In late 2011, as Flint's finances continued to worsen, Snyder appointed an emergency financial manager with vast powers to oversee the city's finances – and effectively rendered local elected officials powerless.
The city's water woes come amid a troublesome moment in Flint's history: throttled by financial uncertainty, Flint was placed into state receivership in 2011, when Snyder appointed an emergency manager with vast powers to oversee the city's day-to-day operations.
With vast power, but limited public accountability, that old guard is not unlike senior Soviet apparatchiks.
Instead, advocates said, it was typical, underscoring the isolation and vulnerability of immigration detainees in a disjointed system with vast power to transfer people out of reach of lawyers and family members.
The move, which came after months of steadily more ominous threats and a downgrade of Nassau's debt by a credit-rating agency in November, turns the oversight board into a control board, with vast power to rewrite the county's budget and veto labor contracts, borrowings and other important financial commitments.
With the vast powers of the governorship suddenly available to him, Mr. DiFrancesco was expected easily to beat back a primary challenge from Bret D. Schundler, the mayor of Jersey City and an insurgent conservative candidate.
Those same founding fathers ensured that an American president must share his vast powers with Congress, and Republicans still control the House of Representatives and can filibuster and stall legislation in the Senate, through their minority there.
Old comrades were loaded with titles, money and vast powers; nightclub bouncers and beer hall bullies suddenly found themselves living in grand palaces, lording it over millions of people.
He was in superb voice, sang with that enchanting hint of vast powers in reserve and concluded with 'Auld Lang Syne' in Italian.
His purpose was to distinguish between those forms of network communication that are hopelessly corrupted and no longer usable, those that are endangered by a continuing assault on the part of an agency gone rogue, and those that, even with their vast power, all their wealth, and all their misplaced ambition, conscientiousness and effort, they still cannot break.
He referred with wry wit to the vast powers of Mexican presidents in a column published in 1992, during the presidency of Carlos Salinas de Gortari.
