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The Stupidity of My Local Officials

Posted on May 4, 2009 by Ray Watkins
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City of Charleston

NOTICE TO PUBLIC

Termination of Residential Recycling Drop-off Bins

Due to Limited Resources & Availability of Local Recycling Alternatives.

Please contact Local Waste Collectors offering curbside recycling services…

I loaded up my truck with two weeks of recycling the other day and Bear and I headed out to do our civic duty, only to find that the dumpsters were missing. A few years ago the city moved them without much public notice and, with a little digging, I found them again, so I figured it had happened again. This is just part of living in this strangely dysfunctional Midwest town.

When went to my “progressive” city’s website, however, I found that the recycling program had ended. The country goes one way, making at least some small strides towards sanity, and the bozos in my town go in the opposite direction. It makes no sense at all to have these private companies collecting garbage in the first place, and now they’ve cut off public support of recycling.

Here, the market still rules, despite all evidence of its inefficiency and lack of ethics. I’d like to know more about the local businesses who benefit from this change. My guess is that they are either big contributors to our local politicians or closely associated with them in some way or some combination of both. Market ideology always sounds disinterested but is always very much interested.

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Categories: Composition, Language, Writing
Notice: This work is licensed under a BY-NC-SA. Permalink: The Stupidity of My Local Officials
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    Get my book at Southern Illinois University Press, Amazon, or Powell's Books.

     

    The C.C.C.C webpage, A Taste for Language: Literacy, Class, and English Studies includes a short podcast interview with me along with links to these reviews:

    ... by Victor Villanueva in CCC 62.4 (June 2011)
    ... by Chanon Adsanatham in Teaching English in the Two-Year College 38.3 (March 2011)
    ... by Scott McLemee in Inside Higher Education (17 Feb 2010)

    Note: you need to be a member of NCTE, and a subscriber to the relevant journal, to read the reviews by Villanueva and Adsanatham; the review by McLemee is available to the general public.

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