Episode 1412
Growing food and getting free / C.E.
Dec 1 2021
No matter how careful you are when you go to the supermarket, it's virtually impossible to avoid plastic. And there are sound alternatives, but I think that what's really confusing to the public is plastics companies have spent millions of dollars deceiving the public into thinking, ‘don't worry about all the single use plastic we use, just toss it in your recycling bin’. But they know that most plastics never get recycled. The plastic recycling rate is an abysmal 5% to 6% nationwide. And the people who know this the most are the plastic makers. The number one plastic producer in the US today is this little mom and pop company called ExxonMobil. And the problem of deceiving the public about plastics recycling is so serious that in September of 2024, the California Attorney General Rob Bonta sued ExxonMobil for making deceptive statements about plastics recycling and then their latest false solution, chemical recycling. I think that lawsuit has legs and we know that the courts are slow. But when plastics has its day in court, I think Attorney General Rob Bonta will have a very solid, judicial victory that will benefit all of us nationwide.
Judith Enck joins This Is Hell! to talk about the book that she recently co-authored of, "The Problem with Plastic: How We Can Save Ourselves and Our Planet Before It’s Too Late”, published by The New Press.
Judith is the founder and president of Beyond Plastics, whose goal is eliminating plastic pollution everywhere. In 2009, she was appointed by President Obama to serve as regional administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and served as deputy secretary for the environment in the New York Governor’s Office. She is currently a professor at Bennington College, where she teaches classes on... read more
Séamus Malekafzali
Jan 15
The Assassination That Paved the Way for Trump’s Venezuela Attack / Séamus Malekafzali
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Nov 23 2021
Nov 10 2021
Posted by Matthew Boedy
Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink. This is a pep talk for me, but I suspect others can use one, too.
I was reading an article about how entrepreneurs like the Fyre Fest guy and the fake blood machine woman have conned investment cash out of venture capitalists. One of the startup companies mentioned was WeWork, a real estate company, I guess, specializing in incubator- type spaces or something, where people working on a project together would live in the same space, maybe, or just inhabit the space somehow, but the space would be specifically curated to cater to a group who wanted to be, I don’t know, entrepreneurial or some shit, like maybe the type of people who would develop a company like WeWork, the company specializing in spaces for groups of people getting together to come up with companies like WeWork.
Companies that are con-jobs specifically structured to take investors’ money fascinate me, because they demonstrate how fucking brainless capitalists are, and how expecting vacuous greedy twatism as a philosophy to somehow improve society can lead to hilarious disasters. WeWork started out with a hefty valuation of $47 billion, one that dwindled to, I think, currently, do not quote me on this, five dollars and forty cents.
What caught my eye, though, was a phrase in their phishing literature that attracted investors: there was a “kibbutz-like” atmosphere at the company, or in its buildings, or some such garbage. Whatever you think about Israel, a kibbutz is a socialist socio-economic relationship between its members, often built around a few small industries, crops, and livestock. There’s a seniority system, but at every level the fruits of labor are shared out equally, and decisions about just about everything are made democratically. Children are all raised together, so they are like siblings. A lot of siblings.
The thing that surprised me is that anyone would consider a kibbutz or any socialist enterprise an attractive advertising analogy. But then I got to thinking how successful many left efforts have been in the marketplace.
Greenwashing is, of course, when a vile corporation, the sole purpose of which is to make as much profit as possible, pretends to the public that it cares about the environment. Greenwashing it a huge part of any polluting company’s PR budget.
Likewise, sensitivity across the gender, ethnicity, and racial spectrum.... read more