All About The Garbage

Laura Henry, The Conversation:

A steady stream of garbage-laden trucks moves the waste of Russia’s capital to landfills in the surrounding region. The resulting mountains of refuse emit noxious fumes and leach pollutants into nearby waters, endangering the residents of the region around Moscow.

Citizens living near these landfills have had enough.

Protests against garbage dumps have erupted in at least eight towns and villages around Moscow in the last six months. As a scholar who studies contemporary Russian politics, I believe these garbage protests reveal a crisis of basic governance that potentially poses a greater challenge to Putin’s government than pro-democracy activism.

'Scuse me, ma'am - not to get too nit-picky - but I'm thinking that when you turn people out for a public protest, that's what "Pro-Democracy Activism" actually is.

But, please continue.

Russian activists have come under increasing pressure since Putin returned to office in 2012. Protests have been relatively scarce after the 2011-2012 Bolotnaya demonstrations in response to election fraud. Long-standing nongovernmental groups working on environmental and human rights issues, which relied in part on funding from abroad, have been labeled “foreign agents” by Russia’s Ministry of Justice.


- and -

Since 2010, under the leadership of Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, Moscow has transformed into a dynamic global city, fueled by oil wealth and urban redevelopment. Moscow’s growing population and unfettered consumption mean increased waste. A report by the environmental group Greenpeace calculates that Moscow is responsible for 11 million tons of trash annually, approximately one-fifth of all waste in Russia. Only 4 percent of Moscow’s waste is recycled.

To preserve quality of life in the capital, the Moscow’s government sends streams of municipal waste into the surrounding regions. Greenpeace reports that 90 percent of Moscow’s waste goes to landfills in Moscow’s suburban region. Landfills created in the Soviet and early post-Soviet period, when there was little consumer waste, have been expanded, often with no community notification and despite being in close proximity to homes and schools. Air quality suffers as the dumps release fumes from decomposing waste.

In addition to established landfills, 52 illegal dumps were identified in the Moscow region in the first half of 2017.

As the stench rises and the public health risks – such as respiratory diseases that most acutely affect children – mount, citizen appeals to regional and national government officials have had little effect.

Local people are left with few options but protest. Demonstrations of more than 1,000 people occurred in at least eight towns and villages near Moscow. Citizens also have organized groups on VKontakte, a Russian social media platform, to coordinate petitions, block roads and even mount hunger strikes.

There' s always a link between individual commercial interests and the destruction of the commons, which is always brings the erosion of people's political and civil rights, so it always ends up having something to do with a small group of power-drunk people rationalizing the use of government force against its own citizens.

If an Unfettered Free Market System is great and beautiful and fair, then you don't need a large militarized police force to keep people in line.

As the USSR was falling apart, Poppy Bush sent Robert Strauss to Moscow to help them with "democratization", and whole platoons of Free Market True Believers went with him - to teach those silly Commies about good ol' western capitalism.

All the state-owned entities were sold off, which gave us Russian Oligarchs, which eventually gave us a "term-limited Russian presidency" that's been held by Vladimir Putin for 20 fuckin' years.

Some of the big problems we have with Russia now are at least partly due to our own meddling, as well-intentioned as it may have been.

(I'm not saying we had it coming, and I'm not saying our fiddling with the Russian economy is the same as Russian rat-fucking in the 2016 elections. Don't be daft.)

The point here is that when it's obvious that privatizing government leads to extremely bad outcomes, we need to call it out. Unfettered Free Market economic policies hurt people, and they lead us to the Daddy State.

Let's also be sure to remind ourselves that it didn't get all fucked up yesterday, and we're not going to get unfucked by tomorrow.