GOP repeatedly opposed infrastructure upgrades. Now Mississippi's capital has no safe water

[ItsjustMe]

https://www.salon.com/2022/08/31/repeatedly-opposed-infrastructure-upgrades-now-mississippis-capital-has-no-safe-water_partner/

As many as 180,000 people in Jackson, Mississippi will not have access to safe running water for the foreseeable future, state officials said Monday night—the latest manifestation of a longstanding crisis in which the city's residents have been made to suffer the consequences of chronically underfunded infrastructure, compounded by a worsening climate emergency.

"Do not drink the water," Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said at a press conference. "In too many cases, it is raw water from the reservoir being pushed through the pipes. Be smart, protect yourself, protect your family, preserve water, look out for your fellow man, and look out for your neighbors."

Reeves, a Republican who has refused to prioritize upgrading Jackson's failing infrastructure throughout his two years in office, declared a state of emergency and announced, "We need to provide water for up to 180,000 people for an unknown period of time."

"This is a very different situation from a boil-water notice," Reeves continued. "Until it is fixed, we do not have reliable running water at scale. The city cannot produce enough water to fight fires, to flush toilets, and to meet other critical needs. The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency will take the state's lead on distributing drinking water and non-drinking water to residents of the City of Jackson."

[NEOBuckeye]

1. This is who Republicans are and what they do

They hate governance and government. This is the inevitable end result.

[yonder]

2. Norquist wanted to drown government in a bathtub.

Looks like the results are in....minus the water.

[scarletlib]

6. I think you meant minus the tub.

[yonder]

7. ...

[RussBLib]

3. Well, you know....

Jackson is a majority-black city in a state run by white Republicans, so there you go.

[kimbutgar]

4. I was in Disneyland today and saw a guy with a t shirt on with don't build better back but build it

Like was before”. The guy was overweight covered in tattoos and I thought what an idiot. He doesn’t realize that rebuilding aging infrastructure is a good thing not repairing or and rebuilding it the same way. It was the only political shirt I saw today.

But repukes are against anything that improves the USA. Tate is a prime example of the idiocy of today’s repukes.

[Marcuse]

5. This did not begin with the recent flooding.

Many of the same prominent whites who proudly attended well-funded public schools in Jackson before integration have, since abandoning the city, done everything possible to limit even “adequate” urban school funding or to redirect the money to legacy segregation academies — now usually called “private Christian academies.” They use the state legislature to control how much Jackson can tax our own citizens in order to pay for our own needs. They won’t support desperately needed flood mitigation for the city — unless it provides rich white people with valuable waterfront development. And Medicaid expansion in the time of Covid-19? Forget about it.

White state politicians are even trying to steal one of the few major revenue generators Jackson has left. In 2016, white Mississippi Republicans began a naked attempt to take over the Jackson-Medgar Wiley Evers International Airport — a name, by the way, that still displeases some of the Old Guard — by passing legislation to replace its city-appointed commissioners with a state-appointed governing board, only two of whom would come from Jackson. Black legislators called the move “Jim Crow legislation.” Primary sponsors of the bill didn’t try to hide that they have real-estate interests in the whiter suburban areas just outside the airport gates.

Make no mistake, the fact that low-income Jacksonians are living amid the stench of toilets that won’t flush is a direct legacy of white-supremacist thinking at the state level, not the failure of a few bill collectors in the city to collect on enough delinquent customers. Whether those who engage in that thinking have bothered to face that history or not, it is the state of Mississippi’s role to help fix this problem.

I get it, though: A racist political machine raised many white Mississippians to believe they were simply superior at running things, over any given Black leader in the state. They look at the world through white-tinged glasses and believe their power and wealth, or any power or wealth they might eventually be able to amass, is dependent on scrapping over scarcity. They think they don’t or won't get theirs if they treat the majority-Black capital city, its leaders and its residents with the respect and dignity our citizens deserve.https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/jackson-mississippi-has-water-crisis-because-our-state-legislature-has-ncna1259819