of the special interest, you get a sweet, cushy job at name your oil company, chemical company, coal company. It happens all the time and the door reverses. If you work in private sector, you've made your money and now you want to go, you know, be a public servant. You get a cushy job. So that's basically, it's not like a direct like, hey, they're sending billion dollar checks to the EPA. It's just a revolving door of EPA officials

going to work for the agencies they're supposed to regulate and vice versa. Yeah, it's kind of the most evolved, developed mode of corruption, right? Because you're not, it's not like in Italy where the mafia is paying these chemical companies directly to, you know, bury their waste in the lands around Naples for 10 cents of the dollar. It's not like Mexico where drug lords are literally handing suitcases full of hundreds of millions of dollars to politicians. It's, yeah, it's very, It's very mob-like, but very, very America, you know, cutting edge. In the state of Michigan, one example, residents and Flint were rightly infuriated that Nestle has basically been allowed to pump, I mean, hundreds of millions of dollars of gallons of, excuse me, hundreds of millions of gallons of fresh water out of the Great Lakes for a $200 permit, while the residents of Flint have dirty water. Well, the governor's chief of staff, his wife was an executive at Nestle during all this.

So there's nepotism, there's marriage, there's marriage, there's, I mean, hell, the department of justice. I just did a story with the Department of Justice was working hand in hand with Amazon to go after a former Amazon employee wrongly and try to bankrupt him. And someone at the DOJ used to be an Amazon executive. So there's a lot of this kind of basically backroom dealing that goes on. And I don't know if all of these, I don't think any of these people are actively like, eh, screw it. Let's just poison some people. But I also think they're looking the other way when they know people are being harmed.

Yeah, I think political scientists call it like clientelism, where it's this like fraternity of people, this cadre of bureaucrats and executives. in the private sector and they all know each other to a certain extent. They pat each other in the back. And yeah, like you don't want to fuck over a friend. So you say, yeah, we're going to bury this, you know, if you work in the Department of Justice or whatever. It's bipartisan. It's bipartisan too.

I mean, I think too many Americans wear their red hat or their blue hat. Yeah. I'm here to tell you from my travels, the only color that matters is green. For sure. And a lot of those Michigan politicians that are fucking over black. people are themselves corrupt black people. Yeah, absolutely. That's been crazy to me too.

Like one of the emergency managers was black who did who did this. And he knew what was going on. So yeah, absolutely. And I've covered a lot of stories where you have environmental contamination where a mayor or city council members are black. The people that are being harmed are black. And so yeah. What about the media, in your view, was colluding or whitewashing or mollifying what happened during the height of the crisis, you know, 16 to 19 when it was all over, you know, mainstream press? So I'll give you one like the most egregious was actually in 2014.

So there was a local outlet and local ABC and Flint. in 2014, six months after the water switch. So the Legionaire's outbreak was that waterborne pneumonia, and it was killing a lot of people in Flint. Normally you have like two to nine cases of Legionnaires a year. They had like 40 by August. So a reporter at the local ABC, somehow a document from a local hospital was leaked to her,

and the document was basically the hospital's cleaning procedure that was acknowledging we have a Legion. Airs outbreak and how they're increasing their cleaning procedure. So right then and there, ABC had documentation showing that there's this outbreak of a deadly disease. People are dying. At the same time, people are showing up to City Hall carrying brown water jugs. Kids have rashes. I mean, it was very obvious that what was going on and the Legionnaires was connected. So she starts working on the story and then it mysteriously gets killed at the station.

And I could never, like, prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt, but I'm pretty sure the governor's office called to get that story killed. And also, the former news director of the station told me the hospital that had that outbreak of Legionnaires was one of the biggest advertisers to the local news station. So, again, like, I can't say definitively, but as a journalist, usually if you have documents proving something, that's the final green light to go with it. And they had documents showing the hospitals of Legionnaires outbreak. They have a surge in patients with Legionnaires.

They're increasing cleaning procedures. At the same time that all of this other stuff was going on with the water, they could have ended the Flint water crisis right then and there. Because people would have known there's a deadly bacteria in the water. And they probably would have, the government would have been forced to switch back. to the Detroit's water system. So they killed the story. I've reached out to that network, I don't know, 10 times over the years,

they will never respond. But then there's kind of the more systematic media failure, which I think is basically intentional. I think the media, again, is mostly wealthier, well-to-do white folks for the most part that are very disconnected from what's going on. Very few people that work at these stations. or papers live in Flint.

And essentially, it just became this thing where they were regurgitating whatever the state or EPA told them. That's why I kept going back to Flint. It's not because, like, I'm not from there, but residents were telling me the media is basically just pushing propaganda. So I kept going back and I kept getting the goods. I obtained thousands of confidential documents from the criminal investigation. I got whistleblower sources.

And I was breaking all these stories. broke that the governor's right-hand man was offering payoffs. I broke that they deleted their phones right before the launch of the criminal investigation. I broke that the governor's top advisor was witness tampering, trying to intimidate witnesses. I broke that the governor was involved in covering up the Legionaire's outbreak. And any one of these stories on its own, you would think they would pick it up and run with it. I drove to Michigan in 2020. I met with one of the top editors at the Detroit Free Press, which is the biggest paper in Michigan. I handed him documents I had. I got the governor, the chief of staff, his health director's phone calls that showed they were

on the phone 22 times. I also, in two days, I also got a briefing. The governor was briefed about the Legionnaires outbreak 16 months before he told the public. The editor told me, wow, you got the smoking gun here. I said, thanks. I even offered that you could put one of your reporter's names on the story with me. He said, all right, well, I'm definitely inclined to say yes, but I got to get approval from my boss. Three days later, I'm told they don't have the resources to do this. And I was just stunned because it's like, this was in my opinion. I had, not only did I have the phone calls, I had the documents from the prosecution.

The prosecution was saying, this is evidence the governor covered up the Legionnaires outbreak. And they wouldn't run the story. and I was later told by somebody who worked there, I don't know if it's true, but that the editor-in-chief was kind of chummy with the governor. There's so many examples. The Flint Journal, which is like the hometown paper in Flint, the building they're in, they rent from a real estate company

that's directly funded by a massive private foundation in Flint that my reporting showed this foundation was involved behind the scenes. in causing the water crisis. So this foundation never reported anything other than the government, excuse me, this Flint Journal basically regurgitated what the state told them and never would report anything critical of the governor's administration or this foundation. And it just happens to be that the building they rent from essentially is owned by this private foundation. So I first, I thought it was laziness, but now I truly think that I think the media just wanted to move on from this. And it's a shame because honestly, I mean, I'm biased because I've lived and breathed this.

But this is the kind of story that you would get into journalism for. You know, it's like corruption, cover up, you know, financial scams, payoffs, destruction of evidence. And clicks, views. Like at the end of the day, if it's a business, like that's something. that people are clicking on, you know? If people know, yeah. If people know about it, yeah. And that's what I said.

It was funny, NBC News. They kind of gave me this Birds and the Bee's speech because I brought to them that story how I found out that the governor's top officials wiped clean their phones, which is fairly illegal. And the editor told me, like, you know, this is great reporting and I admire your work.

But like, basically told me, we don't think there'd be enough bang for the buck. in terms of resources we'd have to put into it. And I told her, well, all I can tell you is I have my own YouTube company. It's completely bootstraps. I don't take any corporate funding. And I cover these exact stories that you're claiming aren't sexy. And I've managed to build, you know, it's not millions of subscribers, but a pretty nice channel.

And people are paying per month for these kinds of stories. So you'd be surprised there is huge demand out there to, want to be informed about government corruption. The problem is a lot of these outlets are kind of in league with the government they're supposed to be holding accountable because they don't want to lose access. They don't want to lose their Christmas card invitation to whatever parties. It's all very, very incestuous, unfortunately. Yeah, that's the scariest part is when these institutions see profit and still refuse to take

action. It's the reason that out here in L.A., Hollywood's disintegrated. is because nobody wants to make money. It's in, it's really, really crazy. And that's, and you know, I don't want to make this like a rant. You know, I guess we'll get off on this. Like, what is the solution, right? I say once the world is no longer able to print fiat money, that this is when these problems

will start to go away because everybody will be held accountable financially. And there's, you could, I could unpack that, but we don't have the time. Like, what is the immediate solution? because, you know, my libertarian brain says, well, this is why you can't have, you have to have limited government because it is hopelessly corrupt. It's so inept. And there is no motivation to make money when you can just print more money. Now, you don't even have to take funds for the taxpayers. You just literally get it from Washington and add to the debt. But on the other hand, you see why you have to have government that's regulating these kind of, um,

these dangerous industries, even though, look, it may be a lot of these may be beneficial to, you know, the GDP or even, you know, even like the green energy push, you're going to see a lot of companies that have really, really toxic business models. And so those industries have to be regulated. But it's like here, it's just a hopeless situation because the private industry, the private sector is paying the public sector, the public sector is doing the private sector's bidding, you know, like, what do you think resolves or works towards resolving cover-ups and scandals like this? I think whether you have big government, small government, upside-down government, the real truth is, the problem is purchase government. Our government is purchased. That's why I have

the flag behind me. We live in the United Corporations of America. I don't say it to be funny. I say it because it's true. Whenever you hear of public, private, partnerships run because that essentially means everything's being privatized. And in this case, I mean, just think about it in reality. General Motors, six months earlier than that, was complaining that the Flint River water is destroying our car parts. And the government led General Motors stop using the Flint River, but made the people keep using it and kept them in the dark. I mean, that is sociopathic. That's psychopathic behavior. So to me, I don't have the quick fix because I don't think our government was corrupted overnight.

I don't think it's going to be uncorrupted overnight. But when you have this endless walking conflict of interest, I mean, hell, it's been reported that like 75% of the time our politicians in D.C. are off premises in his off premises building dialing donors for dollars, both parties. Yeah. So until you have some type of reasonable regulations on the amount of money that could be spent on politics, until you have some reasonable laws that prohibit the unholy merger between corporations and government, until you have some type of regulations on this revolving door, I'm not saying that if you ever work in the government, you should be barred from ever working for a corporation. but there should be some reasonable regulations about maybe a little break, a couple years break before you could go work for Dow Chemical if you worked at the EPA. But at the end of the day, our elections are all about how much money you could raise. And our politicians, I mean, I think we need term limits because without them, there is the motivation to just be corrupt. So I have some libertarian instincts, but at the end of the day, small government, big government,

If government officials, 90% of them on the federal state and local level are making decisions for special interests rather than for you, we're going to continue having these disasters, whether it be water, air, soil, or otherwise. Jordan, this was a fantastic talk. Tell everybody where they can find your work. Yeah, so I have a YouTube channel called Status C-C-O-Nus, Status C-O-U-P. We cover these kind of stories and, you know, worker exploitation, local corruption. And the book is called We the Poisoned, exposing the Flint Water cover-up. Get it on Amazon. You could get it at Barnes & Noble. There's an audio version that just came out on Audible.

But I really appreciate you having me and hope people check out the channel and the book. Yeah, and keep putting out that content, baby. I love to hear that it's doing well. And, you know, it's really more independent journalists like you, like Glenn Greenwald. I know he's over at Rumble, but you kind of proof that you actually can sustain as a, as an independent entity, which is kind of the beauty of the times we live in. So I remain positive. And I hope you find, you know, a speck of a, I hope you find a reason to get up in the morning. I know you have your reason.

I hope you find a reason to, you know, find some levity in all of this. And I think we are moving this century to, you know, away from a system that allows this kind of shit. You know what I mean? Well, I will say my daughter and whiskey certainly helps. So, yes. Nothing about the wife. I love that. And my wife.

And my wife. And your wife. Of course, of course. Okay, Jordan, thank you so much. We the poisoned. Go buy it. go, go subscribe to his YouTube channel. And we will catch you guys next time.

This has been the connect with Johnny Mitchell. Jordan, thank you so much. Thanks for having me.