Rumor Mongering: Is Jim Puckett Ousted at BAN?

For the past year, independent studies have piled up overwhelmingly demonstrating what this blog has maintained since 2007.  Basel Action Network does not know what it's talking about, and is making it up as they go along.  Whether they are told politely, or humorously, or angrily that their fiction is hurting the environment and developing nations, they ignore it.

E-Waste Watchdog "Basel Action" Re-Publishes Discredited Data

Or so far they have.   But rumors this month suggest that the Basel Action Network's Board of Directors may finally be listening.   Bad statistics are disappearing from the website.   And in their latest press release, Jim Puckett's name and phone number is missing (Mike Enberg and Sarah Westervelt are listed as the contacts).

Is Puckett just taking a leisurely break following the latest COP (Conference of Parties) at the annual Basel Convention get-together?  Or has the BAN.org board of directors finally started to listen to environmentalists and development professionals who told them their poster child campaign has gone too far?

Environmental Malpractice, Part II: Accidental Racism

In Part I, "Due Disclosure", I asked BAN to come out on the record about the exaggerated mathematics about "e-waste exports".  Those fake numbers create false perceptions about importers, and wreck the reputations and finances of many "Geeks of Color" in the developing world.

PT Imtech, Medi-Com, and Joseph Benson are three solid examples of people who were doing fantastic things with "discarded" electronics they purchased from wealthy countries for elective upgrade and refurbishment.  They were arrested, or their goods seized.  In Vegas, Jim Puckett described this as "collateral damage."

In Part III, I will go into specific cases of this "collateral damage", where an importer or a market was unfairly characterized in the Western Press. 

"Recycling Safari" has become a perverse form of "waste eco-tourism".  Liberal activists go straight to the "source" of poverty, and declare "I was there".  It impresses millions who are at a comfortable distance from poverty.  But if you live near poverty for a long time, your eyes adjust.  Some things associated with poverty include hope.  You will find poverty aggregating around reuse, repair, resale, and recycling the way people in a deep well are gathered around a ladder.  Proximity of a solution to a problem... it's a crazy weird thing to raise money to attack.

Let's attack something we all agree about, anti-globalists, alter-globalists, and globalists alike.

Racism.