This President* Never Deserves the Benefit of the Doubt

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

11 July 18

ver the weekend, there was some slanging and banging on the electric Twitter machine over a very interesting topic: whether or not it is Good Journalism to continue to cover extensively the president*’s gin-up-the-rubes rallies, at which he says the same stuff, over and over again, as though there is any real news value in anything said by this moldy bag of old resentments.

One side argued, with some logic, that, like it or not, the guy is the president* and what he says has inherent news value simply because he says it. The other side argued that he is still Donald Trump, and that, among our presidents, he is uniquely unqualified, uniquely uninformed, uniquely unoriginal, and, most important, uniquely compromised, although to what extent we won’t know until Robert Mueller unleashes the hounds this fall. Therefore, goes this line of thinking, covering this guy as though he were Dwight Eisenhower, or W.H. Taft, or James K. Polk—which is to say, giving him the benefit of the doubts that accrue to his office—is to obscure the unique threat to our institutions that this president* embodies with a cloud of dangerous political banality.

Any action taken by this president* while in office should be considered prima facie as either corrupt or incompetent until proven otherwise. Anybody hired by this administration* should be considered prima facie unqualified for the job given to them. And any judges nominated should be considered prima facie unworthy of having been nominated simply on the basis of the president* who nominated them.

The phrase is, “sui generis.” Get used to it.

I understand that, in practical terms, there are few ways to act on these assumptions. (Although I think it behooves major news organizations to rethink volunteering to get jerked around at the rallies week after week.) The government must be staffed. The courts must function. But we all must be aware that all of that is being done in the most radically different—and radically perilous—political context that the country has seen since the run-up to the Civil War, and we must insist that the institutions of government act on that awareness as best they possibly can. That means that every fight is worthy no matter how futile. Even if all you’re doing is creating a historical record, that’s worth doing. The institutions of government, and the people operating them, have to stand up just to stand up.

This is one way to do it: Doug Jones, the rookie Democratic senator from Alabama, declined the invitation to come to the White House and be one of the Democratic mooks standing with the president*. This is an even better way to do it, from Robert Casey, Jr., the pro-life Democratic senator from Pennsylvania:

I will oppose the nomination the president will makes tonight because it represents a corrupt bargain with the far right, big corporations, and Washington special interests.

Casey announced his opposition to whoever the candidate was, based on both the president* who nominated said candidate, and the political apparatus to which the president* had subcontracted the job. Period. That’s the real thing there.

Another horn of this dilemma is that it requires everyone to stop pretending that Trumpism is an aberration, a mutant form of Republicanism, instead of the perfectly predictable product of an evolutionary process deliberately begun in the late 1970s, when Republican conservatism absorbed the still-vital remnants of American apartheid and allied itself with newly politicized splinter Protestantism.

In this, the coming debate over the Supreme Court is utterly dispositive. The assault on reproductive rights, on voting rights, on environmental regulations, and on the rights of labor have been consistent Republican offensives for four decades. The legal underpinning of these assaults has been carefully developed and nurtured by a conservative legal establishment richly financed by corporate sugar parents. There is nothing being done as regards the judiciary by President* Trump that would not have been done by a President Cruz, a President Walker or, yes, a President Kasich.

This president* is nothing more than a grotesque exaggeration of processes that were underway long before he got to town. He merely built on a foundation already laid. He merely tapped into the energy that already was flowing. He merely shouted his slanders more crudely and through a bigger media megaphone than any ever granted to a politician of his era.

(Tell me, all you Bush Administration NeverTrumpers now d/b/a cable analysts, how loudly did you protest the slandering of John Kerry within the hierarchy of the 2004 re-election campaign? Thought so.)

However, all of that sad history does not mitigate the unique peril that this president* presents to the present and the future of the American republic. It has to stop, all of it, now, before it’s too late.

More Recycling Won't Solve Plastic Pollution

By Matt Wilkins, Scientific American

11 July 18

he only thing worse than being lied to is not knowing you’re being lied to. It’s true that plastic pollution is a huge problem, of planetary proportions. And it’s true we could all do more to reduce our plastic footprint. The lie is that blame for the plastic problem is wasteful consumers and that changing our individual habits will fix it.

Recycling plastic is to saving the Earth what hammering a nail is to halting a falling skyscraper. You struggle to find a place to do it and feel pleased when you succeed. But your effort is wholly inadequate and distracts from the real problem of why the building is collapsing in the first place. The real problem is that single-use plastic—the very idea of producing plastic items like grocery bags, which we use for an average of 12 minutes but can persist in the environment for half a millennium—is an incredibly reckless abuse of technology. Encouraging individuals to recycle more will never solve the problem of a massive production of single-use plastic that should have been avoided in the first place.

As an ecologist and evolutionary biologist, I have had a disturbing window into the accumulating literature on the hazards of plastic pollution. Scientists have long recognized that plastics biodegrade slowly, if at all, and pose multiple threats to wildlife through entanglement and consumption. More recent reports highlight dangers posed by absorption of toxic chemicals in the water and by plastic odors that mimic some species’ natural food.

Plastics also accumulate up the food chain, and studies now show that we are likely ingesting it ourselves in seafood. If we consumers are to blame, how is it possible that we fail to react when a study reports that there will be more plastic than fish in the oceans by 2050? I would argue the simple answer is that it is hard. And the reason why it is hard has an interesting history.

Beginning in the 1950s, big beverage companies like Coca-Cola and Anheuser-Busch, along with Phillip Morris and others, formed a non-profit called Keep America Beautiful. Its mission is/was to educate and encourage environmental stewardship in the public. Joining forces with the Ad Council (the public service announcement geniuses behind Smokey the Bear and McGruff the Crime Dog), one of their first and most lasting impacts was bringing “litterbug” into the American lexicon through their marketing campaigns against thoughtless individuals.

Two decades later, their “Crying Indian” PSA, would become hugely influential for the U.S. environmental movement. In the ad, a Native American man canoes up to a highway, where a motorist tosses a bag of trash. The camera pans up to show a tear rolling down the man’s cheek. By tapping into a shared national guilt for the history of mistreatment of Native Americans and the sins of a throwaway society, the PSA became a powerful symbol to motivate behavioral change. More recently, the Ad Council and Keep America Beautiful teams produced the “I Want to Be Recycled” campaign, which urges consumers to imagine the reincarnation of shampoo bottles and boxes, following the collection and processing of materials to the remolding of the next generation of products.

At face value, these efforts seem benevolent, but they obscure the real problem, which is the role that corporate polluters play in the plastic problem. This clever misdirection has led journalist and author Heather Rogers to describe Keep America Beautiful as the first corporate greenwashing front, as it has helped shift the public focus to consumer recycling behavior and actively thwarted legislation that would increase extended producer responsibility for waste management.

For example, back in 1953, Vermont passed a piece of legislation called the Beverage Container Law, which outlawed the sale of beverages in non-refillable containers. Single-use packaging was just being developed, and manufacturers were excited about the much higher profit margins associated with selling containers along with their products, rather than having to be in charge of recycling or cleaning and reusing them. Keep America Beautiful was founded that year and began working to thwart such legislation. Vermont lawmakers allowed the measure to lapse after four years, and the single-use container industry expanded, unfettered, for almost 20 years.

In 1971 Oregon reacted to a growing trash problem by becoming the first U.S. state to pass a “bottle bill,” requiring a five-cent deposit on beverage containers that would be refunded upon the container’s return. Bottle bills provide a strong incentive for container reuse and recycling, and the 10 states with bottle deposit laws have around 60 percent container recovery rates compared to 24 percent in states without them. Yet Keep America Beautiful and other industrial lobbying groups have publicly opposed or marketed against bottle deposit legislation for decades, as it threatens their bottom line. Between 1989 and 1994 the beverage industry spent $14 million to defeat the National Bottle Bill.

In fact, the greatest success of Keep America Beautiful has been to shift the onus of environmental responsibility onto the public while simultaneously becoming a trusted name in the environmental movement. This psychological misdirect has built public support for a legal framework that punishes individual litterers with hefty fines or jail time, while imposing almost no responsibility on plastic manufacturers for the numerous environmental, economic and health hazards imposed by their products.

Because of a legal system that favors corporate generation of plastic, plus public acceptance of single-use items as part of the modern economy, consumers who want to reduce their plastic footprint are faced with a host of challenges. We should carry around reusable beverage and takeout containers. We should avoid bottled water or sodas at all costs. When we have to accept a single-use plastic container, we should inform ourselves about the complex nuances of which types of plastic are acceptable (No. 1–3, but not No. 5?), which forms are acceptable (bottles and jugs, but not bags?) and where they can be deposited (curbside or at a special location?).

In the case of most restaurants and gas stations, which almost never have customer-facing recycling facilities even where required by law, we should transport recyclables to another location that does recycle. Even then, we must live with the knowledge that plastics generally degrade with recycling, such that plastic bottles are more often turned into non-recyclable carpets and synthetic clothes than more bottles. Effectively, we have accepted individual responsibility for a problem we have little control over. We can swim against this plastic stream with all our might and fail to make much headway. At some point we need to address the source.

According to a 2016 Pew Research poll, 74 percent of Americans think the government should do “whatever it takes to protect the environment.” So what would swift, informed and effective governmental action to stop the pollution of our water, food and bodies look like?

Legislators could make laws that incentivize and facilitate recycling, like the national bottle deposit and bag tax bills that were proposed in 2009. These bills would have created a nationwide five-cent deposit on plastic bottles and other containers, and a nonrefundable five-cent charge on plastic bags at checkout. The U.K. launched a similar charge on all single-use grocery bags in 2015 and announced a nationwide bottle deposit requirement in March of this year. Within six months of the plastic bag charge being in place, usage dropped over 80 percent. Similarly, in Germany, where a nationwide bottle bill was put in place in 2003, recycling rates have exceeded 98 percent. In the U.S. these actions would go a long way toward recovering the estimated $8 billion yearly economic opportunity cost of plastic waste.

Other actions could include a ban or “opt-in” policy on single-use items like plastic straws. That is, single-use plastic items would not be available or only upon request. A small tweak like this can lead to huge changes in consumer behavior, by making wastefulness an active choice rather than the status quo. Such measures were recently adopted by several U.S. cities, and are under consideration in California and the U.K.

And yet, some plastic producers continue to oppose legislation that would eat into their profit margins. Though California and Hawaii have banned the free distribution of plastic bags at checkout, a result of lobbying is that 10 U.S. states now have preemption laws preventing municipalities from regulating plastic at the local level. Plastic producers see their profits threatened and have taken a familiar tactic, forming the Save the Plastic Bag Coalition and the American Progressive Bag Alliance to fight bag bans under the guise of defending customers’ finances and freedom to choose.

So what can we do to make responsible use of plastic a reality? First: reject the lie. Litterbugs are not responsible for the global ecological disaster of plastic. Humans can only function to the best of their abilities, given time, mental bandwidth and systemic constraints. Our huge problem with plastic is the result of a permissive legal framework that has allowed the uncontrolled rise of plastic pollution, despite clear evidence of the harm it causes to local communities and the world’s oceans. Recycling is also too hard in most parts of the U.S. and lacks the proper incentives to make it work well.

Second: talk about our plastic problem loudly and often. Start conversations with your family members and friends. Call your local and federal representatives to support bottle bills, plastic bag taxes and increased producer responsibility for reuse and recycling. Stand up against preemptive bans on local plastic regulation. There are signs that corporations are listening to consumer opinions, too. After numerous petitions from customers and environmental organizations, McDonalds has pledged to use only sustainable packaging materials by 2025 and to phase out Styrofoam by the year’s end.

Third: think bigger. There is now serious talk of zero waste. Instead of trying to reduce waste by a small fraction, some individuals and communities are shifting their lifestyles to ensure that nearly everything is reused, recycled or composted. Non-recyclable straws and to-go cup lids do not fit into this system. Though inspiring, a zero waste lifestyle will be impractical or impossible for most of us within current economic systems.

A better alternative is the circular economy model, where waste is minimized by planning in advance how materials can be reused and recycled at a product’s end of life rather than trying to figure that out after the fact. To make this happen, we can support groups like the Ellen MacArthur Foundation that are partnering with industry to incorporate “cradle-to-cradle” (i.e., circular economic) design into their products.

This could be our future—a future of clean cities, rivers and beaches but also simpler, more responsible choices for consumers. There are now too many humans and too much plastic on this pale blue dot to continue planning our industrial expansions on a quarterly basis. It’s time to stop blaming consumers for our plastic crisis and demand a better system.