The way the rules in this world seem to have two different versions, one version for the regular person on the street and another version entirely for the people and organizations with enough money and power to make consequences disappear.
And nothing does better illustrates this better than the conversation around littering and corporate waste dumping, so let's think about this for a moment, so if you or I throw a sachet of anything on the road in certain places we can be fined, we can even be prosecuted too, there are laws about it, there are also these officials enforcing it, there are consequences waiting for the ordinary person who does not dispose of their rubbish properly, and I am not saying those laws are wrong, littering is bad, keeping our environment clean matters, I agree with all of that.
But then a major company, a corporation with billions in revenue, with lawyers on retainer, with government connections and lobbying power , dumps industrial waste into a river, pumps chemicals into the sea, destroys an ecosystem that thousands of people depend on for their livelihood and their survival, affects fishing communities, contaminates water sources, kills wildlife, ruins land that families have farmed for many generations.
And what happens?
A fine, maybe, a fine that to a billion dollar company is the equivalent of you or I finding loose change in a sofa cushion, or an investigation that goes on for years and quietly disappears, or a statement expressing deep regret and a commitment to do better while the waste is still sitting exactly where they dumped it.
Tell me how that makes sense, tell me how we have built a system where the person causes the smallest damage faces the harshest immediate consequences and the entity causing the largest damage barely feels a thing.
The answer is not complicated even though people in power would like us to think it is, money talks, it has always talked and it talks loudest in the spaces where laws are made and enforced, companies employ people, companies pay taxes, companies fund campaigns and political parties and have relationships with the people who sit in the offices where these decisions get made, and so when it comes time to hold them accountable there is always a reason to go easy, always a justification for why the full weight of the law should not apply here, always a conversation happening behind closed doors that the ordinary person affected by that dumped waste is not invited to.
Meanwhile the person who dropped a wrapper on the floor is being made an example of.
I am not saying individuals should not be held accountable for littering, I am saying the scale of accountability should match the scale of damage. If anything the companies causing mass environmental destruction should be facing consequences that are so severe and so unavoidable that it becomes genuinely cheaper and more logical to dispose of waste properly than to dump it, right now the calculation works in the opposite direction, Dumping is cheaper, yhe fine if it even comes is manageable, the incentive to do the right thing is weak because the punishment for doing the wrong thing is weaker.
This is not an accident, systems do not end up this way by mistake, they end up this way because the people who benefit from the imbalance are the same people with the power to change it and they have very little reason to.
So yes, the government is more lenient with companies than with individuals, not because the law says so out loud, but because of how the law is applied and who it is applied to, and until that changes the sachet on the road will always cost more than the oil in the ocean.
Image Is Geneated With ChatGpt