Our entire nation has collectively lost its shit:
A Valley community’s decision to change the way trash is picked up provided further proof of how deeply the nation’s anti-government, “tea party”-fueled sentiment is running.
A decision by the Fountain Hills Town Council to hire a single trash hauler and begin a curbside recycling program has been met with angry protests from residents who accuse town leaders of overstepping their bounds and taking a leap toward socialism.
Some even likened it to “Obamacare” for garbage, calling it “trashcare.”
An Arizona website affiliated with the Alexandria, Va.,-based Campaign for Liberty, azc4l.com, features an intimidating, cigar-chomping man standing in front of the town’s famous fountain next to a story about the issue.
And last week, a flier was circulated around Fountain Hills with an ominous icon and the phrase, “The Hills Will Have Eyes,” and that claimed the “Fountain Hills Green Police” checked residents’ garbage and recyclables, and as a result, “you are wanted for questioning.”
On Thursday, a divided council approved a five-year contract with Allied Waste Services to be the single hauler and begin a recycling program. Residents currently can choose among five haulers and the town has no curbside recycling.
***Councilwoman Ginny Dickey, who also supported the measure, said she felt that her motivations were especially questioned because she is the only Democratic council member and worked for seven years at the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality.
“It seems counterintuitive, but in order for this proposal to pass, I believe I had to downplay the benefits of recycling,” she said. “When ideology prevents rational discussion of a really pretty mundane topic, trash, there is no perspective. Everything is suspect, which paralyzes us.”
This is how the American empire will end. With us rioting in the streets over the right to choose a trash collecter, while the top 5% laugh all the way to the bank.
Zifnab
/facedesk
FlipYrWhig
Isn’t Arizona basically only inhabitable at all because of large-scale government projects to irrigate it? Or am I thinking of Nevada?
BR
Actually, oddly I agree that cities shouldn’t have uniform trash pickup, if only because I think we should move towards having zero waste as individuals. (Reusable bags for food, no consumer goods, and composting.)
Bulworth
Until the tyranny of recycling ends, we will never be Free!
themann1086
@FlipYrWhig: No you’re right. As always, conservatives are the biggest hypocrites.
ETA: I actually overheard this argument last year when poll watching our local elections. The other Republican poll watcher was like “are you crazy?”
Steve
When I argue the constitutionality of the individual mandate, I point out that there is no real difference between paying taxes to the government and having the government contract with a private trash hauler, and paying a trash removal fee directly to the trash hauler. I think I may have to find a new example.
eric
i would worry more about a 5-year deal with one company than i would the dangers of soshulist recycling, but then i am not a member of the WSJ editorial board.
BR
@FlipYrWhig:
Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, parts of Colorado, parts of Utah, and Southern California.
Bob L
A man’s trash is the foundation upon which his castle is built.
Meanwhile I predict in a year these same people will be screaming about the trash in the streets.
Michael
I can tell you how it all winds up with all that “freedom”.
In the hills of Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia, you have a time-honored, freedom-loving practice of dumping your shit down the slopes and into the creeks, ‘coz it might result in an expense to properly dispose of things. That way, the entirety of the outdoors becomes your personal dump, and will remain so until Jesus comes back, which Scripture tells you will be “any time now”.
Stevious
Can you imagine if we *didn’t* have an interstate highway system right now, what a nightmare it would be to get it implemented?
Butch
This post actually will be on topic in a minute; there’s a local website called Pinecam (because the community – it’s a rural area of Colorado and not really a “town” – is named Pine) and if you want some nutcase right wing ranting you will go to the Pinecam forum site called The Study, which is a board for political, um, “discussion.”
Anyway, one of the local county boards recently proposed a curbside trash hauling service; the response was unbelievable and yes, if you checked The Study, it was met with outraged shrieks of “socialism.” I didn’t realize that the right to haul one’s own trash to the dump was such a sacred thing.
Bulworth
Has the Federal Reserve, progressive income tax, and 17th Amendment been repealed yet?
trollhattan
@BR:
Also, too, eastern Washington, eastern Oregon, southern Idaho….
But the New Deal was soclalizm.
debbie
Good. Let this be a relatively benign example to them just how stupid their governing philosophy really is.
chopper
just hire whatever firm collected the trash in galt’s gulch.
stuckinred
@trollhattan: Chinatown
General Stuck
Wonder what would happen if dems came out for ending abortion and welfare, privatizing SS, and banning masturbation while legalizing lynching. I don’t know whose head would explode first or loudest, the left or right, but it would be entertaining and have the added benefit of getting on with the civil war to straighten shit out.
this is snark and gallows humor for our delicate flowers.
thomas Levenson
@FlipYrWhig: It’s much broader than that. Red states live on the largesse of the rest of us, and think that they are therefore “self sufficient” and the only real Americans.
Large sections of the country would by crying for their mommies without the Feds, and cash infusions from actually successful parts of the country.
A taste of what’s at that link:
Dave
This assfuckery is happening in Arizona?? Wow, how shocking…
Every day I become more and more convinced that maybe we all just should have gone our separate ways in 1860. Then these asshats could have their little Randian paradise while the rest of us build a functioning society.
fasteddie9318
@Stevious:
Holy shit, Trotsky, what do you have against the right of every free American to choose whether or not to drive on a paved road? Why don’t you just toss us all in a goddamn FEMA camp while you’re building your so-called “interstate” (so much for federalism, I guess) highway system? I’m sure it will come in real handy when you start busing in Mexican cartel gunmen to take all our jobs and money.
cleek
i love the comments. all the wingnuts are shrieking about the “monopoly” of having one company handle the service. when it’s actually just a simple 5-year contract, won and awarded via competitive bidding – just like everything else a local govt does.
Morbo
The Hills? The Valley? I had no idea The Oblongs was real, but given the story it all makes sense now.
EEH
This makes me so glad that I live in the soshulist city of Denver where the city not only still has its own fleet of trucks to pick up the trash from the dumpster in my alley but also tyrannizes me with the recycling program it has going.
Jay C
Actually, John, this sort of shit really ought NOT to be surprising – we’re a funny* people; big issues of national importance (like the economy, wars, etc.) often get shrugged off, or ignored: petty stuff like trash collection – maybe because it literally affects us “where we live” – can engender passions and near-riots: and the smaller the locale, the more het up people get. Old news.
But the recent teabagger nonsense, I think – in the news, everywhere has just inflamed (and provided a new label for) the local assclowns who would just protest everything anyway – a la the fools in Colorado (?) who made a campaign issue about letting their county roads revert to dirt, rather than have to depend on “government” to pave them.
*in the sense of “weird”, not “humorous”
Poopyman
Who? How many people in this group?
It takes maybe a dozen people to tie up a council meeting this way. I wish the paper had said more than “two tea party groups”. Because I suspect there’s maybe a couple of dozen out of 25,316 (Wikipedia) people.
Assholes.
Just Some Fuckhead
Time to start deporting these asshats to Somalia.
MikeJ
Arizona’s got that giant hole in the ground to throw stuff in. It’s public land, why shouldn’t they be allowed to fill the Grand Canyon with garbage?
Poopyman
@FlipYrWhig: Fountain Hills has yer friggin’ water right here.
DB
Gotta love right-wingers. They’ll vote for warrantless wiretaps but shit their pants that the government is going to dig through their empty Jimmy Dean breakfast sausage wrappers.
Off-topic (DODT), but this is brilliant. I don’t like “the president should say this” posts in general, but this one is about a strategy not just optics.
TaMara (BHF)
It’s Arizona. ’nuff said.
BTW, AZ, I want my water back. Think I’ll ask Hickenlooper to make that a priority. Individual state’s rights and all. Or at the very least, make you pay a fair price for it.
EDIT: I have no idea if their water comes from us, but again I point out in the 21st century, facts don’t seem to matter.
Alice Blue
Jesus Christ, I don’t know what to say. My mom lives in northwest Georgia (the reddest part of this red state) and no one ran screaming into the streets when her town instituted a recycling program. Is Arizona’s “dry heat” kicking in? Or are southwest winghuts more insane than southeast wingnuts?
ThresherK
@Michael: But when all those Appaclachian mines are dumping their shit downhill, with a wink and a nod from the elected officials who “know what’s good for ’em”, why do the locals have to be the ones to be noble about proper waste disposal? (The sad part is I’m only half-kidding.)
And if you think that’s funny, you should have seen CBS’ Sunday Morning piece with Ben Stein’s grandson touting “micronations”, way out in international borders, as a laboratory to find out what works for self-governance and (supposed) self-reliance. They’re like gated communities you can only reach by yacht.
Rommie
And there’s enough people who think they’ll be part of the 5 percent at the endgame to prevent a reaction. When it finally becomes clear who’s going to be in the 95 group, it’ll be too late to stop it.
So we’re getting more and more of this kind of weird – people who have little chance of being a 5’er acting like it’s a sure thing they’ll be in the Club. It’s the flip side of a Religious jack-wagon who poo-poos it because they are “guaranteed” to have a ticket to JesusLand.
celticdragonchick
It seems a relative of mine on the city council came to the same sort of epiphany that I did. (Dickey is a very rare last name from Scotland and we are all related to some degree. Much of my family in California leans heavily Republican, so it is fun to see an outlier who is a Democrat in elective office)
celticdragonchick
@Alice Blue:
Arizona has a lot of wealthy retirees who have gone reactionery, while in Georgia everybody knows someone who has had to go looking for cans to recycle to make a few extra bucks.
GregB
First they came for # 2 plastic bottles.
Paris
licensed to kill time
This is bizarre. You know, I was watching a segment on CNN Int’l this morning about the trash problem in Haiti-there are huge mounds of smoldering garbage lining the streets and rivers and it’s just everywhere and no one seems to be able to do anything about it. I bet they would LOVE to have a government contracted single hauler.
These paranoid peeps worry about the stupidest stuff. “The Hills Will Have Eyes”, jeebus h. stupidicus americanus.
Citizen_X
Garbage collection is theft!
John Bird
“Trashcare”?
A defining part of our discourse nowadays is how dissociated the buzz words have become.
“Obama” + “health care” = “Obamacare”
“Trash collection” + ???? = “trashcare”
So this trash collection is like health care? It involves the President somehow? Health care is bad? I’m really at a loss.
Alice Blue
@celticdragonchick: True ’nuff. I remember my childhood summers when my friends and I would go around looking for glass “co-cola” bottles to bring back to the grocery store for popsicle/comic book/no particular reason money. I guess you could say recycling is just one of those ol’ southern traditions.
ThresherK
@Alice Blue: It’s not a Southern-only tradition. I was in college in Massachusetts when the bottle bill passed. There was a notable decrease in accumulation of certain types of garbage strewn near places where collegians were rumored to drink cases of cheap, cheap beer.
Zach
Here’s another example; shorter NRO: Obama attends Indian state dinner marking the celebration of Diwali. Robert Costa’s take: “The White House press pool, and the president, live it up in India.” Candles and flowers are common Diwali decorations/symbols. Next, “Obama swoons over women dancing before him with intricately painted hands.”
Of course, I seriously doubt Costa posts this to lend credence to the $200 million/day fantasy. The American taxpayer should not be on the hook for any diplomatic mission (to a nuclear power engaged in a cold war with our uneasy-essential ally whose economy is increasingly enmeshed with America’s) that includes such extravagance!
ruemara
Praying for the asteroid. Yeah, I might get hit too, but we’re too dumb to live most days.
ann
It’s not who picks up their garbage….it’s the fact of having to recycle. Recycle = Al Gore. Also, he’s fat too.
JenJen
Hey Cole, have you seen this?
Republicans sweeten offer to Manchin
Any thoughts from on the ground in WV?
John Bird
@John Bird:
You know, looking at this again, I’m struck by one source of rhetorical strength here.
The people who opposed ‘Obamacare’ associate ‘health care’ with the left wing – because many of them don’t actually have health care.
peej
I’d be happy if the private trash haulers that my home owner’s association contracts with would deign to pick up all my trash. They refuse to pick up the used kitty litter (which is double-bagged) and I have to haul it off to the county trash facility. #*($&(# private enterprise!!
peej
@TaMara (BHF): I know Phoenix’s water comes from the Colorado River…it’s piped down from northern AZ and it’s the worst-tasting water I have ever encountered.
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
@FlipYrWhig: Actually, both are only inhabitable on a large scale that way.
Citizen_X
Hey John, I was also going to post about what JenJen just mentioned.
So it looks like Manchin is already staking out a position as our newest Senate drama queen, before even being seated. I so look forward to the breathless speculating on what Nelson/Lieberman/Manchin will do in regards to this or that Democratic issue.
JenJen
@Citizen_X: Gotta love that mealy-mouthed response from a Manchin advisor too, no?
Ugh. I’m thinking this is gonna suck.
Elie
Don’t laugh. Our county repealed an ordinance requiring folks to maintain their septic systems and pay for repairing them if they failed the test. Hoards of tea party morans showed up at the County Council meeting and their goat roper county councilmen repealed the ordinance. They apparently want the right to live in their own shit, which is just fine to me as long as they sink a fence around their perimeter such that it prevents their shit from exiting onto the waterways or contaminating our ground water..
Bunch of fucking stupid hicks in some of rural WA state. I think we should cordon off the southeastern states and put all the rubes there together with their own stupid kind.
MattR
@cleek:
But of course there is complete silence when Halliburton gets awarded a monoplistic defense contract without an open bidding process.
Personally, I look forward to the day when all soldiers get to choose the manufacturer of their guns, when Air Force pilots get to choose who makes the planes that they fly in, etc.
Free market rulez!!
gocart mozart
@fasteddie9318:
Do you know who else built an interstate highwas system?
aimai
I’d like to point out that you might have to have lived in a place where trash hauling is done on a competitive “if I feel like paying for it” basis, like, say, Kathmandu, Nepal to see what a terrible idea it is to leave each homeowner/renter at the mercy of a new contract with a different company as he or her wishes. Open sewers, rotting trash left on random street corners or in heaps in building courtyards, rats and feral dogs everywhere…etc…etc…etc..
Basically trash collection is like public health care: a healthy community can’t leave it up to the individual to choose or reject (for example) trash collection or even how trash is collected. You have to have community standards (closed or open baskets? day of the week? time of day? time that barrells can be put out? recycling?) because if one or more people opts out you get rot, rats, other vermin, and a potential spread of trash and disease as well as unsightly dumping and hazardous waste left out on the street.
A city or a town is like a body: it has arteries, consumes and excretes–it has needs that have to be tended on a daily and even hourly basis if it is to work properly. The totally absurd “individualist” ideology makes as much sense as insisting that every cell in the human body perform every other job with kidney cells also responsible for vision.
Making a single, five year, decision to award a contract to one or more companies makes total sense and prevents free riders from refusing to pay for trash collection and putting everyone elses’s health and property values at risk.
aimai
aimai
I’d like to point out that you might have to have lived in a place where trash hauling is done on a competitive “if I feel like paying for it” basis, like, say, Kathmandu, Nepal to see what a terrible idea it is to leave each homeowner/renter at the mercy of a new contract with a different company as he or her wishes. Open sewers, rotting trash left on random street corners or in heaps in building courtyards, rats and feral dogs everywhere…etc…etc…etc..
Basically trash collection is like public health care: a healthy community can’t leave it up to the individual to choose or reject (for example) trash collection or even how trash is collected. You have to have community standards (closed or open baskets? day of the week? time of day? time that barrells can be put out? recycling?) because if one or more people opts out you get rot, rats, other vermin, and a potential spread of trash and disease as well as unsightly dumping and hazardous waste left out on the street.
A city or a town is like a body: it has arteries, consumes and excretes–it has needs that have to be tended on a daily and even hourly basis if it is to work properly. The totally absurd “individualist” ideology makes as much sense as insisting that every cell in the human body perform every other job with kidney cells also responsible for vision.
Making a single, five year, decision to award a contract to one or more companies makes total sense and prevents free riders from refusing to pay for trash collection and putting everyone elses’s health and property values at risk.
aimai
AnderJ
Simpsons did it!
Gozer
Wow…they would really lose their shit in my town. We are required to recycle by city ordinance.
Sort of off topic, but the other day I saw a Prius with a Pat Toomey sticker on the back…
BobS
@Elie: I wish ours had an ordinance to repeal. I live in an agricultural/resort county with miles of Lake Huron shoreline. A substantial number of lakefront homes on postage stamp lots were built before the county had any septic code and consequently have substandard systems. Attempts in our township to implement a transfer-of-ownership inspection and (if necessary) repair or replacement program were predictably met with squeals from the ‘property rights’ folks, many of them the same people who piss and moan about water quality in the lake and complain about local, state, and federal government inaction.
They take their inspiration from the farmers, overwhelmingly Republican, who are collectively the biggest welfare recipients in the county (not only through federal programs like price supports but also locally through the intricate network of county drains that allow them to drain their heavily fertilized fields into Lake Huron) and yet bitch about taxes and deficits.
themann1086
@Gozer: Thanks, this week hasn’t been bad enough as it is. Ugh.
Mnemosyne
This is the town where my parents live.
/facepalm
Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise that G may not be able to get Christmas off after all …
suzanne
Sigh.
This is in my district (though not my city, thank FSM—we have recycling). Our new Congresscritter, David Schweikert, is from Fountain Hills. It’s even worse than Scottsdale. Seriously. I just wonder when the Tea Partiers are going to come out with a whole pro-kitten-punching platform.
suzanne
The one thing I just want to point out, ’cause this is my backyard and all, is that the Phoenix-area municipalities are all really different, and Fountain Hills is basically only super-rich old white people. Other areas of the Valley are much more sane.
Mnemosyne
@John Bird:
I hate to tell you, but they do have health care — Medicare. And they want to keep the government out of their Medicare.
If I facepalm any harder, I may knock myself out.
Catsy
We use Allied Waste here in Bellevue, WA. Trash collection is like clockwork–each neighborhood has a trash day (ours is Thursday) and it’s the one day out of the week where everyone brings out their trash, recycling and yard waste bins, and knows not to park on the street. The rest of the week we don’t ever hear a peep from the collection vehicles.
I like our socialized waste collection just fine, kthx.
debbie
@MattR:
Speaking of Halliburton, GWB said that when Cheney was yelling at him for refusing to pardon Scooter Libby, he tossed a metaphor at Bush, asking how he could possibly leave a soldier out on the battlefield. Funny coming from someone so opposed to ever being there himself.
Elie
@BobS:
You got it man. Here too.
Not only septic stuff but the lawn chemicals that people want to allow to run off into the Bay along with brake fluid and other noxious automotive chemicals. Hey, not to worry. Why the hell are so many frogs and other amphibians as well as fish, having increased incidence of limb and other malformations? Beats me, but here, have some more herbicide with your breakfast cereal. Yummm, the American Way…
Elie
@Mnemosyne:
But at least you will be out of pain. The psychic pain of this just won’t stop for me. I am literally so uncomfortable that I squirm when I deal with this stuff and I just had to stop going to some of the public forums for these discussions… I was mad/sick for days..
Elie
@aimai:
aimai — we are living without civics or a sense of the common good, common benefit or welfare. Hopefully, its a cycle and we will emerge through some strange alchemy of realizing consequence and waking up from the mememe century. Dunno, but its not going to lead to anything but continued dismantling and fraying of our national community and the actual quality of life for all the individuals who cannot see beyond the tip of their noses…
Alex S.
Heh, it had to be in Arizona.
libdevil
@Steve:
There’s one big difference. If you pay taxes to the government which then contracts a service, the government is pooling resources and has leverage to negotiate the most favorable terms (and, could even provide the service itself, if the private sector won’t do so in an acceptable fashion). If you are required to pay a fee directly to a private business, that business has all the leverage and will ‘negotiate’ the most favorable terms for itself.
Despite decades of Republican cries of fraud, waste and abuse in government programs, they never seem to be able to achieve any cost savings by eliminating those drains on the system. Because it’s all part of the Big Lie. Government programs can be massively more efficient than private business, if they wish to be, with no profit motive or need to compete for market share. Witness Medicare with its 1-2% overhead (and 0% profit) vs. private health insurance with 10-30% overhead and profit taking.
Pasquinade
From a FReeper:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2623731/posts?page=4#4
MattR
@Pasquinade:
This is all we need to know. We could have saved ourselves the first 73 comments.
Lori
Go to any developing country, that’s the way it’s done. Garbage clogging the stormwater drains in the street (and home and street floods after the rains), rats eating the trash and spreading diseases, and piles of garbage illegally dumped on open lots since there are so many garbage companies no one knows who did it. I recently lived in Guatemala for a year, in a place that had all that… after each rain you’d see the local shopkeepers literally shovelling the dirt from in front of their stores, that the flooded streets had laid there. Republicans want the US to revert to a developing country state where there are few public services. Like many developing countries where if you’re lucky enough to get running water it isn’t going to be drinkable, but people who can afford bottled water get potable water delivered. Children and old people dying of diarreah from unclean water, and the rest of us occasionally having a bout with the shits due to the same. And with less regulation each shopkeeper can decide how high to build a sidewalk outside their place… so some have a sidewalk 4 feet high, some 2 inches high, and others have big holes in their sidewalk… so people just all walk in the cobblestone street, because the sidewalks are too dangerous plus hard to walk on with all those height changes and potholes. Recently came back from developing countries and people are trying to turn my country into one.
Comrade Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
“Gotta love that mealy-mouthed response from a Manchin advisor too, no?”
Nah, he’s putting out the rumors (or not squashing them) to get a better offering from Reid in terms of committee assignments.
If he shifts, he might shift in 2012, when there’s 23 Dems up for reelection/10 GOP: unless Obama has a good year, the Senate might shift. No reason for him to shift this year.
rlmurkin
You will only get my glass & cans when you pry them from my cold, dead fingers!
Doc
you can NOT fix stupid.
mike
I used to live in the backward state of Arizona. In my area you had to make your own trash arrangements. The arrangement many of my freedom-loving neighbors preferred was to haul their trash out into the desert or pile it in their yards. Some had these constantly smoldering stinkholes they threw it into. The most creative ones would take the big items like fridges, TV’s, water heaters and stuff out into the desert and shoot them full of holes.
Arizona is a primitive place and the best thing for the rest of the nation would be to TURN OFF all the free water they get from the government-provided dams and canals.
Chango
Cole:
You’ve been thoroughly schooled by Radley Balko. Perhaps you could take the euphemism literally and go to school by reading his response. I suppose it’s too much to ask that you learn something.
T13
Yeah, Balko pretty much kicked your back-side Cole.
Libertas
Balko > Cole.
NathanS
Meanwhile trash riots across Europe continue to dump tons and tons of waste into the streets. Yes, more efficient, but at what? Paying unions for not doing shit.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1323500/France-strikes-10-000-TONS-waste-pile-streets-Marseilles.html