“Higher taxes on plastic products will enrich corporate interests with no guarantee of reducing plastic waste… [and] will have a devastating impact on working families.”
A California flier from the Environmental Solutions Coalition, a false flag message funded by the plastics industry and other business interests.
America now faces the ability of well-funded special interests to explode through social media, paint the innocent as malignant forces bent on evil, and convince the “conspiracy theory” susceptible, searching for new scapegoats, that there is truth in the lie… by persistence, never deviating from the message, making lots of accusations (founded or not), to spread that message wherever it needs to go. The entire Trump era is clearly defined by that reality. Now!
So why wouldn’t toxic polluters or businesses, watching the wild success of that practice and seeking to avoid obvious and necessary regulation, simply adopt that ploy to advance their agendas? Well-placed false narratives can avoid expensive regulation and allow those corporate miscreants to keep all that gold for themselves. More than their same-old/same-old “job loss” mantra that is tired, uninteresting and getting to be way too repetitive? Public relations, with an entirely new set of lies, attaching blame to innocents – the new scapegoats – is catching on.
Plastics may be useful, but they have created microplastics embedded in our bodies, are piling up with long, non-biodegradable life expectancies, killing wildlife and shoving garbage on land, sea and air and generally creating a gigantic mess for taxpayers to clean up. California, a consumer-friendly state tired of paying for the rising cost of cleaning up and disposing of plastic waste, particularly single use containers, has proposed a November ballot initiative banning such single use plastics. Of course, the plastics industry wants that regulation gone or watered down.
Susanne Rust, writing for the May 23rd Los Angeles Times, explains: “The initiative, the California Recycling and Plastic Pollution Reduction Act, would require all single-use plastic packaging and food ware used in California to be recyclable, reusable, refillable or compostable by 2030. Single-use plastic production would have to be reduced by 25% by 2030. The costs of the program are to be borne by the producers and distributors of single-use plastics, and the language explicitly states the costs cannot be passed on to the consumer.
“U.S. industries for decades have formed seeming ‘grass-roots groups’ to push agendas such as lower taxes and fewer restrictions on tobacco and pollution. The groups behind the Environmental Solutions Coalition include the California Business Roundtable and the American Chemistry Council, which includes plastics manufacturers and oil companies. Members of the coalition have stated they’d prefer to see the issue settled in the Legislature.” The reason is simple: legislators take campaign contributions; voters do not. So, these groups are throwing tons of cash in a massive marketing effort to kill that initiative, because initiative are people driven.
Yet, as Rust points out, there are some solid reasons to pass this and even broader plastics limiting laws: “Plastics never fully degrade. They just break down into smaller and smaller pieces called microplastics. These particles often contain harmful chemical additives such as flame retardants or plasticizers. Reports suggest that humans consume roughly a credit card’s worth of microplastic each week.
“Over the last year, research has shown the presence of these particles in human blood, healthy lung tissue and meconium — the first bowel movement of a newborn. They are also found in marine organisms, ocean water, air and soil… Some researchers project that by 2050, there may be more plastic by weight in the world’s oceans than there are fish.” Still, imposing reasonable limitations on plastics manufactures will both make them accountable, at least in part, and cost them money. It’s cheaper to oppose the regulation than learn to live with it.
The problem is that so many of these corporate and political media blitzes are driven by obvious falsehoods, scapegoating, in a way that seems to be increasingly just a “that’s just the way America runs” belief. Some hide behind the First Amendment, some states (like Texas) try to force social media to carry knowing lies, but there is always someone trying to nip any form of business responsibility in the bud. Almost always with GOP backing. Invigorated by Citizens United vs FEC.
Indeed, if lying is condoned by legal inaction, it is most certainly enabled by mass and social media in search of ad dollars. As the Federal Communications Commission struggles over the scope of its jurisdiction, the business community has long fought to keep genuine regulators out of power in that agency. Republicans, trying to enable the spread of conspiracy theories and the Big Lie every chance they get, are also ready to keep that regulatory agency from clamping down on false advertising, in business and politics. Thus, keeping the FCC from regulating is a clear Republican goal.
As LA Times OpEd writer, Michael Hiltzik notes in the May 25th edition: “Riding high after killing off President Biden’s nomination of a pro-labor regulator for a key post at the Department of Labor, big business has been sharpening its knives for a noted consumer advocate nominated to join the Federal Communications Commission.
“The target this time is Gigi Sohn, whose credentials as a critic of the monopoly power of big telecommunications companies and a defender of the public interest are unassailable. So the telecom industry and big business in general have chosen to smear her with misrepresentations and outright lies… So far they’ve succeeded in hobbling Sohn’s progress toward confirmation. That’s placed a whole raft of telecom reforms on hold because without her confirmation, the FCC is stuck with a 2-2 split between Republicans and Democrats… The campaign against Sohn has falsely painted her as a foe of diversity in telecommunications and an advocate of suppressing conservative viewpoints.”
Lying, always a part of political excess, has achieved a new level of official legitimization, a legacy from the Trump administration that simply will not go away. Are Americans so inured to this slimy mass mendacity that they just do not care? Do so many Americans simply avoid thinking about these issues, choosing instead blindly to outsource their opinions? Whatever Mitch, Kevin, Donald, Ron and Greg… or Fox News hosts say?
I’m Peter Dekom, and whenever people give up on democracy, outsource their opinions to special interests and “bought and paid for” politicians placing party over country, everyone loses… and democracy unravels.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment