The technical implications aside, the Gulf Oil Spill and now Fukushima have been a real eye opener

[howard112211]

for me with regards to one particular thing:

I have a friend from Belarus who lived in Minsk when Tschernobyl happened. Minsk is only a few hundered miles from Tschernobyl, and they still have increased cancer rates today because of it. He talked about the days when it happened once. He said that at first there was total silence from the Soviet media. Then they told everybody to stay at home, and the government took certain measures to address the issue. The whole time the tone was something like "Stay at home, take such and such precautious measures, but nothing has happened."

Basically, the government was in denial, and factual information only slowly dripped out.

I always put this off as being particular to the Soviet system, assuming that "free" governments would go about this differently.

Aside from the fact however, that we do have a lot of "sensationalism" coverage of the disasters, in the cases of the Gulf Spill and Fukushima, it seems like the US government, and also the Japanses government, have taking a similar stance as the Soviet government: Downplaying the disasters and trying to hide as much of the true scope of the events as possible.

It does have a certain Soviet-esque feel to it.

[JVS]

1. Our news system does the opposite. All kinds of info and live footage for a day or so...

and then total silence if developments continue.

[franzia99]

2. The financial crisis and BP spill changed my view of government

With both of these situations regulatory enforcement broke down because the industry was too close to the regulators. These industries have so much money to throw around they're able to buy a lot of influence. In both cases, a huge number of people suffered as a result.

With Fukushima, things played out just as I expected. The industry was powerful and corrupt, and the regulators just let them do what they wanted, and again many people will suffer.

Since big gov and big business have failed us in such big ways, it's up to us regular people to take action and hold government and big bus accountable. But until we get more active politically, I fear stuff like this will happen again and again.

A baby boomer friend of mine was telling me how back when she was young regular people were engaged in political activism all the time. Then everyone got lazy and stopped and now look at how our government behaves.