Discovered the ultimate cure for the NIMBY syndrome!
Reported by Beppe Grillo (popular Italian blog), but ignored by mainstream television news as usual: with an urgent decree effective since May 1st 2008, Italian Government allows toxic/nuclear waste storage sites, polluting power plants, incinerators and similar tourist attractions to be covered by State Secret.
Information about their existence, location and environmental impact can be declared “classified”: anybody revealing them risks up to 5 years in prison.
Even the official Public Health agencies are banned from exercising their ordinary monitoring powers: in other words, no common people can actually measure, know or tell if a certain place in the sun-blessed Italian seaside or countryside is being actively poisoned by a government-blessed shit factory.
In the embedded Youtube movie clip, former Minister of Culture and Tourism Francesco Rutelli (of the cabinet which wrote the aforementioned decree) invites you to visit the Best Country in the World®.
Where are you going to spend your summer vacations?
Any relocation hint for me and my family?
May 20th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
I’d suggest you a waste-free country… or, better, a Grillo-free country!
I’d like to remind you that the waste business has always been in the camorra (Napoli version of Mafia) caring hands, so I don’t find that stupid to keep toxic waste storage sites or even incinerators "classified", if this helps to keep camorra out of the business.
Just my two cents.
P.S. what’s exactly a "marxian martial artist" ? A communist soldier who loves painting ? ;-)
May 20th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
@Paolo:
I can’t really see any logic consequentiality in “Waste business is handled by mafia, hence we need to keep hazardous plants secret AND we need their environmental impact not to be monitored by independent public health agencies“.
If mafia fits somewhere in this line of reasoning, is that maybe government and and its sponsoring energy companies want to compete with mafia in the same business under the same rules, i.e. being not traceable or responsible for any damage caused to environment or population health.
Last but not least, I would be really surprised if camorra had not started yet to recycle its money into the incinerator business and the “ten new waste storage areas” which Berlusconi just announced and which I bet will be kept secret.
A marxian martial artists is an anti-capitalist musician who loves to socialize some dojo ass kicking from time to time.
May 27th, 2008 at 6:57 am
He sounds like Christopher Walken…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Walken
May 28th, 2008 at 4:41 pm
Gosh Giorgio,
You Italians get to **know** you’ve got waste dumps, even if you aren’t allowed to know where?
Don’t move here then - even though the Australian Government says we don’t have any dumps, we really have had 3 radiation dumps (provable and finally admitted to by the respective state governments) that have poisoned inner-city residents for the past 50 years (housing built right on dump fill) and quite some few agricultural poison dumps that have been again finally admitted to by various state authorities **only after** they’ve been unearthed by development excavation.
So, we Australians aren’t even allowed to find out whether we’ve got waste dumps until we’ve been killed or poisoned - - -nor are we allowed access to what kind of research results are used by the government to make decisions about whether Australia could site waste dumps **safely**.
Welcome to the mushroom club.
**but we’re working against this virus of secrecy very very hard - - check out the scabs on my forehead :-)) Good luck with your search for safety from the mighty commercial imperative ;-)