Africa is not a Leak in Your #CircularEconomy

The Twittersphere continues to post drama documentaries about Agbogbloshie, illegal dumping, largest e-waste dump on earth, etc.  Just 12 months ago, another European documentary was produced which tries to out-do the outlandish racial profiling that already put Joseph "Hurricane" Benson in prison.  It now has over 1M views.

But there's no title.  No filmmaker.  Narrarator is unnamed. There are no credits. No funding source. No one to ask questions of.  It's an anonymous hit job on Africa's Tech Sector, doing the business of Planned Obsolescence, Big Shred, and Charity Industrial Complex.

Joseph Benson of BJ Electronics, Olu Orga, and the Tech Sector in Ghana still face a European lynch mob... but now the journalists may as well be wearing hoods.  Learning from the retorts to #SashaRainbow and #BaselActionNetwork, the propaganda now seeps through social media without anyone to confront or trace it back to.

Racketeering or Certification 6: Defamation Is The Only Product BAN Sells

The 2019 Certification or Racketeering series of blogs began about Total Reclaim of Seattle.  Craig Lorch and Jeff Zirkle were sentenced last week on their fraud case.  I offered to fly in to testify, and sent them a letter for the judge, to make the case (as in the blog) that the executives at Total Reclaim had been told by BAN that 80% of recyclers were shipping 80% of goods overseas, where 100% percent were smashed by hands in primitive conditions. As I testified at Brundage's sentencing hearing in Chicago, those were false claims.

• BAN begins by defaming the Tech Sector overseas, with wild hallucinatory descriptions of thousands of orphans in rice paddies beating electronics with hammers. 
• BAN creates a lie about the Basel Convention having been "amended" to criminalize legal exports (reuse, repair and recycling are ALL legal under the actual Basel Convention, not just "tested working")
• BAN then defames those who (like yours truly) question or rebut the initial defamation, or correct information they give about the Basel treaty.
• BAN defames the companies who don't pay tribute through E-Stewards certification, and defames the alternative certifications.
• If the companies like Intercon or Total Reclaim threaten to withdraw from BAN, or defend themselves (Total Reclaim exported far less than 10% of the material they received), BAN's enforcement is to defame them.

Essentially, defamation and slander are BAN's only product. And at its root, the initial domino of defamation - of people in faraway geographies beating LCDs and CRTs with hammers - is a fake statistic. BAN is the most ruthless in attacking anyone who questions their credentials.

What percentage of what Total Reclaim exported became "waste"? Was that the source of the corporate profits? Or were those profits, and the repeated purchse of flat screens from Asians, evidence that the exports were likely NOT WASTED?  How does the Department of Justice conflate fraud, profit, and mercury to poison our minds with racist assumptions about Asia's Tech Sector when there is no evidence that the goods were dumped?  The crime Total Reclaim execs pled guilty to was lying about the export, not knowing the goods were dumped or that the buyers were poisoned.

It's a sin to kill a mockingbird.

Bullyboys 12: George Wallace and Collateral Damage

How We Rationalize False Arrests and Misused Authority

You might feel better that some of the men hanging from the trees were no angels.   You might take consolation in the bribes and forged dates and mislabeled bill of ladings on some of the 91% reused and repaired equipment.   But there's not much "pollution crime" to see  here.   I have hundreds and hundreds of photos of men and women who were accused, some of whom lost their businesses.

They were arrested thanks to one gnome-like dude in Seattle, who enlisted an exotic photographer, and made up a strange, bizarre, unsupported statistic, framed with words like "ghoulish" and "macabre", "skeletons" and "witches brew".   E-Stewards ran and got the rope, tied affordable internet to a wooden stake, and applauded while dictators lit the match.   It was a witch hunt, charged with racial exoticism, misleading photography, water samples from downstreams of textile mills, rumors and hyperbole.

It's all recorded on my hard drive.  I have a suspicion, they will get me next, somehow.  Three years ago an E-Steward company came and offered virtually every one of my Vermont clients to collect their junk TVs for a penny a pound.   It was predatory pricing, and the sole purpose was to put me out of business.   And they probably justified it to themselves by calling me an "exporter-lover".  I see them circling around a CRT glass recycler who refused to join E-Stewards, refused to pay for "certification".  With the  foreign market now better researched, they will turn on the domestic recyclers, and manufacturers.

To Kill a Mockingbird.  That accuser made the story up.  There were no facts to support the accusations against Tom Robinson.   And there are no facts about Benson, or Semarang, or Penang factories.

The 80% "statistic" is a lie, it's a fabrication.  It comes from a single source, a man so certain of his mission that he calls the very people targeted "collateral damage".   Personally, I don't think that definition works when you declare someone guilty, aim your gun, and shoot them.

A Modest Moral Proposal: Blow Up Basle

Why the Basel Convention Should be Morally Sunset.

Basel Perspective is Set in Stone

MORALITY DIMENSION 1:  Integrity.   Whether it's from Mother Theresa, or Honor Among Thieves, or Al-Qaeda's word of honor.  This was the focus of yesterday's post on "favors".  You are who you say you are and you do what you say you will do.

MORALITY DIMENSION 2:  Intent.  Distinguishing between the good deeds of Mother Theresa and the bad deeds of Thieves... is the intent good or evil?  Just how moral are the things you intend to do?

MORALITY DIMENSION 3:  Effect/Outcome.  Whether through ignorance, or butterfly effects, did our best intentions (#2) and integrity (#1) result in something we'd judge as good?  And how negligent were we if the "best intentions" go berzerk, or the perfect became the enemy of the good?

On the last, the problems we have in society are pride and ignorance.  Religious believers who believe so intently in their prayers that they feel honor to strap on a suicide belt, that's the worst extreme (assuming God didn't personally tell them otherwise after all).  But the literature also shows how people become vested in their image, their mistaken beliefs, financial motives, groupthink, their causes, and their dissonance, and just bad risk-benefit math.

Here's an idea:  If we set a bunch of rules based on who was rich in 1960 to govern which cell phone factories can take back and refurbish the smart phone e-waste in 2012, maybe we should set an egg timer on those rules?  Maybe ... just maybe.... these no longer "define morality"?  Maybe what seemed moral for a broken black and white TV set in 1960 Dublin, Birmingham, or Athens doesn't still predict the best thing to do with a repairable HTC Evo 4G sold to Singapore, Taipei, or Dubai?

E-Stewards is stuck in time. Static.  It appears to sink as the rising tide of emerging markets renders both the generation and end-of-life recycling statistics of 2002 completely and utterly analog.  Maybe regulations written on typewriters, corrected with liquid paper, are too hard to update when elective upgrades and off-lease purchases and hot capacitor swaps make 4G recycling auto-correcting freedom geeks kneel to dictators' thugs, patent trolls, and anti-gray obsolescence corporations?  Rules written for the classified ads of print news may not sync to with Alibaba.com.

It's not just "the war is over, dad".  This is a totally different war than the Basel Convention waged against drums of toxic waste dumped on the beach in Cote D'Ivoire (Ivory Coast).  This is a patent extention war waged most fiercely against Guangzhou geeks refilling "disposable" ink cartridges, and Cairo fixers swapping blown capacitors off of returned Optiplexes.

Environmentalists of Earth Day 1970 - we are no longer young.   We must see that the dogmas of our elders are not a disease to which we are somehow immune.