Watchdog Supports "E-Waste" Recycling, Export to Africa

I'm not sure people paid attention to this story about fair trade recycling, "e-waste" and Ethiopia.

Bullet Points:

1. EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson toured a well run "e-waste" shop in Ethiopia.
2. Basel Action Network (via this blog) takes credit, applauds their role with this shop.
3. I applaud it too, as proof that the "Geeks of Color" can do this work.
4. BAN responds, saying that their African e-waste shop is good, but WR3A's aren't
5. BAN has never been to one of our shops, nor to several they have attacked.  I say so.
6. BAN (outrageously) accuses me of re-writing the blog post they had commented on.
7. I prove "did not".  Screen shots of the date of comment, and of last edit of the blog.
8. Pouting ensues on both coasts.

So, the Ethiopia "e-waste" shop creates good jobs, digital access, without polluting?   "Not polluting" is too tame a praise.   The recycling is constructively good for the environment, creating jobs both in the developed nations which export, and in the African countries that receive it.  Compare the jobs created by the Ethiopia (BAN-supported) electronics recycling trade, ton per ton, with the jobs created by shredding PCs (then sending the pieces to be sorted in China - the end market for "no intact unit").


Why doesn't this completely support the "fair trade recycling" approach?  Why don't the "Watchdogs" acknowledge that perhaps what they take credit for in Ethiopia might be an example of what they have been attacking in places like Indonesia?

Could it be that BAN has monetary reasons underlying their "Reefer Madness" campaign against well-run refurbishing factories?  Could it be that BAN's 40 minute description of eleven year old Guiyu video to Terry Gross at NPR's Fresh Air, done after their involvement in Ethiopia, had something to do with payola from the "no-intact-unit" shredders (BAN gets 1% of the gross proceeds from "certified e-stewards", almost 100% of that gross income from zero-export shredding companies)?

The Watchdogs promote their shredding benefactors with pictures of barefoot children, and would keep those kids' and their parents barefoot and pregnant with a boycott.   This is not an "attack blog", it's a "defense blog".
My middle name Freeland comes from the great-great grandparents who left New England about 150 years ago (and their families the Beaches and Dewards of Vermont, whose pictures adorn my parents wall).  I don't represent myself as a native Vermonter, I'm a carpet bagger from Arkansas... but I do have blood roots here.
My Freeland ancestors left New England for Kansas, in the John Brown abolishonist campaign (to populate Kansas to vote it to be a "slave free" state after Missouri voted for slavery above the Mason Dixon line).
This trick of using pictures of "primitive" children overseas to describe ISO14001 contract manufacturing plants is sick and perverted.  If BAN has admitted that their plant in Ethiopia is clean and legal, where is the national outrage over their depictions of PT Imtech as a wire-burning operation?
"I am not a racist, accidental or otherwise", says the head watchdog, in response to my blog.   Yet he never retracts his depictions of our WR3A member factories, which he has never seen, as polluting.  He seems to think that a single allusion to a well-run shop makes up for the constant drumbeat of denigration to the other well-run shops.

BAN can donate some of their shredder money to the technicians in Ethiopia, Ghana, Angola, Mexico, etc.  I do. I put my money where my mouth is.  I challenge BAN to match the funding I personally put into Retroworks de Mexico, Las Chicas Bravas.  You took credit for Ethiopia.  Let's see a cancelled check.

I like to think I'd be in Kansas, with my ancestors, to fight slavery if I lived 150 years ago. I can imagine John Brown and the anti-slavery crusade made a lot of people uncomfortable, and a lot of New Englanders would want to change the subject if my family kept bringing up slavery over and over again.  I can imagine that BAN would have been supporting the "send the slaves back to Africa", unwilling to believe that the Africans had the potential to become Americans like them.

The affordable computer access, made possible by careful and proper and clean recycling techniques in Ethiopia, Mexico, and Indonesia, can be done in Egypt.  It is the geeks I work with, and trade with, in Egypt who brought democracy to a nation, and will prove they are not too "primitive" to turn their nation into one of the best democracies in the world.  I completely believe in, and trust the people of Egypt.  Maybe I should move there with my family.  I wish I had funding for two, three, four, five "RETROWORKS DE MEXICO" operations.
Some at the ISRI convention here think I'm a loony uncle.  Lingelbach thinks I'm not diplomatic enough.
What my ancestors probably realized is that you can't just attend speeches by Frederick Douglas, while ignoring the potential for Barry Obama.  Liberia is not the answer.  You need John Brown.