Over the past year, media reports and op-eds have examined the lead poisoning disaster in Flint, Michigan, from a variety of angles. Some focus on Michigan’s emergency manager laws, which the Republican-dominated legislature has used to suspend democracy in majority-African-American cities, including Flint, Detroit, Pontiac, Highland Park, and Benton Harbor.

Others focus on the larger issue of lead pipes and decaying infrastructure, or the criminal negligence of Governor Rick Snyder and his administration. Still others note that the long history of housing discrimination in Flint, and the racist application of emergency manager laws, help explain why the majority of the poisoning victims are African American (although they include many working-class whites).

Corporate media coverage, however, has ignored the relationship between the water crisis in Flint and ongoing mass water shutoffs in Detroit. More broadly, it has obscured the role of neoliberal restructuring in undermining one of the nation’s largest water systems, and in leaving over one hundred thousand people without running water in a state surrounded by the Great Lakes.