There must have been a run on Kool-Aid, because everybody in the trailer park seemed to be drinking it. The old man in Unit 1420, the kids playing in the rubble pile of an old double-wide that had been torn down and left to rot, the little white baby hanging out a window with a load in his diaper. Everyone residing at the Kirkwood mobile home park wearing teeth stained red. Except Dee Johnson, a fifty-year-old white woman. It didn’t appear as though Dee was wearing her teeth today.
What’s with the Kool-Aid? I asked.
The tap water looked and tasted like crap, she told me. The city had switched the water from its Detroit source for some reason. Now the city was drawing its drinking water from the toxic Flint River. Officials assured the people it was okay, but still you couldn’t drink the water without sugar in it. It made you gag.
There was a brownfield out behind the trailer with the toddler hanging from the window there on Sunshine Drive, a square mile of cement and horse thistle and weedy trees. One square mile of post-industrial nothingness. This is where Delphi used to make things in America: spark plugs, fuel pumps, oil gauges, speedometers. It also pumped out paychecks: more than ten thousand paychecks a week at the plant’s peak. Plus bennies. Good bennies. And bennies were where it was at.
Delphi was a division of General Motors before GM spun it off in the late 1990s to save money. That’s when Delphi became a stand-alone company. But the financial sleight of hand couldn’t save it, and Delphi, the largest auto-parts manufacturer in the world, declared bankruptcy in 2005, sending shock waves through the automobile industry.
Delphi ditched its pension obligations onto the American taxpayer as workers’ pay was cut in half and executives took millions in bonuses. The company then received billions in federal bailout dollars, shuttered most of its American factories, and moved its corporate headquarters to England to avoid paying taxes to the U.S. Treasury.
At the moment Delphi declared bankruptcy, it had employed fifty thousand American workers. Less than a decade later, it employed more than fifty thousand Mexican workers, making it one of the biggest employers in Mexico, with factories in hellholes like Reynosa. And it left behind abandoned city blocks in places like Flint.
Predictably, Flint—Vehicle City—hit the skids. Murder City. Police headquarters closed on the weekends. Failing schools. Four in ten living in poverty. It all got turned on its head somehow. Flint: Can’t drink the water. Delphi: Hecho en México.
Flint is the birthplace of General Motors and the United Auto Workers and mass credit. For years the factories hummed, and the Flint River grew so toxic with industrial waste, it was said you could clean brass with it. But Flint was rich. It didn’t need the river. It could afford to ship one in from Detroit, sixty miles away. But then Flint’s jobs went to Mexico and Flint’s politicians mismanaged and stole. And Vehicle City went broke. People left by the tens of thousands.
The city was taken over by the state in 2011 and stripped of its assets to pay off its debt. In order to save more money, the governor’s men ordered the people who were left to drink from the Flint River.
The children’s lips would have told you it couldn’t be drunk without Kool-Aid.
Down the road from the collapsing trailer-court cracker box was another brownfield, another dead factory, where dead-end children with blood-red teeth rummaged through filth. None of them had a chance.
Would somebody get that kid out of the window? I thought. He’s gonna fall and break his neck! And for fuck’s sake, change his fucking diaper, won’t you please?
Unemployment and homicide—that’s about what they got left in Flint, said Dee, who grew up here and raised kids here and grew irrelevant here. Irrelevant to the government. Irrelevant to the powers that be. Irrelevant but still alive.
The old footprint of a factory long gone. The jobs somewhere else, done by someone else being paid peanuts, or done by a machine that requires no peanuts, no health insurance, no time card. It hurt to look at. I grew up near a Ford transmission plant. Bob worked at GM for a few years, and his father clocked thirty with the company. By the end, his old man was the guy helping the factories relocate to Mexico, set them up, and get them running. He regrets it now. But damn it, somebody was going to do it.
These plants literally put food in our bellies and muscle on our bones and good schools in our communities. They were part of our fiber. Sure, guys like me and Bob and Matt, who grew up near the steel foundries of Gary, Indiana, moved up and on and out. We became men of the world, but we are the offspring of heavy-metal industry.
And so was Dee. Dee here was our sister. Her children, our children. She looked too old for herself. She’d been made into a Third World woman while the campesina back in Reynosa had been transformed into a prisoner of a sweltering box deep in a slum of the new world economy.
Evoking concepts of comparative advantage and opportunity costs, the ruling bosses promised that the new way of doing things would be good for people like Dee and the children running wild here: free trade and a new public water source. But surely it wasn’t. You could watch the water come from the tap. It didn’t just look like shit, it probably had actual shit in it.
Still, they were telling the people the water was fine to wash your babies in. The economy was improving, they said. And those Central American women and children on TV bum-rushing the border? Well, they said, we had room for that desperate horde because we were a generous people.
But what about us? asked people like Dee. What about our kids? We do everything for those kids from over there, but what about our kids here?
No one’s listening, sister.
Delphi had announced the previous week that it had earned record profits. But where were these profits? Not in this bombed-out trailer court. Not in the U.S. Treasury accounts. I tried repeatedly to get an appointment with Rod O’Neal, the CEO of Delphi, but couldn’t get ahold of him. Or rather, he refused to see us. But this is TV, and paper statements of corporate doublespeak tend to be bad for ratings. Did Delphi owe anything to the American people? Was it an American company anymore? Would it pay back the bailout and pension obligations now that the money was rolling in? How was Rod O’Neal going to spend that $14.8 million in salary and bonuses? How about a twenty-four-pack of Huggies for the kid in 1511? It seemed like the least he could do.
We took a drive to Delphi’s “operational headquarters,” about a half hour down Interstate 75, in suburban Detroit, where Rod has his offices. Hot Rod, I decided, was going to have to tell it to the lens.
Never come empty-handed, my mother always taught me. Bring a gift of some sort, a token of esteem and affection. So we stopped at a chain convenience store. Browsing through the merchandise: shoelaces from Bangladesh, condoms made in India, even the goddamned store’s corporate headquarters were located in Asia. Eventually, I found just the right gift: a microwaveable chimichanga “assembled in Mexico.”
How appropriate, Bob said, cackling. I bet O’Neal’s gonna love it.
Delphi’s so-called global administrative office is a big ugly pillbox of a building laid down in a sprawling blacktop parking lot off the cloverleaf ribbon of interstate, located near absolutely nothing. This is where the white establishment works. The suits. The outsourcers. The brains of the global conglomerate. Except Mr. O’Neal, of course. He’s black. So Delphi deserved diversity points, I figured.
We got lost in the sprawl, until we got found. It was an eerie campus. There was no sign of life. No movement. No people. No birds on the well-tended lawns.
We entered the main building. Again security. Again hubbub about the cameras. Again the recurrent question. Credentials?
Yes, indeed. Sure. NEWS MEDIA PRESS OFFICIAL IDENTIFICATION.
A corporate mouthpiece wearing an ill-fitting sleeveless blouse and surrounded by security booted us out, but not before accepting the chimichanga on Rod’s behalf.
I should have also brought him some bottled water, because soon after we visited, this notice was published:
CITY OF FLINT
LOCALIZED DRINKING WATER WARNING
A localized area of City of Flint water is contaminated with fecal coliform
BOIL YOUR WATER BEFORE USING