The Thorny Distraction of Environmental Police / Malaysia Rhino Horn

It has been a couple of years now since WR3A's last meeting with INTERPOL in Lyon, France. After our first and second visit to Agbogbloshie, laughingling labelled the "world's largest e-waste dump", INTERPOL officials let me know that "Project Eden" was a misfire. They would sunset it silently.  This is what grown up environmentalists do.

The #ewastehoax launched by Jim Puckett of Seattle almost two decades ago has distracted environmental regulators, and has diluted their enforcement, from much more important concerns.  Like this.

Fifty rhino horns, worth $12M, seized by Malaysian environmental officials in Kuala Lumpur. This is a big news story. Yet it's been distracted from and diluted by Basel Action Network, and there's been no country more so distracted by BAN's war on repair than Malaysia DOE.

WR3A is Fair Trade Recycling - 10 Years

The World Reuse, Repair and Recycling Association, doing business as Fair Trade Recycling, was legally incorporated in Vermont a decade ago.  How have we done, and what it the status?

The group originally had great success by finding very very large import orders (places like Malaysia's Net Peripheral) and working as a collective to supply those orders from USA companies willing to export to the right people.  It was financially interesting to both the buyer and seller.  However, this model created a disincentive to add more members (increasing supplier members diluted USA members, recruiting demand members diluted vetted overseas companies).  Membership reached a critical mass it could not grow from.  We added more USA suppliers, the price of exported goods went down, etc.

The coop model severely imploded in 2012, when a copy of one of our audits of the Malaysia company was sent by a USA Big Shred investor to the Malaysia Department of Environmental Conservation.  The import letter was valid, Malaysia officials said, but they also visited the factory and took away the import permit.

"No good deed goes unpunished."


"Poverty was not created by export of used goods. Wealth was created by import of used goods."

How To Categorize People Properly: Beware Those Who Accept 80%ism

Do's and Don'ts for categorizing people.

80/20 Rule is useful enough... which is why we must be careful with it as is.  Exaggerating that "80%" of someone or something is bad is over the top, the worst insult.

We all need to make simplifications, rules, and shortcuts to efficiently survive.  The most famous and useful generalization is the "80 / 20 Rule", aka the Pareto Principle, which says that 80% of the value is in 20% of the transactions or stuff.  It's a risk management principle as well - 80% of the danger is in 20% of something.  I applaud this principle, and use it all the time in business, especially in training new staff.  What we teach people the first month on the job is the 20% of things they need to know to get 80% of the work right.  The learning curve is eventually going to kick in if training is regular and consistent.

But the 80-20 rule has a downside, too.  Donald Trump is on his way to being infamous based to his brute appeals to this kind of generality.

We can all imagine how we'd feel if the generality was actually reversed... there is nothing that feels more racist and insulting than to have your own demographic group called 80% stereotype.   Consider these horrible insults...

80% of men are rapists
80% of women are incompetent
80% of German citizens are Nazi apologists
80% of white Americans are racists
80% of black Americans are drug dealers

Most readers would agree that the statements above are difficult to even read.  They are simplifications that appeal - in the worst and falsest way - to the human instinct to generalize.  I'd call it hate-speech.  When I even use these as examples in conversation, I can see my friends blood pressure rising.

Now imagine I make it about how professionals do their work.  It's not racist, but a class of people nonetheless.

80% of doctors mistreat their patients.  
80% of carpenters build homes that fall down.
80% of environmentalists perpetuate hoaxes.
80% of soldiers shoot innocent civilians.
80% of police falsely accuse innocent suspects.

Ok, it no longer counts as "hate speech" if it's about a profession rather than a culture or race or demographic, right?


















"80% of used computer importers dump junk to pollute their countries."

Imagine how Jaleel, 34, above, feels about that?  Jaleel is a guy who worked very hard in school, excelled beyond expectations for people from his village.  He was a great saver, a marshmallow experiment prodigy (see Standford Marshmallow experiment below for the "type" of person he is).

Or Jaleel's young son?

Or Jaleel's boss, Kamel?

Or his co-workers?

Or his father?

Or the people he buys stuff from, every day, in the market?  See, just how the "white lie" pervaded Europe, it is pervading Africa in the opposite direction.   The Africans all know the 80% lie.  Just the same as you'd know it if something extreme like that was said about you.

The number of educated European policy students and professors and German photo-journalists may well be impressed.  If your audience is the Privileged, you have safely made their discard decisions easier to navigate, and they will applaud you.

But the collateral damage to your organization from the people who know people who could not possibly have afforded internet, television, cell phone, or other teledensity measure if-not-but-for Jaleel and his world, is enormous insult.  They have never actually lived in a world where they are a "minority", and they really don't have first hand experience with Racism against Minorities, which is the subject or most writings on the R-word.

But it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck.

 It's 80=percent=ism.

I'm defining as "80%ism" the reverse of the Pareto 80/20 rule.  It is the description of 80% of something in the worst possible way, knowing that human nature may confuse it with the 80% of the perceived risk that comes from 20% of the population.  My hunch is that the 80/20 rule is used subconsciously by so many people that we perceive its 80% bad as a hyperbolic insult, and at the same time fear that people will "compromise" emotionally and consider 20% of us to be bad as a "likelihood".


So how do we harness the awesome power of the Pareto Principle, to simplify and economize the way we treat people, without triggering fear of generalizations and false identifiers?  Like a gun, most of us want the simplification method to be in the hands of authorities who protect us.  But we don't want it to be a short-cut or label for whole groups of geographies and demographics and religions and sexual orientations, etc.  To some, "politically correctness" verges on "disarming the police".  But none of us like it when it happens to us.  As comedian Chris Rock said, if a guy goes ballistic and kills his co-workers, it's probably a white guy.  But that's actually what occurred in San Bernadino, CA, and because it WASN'T a white guy, candidate Trump used the occasion to invoke the infamous "Muslim Ban".  That's how sharp the 80-20 simplification knife cuts.  Today it's pointed at a threat, and you feel a little safer that if only 20% of the people cut really were a threat (and 80% were innocent), that it's not your problem.  But when you are the subject of the "great rounding of numbers", nothing feels more threatening.

So I'm out of time, but here are two very famous psychological studies from the 1960s and 1970s which can help you to properly generalize people... and not by race or culture.  Not at all.  But these are really the things that you should be concerned by.

Stanford Marshmallow Experiment - This study looked at kids who were tested as follows.  They had to sit still at a table, hungry, and look at a sweet (marshmallow) for an hour or 30 minutes or something.  They were told that if they waited the whole time and didn't eat it, they would get two marshmallows (double ROI return on investment).  If they ate it, they would not.  The Stanford researchers kept track of the students, and found that those who had NOT waited for the second marshmallows performed poorly (economically) the rest of their lives.  Whether that's because they lacked discipline, lost accrued interest, or otherwise succumbed to instant gratification, is speculation.  Perhaps (I have pointed out) they lived in a culture where the Authority Figure (the one who made the "deal" over the marshmallows) is less likely to be truthful.

If so, then the Authoritarian Regimes the Global South is notorious for (to generalize) have a long term effect on the citizenry and the economics.  Accrued interest, Einstein supposedly noted, is the most powerful force in the known universe... nothing naturally observed grows at that rate since the Big Bang.

Milgram Experiment - this infamous experiment tested unwitting participants willingness to inflict pain on a third party if told to do so by an authority.  Just to simplify, about one third of people will refuse to do harm to the third party on moral grounds, about one third will inflict the pain or harm on the third party if told to do so by an authority.  And one third in the middle has to somehow be convinced, or it depends, or it's a little unknown.

What Nazis did was scare the hell out of that middle group by not threatening them directly, but by selecting a minority - should be kept at 5% or under - and applying the 80% Racist Stereotype against them.  Kill them.  Show absolute authoritarian power.  The "follows authority" group will do so, the wishy-washy middle just want to make sure they are not IN that minority.

This is how we should catergorize other humans.

By what they do when told something by an authority.

And who is willing to tell the most vulgar, exaggerated lie -  not that 20% of some people are unsafe to deal with, but that EIGHTY percent are unsafe.  That's the hypnotic power of evil, taking the naturally assumed, frequently good-enough 80/20 rule, and reversing it so that privileged white people in Europe actually feel really good about putting TV repairman Joe Benson in prison for fixing TVs.  They actually are hypnotized or persuaded that by doing so, they are agents of conscience, doing something good for the environmnet, saving the poor.

The problem is the false authority.

For Jaleel's network of humans, it's the Ayatollah of E-Waste.  He doesn't know it, but he threatens them with poverty and all the death, destruction, lack of education, etc. that goes with it.  And the most dangerous authorities are not evil people, they actually believe their simplism.  They know perhaps it's only 20%, not 80%, of exporters are violators, but they write laws focused on their own fame, and the number of people who believe they saved Africans, rather that dropped bombs on them.

Sorry, "collateral damage" is not an excuse for reversing the 80-20 rule to create a stereotype that makes bomb-dropping more acceptable to the privileged third of people following your authority.  You lied.  You damaged people.  And there is no way to cover this up, hundreds of students are doing forensics on it.  You

Editors Note: Status of WR3A Good Point Blog

Blog Status December 6, 2016.

Wahab, left, points to photo in Washington Post of Idrissa, who was struck and killed by a truck in 2013 or 14

Catching up on editing 4 blog articles (from "Collateral Damage" series) and one magazine article, and preparing for my presentation at ICM in Salzburg, Austria.  Also getting all my vaccinations for the re-visit to Ghana.   I'm double checking things from the draft Fair Trade Recycling report (2015 visit).

1- Does something bad happen  at Agbogbloshie?  Bad for health, for the environment, etc.?

2- If something bad happens, is it related to unfair export and import trade?

3- If something bad happens, due to unfair trade, is it illegal or a "loophole"?

4- If something bad happens, due to unfair trade, and it is illegal, should Joe "Hurricane" Benson and other Tech Sector African businesspeople pay fines or go to prison for it?

The answer to the first question is yes and no.  Or rather, some bad things happen, and some good things (better than if the goods were in the USA or EU) happen.  The worst thing is probably the men who burn wire and then use their bare hands to scrape metal out of the dirt and ashes.  The earth there will be contaminated by lead.  Some of the lead is from automobiles, some from leaded casings in older electric wire (not computers).  If they aren't washing their hands really well, they are likely to suffer consequences.

The good thing is that the goods are used for far longer than westerners use the goods.  Even after westerners have finihsed using the electronics, Africans will tend to reuse them twice as long as that. And hand disassembly is better for the environment than shredding.  And the cost of achieving internet, phone, TV, radio and other teledensity measures, per African is a TINY FRACTION of the upstream environmental cost per capita done by Western countries.  And most of THAT damage, from mining, occurs in places like Africa.

2 - No.  The junk in Agbogbloshie is far more likely to be collected from African city residents and businesses after 10-20 years of use than it is to be imported. The people saying that it came from sea containers being dumped to avoid recycling costs are making it up at best, and in some cases lying.

3. Not under Basel Convention Annex IX.  But - in reaction (over-reaction) to lies about #2, some EU countries have passed stricter laws.  It's like if you thought bananas were poison, and passed a law against selling bananas... yeah, banana sellers would be criminals.  But seriously.

4. No. This was a witch hunt.

Collateral Damage TOC: The Preview of Ewastegate

TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR "COLLATERAL DAMAGE" BLOGS

Many, many posts on this blog have been around the theme of "unintended consequences".  Two decades of attacks by Basel Action Network to save the world's poor from the waste of the rich nations have added up to a lot of environmental injustice.

This series of blogs will try to document the case for "intervention" by Basel Action Network's donors and E-Stewards.  The NGO has lost its way, and is expending more of its firepower on agents of conscience and authors of nuance.

These are in order of scale of importance, but if you are skimming, jump to #7.  I got something new, and if it turns out to be proven, BAN's Board of Directors will need to take action before the feds get involved, and before Jim Puckett starts erasing his emails.

Collateral Damage 1. Modern high tech recycling and refurbishing factories

BAN spokespeople have repeatedly called the best and brightest recyclers and refurbishers "a myth" and have attacked those who represent them as "deniers" and "apologists", and sought amendments to the Basel Convention to make trade with those factories illegal.


Collateral Damage 2. Small scale (Informal) repair and recycling of home generated scrap

BAN has made the "informal sector" a bad word, when the smaller refurbishers are actually the most vulnerable.  Forcing African, Asian and Latin American small scale tech-sector to buy from fewer OECD suppliers creates "back alley" recycling, just as most prohibitions and boycotts do.


Collateral Damage 3.  Reporters and journalists

Reporters and journalists are in a tough spot already, forced to be experts on every environmental and economic and political topic.  Calling themselves a "watchdog", the NGO has gotten extremely false and inflammatory statistics ("80-90% exports are dumped") into USA Today, National Geographic, CNN, BBC, Economist, Al Jazeera, Science Daily, NPR, etc. etc.  The poison circulates from journalist to journalist, diverting attention from real environmental problems (like non-ferrous metal mining).

Collateral Damage 4. Environmental movement

Ditto.  Well meaning young environmentalists respond to the photos of children at dumps with a passionate indignation, not knowing that the devices they insist on destruction would have been properly repaired and reused, or even properly recycled, by the "others" portrayed as sub-adults.  This "accidental racism" will create cynicism.  (I've been urged not to use the word "hoax" out of fear fellow environmentalists will wind up as collateral damage).


Collateral Damage 5. Interpol, EPA, and Enforcement

A massive waste of resources, "Project Eden" found no Eden in Africa.  It found statistics from World Bank that showed no more illegality or fraud in trade of used electronics than any other trade - until the crackdown.  (Make straw hats illegal and straw hat crime increases).

Collateral Damage 6. Economy (CA SB20)

California believed BAN's malarky about CRT dumping in Guiyu (never a destination for CRTs) and cut itself off from a billion dollar per year refurbishing factory market, which BAN told SB20 was "illegal" and "a myth".  The "cancellation clause" created huge piles of CRT glass and robbed California taxpayers while doing nothing at all to improve the environment.

Collateral Damage 7. Basel Action Network Board of Directors, employees, and friends

In this post I intend to reveal new information about the MIT GPS methodology, suspicions about methodology asked about in our 14 page letter to Carlo Ratti, some of which are now proven. But ironically, there is a brand new development I would have missed if I hadn't been forced to go back to it by BAN's false attack on my company and its friends.  It has to do with the releasing of information about the GPS trackers to companies who pay BAN a portion of their income.   

During the period the GPS was sent to Middlebury, my company was in the process of shipping several loads of printer scrap to an E-Steward.  The company denied Good Point Recycling dock apointments, which we asked for repeatedly over several days.  If Jim Puckett allegation that the printer "very quickly" went to Chicago, that means he had real-time knowledge of the tracked device.  It now appears that device WOULD have been delivered from my company to the E-Steward if our dock appointments, which we'd already shipped several, had not been cut off while the GPS device was in our factory.  I may reveal the frustration from emails sent by my employees over the E-Steward delivery cancellations, and my pleading with the Chicago area e-Steward to let us deliver the loads which we had been issued purchase orders for.  We can show that resulted in a change to the other R2 Chicago company - the one we had not tried delivering to, but whose audit showed R2 certified downstreams in Hong Kong... and how we sought to relieve that pressure by re-sorting potenially reuseable laser printers for the R2 load.  

 Put this another way:  The ratio in 2015 for loads shipped to the E-Steward to the R2 company (total all materials, not just printers) is 93.3% to 6.7%  The odds that a device would wind up at one of the two companies, rather than the other, is striking.

If is apparently true that MIT undergraduates were instructed how to find a non-public office on the basis that they disclosed my company, and they selected a laser printer which sells used for $349 to drop off there, it was bad enough.   If in addition, BAN knew the location of the device in real time, and the Chicago area e-Stewards recycler cancelled the 5th load already prepared for it because it had information about the GPS device from BAN, then that is potentially criminal. 

Got that?  That would appear to be a violation of SEC rules at best, and potentially a criminal enterprise if the collusion was intended to harm R2 companies that were using the same "approved" downstream as E-Stewards companies (which have agreements to pay BAN $$ a share of their income, which goes in Jim's pocket).  Before I provide the evidence of it, I would suggest that BAN's Board of Directors get in touch with me, so I can provide them and MIT's attorney with information that should not be given to Jim.  I have testimony from E-Stewards that they were aware of the GPS devices before BAN made the public announcement, and in some cases actually helped deploy the devices against competitors. 

I had asked MIT about this possibility in May 2016, and MIT provided my letter to BAN (without cc'ing me or informing me).  It should have been an opportunity for Jim to vet the methodology internally.  If, as it now appears, BAN leaked information selectively to e-Stewards, and some of that was "live" information, someone could actually go to prison.  There may be a legitimate explanation for the cancellation of the printer scrap delivery to the E-Steward company.  But if not, E-Stewards and BAN itself could be the biggest collateral damage of their leaders obsession with Robin Ingenthron and Fair Trade Recycling.

Collateral Damage 8. My personal relationships

Admittedly, I look obsessed, too.  That ain't good.  But its the business relationships I'm building, the memberships in Fair Trade Recycling, that have been collateral damage to BAN's 2 page hit job.  And yeah, I'll write more about that too.  It's the financial damage that would become a part of a defamation or slander lawsuit.  But those are expensive and tie up the legal system.  It is the due diligence of Boards of Directors and MIT Ethics departments which will shake this out when they see that I have a very legitimate case.

Let the due diligence begin.

"Ewaste Crimes in Ghana": Intermission

End of Week 2 in Africa.

To catch everyone up, here are the cliff notes.

1) In 2002 three Americans were in Guangdong... Jim Puckett (BAN), Adam Minter (Shanghaiscrap.com), and yours truly.   We saw different things.   But the report with the least nuance (BAN's 80% dumping claim, claim that the water pollution was from e-Waste etc) got the biggest headline.  

Make the biggest claim, get the biggest coverage.

Where there's smoke, there's Tires.  Most of the visible smoke s from the tires.

2)  In fact Guiyu China was not receiving the CRT monitors, they were going to SKD semiknockdown factories for remanufacture, and the water pollution found in "Exporting Harm" was telltale from textile dying.    However, BAN ignored the nuance and created a Pledge of True Stewardship to raise more funds for their fledgling NGO.

7 Steps To Create a Profitable Hoax (#ewastegate)

No one denies that the volume of unwanted electronic scrap is growing.   Gadgets improve lives around the world.   They don't work forever.  But they often have more than one life.

Display devices (more than half of all the e-Scrap) are like used automobiles.  The average life of an automobile (15k miles per year, 200k miles per car) is about 13 years... some last longer, some shorter.   But the average first ownership of cars is less than 50 months, or about 4 years.    

Some people (with means) like to buy new cars every 3-5 years. Same goes for television and video displays.   Just as the cars roll around for twice the number of years they were used by the first owner, there's a secondary market for TVs, PCs, and their display devices.   

How can a do-gooder create a $3M non-profit out of the used appliance (or used car) market? Two parts White Guilt, one part Exotic Locale Photos, one Fake Statistic.  Print millions, move on. 

For more, visit 2010 "Top Ten Myths of #ewastegate"



1.  Create a fake 'e-waste' news crisis  

Tell all the environmentalists that you have a "dirty little secret"... that most of the electronic material they have brought in to recycling centers didn't really get recycled in the USA, or at all.   CBS 60 Minutes, PBS Frontline, NPR, USA Today, BusinessWeek, BBC will come running to you with the microphone.  You are marketing a believable message to people who are already "activated" on the topic (already making the effort to bring old gear for recycling).

This is key, you aren't trying to convince people to care, you are taking people who already care and convincing them of a scandal.   For example:

Game Theory 1: African Can't Fight UK City Hall

Hurricane Joe Benson (#FreeHurricaneBenson) spent years on appeal before concluding he couldn't fight "City Hall."   

 "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake." - Sayre's Law (Wallace S. Sayre)

In a small pond, big fish are kings.   And intellectuals talking about a rather obscure niche of world recycling policy have become empowered by the smaller audience.   You learn that the proportionality of Sayre's principle cuts both ways... the big stakes questions about recycling policy go "whoosh" over the heads of local decision makers.  And the small contracts, small business disputes, small business accusations, and "people from third world countries", can whip City Hall into a frenzy.

Game Theory is the study of strategic actions in multi-decision-maker scenarios.  Game Theorists may use math - especially statistics - to predict how the number of actors involved in a decision affect the outcome.  Or they may measure the wealth of the outcome, and how its control affects the behavior of stakeholders and decision makers.  Look at it this way - the strategy and outcome of a game of RISK is affected by the number of players.  If you have six players, a goal of controlling a continent is much more difficult to achieve than a game with three players.  If you get to keep the cards of an eliminated player, timing that player's elimination (so you execute their final play and get their cards) becomes more important than the extra pieces you achieve by controlling a continent.

As players are eliminated, the sea of stakeholders gets smaller and smaller.  The stakes in the economy, per player, get larger.

[Note:  I'm on my way to New Orleans for the Recycling Innovators Forum... leaving in 20 minutes.]

A small set of stakeholders interested in an outcome starts to resemble a "small pond", as goals and perspectives become less diverse.  This in turn defines the law, or the rules about behavior concocted by the remaining participants.  But as the economy or stakes become greater, more people want to play at the table.  This "game theory" analysis explains a lot about electronics recycling policy, perhaps so much that no one even notices the lack of actual data on the "risks" to be mitigated.  Free and fair trade is almost presumed guilty, and in a rush to make rules, any rule may do.  And the rules are being made by a small group of players:  OEMs, Big Shred, Poverty Pornographers, and the contract managers at City Hall.

Take an online game of poker, with real cash stakes, with players on 5 continents.   A vote comes up, which lettering to use on the playing cards, Chinese characters or western Arabic?

Australia, Europe, North America, and South America vote against the Asian card numbering... and like the JDowsett's Ferguson-themed Racism by Bike Blog, the game is subtly biased in a way that a Western observer won't even notice.   Language is in many ways a better lens than color or bike-vs.-car for studying how majority behavior dictates systems.  Debating use of language used at "City Hall" is a better study for "tyranny of the majority", perhaps, than calling darker skin a "minority" in a world geography, precisely because it takes us away from "You're not Trayvon" jingoism.

Apparently, I'm now defending JDowsett and the Racism by Bicycle Blog.   But I'm also trying to demonstrate how finger-pointing do-gooders can create a carnage of collateral damage in a rush to make rules they haven't the time to vet.   Primum non nocere ... first, do no harm.

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.

Bullyboy 9: Authority Without Borders

"Be Quiet!  I order you to be quiet!" 

- Arthur, King of the Britons, (Monty Python and the Holy Grail).

As I wrap up the "Bullyboys" case for exoneration of African traders, we are left with a simple question of authority.  Jim Puckett told me directly, a few years ago, to "stop referring people to Annex IX of the Basel Convention."  (the section that makes export for recycling, and repair, legal - so long as it isn't dumping).   It was in the form of an order.  Basel Convention was his "turf".   He drew a line and told me not to cross.

"The Magna Carta Action Group."
"The Declaration of Independence Action Network."
"The Bill of Rights Action Center."


There are lots of authoritative names a small, underemployed environmentalist can bestow himself.  Most Americans wouldn't fall for the "Associations" above.  But if you select the name of a Swiss Treaty, and say "international law" enough times, you may even get an informed journalist to report your press release as something from an authority.

Ill defined legal systems produce bullyboys.

King Arthur: I am your king.  Woman: Well I didn't vote for you. King Arthur: You don't vote for kings. Woman: Well how'd you become king then? [Angelic music plays... ] King Arthur: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. THAT is why I am your king. Dennis: [interrupting] Listen, strange women lyin' in ponds distributin' swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony. 

The difference between an authority and a bullyboy?  Law. Courts. Constitutions.  Consensus.   And the problem in this whole case is that there is little in the way of an international court system.  Lacking international law, and fed fake numbers by BAN.org, Europeans have reverted into bully justice.

Granted, true international law is more orderly.  I've been to the the Hague, I've been to Strasbourg.  But these are very busy places to get into.  If you are arrested in Britain for a crime you are not even accused of committing where it didn't occur in Nigeria, and think you can find a place on the International Court Docket, go buy a Megabucks lottery ticket, right now.

Laws only "happen" inside borders.  The police or Stewards or regulators who enforce international "law" are enforcing something that is extra-juridicial.   That's why treaties have to be "ratified", to give them status of law inside the borders of a nation with laws and courts and police.   Inside a border, giving "international" law to a policeman, there is otherwise no constitutional basis for appeal.

Your sole appeal is to the bully-boy.

Bullyboy 6: Eden is Not On Our Map

Fair Trade Recycling.   Our vision is not the same, perhaps, as Basel Action Network, or the "Back to Eden" program of Interpol.  Arresting dozens of Africans and seizing thousands of "good enough" televisions and monitors, purchased for repair and resale, will not get us where we are going.

Where are we going?  According to the Economist, to the end of poverty.  The world population is making the same progress as the United States made, in standard of living, for the past 100 years.

Nearly 1 billion people have left poverty in 20 years.

In "Towards the End of Poverty", the Economist shows how at this rate, another billion will leave poverty in a decade.

This  is our vision.  Africans with television, barios with high speed internet, rice fields with smart phones.  Yes, that means they will "generate e-waste", just as we did/do.  But "Back to Eden" isn't on our Map.

Jack Johnson, the Galveston Giant (Better Together)

History Channel:   I've learned about Jack Johnson, an African American professional boxer who was finally allowed to fight a white champion, Tommy Burns.  See also the Ken Burns documentary on PBS, titled "Unforgivable Blackness". He's in the news again (last month), for a congressional request to Barack Obama to grant Jack Johnson a pardon for his phoney conviction.

US Library of Congress

Both History Channel and Wikipedia link concern about Johnson's interracial sexual partnerships, and fear of his dominance of the sport, with the passage of the Mann Act. The Mann "White Slave" Act made it illegal to transport a prostitute geographically across state lines.   According to Wikipedia:

The White-Slave Traffic Act, better known as the Mann Act, is a United States law, passed June 25, 1910 (ch. 395, 36 Stat. 825; codified as amended at 18 U.S.C. §§ 2421–2424). It is named after Congressman James Robert Mann, and in its original form prohibited white slavery and the interstate transport of females for "immoral purposes". Its primary stated intent was to address prostitution, "immorality", and human trafficking; however, its ambiguous language of "immorality" allowed selective prosecutions for many years, and was used to criminalize forms of consensual sexual behavior.^[1] It was later amended by Congress in 1978, and again in 1986 to apply only to transport for the purpose of prostitution or illegal sexual acts.^[1]

According to the History Channel documentary, the passage of the Mann Act in 1910 coincided with Jack Johnson's peak years, and specifically with Jackson's defeat of great-white-hope champion James Jeffries.  Race riots resulted.  Blacks celebrated, whites tried to stop the celebrations, people got killed.  It was the top news story the year the Mann Act was passed.

How to solve a problem of competition?  With racial discomfort and fear-based overreaction. 

 In addition to his punishing victories, however, Johnson was known for his extravagant lifestyle, and was excoriated by his white critics for his romantic relationships with white women. In 1913, Johnson was convicted (in what was widely considered a sham trial) of violating a federal law, the Mann Act of 1910, which outlawed the transportation of women across state lines for "prostitution, debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose." He was found to have traveled with his second wife, a former prostitute, across state lines before they were married.

That's right.   The 2010 Mann Act law against transporting prostitutes across a state geographical border was used to arrest Jack Johnson for driving his wife, a white woman, and ex-prostitute.   The courts found him guilty because he had driven her across a state border before they were married, in 1908.. Two YEARS BEFORE THE MANN ACT WAS PASSED!  

What does that remind us of?  How about the Basel Ban Amendment, which still hasn't been passed, which is described as some kind of a limit for transboundary export-for-repair, in today's trade journals?

Geography, protectionism, racial segregation... greed and fear... cognitive dissonance.    What's the root story?   Out of fear of competition, blacks were banned from boxing whites in the USA.   When Jack Johnson found a venue (Sydney, Australia) to meet and defeat the white boxing champion, and used his winnings to celebrate with white women prostitutes, whites tried to find a white hope to shred Jackson in the ring,  But the undefeated champion Jeffries, allowed to box Jackson in Las Vegas, would lose in 1910.

Should we stop White Slavery?  Of course.  But was it really a problem in the first place?  Or was it a way to rationalize interfering in relationships which bothered us for the wrong reasons?  People like Jacksons wife are described as victims, transportation is observed.   It doesn't add up to a crime.

FIREHOSE Statistics on Exports of Used Electronics

"The majority of refurbished products stem from imports via the ports of Lagos. The interim
results from project component 2, the Nigerian e-Waste Country Assessment, show that 70%
of all the imported used equipment is functional and is sold to consumers after testing. 70%
of the non-functional share can be repaired within the major markets and is also sold to
consumers. 9% of the total imports of used equipment is non-repairable and is directly
passed on to collectors and recyclers."

- Final report of the UNEP SBC, E-waste Africa Project,  Lagos & Freiburg, June 2011 

Right wing think tank?  Protectionist industry study?

"9% of the total imports of used equipment is non-repairable and is directly passed on to collectors and recyclers."

No.  This is from the two year study of the Basel Convention Secretariat, one of the several listed at the UNEP and Basel Convention site.  " Informal e-waste management in Lagos, Nigeria – socio-economic impacts and feasibility of inter-national recycling co-operations"  And it is not a typo.  Thats NINE PERCENT, not 90%!

Ok.  It's not perfect.  9% of the used electronics purchased by Africans could not be reused or repaired, and that's a lot of waste.  But is it bad enough to ban exports?  

Take a guess what new item store returns are for product sold in California?  11.9%

That's right, dear readers.   According to the National Retail Foundation, store returns of merchandise sold in California is nearly 12%.   Now, no doubt some of those returns are "buyers remorse", and the NRF estimates that a certain percent is return fraud.  But that's retail, it doesn't include damage in shipping... or static damage discovered before the goods are sold, or are pulled from the shelf because of high returns.

Here are the statistics of the percentage of electronics which are damaged by ELECTROSTATIC charges upon import to the USA.   From ESD Association web site:

“Despite a great deal of effort during the past decade, ESD still affects production yields, manufacturing costs, product quality, product reliability, and profitability. Industry experts have estimated average product losses due to static to range from 8-33%. Others estimate the actual cost of ESD damage to the electronics industry as running into the billions of dollars annually. The cost of damaged devices themselves ranges from only a few cents for a simple diode to several hundred dollars for complex hybrids. When associated costs of repair and rework, shipping, labor, and overhead are included, clearly the opportunities exist for significant improvements.”

So damage to new electronics is estimated at 8-33%, and store returns in California are 11.9%.   And Ghana and Nigeria studies found loss or damage of used product to be between 9% and 15%.  

AND HERE'S the killer.   At the Vermont Fair Trade Recycling Summit at Middlebury College, I learned that brand new product - the ones Africans can afford, cheap stuff from China - fails at a higher rate than used goods!   The Ghana and Nigeria study never tested the new product, so there's actually not even a control group... but the Africans who came to the Summit said there's much less risk to buying used American  name-brand electronics.

Based on the firehose of disinformation hurled at Africa technicians, the statistics above aren't ever considered.  Basel Action Network fabricated, hallucinated, or otherwise made up the only statistic Interpol needed to arrest and seize the goods of 40 African electronics businesses in the past 6 months, 240 tons of affordable computers and televisions purchased by Africans for resale in their cities...

And now, without further adieu, here is today's press release from our friends in Seattle Washington.  Click below... hear how Puckett describes the "reuse excuse", those nasty, polluting, toxic African techs.  From the source of the "90% of Africa Imports are Primitive", here's a report from the Basel Convention.... which leading up to the Fair Trade Recycling Summit, is leaning our way.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Term Paper IV: "E-waste" Export, Geog of Env Justice

Sitting in the exhibit hall of CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, at the World Trade Center (an enlightened name for an exhibit hall)  in Las Vegas, Nevada.

In part I, I mapped the toxics in the USA, contrasting the tonnage of serious toxics (remote areas, primarily from raw material extraction) to the number of 100 data points close to urban areas.  I used this to support my thesis that environmental enforcement correlates positively with property value.

In Part II, I put the USA map into a generic Venn-like diagram (below), with the bluer areas representing land with high property value, and the green areas representing forests, tundra, moutains - land not valuable except to minimalist living or raw material exploit or agriculture.   The remote areas, where:

THIS HAPPENS (Mexico primary lead smelter 1999)
THIS HAPPENS (Peru primary ore smelter 2009)
And THIS HAPPENS (Zambia primary ore mining 2007)
And THIS HAPPENS (China primary copper, zinc, lead smelting 2000-1010)

In Part III, I made analogies over 130 years, how mercury mining and Indian wars and extinction of bison in the big green wild USA parallels the mercury mining, conflict metal wars, and extinction of gorillas in the wild jungles.  And the tinker Irish laborers in Boston who made paper mills survive by switching to recycled feedstock were looked down on 130 years ago, and suffered in the "great stink" of flushing toilets in Baltimore, much like repairpeople in Accra are looked down upon by recyclers while the goods they fix are labelled toxic, and while rich flood the markets with used devices...  Accra repairman lives in an Irish ghetto in a USA eastern city, and Congo mercury miner lives in the wild green lands of Wounded Knee.

In Part 4, I want to explore how the miracle of transportation allows trade between different zip codes in different countries.

Criminalizing Hard Work Done "By Hand"

Society recoils from hard work when toil is presented in a racially charged manner.

reported from the road in Ozark Mountain country.

My kids Posed "Toiling" Cameroon 1985

Hard work was good.  Working with your hands was nothing to be ashamed of in Arkansas and Missouri, where I spent every summer.
But the Western Press increasingly presents anything done "by hand" in the developing world as being an unsafe and sad "state of affairs".  See again the coverage of "fair trade" by Victoria's Secret, headlined "Children Toil With Bare Hands in Burkina Fields."
In the Ozark Mountains, toil was something to enjoy, something to be proud of.   But during the attack on fair trade cotton, "Toil + Manure + 13 years old labor" was a damning equation for Victoria's Secret.  Manure to a farmer is non-toxic fertilizer, but to an American reporter, seems simply odorous.

In Burkina Faso, girls marry at 13.  Most girls that age are lucky to be in school, even part time.   If they are not lucky enough to be in school, there is a short list of careers for them.  If a girl is an orphan or foster child, the choice of careers is shorter and the choices more perilous.  One of two girl students of mine at 9th Grade of CES Ngaoundal in Cameroon, the privileged daughter of the Sous-Prefet, died in childbirth the night before I was to hand out her grading card (she failed my English class).