The Opinionated Ogre Podcast is 100% listener-supported. Please help us continue to inform/amuse/outrage you by becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year! If not, it’s all good. Welcome to the Ogre Nation anyway!
100 days of fascism, crime, incompetence, and stupidity. But America still stands and we the people are fucking angry. The fucking fascists are hard at work destroying everything but it’s getting harder every day and now they’re getting sloppier and more desperate as time runs out.
Join me and Shannon as we go over the damage they’ve done and what comes next.
Ogre Nation News Update!
1:45 - 29:22 Trump wanted to be Hitler and overthrow democracy in less than 100 days and failed utterly. He broke a lot of stuff and hurt a lot of people but not enough to get the job done and he’s running out of time.
29:23 - 38:46 What are the fascist failures going to do next now that their agenda is in jeopardy? Nothing good.
38:47 - 42:20 Florida has decided that if Trump can ignore the courts, so can they and that is going to be a problem
42:21 - 51:37 This Week in Republican Racism
51:38 - 1:00:35 Headlines for Short Attention Spans!
What Started as Public Health Tools Are Now Feeding Mass Surveillance
A whistleblower at the National Labor Relations Board reported an unusual spike in potentially sensitive data flowing out of the agency’s network in early March 2025 when staffers from the Department of Government Efficiency, which goes by DOGE, were granted access to the agency’s databases. On April 7, the Department of Homeland Security gained access to Internal Revenue Service tax data.
These seemingly unrelated events are examples of recent developments in the transformation of the structure and purpose of federal government data repositories. I am a researcher who studies the intersection of migration, data governance and digital technologies. I’m tracking how data that people provide to U.S. government agencies for public services such as tax filing, health care enrollment, unemployment assistance and education support is increasingly being redirected toward surveillance and law enforcement.
Originally collected to facilitate health care, eligibility for services and the administration of public services, this information is now shared across government agencies and with private companies, reshaping the infrastructure of public services into a mechanism of control. Once confined to separate bureaucracies, data now flows freely through a network of interagency agreements, outsourcing contracts and commercial partnerships built up in recent decades.
These data-sharing arrangements often take place outside public scrutiny, driven by national security justifications, fraud prevention initiatives and digital modernization efforts. The result is that the structure of government is quietly transforming into an integrated surveillance apparatus, capable of monitoring, predicting and flagging behavior at an unprecedented scale.
Executive orders signed by President Donald Trump aim to remove remaining institutional and legal barriers to completing this massive surveillance system.
DOGE and the Private Sector
Central to this transformation is DOGE, which is tasked via an executive order to “promote inter-operability between agency networks and systems, ensure data integrity, and facilitate responsible data collection and synchronization.” An additional executive order calls for the federal government to eliminate its information silos.
By building interoperable systems, DOGE can enable real-time, cross-agency access to sensitive information and create a centralized database on people within the U.S. These developments are framed as administrative streamlining but lay the groundwork for mass surveillance.
Predictive algorithms now scan vast amounts of data to generate risk scores, detect anomalies and flag potential threats.
These systems ingest data from school enrollment records, housing applications, utility usage and even social media, all made available through contracts with data brokers and tech companies. Because these systems rely on machine learning, their inner workings are often proprietary, unexplainable and beyond meaningful public accountability.
Data privacy researcher Justin Sherman explains the astonishing amount of information data brokers have about you.
Participation in civic life, applying for a loan, seeking disaster relief and requesting student aid now contribute to a person’s digital footprint. Government entities could later interpret that data in ways that allow them to deny access to assistance. Data collected under the banner of care could be mined for evidence to justify placing someone under surveillance. And with growing dependence on private contractors, the boundaries between public governance and corporate surveillance continue to erode.
Initially built for benefits verification or crisis response, these data systems now feed into broader surveillance networks. The implications are profound. What began as a system targeting noncitizens and fraud suspects could easily be generalized to everyone in the country.
Eyes on Everyone
This is not merely a question of data privacy. It is a broader transformation in the logic of governance. Systems once designed for administration have become tools for tracking and predicting people’s behavior. In this new paradigm, oversight is sparse and accountability is minimal.
AI allows for the interpretation of behavioral patterns at scale without direct interrogation or verification. Inferences replace facts. Correlations replace testimony.
The risk extends to everyone. While these technologies are often first deployed at the margins of society – against migrants, welfare recipients or those deemed “high risk” – there’s little to limit their scope. As the infrastructure expands, so does its reach into the lives of all citizens.
With every form submitted, interaction logged and device used, a digital profile deepens, often out of sight. The infrastructure for pervasive surveillance is in place. What remains uncertain is how far it will be allowed to go.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article HERE.
Mrs. Secretary Hegseth escorts her husband to White House Easter Egg hunt
Here’s something quaint to tickle your funny bone on this 101st Dark Night of Our Souls: Practically the same day the Washington Post reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been making use of his wife Jennifer in an “unorthodox role” in the Pentagon, Hegseth announced that he was eliminating a program intended to empower women’s participation in what the Post called “national security spaces” that include the Pentagon. In times which now seem to have faded into a distant, fuzzy past, this would have been called a policy contradiction, or even – here’s another good one – hypocritical.
Mrs. Hegseth, the Defense Secretary’s third wife, was a producer at Fox News when Hegseth was a guest on the morning chat-show “Fox and Friends.” She was pregnant with his child at the same time Hegseth was getting a divorce from his second wife. This was also around the same time he allegedly sexually assaulted a woman at a hotel in Lake Tahoe in 2017. He later paid the woman $50,000 to settle a lawsuit she filed against him for the sexual assault. Hegseth and Jennifer would later marry in a ceremony at one of Trump’s golf clubs in New Jersey in 2019.
Hegseth has admitted to having a drinking problem during the time he allegedly assaulted the woman in Lake Tahoe. During his confirmation hearings, he promised that he would not consume “even a drop of alcohol” if he was confirmed as Defense Secretary. In an interview last year with conservative commentator Megyn Kelly, Hegseth claimed that his “two J’s,” Jesus and Jennifer, had changed him and made him a different person from the man he was when he was taking the staff of a veterans’ group he chaired to strip clubs and standing on the tops of bars and chug-a-lugging beers and shots. “Without those two J’s,” Hegseth told Kelly on her podcast, “I wouldn’t be sitting here right now.”
The Secretary of Defense seems to have rewarded one of his “J’s” by regularly taking her to work at the Pentagon, where she has been included in high-level meetings with his counterparts from Great Britain and other countries. He has taken her on official trips to Europe for meetings with NATO countries that have pledged support for Ukraine and the Munich Security Conference in February.
Jennifer Hegseth was also included in at least one chat group on the social media platform Signal during which Hegseth shared specific attack plans on Houthi rebels in Yemen. The Washington Post reported yesterday that there appears to have been a third Signal chat organized by Hegseth that included his wife. Others on that Signal chat included Tami Radabaugh, described by the Post as “a former Fox News producer overseeing how Pete Hegseth and the Pentagon engage with the media,” and Sean Parnell, a senior advisor to Hegseth and one of the Pentagon spokesmen. Why Hegseth would need not one, but two former Fox News producers in a chat group to discuss top secret military affairs has not been explained by either Hegseth or spokesmen for the Pentagon.
Hegseth has engaged in other “unorthodox” behavior in his new position overseeing the 1.4 million members of the nation’s uniformed military services and another 1.5 million civilian defense employees. It was recently revealed that Hegseth had an insecure wired public internet connection installed on one of his office computers so that he could use the Signal program on that machine. (Commercial cell phones do not work well in the Pentagon which was constructed using thick walls of reinforced concrete that is not friendly to cell signals.)
Jennifer Hegseth’s presence around the E-Ring at the Pentagon is ubiquitous enough that she is frequently referred to as “The Leash,” apparently a reference to the tight control she exerts over her dry-drunk alcoholic husband. Other Pentagon staffers refer to her as “Yoko Ono,” who was widely seen as such a controlling influence over her husband John Lennon that their relationship was thought to be one of the causes of the break-up of the Beatles.
His wife hasn’t been able to keep Hegseth out of other problems he has faced. Hegseth recently fired two of his closest advisers for allegedly leaking stories to the press. He ordered that the two be investigated by the Pentagon Inspector General. Those investigations were dropped last week, but the two aides have not been rehired. Hegseth also got rid of his chief of staff, Joe Kasper, who was closely involved in the firings surrounding leaks about the two Signal chats Hegseth was involved in concerning the air attacks on Houthi positions in Yemen. Kasper was originally supposed to “transition” to a different job in the Pentagon, but last week, it was announced that he would be leaving Defense Department employ altogether. He will return to “government relations and consulting,” according to a report in Politico.
No Secretary of Defense in American history has had his wife as an informal advisor who frequently accompanies her husband to work. Jennifer Hegseth has been involved in interviews with prospective hires for Pentagon jobs, either sitting in on interviews with her husband or interviewing job candidates herself. Jennifer Hegseth does not have an official Pentagon position or job title. Nor does she have the kind of high-level security clearance that would ordinarily be required if someone was to sit in on top-level meetings with foreign officials at which highly sensitive material would be discussed.
As far as the Signal chats are concerned, there has never been in the history of this country another instance of official conversations or contacts taking place between high level officers of the Department of Defense outside of official channels, so there is no comparison that can be made involving who had the requisite security clearances and “need to know” about military attack plans of the kind that were shared with others by Hegseth and his wife over Signal.
As Secretary of Defense, Hegseth appears to stand alone in his level of unpreparedness for the job and incompetence once in office. His alcoholism alone would have been an absolute disqualifier in previous administrations of both political parties, as would the charges he faced for sexually assaulting a woman. Even adultery would have been a disqualifier in past years.
Hegseth’s intended elimination of the “Women, Peace and Security” program this week has been misbegotten and mishandled right from the start. Hegseth posted this announcement on X: “This morning, I proudly ENDED the “Women, Peace & Security” (WPS) program inside the @DeptofDefense. WPS is yet another woke divisive/social justice/Biden initiative that overburdens our commanders and troops — distracting from our core task: WAR-FIGHTING.”
The Women, Peace and Security program was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Trump in his first term. Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem, was the lead sponsor of the bill in the House, and his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, was the lead co-sponsor of the bi-partisan bill in the Senate. While he was a congressman, Trump’s National Security Adviser, Michael Walz, was the chairman of the House WPS caucus for several years.
This is, of course, the problem with the kind of broad-brush approach the Trump administration has taken to all things even marginally identifiable as DEI-related. This country’s uniformed military is about 18 percent female. Countless women work in civilian positions in the Department of Defense, and there have been women who have served as Secretaries of several of the military services, as well as undersecretaries and deputy secretaries, not only of defense and the military services, but in all the intelligence agencies. The WPS program was intended to encourage and empower women to work in capacities at all levels of the nation’s defense. One of the projects championed by the WPS program was an effort to ensure that military combat gear and ballistic defense vests and helmets fit the female body as well as they fit men. Hegseth and the rest of the Republican manosphere can say what they want about women’s roles in the combat arms, but in modern warfare, everyone is vulnerable to enemy attack by drones, missiles, artillery and airstrikes, even soldiers serving in combat support positions like transportation, signal, and supply.
What Hegseth wants to do is cancel the program that helped to ensure that women in military positions vulnerable to enemy attack are as well protected as men. That should be a big help when it comes to recruiting and retaining women in military service.
Trump was quoted in one of his 100-day interviews as saying of Hegseth, “I think he’s going to get it together.” Well, if Trump ends up firing Pete, he could appoint Jennifer to replace him. She comes prepared with the requisite background at Fox News and has had plenty of on-the-job training. She even has her own account on Signal.
We need your support to get through the next 100 days of this nightmare. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
The repeated theme in the uncertainties of federal spending is that Medicaid will have to suffer a huge hit to make the numbers work for Donald Trump’s visions about underwriting immigration and military programs and providing permanent tax cuts for the wealthy.
Primarily, those projected $880 billion in cuts over 10 years being required by recent House resolutions will hit at tens of millions of Americans with the most vulnerability.
But it’s become apparent that cutting Medicaid would also affect those beyond direct recipients, but those who rely on the medical facilities that are financially dependent on theprogram’s reimbursements. From all accounts, rural hospitals fear massive Medicaid cuts could decimate maternity services or close already struggling medical facilities.
Those hospitals disproportionately serve communities that overwhelmingly voted for Trump.
A recent analysis in JAMA Network Open warns that the country already may face a shortage of beds by 2032, the result of an aging population with more complex health problems, increasing chronic disease, labor shortages and hospital finances. It’s a trend building since 2009. exacerbated during Covid, but the point is that there already are issues for hospitals.
And, in a variety of ways, hospitals — urban and rural — increasingly are turning to corporate alliances and business practices based more on finance than health.
Nearly half of all rural hospitals nationwide, often small facilities, operate at a deficit, with Medicaid barely keeping them afloat. Almost 200 rural hospitals have closed over 20 years, according to the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research, part of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
We’ve Known This
None of this is a secret, and little of it is new. But almost none of it is getting a full hearing as “populist” Republicans seeking to change federal spending, consider big cuts to Medicaid. Instead, they insist, as they do with other federal spending programs, that the differences can come from trimming fraud and waste in overpayments and striking ineligible patient reimbursements.
In scattered news articles and interviews, there are warnings about the effects that shutdowns of rural hospitals will mean. Longer transit to a regional hospital will mean more heart attacks and strokes will prove fatal or severe, for example. Rural nursing homes may vanish. Prenatal checkups will require long drives, and, well, we know that rural hospitals in red states are abandoning abortion and unrelated maternal health care, reimbursable or not.
Perception of Medicaid as primarily serving the urban poor but statistically, rural children and non-elderly adults are more likely to rely on Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) than those in metro areas, according to the Center for Children and Families at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University.
More than 35 percent of U.S. counties don’t have birthing facilities or obstetric clinicians, according to a March of Dimes report. In Texas, that figure is closer to 50 percent. Cuts to Medicaid will prompt more decisions to shut down maternal health units.
Let’s throw in closing down services provided by the Veterans’ Administration by the 80,000 employees it wants to dismiss. Does anyone in the Trump administration coordinate among the departments about the ripples it is sending across the country?
The Politics
Seeing the writing on the wall, even some Republicans, including Sen. Josh Hawley. R-Mo., and Trump ally Stephen K. Bannon have advised against cuts to Medicaid. Trump says he will not touch Medicaid, even as he supported the bill to insist on them and is unleashing Elon Musk and his computer minions on health coverage.
We all understand that cutting federal spending means eventually having to consider cuts to Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security in one form or another, since they make up about 40 percent of federal spending.
The alternative, promoted over time by Democrats, is to tax the wealthy at a fair share of income, which will eliminate the financial pressure.
Trump wants the tax cuts.
KFF, which monitors health issues, has a recent poll showing three in four rural residents saying that Medicaid funding should increase or stay the same. Republicans promoted Medicaid cuts in 2018 and lost the elections.
Of course, Trump being Trump, we can expect that there will be exceptions to protect certain states or regions or some other political accommodation. Generally, Trump favors shifting federal costs to states altogether.
Apart from being health facilities, hospitals also are substantial employers, particularly in rural communities.
Republicans insist that tightening work requirements will reduce eligibly without changing reimbursements, an assertion belied by statistics that show that the vast majority of patients are working, looking for work, or disabled. Medicaid was extended through work stoppages during Covid, and millions were removed from Medicaid rolls as a result. Republicans also claim there is too much fraud and waste in the system, and there are occasional prosecutions for fraudulent billing. But the chances of that rolling up the hundreds of billions of cuts proposed is slim to none.
Health care is expensive, without question. America is aging and its rural counties are growing, without question. It would seem a rationale issue for the Trump administration to analyze, though these questions are not among the top 10 even getting a mention from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Waving a magic wand isn’t going to provide good health care for all with no investment. It is a values question for America. Simply put, this administration values billionaires’ tax reductions over extension of health benefits.
“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.
This article is part of “Flint Unfiltered: Stories from An American Water Crisis,” a project that we have partnered on with the School of Journalism at Northeastern University. Eight of their enterprising students delved into the story of Flint, Michigan, the site of one of the country’s worst public health crises. As part of our mentoring program, we’re amplifying their efforts by sharing the amazing work produced by their students, as well as personal essays from Flint residents and stakeholders. Please visit the project’s website HERE.
More than a decade after the water crisis, no officials have been held accountable and no residents have seen a penny from the $626 million settlement — except lawyers
FLINT, MI — Bethany Hazard believes she will die before anyone is held accountable for the poisoning of Flint’s water.
In the decade since lead and other contaminants infiltrated the city’s water supply and set off the country’s largest man-made public health disaster, Hazard and thousands of others have watched criminal charges against state officials fail to see a day in court and promised settlement money stall in its disbursement.
The 68-year-old has battled two rounds of cancer and an immune system disorder, which she partially attributes to the discolored water that flooded from her faucets during the water crisis. Today, she spends her days at home, devoid of hope that anything will change.
“We’re disposable people, we don’t matter, that’s all. It doesn’t matter what happens to us here,” she said between sips of coffee held between weathered hands. “There’s no democracy here. They don’t think about the people, they’re thinking about how much money they can get.”
Even though a historic $626 million settlement was approved in United States District Court in 2021, the process for earning a spot was riddled with complicated paperwork, requiring people to prove that their devastating illnesses and injuries resulted from the tainted water. As of early January, 27,581 claims had been approved, which is about one-third of Flint’s population. Not one claimant has been issued a penny so far, while lawyers have been awarded three rounds of payments that total in the millions.
On many fronts, the people of Flint feel there has been a complete lack of accountability taken in the aftermath of the water crisis. They have spent endless amounts of money on doctors’ appointments, medications and bottled water that is safe to drink, all the while desperately waiting to see anyone held responsible for the tragedy brought upon their city. In 2023, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel called off her office’s pursuit to prosecute former Gov. Rick Snyder and other top officials after the state’s Supreme Court dismissed the charges.
When Nessel’s office first partnered with Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy and Michigan’s Solicitor General Fadwa Hammoud in 2019 to bring prosecution against Snyder and 15 other officials, Hazard thought maybe something would come from it. After all, the team vowed to exhaust “all available legal options” when Nessel dropped the cases her Republican predecessor, Bill Schuette, had previously been litigating.
Schuette had charged 15 state and local officials, including emergency managers and a member of the governor’s cabinet, with crimes as severe as involuntary manslaughter. Though seven had already taken plea deals and eight more were awaiting trial, Nessel wanted to start from scratch.
But after four years, Nessel put the effort to bed when Michigan’s Supreme Court ruled that the officials had been improperly indicted under a longstanding state law that allows a one-man jury to investigate, subpoena witnesses and issue arrest warrants, but not hand down indictments.
“When [Nessel’s team] came here I met with them and they said they were going to make us whole. It was just a big, fat lie. So what can you do?” said Hazard, who worked at the Veterans Hospital for 27 years before she was forced into early retirement due to her illnesses. “There’s no justice; there never will be.”
Breaking down the settlement
On Nov. 10, 2021, Judge Judith Levy of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan granted final approval to a historic $626.25 million settlement resulting from the combination of several class action and individual lawsuits brought on behalf of Flint residents and businesses against multiple governmental defendants.
The state of Michigan is responsible for the majority of the settlement with a $600 million payment. The city of Flint is paying $20 million, McLaren Hospitals $5 million and Rowe Professional Services Co., which did engineering work related to the 2014 switch to the Flint River as the city’s drinking water source, is paying $1.25 million.
Because some of the most lasting effects of the poisoning were a result of high lead levels, about 80% of the funds will be dispersed to individuals who were under the age of 18 at the time of the crisis, with a large majority to be paid to children who were 6 and younger. The remaining funds will go to special education services in Genesee County, adults, business owners and property owners for property damage.
But under the terms of the settlement, no claimant is to be paid until all of the claims are fully resolved, including appeals. The deadline for all outstanding paperwork to be filed was the end of March, and the lawyers for the claimants said they expect payments to start this summer.
Eleven firms are presently involved in the settlement effort, though about a dozen more have had their hand in the pot throughout the years-long process, said Cary McGehee, a partner at Pitt McGehee Palmer Bonnani & Rivers, one of the two firms serving as co-lead counsel.
The door to the Flint Water Crisis City Counsel Team office, pictured in early March. Credit: Asher Ben-Dashan
Behind a tinted glass door lies an office suite where a legal assistant works three days a week. Yellow notepads and piles of papers are stacked on her desk, a can of Dr. Pepper sits within arm’s reach.
On a Tuesday afternoon in early March, she patiently coached a Flint resident over the phone on how to locate their parents’ medical records and record the information onto paperwork to ensure that the correlation between their gastrointestinal disease and the tainted Flint water verified their claim to be part of the settlement. They were on the phone for about 15 minutes.
A second went by before she picked up the ringing phone again.
“Was your injury between 2014 and 2016?” she asked the next caller.
The small “Flint Water Crisis City Counsel Team” office, located in the back of a parking lot off Robert T. Longway Boulevard, is open three days a week from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. It’s where the two co-lead counsel firms encouraged their clients to stop by and ask questions about the paperwork they were asked to fill out.
Foot traffic leading into the office had nearly tripled in the weeks leading up to the mid-March deadline, said the woman, whose boss, one of the lawyers at Pitt McGehee Palmer Bonnani & Rivers, told her she was not authorized to speak with reporters.
In the past year, the settlement pool has increased by $33 million due to two engineering companies agreeing to settle over allegedly failing to give appropriate professional advice to prevent the flow of lead into Flint’s drinking water.
Final approval to the $8 million settlement against Lockwood, Andrews & Newman, an engineering firm based in Texas, came in May 2024. In October, final approval was granted to a $25 million settlement with Veolia North America, a Boston-based engineering company that the state said failed to properly identify corrosion control issues.
Veolia agreed in February to pay an additional $53 million to close out an eight-year long litigation process — money that is still under review to be added to the settlement fund.
But despite all the legal work in the process, those affected by the crisis have yet to be handed results in the form of financial compensation. Some lawyers also aren’t sure the end result will achieve as much justice for victims as initially believed.
“When you go into a process like this as a social justice-minded lawyer, you think you’re going to accomplish things, and in retrospect, I don’t know if that’s in fact what happened here,” said Julie Hurwitz, president and partner at Detroit-based firm Goodman Hurwitz & James, one of the litigating firms. “I think the community will never be made whole. I think the amount that each individual class member is going to get is miniscule compared to what they went through.”
It is unclear how much individual claimants will receive from the settlement. Lawyers said no one will know the amount they’re expected to receive until payment notices are issued, but the court has ruled that individual awards as low as $500 would be acceptable.
More than 28 law firms played a role in the development of the settlement, which also reduces the amount of money that will ultimately be dispersed to claimants. In a 2022 ruling, Judge Levy awarded the involved firms 31.33% of the total settlement fund, which includes a global “CBA,” or costs and benefits agreement, of $39,641,625 and an expense award of $7,147,802.36, for the resources the firms paid for.
In order for the court to rule on how much lawyers should be awarded, firms had to submit what’s known as lodestar documentation, a method of calculating attorneys’ fees by multiplying the hours employees worked by a reasonable hourly rate. For example, one partner put 36 minutes of work into the settlement. Under the lodestar calculation, he would be eligible to receive $534 at his hourly rate of $890.
Some claimants petitioned against the amount the lawyers asked to be paid.
“Plaintiffs’ attorneys are being paid too much and community residents are not receiving adequate compensation in view of the long-term harm the water crisis created. Plaintiffs’ attorneys will receive much more compensation than the average adult in the settlement,” anonymous objectors wrote in a court filing.
Their complaints were rejected. When Levy awarded the lawyers their compensation in 2022, she wrote that although she heard from many objectors, they represented an “exceedingly small” amount of people in comparison to the “overwhelming number of non-objecting participants.”
However, the court found that individual class settlement awards of approximately $500 per claimant are “substantial” awards and that a total attorney fee award of over $1 million is reasonable, according to one court filing.
EPA lawsuit
A major player in the water crisis was the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, which lawyers believe has evaded scrutiny for too long by hiding behind sovereign immunity, a legal doctrine that protects the government from being sued without its consent.
Litigation against the EPA has been in the works from Flint residents since 2016. Plaintiffs allege that the agency failed to utilize its enforcement authority under the Safe Drinking Water Act to intervene, investigate, obtain compliance and warn Flint residents of the health risks posed by the water.
The bank of the Flint River in early March. Credit: Emily Niedermeyer
The United States argues that it has not waived its immunity from plaintiffs’ claims because Michigan law would not impose liability on private individuals in similar circumstances—the extent to which the Federal Tort Claims Act, or FTCA, only waives government immunity—and because the alleged misconduct by the EPA is excepted from liability under the FTCA’s discretionary function exception.
But in February, Judge Linda V. Parker denied the agency’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit, writing in the decision: “While the EPA may have had the discretion in deciding when and how to respond to citizen complaints about Flint’s water, once it decided to respond, it did not have the discretion to provide dangerously misleading or inaccurate information.”
McGehee and Hurwitz are two of four firms that have been litigating the case against the agency. They have a glimmer of hope that the EPA’s time in court will soon be approaching.
“The EPA had the ultimate responsibility for overseeing that the water was safe, and they should’ve known at the time of the switch that the corrosion control hadn’t been administered and that it was going to result in leaching into the water,” Hurwitz said.
Two parallel cases are before Judge Parker for a bellwether trial, which is when a small consolidation of lawsuits are taken from a larger group of similar cases to be tried almost as a practice run for future cases.
McGehee and three other firms are representing roughly 8,000 individuals in the EPA case. The parallel case is brought on behalf of roughly 500 children, McGehee said. No sums have been discussed yet.
Judge Levy set that trial for January 2026. Flint residents and experts will have the opportunity to testify about the damage that was inflicted upon the city.
“Finally, the people of Flint will get their day in court,” McGehee said.
‘We’re still here’
Mike Herriman, longtime Flint resident, speaks about the frustration he feels about the criminal charges against state officials being dropped. Credit: Asher Ben-Dashan
Thousands of Flint residents who could afford to leave the city after the water crisis did. The city’s population dropped about 15% between 2015 and 2020.
But for Mike Herriman, who runs Vern’s Collision and Glass, an auto-repair shop in the city’s East Side, there’s no reason to give up on a place that’s been his home since the business began 53 years ago under his father’s direction.
“They’ll come here because we’re still here,” said Herriman, 72. “We’ve stuck it out.”
Herriman believes that the idea of accountability has become rooted in Flint’s identity in an adverse way. People became sick of seeing leadership fail to take responsibility for what happened and, as a result, many decided to give up on their own responsibilities, too.
He said this “snowball effect” has resulted in a loss of motivation for many Flint residents to pay taxes or water bills, keep up their homes or even take their cars in for repairs at his shop.
Herriman, who is involved in numerous neighborhood associations and advocacy groups, said the government should not be exempt from prosecution. The only way he feels the city can ever receive justice would be if officials are properly charged in court, which seems more unlikely than ever.
Nessel in 2024 said she would publicize the findings of her office’s investigation so the public would finally know of the corruption that occurred. But a few months into 2025, the investigation has still not been released.
“The Attorney General intends to publish this department’s report on the Flint Water Crisis investigation and prosecutions [later] this year,” Nessel’s press secretary, Danny Wimmer, wrote in a statement. “She continues to express her desire that the settlement funds be disbursed to the people of Flint as promptly as possible.”
For Claire McClinton, a longtime social justice warrior and founder of the Democracy Defense League, a group of Flint residents dedicated to fighting for democratic rights, Nessel’s decision to drop the prosecution was simply another hit on a community that has grown accustomed to being let down.
“We were already demoralized because nothing was happening. We’re not going to act like the water is just like it was, but it’s not where it should be. And for them not to hold anyone accountable, was such a blow, I mean, it was just such a blow,” she said.
Claire McClinton continues advocating for her community more than a decade after the Democracy Defense League’s campaign to prevent an emergency manager from taking control of the city. Credit: Asher Ben-Dashan Credit: Asher Ben-Dashan
McClinton believes that Nessel didn’t do enough to push the prosecution forward, especially after making a show of firing special prosecutor Tod Flood, who reviewed millions of pages of discovery during his work for Schuette’s office.
“The charges being dropped was devastating to us,” she said. “And it could only be one or two things: either incompetence or treachery. You either sold out or you didn’t know what you were doing.”
McClinton and Herriman both said that nothing would materialistically change for Flint if officials were charged, but it would move mountains in boosting morale for a population that has continuously been lied to and deceived.
“The same organizations that lied to us back then are still in power and nobody’s been convicted. It proves to the community that we can’t trust the system,” Herriman said. “There’s still not been acknowledgement, there’s not been prosecution. Nobody has been able to say, ‘OK, they’re finally convicted and because of that, maybe no one will do it again.’”
“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.
“I would say that we live in a democracy, and part of the responsibility of being a parent is to do your own research,” the health secretary said, in response to a question from a woman in the audience who asked how he would advise a new parent about vaccine safety. “You research the baby stroller, you research the foods that they’re getting, and you need to research the medicines that they’re taking as well.”
"Do your own research" is supposed to ring with independence and a refusal to blindly follow the sheeple, combined with an implicit claim that your google search is probably just as good as what those so-called experts tell you.
But what I really hear in this exchange is a rejection of collective responsibility. "Can you help me make a safe choice for my child?" the young mother asks. "Not going to do it," replied the damned Secretary of Health and Human Services of the richest nation in the history of the world. "Your kid is not my problem. Your kid is not anyone else's problem. Go figure it out yourself."
This has always been the message of the school voucher movement since those long-ago days when Milton Friedman dreamed of a country where education was just one more commodity in a government-free marketplace. "Go get an education for your kid yourself. It's nobody else's problem, nobody else's concern, nobody else's responsibility. Here's a little voucher; now shut up and go away."
This is the Big Theme of MAGA/Trump/DOGE/Etc-- "We are tired of being told we have to care about other people." That's it. That's the whole thing. "I don't want to have to spend a cent of my money on anyone who isn't me." From the DOGE non-saving inefficient roll-back of anything the government does that involves looking out for other people (including collecting information that could help them make decisions) all the way to J D Vance's bizarre claim that Jesus says the further away from you someone is, the less Jesus wants you to love them.
In fact, not only would they like to not have their money taken to spend on other people, but maybe they can get some of other people's money to spend on themselves.
They can always draw a crowd of people who believe in the legitimate concerns-- government is too often inefficient and wasteful, being free to make choices is good, public schools have too often failed some students-- but those folks rarely get to drive the bus because they never think it would go So Far and going So Far is what the actual drivers intended from the start.
"Do your own research" because nobody else is going to do it, and if you don't have the resources, well, don't worry about it because I'm sure whatever you do will be just as good as any scientist or expert or teacher would come up with. The important part is that you do the science, health, and education research yourself. And if this bold new do-it-yourself approach means that society is sorted into different tiers and classes based on who has the most resources to take care of themselves, well, that's how God meant it to be. The social safety net and government-supported programs have just been a means to lift up people (with my damn money) when those folks should be staying in their proper places, cranking out babies to serve as future meat widgets for our wealthy leaders (who are wealthy and leaders because of their demonstrated merit).
For MAGA, the DeVos's, the Kochtopus, and the rest of that crowd, public schools are just one more way that dollars are stolen to try to lift the lessers out of their proper place in society. It's the businesses, the corporations, that deserve the support and assistance of the government. For individual persons? Do your own research, do your own science, do your own educating-- because the regime is tired of helping take care of you, and they are trying to convince us that disregard is freedom.
Log in
