It's a union town, so it developed with this expectation of living wages and middle class life and having home - all these things that are the American dream in so many ways. The consequences of the economic system, the consequences of strategic inequality that have never really been reckoned with, in Flint and in many other places - we're seeing the consequences of these slow burn emergencies. With the water crisis, in many ways its the result of infrastructure inequality that goes back decades.

Journalist Anna Clark traces the toxic politics that poisoned the people of Flint - from the actions of state and local officials under financial emergency management, to the large-scale structural problems deep within American society - of racialized, strategic inequality, and the corrosion of the notion of a universal, public good.

Anna is author of The Poisoned City: Flint's Water and the American Urban Tragedy from Metropolitan Books.