Basel Action Network Continues Campaign of Racial Prejudice, Systemic Vocabulary Abuse, GPS Sabotage

 Every BAN press release is a lesson in vocabulary manipulation, not science.  

NGO sanctimonious vocabulary demands a rebuttal

For example, an enormous predictor that Jim is exaggerating are the words "waste" and "likely".  Jim of all people knows that "used goods" and "waste" are defined separately in international law, and that the key to guilt is intent. Otherwise, every brand new item that landed overseas - if it failed under warranty, or was damaged in shipping - would be a violation of international law.

BAN has, for two decades, tried to erase the fact that the most knowledgeable actors, the ones most in control of the trade, the purchasers least likely to waste money, are the oveseas buyers. They do not pay to ship "waste" with the intent to avoid costs they would certainly not incur, in the rich nations where they purchase surplus goods. The Action Network was exposed for fabricating a high percentage of waste (80%) (GPI blog, 2013) They did so in order to cause journalists and environmentalists to skip the side of the story from Joseph "Hurricane" Benson, and the overseas Tech Sector he came to represent. BAN issued macabre photos of dumps, where the junk being processed is mostly automotive and mostly was imported to those countries when Joe Benson would have been an apprentice TV repair tech in Nigeria... decades earlier. 

Now, the 80% lie has been exposed. BAN refuses to answer for it. So instead, they are turning to technology. This is similar to the Technology already denounced by the ACLU in tracking of unwitting and unwilling "participants".  Substitute the name of the device - GPS for RFID - and the ACLU's position (ACLU.org) and the unfairness applies with cringeworthy effect... because the use, in this case, is racialized, and being used to keep the defamed Tech Sector from defending themselves.

They cannot or won't stop calling them "primitive" and "ghoulish"

BAN has an advantage in the use of English to define the intent of non-English-speaking businesses, who do not have BAN's privileged access to pose at Conference of Parties meetings. BAN uses these photos ops to signal that BAN is an important international law expert, rather than essentially an international lobbyist, and some would argue, Racketeer.

Return to BAN's press release. Early on, BAN uses its vocabulary privileges to define what hard-working poor people are attempting to purchase as "waste" and "likely illegal"... implying that intent to purchase for reuse does not matter, that even if BAN is responsible for the device being non-working, non-repairable, that the traders were engaged in criminality. 

" exporting e-waste in likely violation of the importing country's laws"

Disclosure - WR3A / Fair Trade Recycling has active members in the Tech Sector in Guatemala. The Guatemala rules are clear... It is definitely illegal to import waste for the purpose of dumping in Guatemala. It is definitely legal to import used goods for the intent to reuse and resell.  BAN always tries to erase the "intent" language in the Basel Convention and the national laws, and to replace "used" or "secondhand" with "waste".

Essentially now an "Anti-Defamation League" for Geeks of Color

(Journalists, here are some questions pre-loaded for RFID and GPS tracking press releases)

See 18 Questions for NGO - Poison Apple Methodology Blog, 09/2018 

What BAN does to circumvent the obvious legality to import secondhand equipment for the intent to reuse is shocking.  BAN outright claims that its agents have damaged the goods they track so severely that even the vaunted Tech Sector, the Engineers of the Emerging Markets, cannot repair it.  The Buyers intent is clear - nothing pays for cost of shipment to Guatemala other than reuse.  

This is not simply "entrapment". If it is true that BAN has damaged the goods, and did not disclose the damage, then BAN is the only entity who intended to export waste. Hiding sabotaged goods in a shipment without negative value CRTs, etc, nothing showing intent to "externalize" waste, is the equivalent of hiding fentanyl in infant formula bottles, and blaming the pharmacy.

BAN uses its systemic advantage - privileged access to vocabulary adapted in the press and guidance documents - to reverse what is happening. The buyer becomes an oppressed slum dweller, the reuse store willing to sell to "dark skinned" buyers is attempting to externalize waste.  This harms companies (like the OEM I've redacted, and the USA reuse chain involved), but is primarily to the detriment of the honest, hard-working, talented and environmentally positive non-white Tech Sector. BAN's press releases profile black and brown people at city dumps to effectively racially and culturally profile the best and brightest in those countries, a bait-and-switch tactic aimed at the press. Go ahead, click on BAN.org website, and count the images of little brown children, as if the kids were at the back end of a self-dumping sea container.  

In FACT, WR3A's Tech Sector member in Guatemala is in active discussion with our Hispanic staff about re-recreating "Retroworks de Mexico" there (GPI blog link to E-Scrap News, 2020). "Retroworks de Guatemala" would employ scrapping staff to collect decades-old junk in Guatemala for properly recycling, as part of our "Fair Trade E-Waste Offset" plan. BAN knows this, I've reached out to them (as I did in 2010, California Compromise). So the fact they are recycling their xenophobic narrative about "others" of the industry is damning.

BAN continues to try to promote a dark, dark narrative on globalization, and the dirty little secret is that they do so to line their own pockets. NOT A DIME goes to the children in the photos, only the threat that those children's parents might wind up in jail for buying the wrong RFID-tracked used cell phone.

The main Profit Motive for the export of Waste is that BAN has to convince us that waste externalization is a problem, to maintain their funding (Trading on Distortion, Lepawsky, 2016) -- now that Jim Puckett's 80% waste claims, and international law violation claims, have been shredded to pieces. BAN is selectively and systematically sabotaging things in a way that foreign tech sector workers never see in a natural business setting, and would not purchase if BAN honestly disclosed that. BAN is the only one in the GPS game knowingly exporting "waste" with the intent to increase their income from certification programs. 

Imagine if the NGO bought a brand new laptop in the USA, removed the working battery, replaced it with a fire-prone damaged non-functional battery, and placed the boxed laptop in with new ones sold to emerging markets...  Imagine the NGO then tracked it with a GPS device, and the sabotaged device burned down a school in Guatemala. Would the manufacturer, the US retailer, or the IT buyer agent at the school, be responsible?  

Clearly, the NGO would be the one prosecuted. But they are cleverly trying to create just enough doubt for donors, DIYers, secondhand shops, surplus property offices, etc. to feel that they might be liable if they don't pay money to an E-Steward, who in turn pays money to BAN. BAN needs to send sabotaged goods with GPS trackers, or the whole rigged system could come down.

This Halloween, ignore BAN's macabre, ghoulish, primitive, skeletal, witches brew claims about our friends in the Tech Sector in emerging markets (Oct 2012 blog). BAN's claims have been disproven, and now BAN is trying to track an ever shrinking percentage of what might possibly be considered waste, ignoring all the devices they did NOT pre-sabotage... as if slipping a razor blade into an apple to boost packaged candy sales. 

Young people across the USA and Europe are now wise to BAN's racist, colonialist, defamation of the geeks of color, who created (according to World Bank) the critical mass of users necessary to put up TV and cell phone towers, internet cables, and satellites, allowing these markets to "leapfrog" colonial aid."

(For a lighter take on the art of defamation of Others by the Charitable Industrial Complex, revisit our blog's 2015 April Fools visit to Ghana.  https://retroworks.blogspot.com/2015/04/agblogblogshie-e-waste-tsunami-covers.html )