How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled

Laura Leebrick, a manager at Rogue Disposal & Recycling in southern Oregon, is standing on the end of its landfill watching an avalanche of plastic trash pour out of a semitrailer: containers, bags, packaging, strawberry containers, yogurt cups.

None of this plastic will be turned into new plastic things. All of it is buried.

"To me that felt like it was a betrayal of the public trust," she said. "I had been lying to people ... unwittingly."

Rogue, like most recycling companies, had been sending plastic trash to China, but when China shut its doors two years ago, Leebrick scoured the U.S. for buyers. She could find only someone who wanted white milk jugs. She sends the soda bottles to the state.

But when Leebrick tried to tell people the truth about burying all the other plastic, she says people didn't want to hear it.

"I remember the first meeting where I actually told a city council that it was costing more to recycle than it was to dispose of the same material as garbage," she says, "and it was like heresy had been spoken in the room: You're lying. This is gold. We take the time to clean it, take the labels off, separate it and put it here. It's gold. This is valuable."

But it's not valuable, and it never has been. And what's more, the makers of plastic — the nation's largest oil and gas companies — have known this all along, even as they spent millions of dollars telling the American public the opposite.

NPR and PBS Frontline spent months digging into internal industry documents and interviewing top former officials. We found that the industry sold the public on an idea it knew wouldn't work — that the majority of plastic could be, and would be, recycled — all while making billions of dollars selling the world new plastic.

The industry's awareness that recycling wouldn't keep plastic out of landfills and the environment dates to the program's earliest days, we found. "There is serious doubt that [recycling plastic] can ever be made viable on an economic basis," one industry insider wrote in a 1974 speech.

Yet the industry spent millions telling people to recycle, because, as one former top industry insider told NPR, selling recycling sold plastic, even if it wasn't true.

"If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment," Larry Thomas, former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, known today as the Plastics Industry Association and one of the industry's most powerful trade groups in Washington, D.C., told NPR.

In response, industry representative Steve Russell, until recently the vice president of plastics for the trade group the American Chemistry Council, said the industry has never intentionally misled the public about recycling and is committed to ensuring all plastic is recycled.

"The proof is the dramatic amount of investment that is happening right now," Russell said. "I do understand the skepticism, because it hasn't happened in the past, but I think the pressure, the public commitments and, most important, the availability of technology is going to give us a different outcome."

Here's the basic problem: All used plastic can be turned into new things, but picking it up, sorting it out and melting it down is expensive. Plastic also degrades each time it is reused, meaning it can't be reused more than once or twice.

On the other hand, new plastic is cheap. It's made from oil and gas, and it's almost always less expensive and of better quality to just start fresh.

All of these problems have existed for decades, no matter what new recycling technology or expensive machinery has been developed. In all that time, less than 10 percent of plastic has ever been recycled. But the public has known little about these difficulties.

It could be because that's not what they were told.

Starting in the 1990s, the public saw an increasing number of commercials and messaging about recycling plastic.

"The bottle may look empty, yet it's anything but trash," says one ad from 1990 showing a plastic bottle bouncing out of a garbage truck. "It's full of potential. ... We've pioneered the country's largest, most comprehensive plastic recycling program to help plastic fill valuable uses and roles."

These commercials carried a distinct message: Plastic is special, and the consumer should recycle it.

It may have sounded like an environmentalist's message, but the ads were paid for by the plastics industry, made up of companies like Exxon, Chevron, Dow, DuPont and their lobbying and trade organizations in Washington.

Industry companies spent tens of millions of dollars on these ads and ran them for years, promoting the benefits of a product that, for the most part, was buried, was burned or, in some cases, wound up in the ocean.

Documents show industry officials knew this reality about recycling plastic as far back as the 1970s.

Many of the industry's old documents are housed in libraries, such as the one on the grounds of the first DuPont family home in Delaware. Others are with universities, where former industry leaders sent their records.

At Syracuse University, there are boxes of files from a former industry consultant. And inside one of them is a report written in April 1973 by scientists tasked with forecasting possible issues for top industry executives.

Recycling plastic, it told the executives, was unlikely to happen on a broad scale.

"There is no recovery from obsolete products," it says.

It says pointedly: Plastic degrades with each turnover.

"A degradation of resin properties and performance occurs during the initial fabrication, through aging, and in any reclamation process," the report told executives.

Recycling plastic is "costly," it says, and sorting it, the report concludes, is "infeasible."

And there are more documents, echoing decades of this knowledge, including one analysis from a top official at the industry's most powerful trade group. "The costs of separating plastics ... are high," he tells colleagues, before noting that the cost of using oil to make plastic is so low that recycling plastic waste "can't yet be justified economically."

Larry Thomas, the former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, worked side by side with top oil and plastics executives.

He's retired now, on the coast of Florida where he likes to bike, and feels conflicted about the time he worked with the plastics industry.

"I did what the industry wanted me to do, that's for sure," he says. "But my personal views didn't always jibe with the views I had to take as part of my job."

Thomas took over back in the late 1980s, and back then, plastic was in a crisis. There was too much plastic trash. The public was getting upset.

In one document from 1989, Thomas calls executives at Exxon, Chevron, Amoco, Dow, DuPont, Procter & Gamble and others to a private meeting at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington.

"The image of plastics is deteriorating at an alarming rate," he wrote. "We are approaching a point of no return."

He told the executives they needed to act.

The "viability of the industry and the profitability of your company" are at stake.

Thomas remembers now.

"The feeling was the plastics industry was under fire — we got to do what it takes to take the heat off, because we want to continue to make plastic products," he says.

At this time, Thomas had a co-worker named Lew Freeman. He was a vice president of the lobbying group. He remembers many of the meetings like the one in Washington.

"The basic question on the table was, You guys as our trade association in the plastics industry aren't doing enough — we need to do more," Freeman says. "I remember this is one of those exchanges that sticks with me 35 years later or however long it's been ... and it was what we need to do is ... advertise our way out of it. That was the idea thrown out."

So began the plastics industry's $50 million-a-year ad campaign promoting the benefits of plastic.

"Presenting the possibilities of plastic!" one iconic ad blared, showing kids in bike helmets and plastic bags floating in the air.

"This advertising was motivated first and foremost by legislation and other initiatives that were being introduced in state legislatures and sometimes in Congress," Freeman says, "to ban or curb the use of plastics because of its performance in the waste stream."

At the same time, the industry launched a number of feel-good projects, telling the public to recycle plastic. It funded sorting machines, recycling centers, nonprofits, even expensive benches outside grocery stores made out of plastic bags.

Few of these projects actually turned much plastic into new things.

NPR tracked down almost a dozen projects the industry publicized starting in 1989. All of them shuttered or failed by the mid-1990s. Mobil's Massachusetts recycling facility lasted three years, for example. Amoco's project to recycle plastic in New York schools lasted two. Dow and Huntsman's highly publicized plan to recycle plastic in national parks made it to seven out of 419 parks before the companies cut funding.

None of them was able to get past the economics: Making new plastic out of oil is cheaper and easier than making it out of plastic trash.

Both Freeman and Thomas, the head of the lobbying group, say the executives all knew that.

"There was a lot of discussion about how difficult it was to recycle," Thomas remembers. "They knew that the infrastructure wasn't there to really have recycling amount to a whole lot."

Even as the ads played and the projects got underway, Thomas and Freeman say industry officials wanted to get recycling plastic into people's homes and outside on their curbs with blue bins.

The industry created a special group called the Council for Solid Waste Solutions and brought a man from DuPont, Ron Liesemer, over to run it.

Liesemer's job was to at least try to make recycling work — because there was some hope, he said, however unlikely, that maybe if they could get recycling started, somehow the economics of it all would work itself out.

"I had no staff, but I had money," Liesemer says. "Millions of dollars."

Liesemer took those millions out to Minnesota and other places to start local plastic recycling programs.

But then he ran into the same problem all the industry documents found. Recycling plastic wasn't making economic sense: There were too many different kinds of plastic, hundreds of them, and they can't be melted down together. They have to be sorted out.

"Yes, it can be done," Liesemer says, "but who's going to pay for it? Because it goes into too many applications, it goes into too many structures that just would not be practical to recycle."

Liesemer says he started as many programs as he could and hoped for the best.

"They were trying to keep their products on the shelves," Liesemer says. "That's what they were focused on. They weren't thinking what lesson should we learn for the next 20 years. No. Solve today's problem."

And Thomas, who led the trade group, says all of these efforts started to have an effect: The message that plastic could be recycled was sinking in.

"I can only say that after a while, the atmosphere seemed to change," he says. "I don't know whether it was because people thought recycling had solved the problem or whether they were so in love with plastic products that they were willing to overlook the environmental concerns that were mounting up."

But as the industry pushed those public strategies to get past the crisis, officials were also quietly launching a broader plan.

In the early 1990s, at a small recycling facility near San Diego, a man named Coy Smith was one of the first to see the industry's new initiative.

Back then, Smith ran a recycling business. His customers were watching the ads and wanted to recycle plastic. So Smith allowed people to put two plastic items in their bins: soda bottles and milk jugs. He lost money on them, he says, but the aluminum, paper and steel from his regular business helped offset the costs.

But then, one day, almost overnight, his customers started putting all kinds of plastic in their bins.

"The symbols start showing up on the containers," he explains.

Smith went out to the piles of plastic and started flipping over the containers. All of them were now stamped with the triangle of arrows — known as the international recycling symbol — with a number in the middle. He knew right away what was happening.

"All of a sudden, the consumer is looking at what's on their soda bottle and they're looking at what's on their yogurt tub, and they say, 'Oh well, they both have a symbol. Oh well, I guess they both go in,' " he says.

The bins were now full of trash he couldn't sell. He called colleagues at recycling facilities all across the country. They reported having the same problem.

Industry documents from this time show that just a couple of years earlier, starting in 1989, oil and plastics executives began a quiet campaign to lobby almost 40 states to mandate that the symbol appear on all plastic — even if there was no way to economically recyc

le it. Some environmentalists also supported the symbol, thinking it would help separate plastic.

Smith said what it did was make all plastic look recyclable.

"The consumers were confused," Smith says. "It totally undermined our credibility, undermined what we knew was the truth in our community, not the truth from a lobbying group out of D.C."

But the lobbying group in D.C. knew the truth in Smith's community too. A report given to top officials at the Society of the Plastics Industry in 1993 told them about the problems.

"The code is being misused," it says bluntly. "Companies are using it as a 'green' marketing tool."

The code is creating "unrealistic expectations" about how much plastic can actually be recycled, it told them.

Smith and his colleagues launched a national protest, started a working group and fought the industry for years to get the symbol removed or changed. They lost.

"We don't have manpower to compete with this," Smith says. "We just don't. Even though we were all dedicated, it still was like, can we keep fighting a battle like this on and on and on from this massive industry that clearly has no end in sight of what they're able to do and willing to do to keep their image the image they want."

"It's pure manipulation of the consumer," he says.

In response, industry officials told NPR that the code was only ever meant to help recycling facilities sort plastic and was not intended to create any confusion.

Without question, plastic has been critical to the country's success. It's cheap and durable, and it's a chemical marvel.

It's also hugely profitable. The oil industry makes more than $400 billion a year making plastic, and as demand for oil for cars and trucks declines, the industry is telling shareholders that future profits will increasingly come from plastic.

And if there was a sign of this future, it's a brand-new chemical plant that rises from the flat skyline outside Sweeny, Texas. It's so new that it's still shiny, and inside the facility, the concrete is free from stains.

This plant is Chevron Phillips Chemical's $6 billion investment in new plastic.

"We see a very bright future for our products," says Jim Becker, the vice president of sustainability for Chevron Phillips, inside a pristine new warehouse next to the plant.

"These are products the world needs and continues to need," he says. "We're very optimistic about future growth."

With that growth, though, comes ever more plastic trash. But Becker says Chevron Phillips has a plan: It will recycle 100% of the plastic it makes by 2040.

Becker seems earnest. He tells a story about vacationing with his wife and being devastated by the plastic trash they saw. When asked how Chevron Phillips will recycle 100% of the plastic it makes, he doesn't hesitate. "Recycling has to get more efficient, more economic," he says. "We've got to do a better job, collecting the waste, sorting it. That's going to be a huge effort."

Fix recycling is the industry's message too, says Steve Russell, the industry's recent spokesman.

"Fixing recycling is an imperative, and we've got to get it right," he says. "I understand there is doubt and cynicism. That's going to exist. But check back in. We're there."

Larry Thomas, Lew Freeman and Ron Liesemer, former industry executives, helped oil companies out of the first plastic crisis by getting people to believe something the industry knew then wasn't true: That most plastic could be and would be recycled.

Russell says this time will be different.

"It didn't get recycled because the system wasn't up to par," he says. "We hadn't invested in the ability to sort it and there hadn't been market signals that companies were willing to buy it, and both of those things exist today."

But plastic today is harder to sort than ever: There are more kinds of plastic, it's cheaper to make plastic out of oil than plastic trash and there is exponentially more of it than 30 years ago.

And during those 30 years, oil and plastic companies made billions of dollars in profit as the public consumed ever more quantities of plastic.

Russell doesn't dispute that.

"And during that time, our members have invested in developing the technologies that have brought us where we are today," he says. "We are going to be able to make all of our new plastic out of existing municipal solid waste in plastic."

Recently, an industry advocacy group funded by the nation's largest oil and plastic companies launched its most expensive effort yet to promote recycling and cleanup of plastic waste. There's even a new ad.

"We have the people that can change the world," it says to soaring music as people pick up plastic trash and as bottles get sorted in a recycling center.

Freeman, the former industry official, recently watched the ad.

"Déjà vu all over again," he says as the ad finishes. "This is the same kind of thinking that ran in the '90s. I don't think this kind of advertising is, is helpful at all."

Larry Thomas said the same.

"I don't think anything has changed," Thomas says. "Sounds exactly the same."

These days as Thomas bikes down by the beach, he says he spends a lot of time thinking about the oceans and what will happen to them in 20 or 50 years, long after he is gone.

And as he thinks back to those years he spent in conference rooms with top executives from oil and plastic companies, what occurs to him now is something he says maybe should have been obvious all along.

He says what he saw was an industry that didn't want recycling to work. Because if the job is to sell as much oil as you possibly can, any amount of recycled plastic is competition.

"You know, they were not interested in putting any real money or effort into recycling because they wanted to sell virgin material," Thomas says. "Nobody that is producing a virgin product wants something to come along that is going to replace it. Produce more virgin material — that's their business."

And they are. Analysts now expect plastic production to triple by 2050.

Source.

The Day Israel Attacked America | Al Jazeera Special Series

The mysterious attack on an American spyship by Israeli war planes and torpedo boats in 1967.

For the sake of the economy

In most of the countries where the first wave of the coronavirus epidemic has already crested, and even in some where it has yet to do so, we are being urged back to work ‘for the sake of the economy’. Yes, people are told, you may be worried about catching the virus, or conveying it home to your family, but aren’t you being just a wee bit unpatriotic? Look at these photos of boarded up sandwich bars in the City of London and whited-out shop windows on the high street. Unemployment is going up, GDP is falling, and if this sort of thing goes on it will be YOUR FAULT!

The ‘economy’ referred to here is a slippery thing. You, the consumer, are supposed to keep it going by emerging from lockdown and queueing outside Pret a Manger for your takeaway lunch, or pawing your way along the clothes rails at Next for a new outfit to wear for your next promotion interview. But you haven’t exactly been starving, or going naked during the lockdown either, have you? While some sectors of the economy have been suffering, others have benefited mightily. As one survey report put it ’62 per cent of 2,000 Londoners surveyed increased their online shopping habits during lockdown, helping add £5.3bn to the UK economy during lockdown as high street shops remained shuttered for months’. Another UK survey found that ‘nearly half said they have become “obsessed” with buying things online since lockdown began on 21 March, while 39% admitted to buying something they “wouldn’t normally buy.”’ Losses for bricks-and-mortar city centre service firms thus translate into substantial gains for their online equivalents. Furthermore, the more business is transacted online, the greater the opportunity for other companies to take their cut, whether this is from providing you with wifi or arranging the delivery.

If (like many members of the current Tory government in the UK) you belong to the capitalist class, keeping your income high is just a question of adjusting where you invest your funds. It is no accident that, according to the US Institute for Policy Studies, during the first three months of the lockdown, the wealth of the top five billionaires (Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett and Larry Ellison) grew by $584 billion, in a period when $56.5 trillion was wiped off the value of household wealth. The pandemic may have been bad for the airline industry (Buffet shrewdly sold off his airline holdings early in 2020) but, with a sizeable portion of the population working from home, reliant on online links, it has been boom time for the likes of Amazon, Apple and Microsoft.

Once again, we are witnessing tectonic upheavals in global capitalism, in which some firms are winners and some are losers but the system itself remains intact. This time round, the main losers seem likely to be small and medium sized firms, many of the sort that have in the past provided employment that is relatively stable and paid their taxes and business rates diligently. The winners seem likely to be large global corporations, many of whom provide only precarious, digitally-managed employment with little security, and many of whom are expert tax evaders. When Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, speak of ‘the economy’ now what exactly do they mean? Their rhetoric suggests concern for the firms that are losers, at a national level, but all their past practices suggest that the interests they seek to protect are those of the winners, at a global level. What seems certain is that the interests of the people who actually produce all that wealth – the workers – are most definitely not their top priority.

Source.

"I can say what I want, Trumpettes my, clap still much!"

'I think I've done more for the black community than any other president,' Trump told Fox News Channel's Harris Faulkner in an interview that aired Friday. 'And let's take a pass on Abraham Lincoln, because he did good although it's always questionable, you know, in other words, the end result.'

Dixit the next POTUM...

Daily Mail.

Read up on the truth of Trump's outlandish claim.

Is there a G-d after all?

Former Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon, triple-amputee Air Force vet Brian Kolfage and two others have been arrested and charged with defrauding hundreds of thousands of donors with their ‘We Build the Wall’ online fundraiser.

Bannon, Kolfage, Andrew Badolato and Timothy Shea are accused of scamming over $25 million under the guise of raising funds to build a wall on the US’ southern border with Mexico in an indictment unsealed Thursday in Manhattan federal court.

While donors to the crowdfunding campaign were told Kolfage, the public face of We Build the Wall, “would not be paid a cent,” the quartet allegedly funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to themselves, concealing the transactions with phony invoices and accounts.

[...]

However, the former Trump strategist’s troubles may have only begun. GTV Media Group, a media company he launched earlier this year with exiled Chinese businessman Guo Wengui, is under investigation by state and federal authorities over a $300 million private offering, according to a Wall Street Journal report published Wednesday. Multiple banks have reportedly frozen accounts associated with the round of fundraising.

Earlier this week, Kolfage announced We Build the Wall would be moving from GoFundMe, saying it was because the platform “supports the racist attacks by #BlackLivesMatter.” He nevertheless congratulated donors on “the largest GoFundMe campaign in history.”

Kolfage’s latest fundraiser, “Black Lives Matter is now a Racist Hate Group,” had been deleted from the crowdfunding platform.

RT.

To answer my own title question: probably NOT! Bannon et al will probably get off with a slap on the wrist due to 'Very Expensive Lawyer Syndrome'. I mean, Bannon: a finer 'man of the people' you never saw, right?

Why we are resigning from the Labour Party

July 24, 2020

We are women of colour active in non-party grassroots organising for social justice for many years. Like thousands of others, we joined the Labour Party (2015) when Jeremy Corbyn stood for the leadership, calling together a movement to fight for an anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-austerity, anti-war government to be elected. Such a government, alongside a strong grassroots movement, could have been transformative.

We got to know old and new members who helped us find our way in a rigid party structure, and were elected officers in our branch, our CLP, and as delegates to conference. We joined Momentum and organised community meetings. We focused on bringing grassroots justice issues to the fore – detention centres, Windrush, racist attacks including on Mosques, anti-rape, police violence, poverty and housing. We were part of a team of canvassers who increased the Labour vote in 2017 and 2019 in our multi-racial and immigrant neighbourhood and in some other constituencies. Our communities have been among the most loyal Labour voters but are the least respected.

We support Palestine and Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions (BDS), and faced a bullish core of white mainly male defenders of Israeli apartheid, some of them councillors, determined to suppress the membership’s support for Palestine by stating or implying it was antisemitic. We made official complaints within our CLP and to London Region about the treatment we and other women, including Jewish women, experienced from these men. There has been no response from HQ. On a recent webinar evaluating the leaked report that exposed gross racism, sexism and sabotage by HQ, a woman councillor reported that similar treatment was going on in constituencies up and down the country: “It’s as if they are protected.” A woman council leader resigned recently citing similar misogyny and bullying from inside the Party.

We are leaving the Labour Party because:·

Starmer’s grovelling apology and the Party payment of hundreds of thousands of members’ money to staff who attacked members and conspired against winning elections, despite legal advice that the Party had a strong defence, is the last straw·

Sabotage, and gross racist, sexist abuse and bullying by HQ are rife but Starmer is more concerned with who leaked the report than what’s in it.·

The 850-page report exposes how staff in charge of complaints, including on antisemitism, were themselves routinely abusive, especially to Black women MPs. HQ undermined Corbyn’s leadership and pursued witch-hunts against members. We were shocked and furious to find out that the 2017 election was lost by a mere 2,500 votes because of sabotage by HQ and right-wing Labour MPs, some of whom are now in Starmer’s shadow cabinet. Starmer’s first response to the report was to get those who leaked it.·

Antisemitism is being misused and elevated above every other form of discrimination, including racist attacks against Muslims and people of colour. False accusations of antisemitism were manufactured and used by Labour’s right-wing to discredit Jeremy Corbyn and launch a witch-hunt within the party where anyone on the left could be attacked for saying what was disapproved of by a small clique. Keir Starmer has said that he supports “Zionism without qualification” and that his “first priority” is “to tackle anti-Semitism” in the Party. Not the hostile environment, and structural and life threatening racism that Black, Asian, Muslim, immigrant and asylum seeking people, and people of colour generally face daily; not the causes of the Grenfell fire that killed 72 people, overwhelmingly immigrant and/or of colour, as if their lives didn’t matter; not poverty which 4.5 million children, disproportionately children of colour, suffer turning up at school hungry; not climate change which threatens all our lives; not Covid-19 and Tory negligence, indifference or worse that has killed tens of thousands, again disproportionately people of colour.·

Black Lives Matter. Starmer, a former Director of Public Prosecutions, told the BBC:

“I worked with police forces across England and Wales bringing thousands of people to court, so my support for the police is very, very strong.”

As people of colour and antiracists rise up against police violence and racism in every sphere, Starmer’s response is to belittle BLM as a “moment”, condemn the toppling of statues of slavers, and dismiss calls to defund the police as “nonsense”. As DPP he refused to prosecute police officers who killed Jean Charles de Menezes in a terrifying extra-judicial execution and then lied about the victim to justify the killing. Starmer’s disrespect for Black lives has already caused resignations from the Labour Party—it is worthy of Boris Johnson and points to a political affinity between them.·

Starmer is putting supporters of Israeli apartheid in charge of Labour’s disciplinary procedures and of who members are allowed to associate with. All the leadership candidates, except Richard Burgon and Dawn Butler, endorsed the 10 pledges of the Board of Deputies of British Jews (BOD). The BOD defends Israeli apartheid, ethnic cleansing and the bombing of Palestinian civilians. How can such an organisation be given power over the membership? The aim, it seems, is to move on from the antisemitism row and increase Labour’s electability. We refuse the racist presumption that treats Palestinians (and pro-Palestinian members) as collateral damage to Labour’s electability.·

Palestinian Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter supports Palestinian rights because there can be no liberation for any of us unless the boot of racist occupiers is taken from our necks everywhere. To allow anyone to be treated as expendable by a party seeking power, opens the way to many more of us being expendable, if that party wins power. To put the BOD (which has attacked Black Lives Matter for supporting Palestine) and the Jewish Labour Movement (which told people not to vote for Corbyn) in charge of the membership gives carte blanche to the Israeli government – a foreign apartheid power aligned with Trump and other reactionary forces worldwide – to take charge of the Labour Party. Already Black women MPs have been reprimanded for participating in a zoom meeting where two Jewish anti-racists, one of them a Black Jewish woman, who had been hounded out of the Party by the vicious witch-hunt, were present. Another Black woman MP is facing verbal abuse and physical threats for supporting BLM; the leadership response has been faint.·

Starmer claims to be a “human rights advocate” but unilaterally reversed a policy decision passed overwhelmingly at Conference to support self-determination in Kashmir. He gives a green light to occupation by Modi’s racist, sectarian violence against Muslim people, with Muslim women on the front lines.

BAME officers were invited to a zoom meeting with Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner on 15 June. Astonishingly, the Windrush scandal, the tragic Grenfell fire, racism against immigrants and asylum seekers, were never mentioned. BAME officers were prevented from seeing or hearing each other and our questions. BAME elections to the NEC were flawed, making it almost impossible for independent accountable candidates to be nominated much less elected.

We won’t campaign for a party where people of colour and anti-racists, and our movements, are maligned and attacked, and where we would be silenced. We resign with immediate effect. We will continue to work with anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-capitalist members in the Party. We need each other to build a strong movement to win the changes we have all been fighting for.

Cristel Amiss & Sara Callaway, formerly Joint BAME officers, Hampstead & Kilburn CLP

H/T TG.

The US: A Mob looking for another globalist protection racket?

US senators threaten Germany's port town of Sassnitz over Nord Stream 2 gas project

Three US senators are threatening the ferry port on the island of Rügen with "crushing" sanctions to prevent the controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Fearing financial ruin, the people of Sassnitz are defiant.

It smells of fried fish, the sun's reflection is glittering in the water and a few sailboats lazily amble along. It's still summer vacation in some German states, and here in Sassnitz on the Baltic Sea island of Rügen even more so. Even the mayor of the little town of 9,000 people is on holiday. Or he would be — if it wasn't for a threatening letter sent from the United States.

"It doesn't happen every day that Sassnitz moves from 0 to 100 in the world's political attention scale," says Frank Kracht, laughing. Then he immediately turns earnest again. "I must take these threats seriously. Because first and foremost, this is also about workers."

Read more: Can Nord Stream 2 pipeline be completed despite US sanctions?

He is talking about the employees of Fährhafen Sassnitz, the company that operates the local Port Mukran. It's the logistical hub for the completion of the controversial Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which is to transport gas directly from Russia to Germany. A good 150 kilometers (93 miles) of the pipeline are still under construction.

In the letter to Sassnitz earlier this month, three Republican US senators — Ted Cruz of Texas, Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin — threatened Port Mukran with "crushing" economic and legal sanctions if it continued to allow ships to be equipped for the pipeline project.

Criticism not new, but tone is

The US wants to do all it can to prevent the pipeline from becoming a reality, and such criticism from across the Atlantic is hardly new. The Americans argue that Germany is making itself dependent on Russian gas. President Donald Trump has accused Germany of wanting US military protection from a Russian threat, while at the same time providing Moscow with high revenues from gas exports.

Ukraine and Poland have insisted the Baltic Sea pipeline will mean they lose out on billions in transit fees from the pipelines that run through their countries.

But there may also be economic interests behind the Americans' tough stance, because they want to sell their own liquid gas in Europe.

There have been threats like this in the past: Senator Cruz sent a similar letter to the Swiss-based Allseas shipping company last December. The company's special ships are financed by international funds, two of which the shipping company subsequently withdrew from work on the pipeline almost immediately.

The Akademik Cherskiy, a Russian ship, is now to complete the work. It still needs to be technically equipped to bring the finished pipes, which are stored in Port Mukran, to the Baltic Sea. But this work is now at a standstill for the time being, which is where the threatening letter from the Americans comes in.

People of Sassnitz worried

The German Green party's Jürgen Trittin has called the letter an "economic declaration of war," while Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania's State Premier Manuela Schwesig has described it as "outrageous" and an "attempt at blackmail."

In Sassnitz, few locals have much interest in US politics. Susanne Bender has lived here for 50 years, running the smoked fish stall "Heimat" ("Home"). Bender sells fish rolls, which are apparently delicious because the queue is long.

"It's not at all right what Trump is doing. Why's he interfering with our business?" she says. "Not just me personally, but everyone here is worried. We all depend on the port." After the tourist trade, the industrial ferry port is the most important employer in the region.

"You build something up and now it's supposed to be torn down again from under your feet," says René Beinhoff, who sells ice cream on the Sassnitz promenade. "What nonsense!"

Mayor Kracht also points out that the permits have all been issued, the pipeline is as good as finished — at least 94% of it is — and they want to stick with it. "It's just a threat. There are no sanctions at the moment," he says. "We have to take it seriously, but we also have to reassure our people that they will not be drawn into this political banter in any way."

Threat may be effective

"The people of Sassnitz do not yet seem to have fully understood the abyss they are looking into," says Sascha Lohmann, a political scientist at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs who has been researching US sanctions for years.

According to Lohmann, the threatening backdrop of a mix of sanctions in the letter is enough to unsettle the financial market players, such as the ferry port's house bank. "The senators understand exactly what psychological effect these threats have," Lohmann points out.

According to Lohmann, the real problem is secondary sanctions. In other words, the US prohibiting its own companies from doing business with companies affected by sanctions — in this case Port Mukran would lose all its US business partners.

Out of concern, the political scientist explains, many businesses prefer to forgo doing business with Mukran altogether, rather than risk their entire US business. "These financial players would then effectively render the port insolvent," he says.

Twinned ports

Nobody really wants to talk about what will happen next. The Akademik Cherskiy is still in the Mukran port. So far, the Germans are determined to stick to the project, while some politicians are calling on the German government to take a stand, even to issue counter-sanctions.

Kracht isn't convinced. "It's counterproductive to rattle back with the same sabers. I think a peaceful solution and cooperation would suit us well," he says. But what exactly this cooperation should or will look like is not entirely clear.

The only connection Sassnitz has with the US, says Kracht, is its twinning initiative with Port Washington, Wisconsin, where one of the senators behind the letter happens to be from. In fact, a group of young people was supposed to travel to Sassnitz from Wisconsin this summer. But then the coronavirus pandemic intervened and the visit had to be canceled. Instead of a happy group of teenagers on vacation, the only thing that came to Sassnitz was a threatening letter.

Source.