Month: June 2019

Source: The Guardian

A Guardian report from 11 countries tracks how US waste makes its way across the world – and overwhelms the poorest nations

What happens to your plastic after you drop it in a recycling bin?

According to promotional materials from America’s plastics industry, it is whisked off to a factory where it is seamlessly transformed into something new.

This is not the experience of Nguyễn Thị Hồng Thắm, a 60-year-old Vietnamese mother of seven, living amid piles of grimy American plastic on the outskirts of Hanoi. Outside her home, the sun beats down on a Cheetos bag; aisle markers from a Walmart store; and a plastic bag from ShopRite, a chain of supermarkets in New Jersey, bearing a message urging people to recycle it. read more

Source: In These Times

To overcome the insistent messaging of the corporate media and Democratic establishment, we need grassroots people power.

Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign with impossible promises, from erecting a massive, Mexican-funded border wall to revitalizing dying industries. Instead of being dismissed as a huckster, he raised Republican voters’ expectations of the possible and normalized the party’s shift to its extreme. Trump’s victory seemed to turn on its head the conventional wisdom that only centrists win general elections. read more

Four years after he became a slavish enforcer of EU dogmas, Greek leader Alexis Tsipras is finally set to lose office. But for former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, next month’s snap elections are a chance to take the fight against austerity back into parliament.