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China Says Serious Polluters Will Get the Death Penalty
formaggio writes "According to the Xinhua News Agency, the Chinese government is now allowing courts to punish those who commit environment crimes with the death penalty. The new judicial interpretation comes in the wake of several serious environmental problems that have hit the country over the last few months, including dangerous levels of air pollution, a river full of dead pigs, and other development projects that have imperiled public health."
Good. About time someone did this.
Fucking ay about time.
...off with your head!
Seriously, China? WTF. Going back to medieval values here? Executing people for pollution?
They should be punished, but death is a bit much.
[nt]
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Boy, I sure hope they catch and kill the worst pollution offender in the entire country: the Chinese government.
In Communist China, pollution kills you (literally)!
I'll bet a truckload of dead pigs that it won't result in any measurable improvement in China's environmental quality. China's environmental crisis has been brought about with the blessings of the Communist Party. Expecting them to now fix it by executing a few factory owners is very naïve indeed.
I imagine this would be reserved for people dumping tons of toxic chemicals into the local water supply on a daily basis. Provided the right person is prosecuted and not some joe schmoe that was thrown under the bus, I like this idea. I'd like it even more if it was extended to senoir bank employees and politicians in equal measure.
You know why they want to execute 'em, they can then sell their organs to wealthy Americans.
The Chinese can't even effectively fine polluters and now there's talk of capital punishment for polluting? What next? Decimate school children when their class average isn't up to par because the instructor's scolding has no effect?
There are several key problems here that are the real underlying problems: 1) the Chinese government is not unified in their vision of the environment and I'm talking differences spanning across provincial & federal levels as well as between federal ministries. 2) they collectively refuse to accept that their abuse of natural resources is part of their winning equation against other capitalist nation states and, as a consequence, no one can talk about how this will hurt their bottom line even though several parts of the government realize it (we pay them to import our pollution). 3) there is widespread corruption at all levels which is why fining is ineffective -- it's so bad that I'm sure if capital punishment is meted out, it will be given to the fork lift operator who dumped those pig carcasses in the river after his supervisor told him to "make them disappear or you'll disappear." No one up the chain will be held accountable and if they are, they need only grease some local wheels and they can consider themselves shielded.
It's disgusting and it's why I tell people where they can shove it when they complain that the EPA is destroying jobs. It's not perfect but we have to cling to things that kind of work when so many other "solutions" are abysmal failures.
The Chinese government is threatening to kill polluters but they can't see that they're part of and dependent on and benefiting from a system of habitual polluting. Increasing the impact of the punishment is a poor and maybe even more detrimental substitution for actually bringing to justice the true criminals up and down their ranks.
My work here is dung.
China - now with rivers full of the bodies of the worst polluters instead of pigs... Or factories powered by the burning corpses of problem polluters.
The environment can now plan the victim card only if it chooses to. Does the environment have the capacity to choose such an action? Really.
It must really suck to be the operator of a coal power plant in China these days.
Not just environmental stuff. What about the wallstreet guys that stole or in some cases hundreds of millions of dollars.
Death penalty. Think about it like this.... that is the life savings of how many people? Guy robs a liquor store for 100 dollars and gets 20 years. Guy that steals 100 million gets 5 years in a minimum security prison.
Many cases of fraud, theft, vandalism, etc need to carry stiffer sentences. While of course other sentences need to be reduced radically. All the drug related crimes need to be looked again. Consensual adults and all that.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
In Communist China, company executives are held responsible for their actions. Meanwhile, in capitalist/fascist USA, the worst that happens is they're fired with a massive golden parachute. Maybe instead, we should get them a literal chunk of gold shaped like a parachute and shove them out of airplane.
American legal system: You're doing it wrong.
Driving should result in having your hands chopped off?
China is saving more lives abandoning communism and heavy socialism, as we are witnessing. Would that the west keep that in mind as it rockets in the wrong direction, living off past glories of economic freedom.
Murder people? You've gotta be kidding. There's a reason you don't execute rapists or failed attempted murderers -- "If you're gonna be exected anyway, well, dead women tell no tales."
Presumably dead inspectors tell no tales, either. :(
By the way, if your impulse to the OP is "Good!", you habe serious problems, wanting to murder political opposition. Eh, these people are in favor of censorship, so it's not surprising.
Go ahead. Censor me because you don't like being accused of having a desire to censor people who claim you like censoring.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
This should be legal everywhere. Call them what you want, but China is leading the way in terms of enforcing pollution controls. We need more nations to follow suit to show that "we are all in this together."
Now I don't think anyone will ever be killed for this, but this serves as fair warning...fuck with the environment and we will fuck with you. This should send a message to corporate America that we cannot just export your toxic waste to other countries and kill HUMAN BEINGS like they are flies on the wall. The 21st century will be marked with extreme climate change, famine, and pollution, so I'm all for enforcing these laws EVERYWHERE if it means our children will be able to breathe. The president called this a century of Asian dominance...they are already leading the way in taking care of the environment.
Meanwhile, America is doomed to rot under its own oil and natural gas. We will have to turn to China for everything in the future...we are setting ourselves up for welfare. We can't even agree on the Kyoto treaty, you can thank Bush and his oil profiting cronies for pulling us out of that. Unless the politicians get the message and start punishing the serious POLLUTERS, WE ARE ALL DESTINED TO DIE.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk 2.
Al Gore named Head Executioner
The Sea Shephards have re-registered their ships under the Chinese flag and will now be carrying RPGs and machine guns to stop the Japanese whaling fleets. No international incident here folks!
sudo make me a sandwich
Last time I was in Shanghai there were bodies floating past the Bund. When I went on the riverboat I was told to try and stay near the middle because if you got splashed with water it might make a hole in my clothes. But the people who polluted Shanghai were only kidding around not the serious type so I guess they are all set.
I seriously doubt it will be implemented against any company or person that is sufficiently connected to the PRC government - this list would include pretty much every existing big company HQ'd in China.
Now potential competitors to the aforementioned companies, and anyone who the PRC government doesn't like? Oh hell yes it'll be implemented - even if the offender has to get a little governmental 'assistance' in generating pollution sufficient to warrant execution.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
When free trade with China was originally promoted it was always promised China would become more like America with open markets and civil liberties. But I believe the opposite is true with America becoming more like China. Some examples are exemption of clean water act for oil and gas exploration, promotion of the keystone tar sand pipeline, and monsanto protection act. While these crony capitalism arrangements would not be surprising in China they are becoming more frequent here. Abolition of labor unions, total government surveillance of all communication, widespread incarceration, and glorification of militarism are other areas where America appears to be moving towards totalitarianism. Wlll someday the scale tip and will China become more progessive than America?
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be-T J
I second this. I spend a good portion of graduate school in Beijing and Manchuria, and you hit the nail on the head. The only people who will pay the price for pollution are the dumb schmucks whose guanxi is not powerful enough to shield them from scapegoating.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
We hardly knew ye.
Will they go after the low level works or the people calling the shots?
"river full of dead pigs"
I wish to know more about this "bacon river"...
A prison sentence is sufficient. With a bread and water diet.
Guess where we got the water.
Have gnu, will travel.
Obviously this is only for SERIOUS polluters, as the article says. After all, if China were to kill all polluters, there would not be a single person left in that shit heap of a country.
Serioulsy, have you ever been there? Kids have slits cut in their pants so they can shit in the street. A video of a woman shitting in an elevator recently made the rounds on Chinese social media.
What a filthy, horrid place.
Certainly will cut down on polluters and help with China's population problem.
I suppose that one way to deal with pollution....
Right now the developed nations are THIS CLOSE to an irreversible tipping point beyond which civilization collapses and there's nothing anyone can do about it.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/temperaturevariations-in-past-centuries-and-the-so-called-hockey-stick/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/apr/23/scienceandnature.climatechange
Before that happens , people will begin to realize that it's going to happen. At that point, far before it actually happens, people will begin to act as if it's already happening.
Mass uncontrollable immigration as millions of desperate people ignore international law, barbed wire and guns in a desperate bid for potable water and food under the pressure of world-wide crop failures.
Total economic breakdown as every penny is spent in either desperate remediation, law enforcement or moon-shoot attempts to remove carbon from the atmosphere.
World wide wars destabilizing Western-friendly nations as radical Islam hitches itself to global warming and the virulent most anti-social forms of fundamentalism becomes a majority viewpoint .
Focusing their angst against the West, they topple Pakistan, get hold of their nukes and do not miss a beat in using them against India and the US, adding fallout and mass panic to the witches brew of the hell life on earth has become.
The President of the United States , the CIA and all other government agencies and agents don't just have the legal right to prevent that scenario from ever materializing, they have a sworn duty to do so.
If that means silencing the psychopaths like Koch and Ailes and Murdoch and Hannity and Forbes and Limbaugh and Watts and all of the other engineers of denialism, then that's what that means. Their lives and greed and sociopathic lifestyles are not more important than the lives of the billions of people thew world over they have chosen to exterminate.
This country right now is arguably in a slow motion civil war with rational people who base their actions on empirical evidence and science on one side and Ayn Randian societal rapists, apocalyptic Christian fundamentalists and sociopaths on the other.
The fact that it's a slow motion bomb the other side is determined to set off means nothing. They will, if they're not stopped, exterminate not just us, but all future generations for all time. A bomb is a bomb is a bomb and a bomb thrower is a bomb thrower is a bomb thrower.
Every nation on this earth should treat deniers and polluters as the clear and present danger to their national security that they are.
If you shout "no fire" in a burning theater and work to make people believe there is no fire when any reasonable person working in good conscience would conclude form the same evidence that there is , then that's murder.
If you think the government isn't going to take the accumulated evidence of what you said, what you posted what you tried to get others to believe and use it to prosecute you as an agent of denial in a near future Crimes Against Humanity trial. then you haven't read history very carefully.
The legitimate government of any sovereign nation has a right to stop the actions of terrorists whose actions are provably a threat to their national security and the security of their people.
This has been affirmed even in the United States, which itself has unilaterally sought and killed people it deems terrorists in foreign nations.
By this reasoning, citizens of the United States whose actions threaten the national security of other nations can legally be subject to executive action on the part of those nations.
In fact, every nation has a right to ensure the national security of its peoples against terrorists, wherever those terrorist may reside and whatever device those terrorists may chose as a weapon.
Denier = terrorist.
Capital punishment western liberals enthusiastically support.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
We need stronger laws against companies to make them more accountable. Prove to me you did all you could to avoid polluting, I might be lenient.
If I see that there is a flagrant denial for the law and pollution was done with no thought what so ever., you die! Not just you, but all the board members and employees delivering the sludge to location xx
I like it, I like it alot!
I mean who would they execute in the company? CEO? COO? Every culpable person? That could easily be dozens and dozens of people, if not more.
Every leftie, every Democrat, every Obama supporter just doesn't know which hole to blow out of. Quick! They need to know what to think! Slashot, you have a mission!
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Aren't they already getting the 'slow' death penalty by having to breathe the air?
I'll be here all week...
They have same problem with aging population as we do, need the organs. So expect a lot more use of the death penalty there, and here as soon as our ruling elites figure out how to get this supply working.
Average USian 6x the average Chinese.
Yup, go killing the chinese, 'cos we don't do nuthin' no siree.
They mean failing to bribe the government to overlook it.
And yesterday I heard that China has largest shale gas reserve.
pollution, will they impose the death penalty on the states?
One can dream that Monsanto management visits their Chinese offices...
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
I mean I can belch out methane from my nether regions with some serious attitude. Does this mean that if I ever go to China (not very likely) and the kung pau chicken doesn't agree with me, does this mean that my life is threatened? Well, maybe. Considering how people smoke tobacco like a brush fire over there all it'll take is one smoker getting to close to me and *boom*!
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
Pollute a water supply in the name of Allah: Terrorism.
Pollute a water supply in the name of profits: Just business.
Uhm...yeah...Anyone who believes it, just form a line and go stand on your head over there in to corner to be counted.
More like, any manufacturer out of step with the Communist overlords will be executed for "littering" for lack of a better tag to use for "official reports" published for the world to see. Kinda like their policy of aborting excess children, retroactive up to 5 years old, which doesn't officially happen, as far as you know, because if it is reported, a reporter would be executed for "polluting" or whatever tickles their nipples that day.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
You want to know why the meltdown happened? Your first thought will be "greed". I'd be more abstract and call it "pursuit of money", but tomato/tomahto. Anyway. GREED! Right, but! It's not enough. Greed happens all the time in the corporate world without causing meltdowns. All businesses are out to pursue money all the time, doubly so in the financial sector, and it doesn't cause meltdowns all the time. The difference here? The reason that the meltdown happened? The system was giving them money for doing the wrong thing. And it started when the Washington, DC establishment combined negative real interest rates (subsidizing the housing bubble) with federal homeownership programs that paid the banks top dollar to make shaky mortgages -- and when federal rules gave ratings from a few firms with clear conflict-of-interest problems special preference in the regulatory system, and thus encouraged all banks to buy AAA-rated mortgage junk to maintain their regulatory capital requirements.
Of course banks caused the crisis. They were paid to do so, and paid handsomely, and chased into doing so by regulators when they weren't overtly paid. But don't worry!!! We've solved the failures with Dodd-Frank and it'll never happen again!!!11 *coughcoughcough asif cough*
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Countries sometimes prosecute foreigners for crimes which affect their local commerce in some way.
Will China attempt to execute people outside their country for pollution crimes? Or, could people in the USA demand the execution of Chinese manufacturers who put lead in to candy, paints on toys, or other products?
Meanwhile, I think the directors of the Fukashima reactor are glad the law doesn't exist in Japan.
I agree with others that it seems wrong to hold a single person responsible for large-scale pollution. It would be like only blaming Hitler, or perhaps him and a few direct subordinates, for the MILLIONS killed by the hundreds of thousands of soldiers (conveying people to death camps, managing death camps, and more directly participating in the killing).
There will also be debate about how much people actually know and comprehend the health impact of their actions.
In any case, I always think it's ironic when the reaction to killing is killing. It's hypocritical, barbaric, and, I think, indirectly promotes a very unhealthy world view that ultimately diminishes the value of life in the minds of the population.
This just goes to show that contrary to public opinion the authoritarian regime of China has very little control over the people that it calls its citizens. Whenever there is some kind of problem, they are unable to fix at grass roots level, usually because nearly all kinds of civil society is completely banned. The education system is so worthless that trying to instil civilized behavior in people from an early age, is in direct conflict with all the other propaganda messages. Rather than try to fix preventable problems before they occur, their only solution is to wade in, in a very heavy handed fashion and start killing people. This is the sign of a desperate, unstable regime. In other places, incentives would be offered, education would be used and the media would be co-opted, but this is China so only death threats are the perceived solution. No wonder that everybody wants to leave.
You do know Chinese parents now buy foreign milk for their babies, even 5 years after the scandal? Milk import is so high the Chinese custom has special rules for them. Looks like the government of your Megacorporate States of America and industrialist overlords did a much better job than the murderous Chinese government and its corporations (You do know the government owns the corporation producing the melamine milk, right?)
You do realize that the government pressured lawyers not to file for compensation for the victims of the milk scandal? That's the justice you want?
Looks like someone from Monsanto china's about to be gutted.