The world is our dumpster

[Image: toxic kid]The most amazing thing to me is how people who are essentially good can do ridiculously cruel things, so long as it’s a few times removed.

This article in the New York Times talks about how “a Greek-owned tanker flying a Panamanian flag and leased by the London
branch of a Swiss trading corporation whose fiscal headquarters are in
the Netherlands” first tried to pass off a load of toxic waste as dirty water in the Netherlands, and then, when they got caught, they loaded the toxic sludge back onto their tanker and dumped it in Cote d’Ivoire.

This is clearly, totally, unacceptably wrong. Some of the world’s poorest people are dying (eight so far) because some company somewhere didn’t want to pay to safely get rid of their toxic sludge.

Who orders that? Who sits at a desk and decides that $300,000 is more important than hundreds of lives? That’s fucking depressing.