Seems pretty standard for the south. Let companies come in and wreck the land up because they’ve promised jobs and profits. Then the companies leave and the residents are confused what happened. So they do the only thing they know how to do, wait for the next corporate benefactors to come in and promise profits and jobs.
Bottles and gasoline are relatively cheap.
Or you can sit there and take it. Those are your options.
The threat of trucks crashing into schools isn’t the only problem that the data center has brought. Local residents Joseph and Robin Williams told WWNO that they’ve noticed their tap water is frequently rust colored since Meta started building the data center, and they say their electricity frequently goes off for hours on end with no warning.
Wow you’d expect this in a third world country, not a place that should have standards 🙄 And is the richest in the world.
No, this is exactly what capitalism has done through most of its history. Whether in the imperial core or not. We pretend to think that capitalism was what the white working class Americans enjoyed back in post WW2. It’s why “MAGA” exists. It’s the belief in the same lie.
Seriously, go look back and look at pre 1950s American capitalism. It’s literally just company towns and chemical dumping everywhere. It’s exactly like this and always has been. We just focus on a specific time in post WW2 that only existed, as “good”, in reality for a minority of the population.
Capitalism doesn’t share it’s surplus with the working class of its own nation unless it feels threatened enough to offer some concessions. Something it definitely felt in a post WW2 in which FDR (really only because of militant labor movements) and the USSR had influenced.
Local politicians are signing off for short term bribes, knowing it will destroy communities but they can just leave once it happens or even before
I’m projecting, as more corporations have more money than the local government and possibly the state, these small rural towns are going to get taken advantage of. The voices saying no will be ignored for the “prosperity” of the city or district. All while these data centers offer almost no long term jobs and abusing the city services like power and water.
It used to just be large developers for suburban sprawl and golf courses but AI is the new game in town.