That campaign - the little recycling logos on our plastics, the upbeat videos about a future where plastic was part of a circular economy of use and recycling - convinced us to buy, wash, and sort plastic.
90% of that plastic was never recycled. It never will be.
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NONE of those splashy campaigns - the announcement that all NYC school plastics would be recycled, the recycling in national parks - ever worked. They all lasted long enough to get some upbeat press, and then they quietly shut down.
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This week's @NPR/@planetmoney investigation by @LauraSullivaNPR doesn't just talk to the ex-chief lobbyists, now serving as belated Oppenheimers, lamenting the impending destruction of our planet.
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It also talks to the current round of executives who have announced a fresh round of plans to recycle plastics - completely disingenuous, insultingly obvious distraction tactics to convince us that their projections of TRIPLING production by 2050 isn't a form of mass murder.
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Then Sullivan circles back to those retired executives, the ones who oversaw the first disinformation campaign, and they confirm that this latest round of promises are literally the same tactic, barely updated for a world on fire.
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The world is on fire. My sky has been orange all week. Our family's socially distanced meetings with friends in parks or back yards have been cancelled because we cannot breathe outside.
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Exxon - and Chevron, and the rest of Big Oil - knows.
In a secret recording released to the @nytimes, oil execs meet to cheerfully discuss how they will burn the world and murder us all but make a buck in the process.
Their plans for climate change don't involve reducing emissions - they're building bunkers and hiring mercenaries to keep us at bay when we come for them. They know what they've done.
Exxon knows.
10/
Exxon knows.
When I searched for the "Exxon Knew" campaign to find a link for this piece, the top of @Google's search results included a blisteringly expensive ad for a disinformation site, paid for by Exxon.
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The sky is orange. The oceans are choking. The air is unbreathable. Your body is full of microplastics.
Exxon.
Fucking.
Knows.
eof/
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If AI has a future (a big if), it will have to be economically viable. An industry can't spend 1,700% more on Nvidia chips than it earns indefinitely - not even with Nvidia being a principle investor in its largest customers:
I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel *The Bezzle*! Catch me in THIS SATURDAY (Apr 27) in MARIN COUNTY, Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!
Combine Angelou's "When someone shows you who they are, believe them" with the truism that in politics, "every accusation is a confession" and you get: "Every time someone accuses you of a vice, they're showing you who they are and you should believe them."
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on , my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Let's talk about some of those accusations. Remember the moral panic over the CARES Act covid stimulus checks? Hyperventilating mouthpieces for the ruling class were on every cable network, complaining that "no one wants to work anymore."
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Corporate crime is underpoliced and underprosecuted. We just choose not to do anything about it. US corporations commit crimes at 20X the rate of humans, and their crimes are far worse than any human crime, but they are almost never prosecuted:
We can't even bear to utter the *words* "corporate crime": instead, we deploy a whole raft of euphemisms like "risk and compliance," and that ole fave, the trusty "white-collar crime":
Using Amazon, or Twitter, or Facebook, or Google, or Doordash, or Uber doesn't make you lazy. Platform capitalism isn't enshittifying because you made the wrong shopping choices.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on , my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Remember, the reason these corporations were able to capture such substantial market-share is that the capital markets saw them as a bet that they could lose money for years, drive out competition, capture their markets.
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