In Tunisia, where the Arab Spring began with the self-immolation of a man fed up with his corrupt government, massive garbage hills grow, dumps maintained by a French firm, Pizzorno Environnement, that collects approximately $45,000 a day dumping a daily average of 3,000 tons of waste.  Landfills must have a termination date, when no more garbage is added, or they become open wounds polluting surrounding land, making life for nearby residents intolerable, distributing stench and windblown detritus.
     From The Guardian, May 13, 2014: "In el-Attar, the stench of rubbish chokes the air; it sticks in your throat and permeates your clothing...Respiratory illness is rife."
     At one mega-dump in Jbel Borj Chakir, waste of all types are deposited together.  "Residents and those who make their living scavenging the dump have reported finding blood bags and fetuses..."
     The various kinds of waste produce leachate, the liquid beneath compressed garbage.
     Kamel Marouani, "a former refuse worker...was diagnosed with lung cancer in August 2012."  He "worked at Jbel Borj Chakir for ten years, the past five for...Pizzorno...One of his tasks was to work in the ten leachate basins that surround Jbel Borj Chakir.  He was required to wade through the often chest-high, reeking, black leachate--building dams or clearing away the thick foam that forms on the surface of the basin."
     There's money to be made in maintaining a never-closing dump.  Pizzorno, gathering in $45,000 a day while also billing the Tunisian government for "the costs of trucks and labor," is rewarded as it makes thousands of lives unlivable, according to what is normally considered a livable existence.  Those who have to raise children amid mountains of sickness and death-producing unmanaged garbage and leachate lakes must inspire no one making money from Pizzorno's garbage dumping business to consider the vile criminality they're engaged in.
     We live, though, in an age of corporations as people.  When a corporation's rectum shits out an endless flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, poisoning coastlines and marshes, killing wildlife, giving disease and long-term health problems to human residents, and then has the gall to make sunny public relations advertisements informing us that "the Gulf is back!" we should have the right to kick the corporation's testicles into its throat.
     Trains carrying oil and natural gas derail in America as often as trains tend to derail--once is too many times, and on average it's more than once a year.  When a train flops over by or near your town and burns for days and nights, do the CEO and corporate officials of the organization responsible feel the real effects of that accident?  Do they breathe the fumes; do they get cancer from it twenty-five years down the line?  My opinion of them, along with the garbage brokers at Pizzorno, is contemptuous and judgmental, ignoring the likelihood that such rich "folks" are nice to their pets, spouses, children and grandchildren, put on a good dinner spread, and give great parties.  They also profit from the long slow way irresponsible corporations and governments kill people.
     "Corporations are people, my friend!" the campaigning Mitt Romney shouted at a heckler in 2012.
     Legally, he was correct.  Corporate lawyers and corporate-influenced judges made this fantasy the law, but didn't ask the logical next question: If a corporation is a person, and people die and become ill because of the actions of that corporation, shouldn't the corporation be prosecuted as a murderer, and proscribed, or eliminated, as a deadly threat to society?
     When a human being commits murder, he or she, when caught, is punished, usually.  When a corporation commits murder that's money in the bank.

                                                                             Vic Neptune