How is our local landfill like Fukushima?
No, not radiation: nobody seems to be responsible.
Colin P. A. Jones wrote for The Japan Times 16 September 2013,
Fukushima and the right to responsible government,
Rather, the means of holding a member responsible for bad judgments
are internalized as part of the rules and discipline governing the
hierarchy to which they belong, with mechanisms for outsiders to
assert responsibility — to assert rights — being
minimized and neutralized whenever possible.
Sure, it’s not exactly the same.
Our local governments live in fear they’ll get sued (or so they claim),
and even sheriffs and judges occasionally get convicted around here.
But it’s quite difficult to get local elected officials to take their responsibility to the
people as seriously as “we’ve invested too much in that to stop now”
where “we” means the local government or more frequently a developer.
And privatizing the landfills and
now trash collection is not that
dissimilar to the Japanese government keeping TEPCO afloat so they
have an unaccountable scapegoat for Fukushima.
Locally, nobody seems to even know, much less care, that the landfill
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