The news that several state officials in Michigan have been charged with involuntary manslaughter in connection to a death in the Flint water crisis is bittersweet. The thought that there might be some measure of justice in one of the worst humanitarian crises in modern American history is only matched by the sense that none of this had to happen in the first place.

Rick Snyder, Michigan’s Republican governor, was not among those listed in the indictments. That’s a crime itself.

When Snyder – a venture capitalist and former chairman at Gateway – ran for governor in 2010, Michigan was still reeling from the recession. While the unemployment rate in the state had dropped by two percentage points in the previous year, it was still tied for the second-highest in the country at 12.4%.

Detroit was still two and a half years away from declaring the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history, and the Tea Party had injected a level of anti-tax fanaticism in the American body politic not seen since the days of California’s Proposition 13.

Running as “one tough nerd”, Snyder won all but five counties in the state as part of a Republican wave that crashed over the midwest in the 2010 elections, turning the governorships of Ohio and Wisconsin over to the Republican party along with Michigan’s. He promised to run government like a business, and with a newly-unified Republican legislature, he got to work on that.

One of the first major acts that Snyder and the legislature took up in 2011 was emergency management. Under Michigan law at the time, cities and school districts that were under extreme financial distress could file to have an “emergency financial manager” that would be able to restructure a municipality’s government in order to prevent going bankrupt. By 2011, there were four cities and the Detroit public schools that were under emergency management.

The new law that was passed by the legislature and signed by Snyder – Public Act 4 of 2011 – differed from the old Public Act 72 of 1990 in one key area: the newly renamed “emergency managers” would be allowed to break collective bargaining agreements in order to return a city to financial solvency.

This would have a profound effect on things like retiree benefits, where non-uniformed public employees (read: not law enforcement) in Detroit, for example, would take a major cut in their benefits as a result of the bankruptcy agreement put together by that city’s emergency manager.

In Michigan, however, statutes can be put to a public vote if enough signatures are collected to do so. The opponents of Public Act 4 did so, and after a decision to keep the referendum off the ballot by the State Board of Canvassers was overturned, Proposal 1 appeared on the November ballot. The result was the repeal of Public Act 4, with 53% of Michiganders voting no on the proposal. Despite the result, the legislature would end up passing a slightly-modified version of the previous law.

This brings us to Flint.

Until 2014, Flint got its water from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD), which provides water to seven counties across south-east Michigan. As a cost-cutting measure, the emergency manager in Flint, Darnell Earley, urged a switch to the newly-created Karegnondi Water Authority (KWA) that would serve Flint and its neighboring cities.

While the KWA’s pipes were built, the city would switch from the DWSD system over to the Flint river, where the pipes had not been treated for the transfer of safe drinking water. On April 25, 2014, Earley and Flint mayor Dayne Walling did a photo op where they drank water from the Flint river to memorialize the switch.

The rest, as they say, is history: as of today, the citizens of Flint, Michigan have been without clean drinking water for 1,148 days.

But for 525 of those days, the state denied that there was an issue with the water in Flint. Or, rather, they denied that there was a problem to the public. If you were an employee working at the State Office Building in Flint, however, you received bottled water nearly nine months before Governor Snyder publicly acknowledged the extent of the crisis.

Even after that public acknowledgement, the response from the state remained slow: the Michigan department of health and human services released a much-criticized poster that told parents that the water was somehow still safe to bathe in, so long as the kids didn’t “drink the bathwater … yuck!”

The state provided clean water, but only at designated distribution points throughout the city. It took a judge’s ruling to force the state to personally deliver the water to affected residents a full 932 days after austerity imposed by an unelected bureaucrat poisoned an entire city’s water supply. Even as the casualties from the Flint water crisis piled up, it seems that the state of Michigan was still concerned first and foremost with saving money.

And what of Governor Snyder’s role in all this? He gave a mea culpa of sorts in his 2016 state of the state address, briefly apologizing for the entirely avoidable humanitarian disaster that occurred on his watch. He repeated the same lines to a congressional hearing.

But in the unveiling of charges on Wednesday by Attorney General Bill Schuette, Snyder’s name was missing. Schuette admitted that he was unable to interview Snyder, which echoed the criticisms of Snyder by US congressman Elijah Cummings, who stated that the governor had refused to provide the oversight and government reform committee with documents and statements for over a year, and that “allowing Governor Snyder to flout the committee’s authority will deny the people of Flint the answers they deserve.”

The committee closed the investigation 967 days after the last Flint resident drank clean water, with committee chair Jason Chaffetz seemingly more interested in placing the blame with the EPA – a perennial bugaboo of conservative lawmakers – than with the CEO of the state of Michigan, despite all of the evidence available to the contrary.

Much like the CEOs who brought us the worst economic meltdown in 80 years, Richard Dale Snyder will escape any punishment for the austerity-backed poisoning of his state’s seventh-largest city. And much like the 10,000 people in the United States who died of suicide as a result of the Great Recession, people in Flint will likely die from Snyder’s mistakes as well.

That’s not justice. It is, instead, the bitter pill of a system that sees government as a source of discipline rather than a guarantor of basic human rights, the right to clean water being amongst the foremost of them. A perfect example of this is even after all the misery caused by the poisoning of Flint’s water, the state is mulling over allowing Nestlé to bottle and sell millions of gallons, perhaps to the same people who the state under Snyder poisoned.

Nestlé, it is safe to say, will get their clean water on time.