FEATURE

By RICHARD LANE
“*As the state arose out of the need to
hold class antagonisms in check, it is .. .
the state of the most powerful, eco-
nomically dominant class, which by virtue
thereof becomes also the dominant class
politically, and thus acquires new means

- of holding down and exploiting the op-—

pressed class ...”’
— Friedrich Engels, The Origin of
the Family, Private Property and
the State.

For seven years they poured toxic
liquid industrial wastes into its porous
glacial moraine. Parts of the waste dump
were like a sponge which is ready every
day for more. Then the dump was only
permitted to take non-liquid wastes. Re-
sidents close at hand worried about the
ground water which was known to run
100 feet below the site and eventually
made up their drinking water!

A few years later a retired Icoal chemi-
cal engineer warned that poisonous
wastes, dumped earlier, were still sus-
pended in the soil above the water supply
and that the bulldozing going on for the
continued land-filling was a surface from
which rain water could flush toxic chem-
icals into the aquifer (the water-bearing
zone beneath the earth’s surface).

Dumping, without authorization was
increased six-fold and government in-
spectors reported the site was ‘‘very

_ poor and unsatisfactory,’ that toxic

chemicals were running off the site, litter
was blowing off and clay was not being
used as a cover for dumped waste as

required.

This situation continued with the
government failing to enforce its own
order on the dumping company. In fact,
the government legal section’s first ac-
tion was not against the polluter but to
develop a possible defence against the
townspeople who were calling for action.

Thus the Scene Was Set

The Government had no proof of
over-dumping, they claimed. This was

because The Company had not installed

weight scales as it had been ordered to!

The Government suggested that the

community had no legal standing and

therefore they could ‘‘... howl all they

wanted to’’. If they felt so righteous .

about the issue ‘‘let them take the com-
pany to court.’’ The government
department responsible scheduled hear-
ings in the town since The Company had
demanded immediately to be allowed to
expand the amount of dumping to five
times as much as previously (remember
ey were already illegally over-dump-
ing).

The municipal government called a

public meeting to plan its next steps

against The Government, and to get a

mandate for action from the local com-

munity. The president of The Company
appeared at the meeting. He had for-
merly been a councillor and mayor of a
neighboring community and had for
many years worked in the area of waste

disposal. He was a member of the

government-in-power party; he assisted
the former and present leaders of the
party in their election campaigns. He got
the company to donate $35,000 to the
party. He was mentor of other local and
city politicians. He assisted in a large
foreign waste disposal. company to

achieve national status. He was made

president of their dump subsidiary, The

Company.

The dumping of industrial waste is carried out without regard for ecological damage or the
- health of local residents.

At the town meeting he strode to the
front of the auditorium and grabbed the
microphone. He told the angy towns-
people that The Company was not going
to be put out of business, the landfill site
was doing what he had claimed it would.
He said he would fight that town to the
highest jurisdictional court if they did not
mind their buisiness. The president knew
his position with the government well —
The Company won on all fronts! Ap-
proval was granted for another dumping
site near at hand and the expansion at the
town dump: was also agreed to. The
Government testified favorably about
The Company, in spite of its own inspec-
tors’ evidence of blatant violations.

m9 Town Told: Mind Own Business

The government, embarrassed by
further complaints because of its toler-
ance of the The Company’s extreme vio-
lations, finally laid 23 charges against
The Company.

Three years later The Government’s
lawyers failed to appear in court and all
charges were dropped. The Government
laid 12 new charges and The Company,
in collusion with the government,
pleaded guilty. The fine — $15,000 —
was equal to the extra revenue from a
week of overdumping.

The same year The Government was
up for re-election and a month before the
election day, the ‘‘Morning News”’ head-
line story read: ‘‘$35,000 donation to
government to back bid for garbage-fill
permit.”

The leader of the government party
called this ‘‘below the belt journalism”’
so close to the election date. He said
although he knew there was nothing to
the story he would call a judicial inquiry
immediately.

Prestigious, Impeccable

The Company president also said
there was nothing to it. He had consulted
a prestigious and impeccable law office
before he allowed The Company to make
the donation. It turned out that the pre-
stigious and impeccable law firm was
owned by an adviser to the leader of The
Government party. During the hearings
it was learned that one of the partners in
the ownership of the dump was an Italian
national who was breaking Italian law by
owning foreign property. The judge al-
lowed The Company president to not
name the man in public because ‘‘. . . the

Fae et ER ee ET a ee pie eh ee, ee Pe he es Oe, OE ee ee

Italian law, was the product of increasing
pressure of the Italian Communist Party,
which was pledged to overthrow estab-
lished government in that country.”

The president testified that the $35,000
donation to the party in power was to
help ‘‘.. . stem erosion toward socialism
... in my opinion the party in power is
acting in our (The Company’s) best in-
terest.’’ The inquiry found the donation
was legitimate one-half a year after the
election.

Five ‘years later evidence uncovered
by women from the dump municipality
indicated that miscarriages, bowel-re-
lated disorders, cancer of the colon, and
other sicknesses, possibly related to pol-
luted water, occurred at a much higher
rate among citizens near the dump than
the national average. They presented
their findings to The Government, which
claimed they were unscientific.

The Government, which had con-
doned chemical dumping 20 years ear-
lier, finally did a study of the water in the
neighborhood. Fifty metals, pesticides,
and lethal compounds were determined
quantitatively. The results showed no
pollution of the water. ‘‘If there was any-
thing wrong in the area it had nothing to
to with the water,’’ the government
spokesman concluded.

A further expansion of the waste dump
was approved.

Samples Not Scientific

A little later, a TV reporter slipped into
the site and took samples from a drainage
ditch. The samples were found to contain
PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyl oils),
hexachlorobenzenes and lindane, all po-
tent organochlorine carcinogens
(cancer-causing). The government
claimed the results meant nothing — the
samples were not taken scientifically.
Later The Company, in routine monitor-
ing, found high levels of PCBs at 60 feet
down in an observation well on the site.

Again alarmed, the citizens raised
money to have the water evaluated.
Water samples from wells near the site
were found to contain organophalides,
aliphotic compounds, toluenes, and
polyaromatics. A regional medical
officer shut down the wells near the site.

The Government again came under
heavy criticism and again tested the
water which was reported to be non pol-
luted. It came to light, however, that

several unusual results in this series of
determinations, were ‘‘covered up”’ by
new tests which of course recorded zero
the second time around. (Lindane, found
in the first test in one sample, was said to

have been contamination of the sampling ©

bottle by the collector, benzopyrene and
napthylamine, a hundred times above
acceptable levels, had, it was claimed,
come from cigaret smoke, PCBs found,
came from contaminated glassware!)

Finally, in 1982, The Government an-
nounced the dump would be shut down
.In 1983, not because there was any real
problem, but ‘“‘to reassure the com-
munity’’. The Company said it would
appeal the closure, and suggested that it
would be willing to close down in 1985.
The Government and the local govern-
ment accepted the 1985 closure date.

Meanwhile, The Company had ac-
quired a huge dumping area west of the
dump community and had also received
approval to take half a million tonnes of
Big City garbage. Negotiations for a
long-term contract were under way with
the big city council.

A public service union investigated the ~

goings on and in a brief to the big city
revealed the scam. They stated that if a
foreign corporation, The Company, can
get hold, single-handedly of all garbage-
dumping facilities — as was happening
— the loss of control would result in run-
away costs. Big City chould own the
dump itself.

Surprisngly, The Company president
came out in support of these findings and

proposed the sale of the dump to Big
City. He wanted $45-million for the site. °
Estimators ranged their estimates from —

$5- to $25-million. Big City settled for
$40-million. Another ripoff?

Epilogue — the Real Names

What is this nightmare?

Who are the actors?

This story is not about Love Canal, the
Niagara frontier or other scandalous
dumping grounds in the United States.
The dump sites are in Ontario, White-
church-Stouffville and near Maple. The
government which fights its citizens in
support of The Company is, of course,
the Conservative government of Bill
Davis. The manipulating president of
The Company is Norman Goodhead,
friend of Davis, mentor of (unelected
Metro Mayor) Paul Godfrey. The U.S.
company Goodhead helped and worked
for is Waste Management Incorporated
(WMI), the biggest waste disposal com-
pany in Canada and the world, with a
billion-dollar annual income. Eddie
Goodman, Conservative and Davis ad-
viser is the owner of the law firm that
okayed the political donation to the Con-
servatives. Mr. Justice Hughes is the
anti-communist judge. CUPE is the
union that blew the whistle on the ripoff.

* * *

The state is an instrument of class
domination. The state utilizes two
methods to preserve ruling-class domi-
nation, force and propaganda. The state
“consists of special bodies of armed men
who have at their disposal prisons ...”’
The state’s ideologues, economists,
teachers, philosophers, parliamentarians
and media directors teach the inevit-
abilitiy, the permanence, the justice of
the appropriation of the social surplus by
a minority. In more than one way the
garbage it spreads has cancerous con-
sequences.

Richard Lane is the pseudonym of a
working scientist.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE, JANUARY 11, 1984 e 7

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