Mafia Sinks Ships Containing Toxic Waste 401
Hugh Pickens writes "For years there have been rumors that the mafia was sinking ships with nuclear and other waste on board as part of a money-making racket. Now, BBC reports on a sunken vessel that has been found 30km off the coast of Italy. Murky pictures taken by a robot camera show the vessel intact, and alongside it are a number of yellow barrels with labels indicating the contents are toxic. The ship's location was revealed by Francesco Fonti, an ex-member of Calabria's feared 'Ndrangheta crime group, who confessed to using explosives to sink this vessel and two others as part of an illegal operation to bypass rules on the disposal of toxic waste. Experts are now examining samples taken from the wreck, and an official says that if the samples prove to be radioactive then a search for up to 30 other sunken vessels believed scuttled by the mafia would begin immediately. 'The Mediterranean is 0.7 percent of the world's seas. If in this tiny portion there are more than 30 (toxic waste) shipwrecks, imagine what there could be elsewhere,' says Silvestro Greco, head of Calabria's environment agency."
No moral fibre (Score:5, Insightful)
Typical psychopatic behaviour pattern (Score:4, Insightful)
"If it makes me $1000, I'll do it. That it will harm 10.000.000 people, it doesn't matter".
That said, nuclear waste is not necessarily the most dangerous imaginable. Believe it or not, the humble dioxines can be more dangerous. If for no other reason, because they accumulate in the body without ever leaving it (except for liposuction).
This is the GOVERNMENT's fault. (Score:1, Insightful)
If the government didn't want them to dump this waste out at sea, they would ease the restrictions on the disposal of toxic waste. Once again we witness how government regulation results in MORE pollution rather than less.
Re:No moral fibre (Score:5, Insightful)
Who is paying them? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't have a hard time imagining crooked corporations paying to have their chemical waste disposed under the table like this, but who has nuclear waste that would do this? At least here in the US I can't see a power plant getting away with this - they have to keep close account of their material and it is audited pretty closely as well. That would leave mostly medical and scientific sources. I suppose they don't dispose of that directly so the company they paid to take care of it must be crooked.
The people that made this decision deserve to fry. Too bad it is impossible to create a justice system that I would actually trust to make those sort of decisions.
Re:No moral fibre (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not that hard to imagine. Surely there is some part of you - some element(s) of your behaviour - that are driven by profit rather than regard for your fellow humans. It doesn't have to be big, consequential stuff; just think about those times when you're likely to act in your own self interest rather than the greater social good.
Now, imagine that those motivations make up 90% of your consciousness rather than the (hopefully smaller) percentage they currently do. It's an exercise in relativism, in thinking in degrees rather than absolutes.
Now spend some time exploring hypothetical situations and imagining how you would react. There's no need to change the basic elements of your personality, just tweak the motivational balance. Are you there? Can you imagine it?
Congratulations! You're a sociopath!
Re:How do they get approved by the EPA? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, because obviously the Italian Mafia in ITALY has to have permission from the EPA, in the U.S.A., to do anything.
Re:No moral fibre (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't forget the element of excuses and justifications!
What can one little ship matter in such a big sea? Those government types are always making bizarre laws and nothing *that* bad ever happens anyway, does it?
Sure, it's gonna be fine! I'll just get rid of this for you, it's no big deal...
Re:Typical psychopatic behaviour pattern (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How do they get approved by the EPA? (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't you have to have some kind of license from the EPA to dispose of toxic waste? Did the producers of the waste not verify the license? There are not that many places to dispose of toxic waste. I am sure it was more than just the guys in the mafia who were in on this. I think the producers of the waste should be responsible for the clean up.
Well... First of all I don't think the EPA has jurisdiction over Italy.
Second, they're the Mafia, I don't think they worry all that much about legality.
Third, I kind of thought that the whole reason this was a story was because it was illegal.
ignorant bastards! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No moral fibre (Score:5, Insightful)
Strange Reasoning.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The Mediterranean is 0.7 percent of the world's seas. If in this tiny portion there are more than 30 (toxic waste) shipwrecks, imagine what there could be elsewhere,' says Silvestro Greco, head of Calabria's environment agency.
Isn't that like saying "OMG, this chainsaw massacre crime scene is just .00000000000000000001% of the earth's surface, so if there's 5 dismembered bodies here just imagine how many more there could be elsewhere?! You should totally give my Agency more money."
Re:No moral fibre (Score:5, Insightful)
Fuck. Me. I sometimes wonder what it must be like to be a person with no moral fibre at all. I can't imagine it, must be weird.
My wife's a psychologist and we have discussed such people. The answer to what it's like to be one is depressingly simple. They have no morals to trouble them at all; no conscience, no guilt. They're happy as if they had ethics and compassion.
There are people who are simply not like us; just not the same.
Well to be honest, morals and ethics are just trivial rules communally agrees upon by a society. We find it unethical, perhaps even immoral, to have sex with a 14 year old. But even our own society less than 200 years ago saw nothing unusual in 40 year old men marrying 14 year old girls.
Re:Reprocessing nuclear waste? (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, it all depends on money. If it costs me $10 per pound to extract the mercury, and I can sell it for $20 per pound, you can bet your ass I'd do it. But if I can only get $2 per pound selling it, I'd rather spend $1 per pound dumping it.
Re:No moral fibre (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Who is paying them? (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't even have to be crooked ones. You put up a legit-looking front and you can get even the good guys' waste floating in the sea. It's got to be a nightmare PR scenario for any company that might have toxic waste to dispose.
Something to think about (Score:5, Insightful)
This is something I think about all the time.
It could be argued that we are all immoral, because we are not interested in the consequences of our actions. The mafia crook dynamiting the ship with toxic waste isn't much different from an "waste resources" executive who bargains to send toxic waste to countries who need the money. One is exalted, one reviled, yet they both basically do the same thing. The executive simply pretends that the waste is properly disposed of in another country. The mafia crook doesn't kid himself. He knows the truth, and accepts it.
Which person is more immoral? Where does accountability figure into the equation? And where in a capitalist equation do you enter the morality quotient? Who enforces it?
These questions are simply not asked, because no one really wants the answer. For me, voluntary ignorance is immoral, and represents one of the great evils in the world today.
Re:No moral fibre (Score:1, Insightful)
I don't know about that. There are some genuinely defective individuals, but most people who make life miserable for others use one of two formulas to justify themselves:
"I did what I had to to survive"
"They would do the same to me if they had the chance"
Basically they have the idea that empathy is weakness and it is right to suppress it. I think that most of the people who act as if they have no morals are just acting because to show any gaps in that facade is viewed as equivalent to showing weakness.
Re:Corporations and the Mafia (Score:5, Insightful)
In broad strokes, organized crime exploits the niches created by legal prohibitions, while corporations exploit the niches created by legal allowances.
Bootlegging, drug running, cigarette smuggling, and illicit waste disposal are all activities that are profitable because they are either illegal, and thus have no legitimate competitors, or have legitimate competitors that operate under considerable restrictions or high taxes. In order to exploit these niches, mafias put resources into stealth and subversion of the law enforcement apparatus(bribing cops, planting informants, intimidating witnesses, etc.). They don't tend to try to alter the law(indeed, the law creates their profitable niche); but simply to evade, subvert, or blunt its enforcement on them.
Corporate activities tend to focus much more on subverting the law, rather than subverting the law enforcement. Lobbying for softball legislation(in particular, if an industry supports federal regulation of something, that probably means that some state's law pisses them off, and they want it preempted), exploiting loopholes(spinning off shell subsidiaries as owners of all your severely polluted sites, say), moving from country to country to find the most favorable regulatory conditions, buying supreme court justices [reuters.com], and the like; are all about exploiting, and where possible modifying, the structure of the law.
The two aren't completely distinct, obviously, and both use a mix of tactics(not a few corporations have used outright violence from time to time, and most mafias have substantial interests in legal areas of business); but there behaviors are hardly identical, even if the results sometimes are.
What I find funny about all this (Score:4, Insightful)
So if you go to the middle east there are regularly news reports about how the west (possibly with some specifics), are dumping toxic/radioactive waste off the coast of Somalia/Egypt/Iraq/Pakistan/other muslim country with a coast. And we - in the west- tend to regard these as nonsense. But now we're finding out that we are getting toxic waste dumped off the coast of western countries - that seems like it might be tip of the iceberg. Somalia isn't nearly as likely as italy to catch these things (albeit rather slowly), who knows what we could find in the deep waters off countries that don't have the ability to patrol their own coasts.
Re:Corporations and the Mafia (Score:5, Insightful)
Just a fine? Sounds to me as though the ship(s) should have been forfeited and sold at auction.
Re:Typical psychopatic behaviour pattern (Score:3, Insightful)
Behaviours that were prevalent a few hundred years ago are now classified as sociopathic. That's the very definition of the word - a behaviour that is harmful to society. So plenty of normal human behaviours (violence, theft, rape, etc.) are classified as sociopathic, and I think that's a good thing.
Re:Corporations and the Mafia (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the Board of Directors should have been sold at auction.
Re:The mob in italy (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Corporations and the Mafia (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No moral fibre (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a classic No True Scotsman fallacy
1. All societies follow generally similar moral rules.
2. Any society that doesn't is not moral.
Re:Who is paying them? (Score:1, Insightful)
You can get _easily_ away with it, even when as in Italy nuclear plants are managed by (partially) state-controlled companies. One thing that many fail to realize is mafia controls a lot of legit business. A _lot_ of it. They can offer low prices and get a valid contract for disposal of toxic waste. The paperwork and all documents will look good and proper, at least in the first stages of the chain. As effective operations get sub-contracted things get more difficult to track and at some points documents are quite simply falsified. They are so far from origin nobody really cares and even if one or two officials have to be corrupted... so what?
Re:No moral fibre (Score:5, Insightful)
>>>a fourteen year old is unable to make an uncoerced decision to have sex
Why not? Lots of 14-year-olds have sex with their boyfriends or girlfriends every day. That's why teen pregnancy is so high (which provides proof they were adult individuals - children are sterile and can't get pregnant). I went to college with a 14 year old, and believe me, he was no dummy. He was fully capable of making adult decisions and handling the adult courseload.
You see numbers are arbitrary. We pick 16 or 18 or 21 or 25 (congress) or 35 (president) for the same reason we say 70% is a C, 80% is a B, and 90% is an A. It just makes life convenient to assign categories, but the choices are still arbitrary.
Re:No moral fibre (Score:5, Insightful)
The specific: a fourteen year old is unable to make an uncoerced decision to have sex with a 40 year old.
Hundreds of years ago society did not agree with the specific rule
Hundreds of years ago, 14 year olds would have been raised to be responsible for themselves and their families, to support their communities and nations, to hunt or raise their own food, and to make major decisions on their own.
Now, 14 year olds are raised to take tests and play videogames.
It isn't "the rule" that has changed.
Re:Connection to Somali piracy (Score:3, Insightful)
This doesn't justify piracy, but it does give lie to the notion that they lack a legitimate grievance and are simply out for money, and it helps to explain why they enjoy such support from Somalians.
Well, it means they had a grievance that lead them away from fishing. But once the crazy piracy $$ started rolling in (many times more than they ever made in the best of times fishing), it became all about the money.
Re:Connection to Somali piracy (Score:3, Insightful)
But once the crazy piracy $$ started rolling in (many times more than they ever made in the best of times fishing),
Really? Is that money more than the cost of all the illnesses and deaths [1] wrought by the toxic dumping, plus the present-discounted value of future fish and sea resources? If not, they haven't been made whole after what's been done to them.
Again, I want to make absolutely clear that I don't think piracy is the right response. They should have sent clan representatives to international bodies (UN, Arab League, EU, international sea organizations, etc.) to ask for respect for their coastal right before any large-scale violence.
But just the same, the poor motives of many of the pirates doesn't detract from their cause. If you believed a certain war was justified, would you change your opinion on learning that most soldiers fighting in it were just there for the soldier's pay and benefits?
[1]dangit, that nasty issue of "value of a human life" pops up again!
Re:Any justice though? (Score:3, Insightful)
Let me tell you a little ugly truth about about docks, dock workers unions and the mafia...