About Plastic. Does It Last Forever? Is there an Alternative?

 

Richard Mellor
GED/HEO
Afscme Local 444, retired

My favorite physicist. Here she is talking about plastics and I have to admit I cannot speak with any real authority on her suggestions here. I do know that I have felt for a long time that plastics are destroying the planet. I know that when I was young we had our milk delivered in glass bottles. Each week the milkman (normally always a man which is why we said "milkman" would come by in his little battery powered car and pick up the empty milk bottles and leave us full ones. Is glass not a better alternative in many of the uses anyway?

What Sabine does not consider of course is the drive for profits which determines what we produce and how. Capitalism cannot place humanity and the natural world above profits and capital accumulation; it just doesn't work that way; that would be committing class suicide. 

The greatest contributor to the destruction of the environment and climate change is the US military and that was not even up for discussion in Glasgow. And as another example, I read in the Wall Street Journal this weekend the report on Colin Powell's funeral. All the major players that are the political representatives of US capitalism were there praising him.

But like all of them, Powell was a war criminal. He presided over the slaughter of a few million people and was decorated for it. He was a willing servant of the most ruthless ruling class that has inhabited the Earth. He convinced very skillfully, foreign skeptics at the UN that they should support the invasion of Iraq, the destruction of that country, the displacement of over half a million people and the murder of a million or more others. He lied to them about the former CIA pal Saddam Hussein  and his weaponry.

Madeline Albright, the disgusting human being who said on US television that the deaths of half a million Iraqi's, mostly women and children was "worth it" said of Powell that, "Beneath that glossy exterior, our warrior-statesman was one of the gentlest and most decent people any of us will ever meet.", unless your a Vietnamese or Iraqi that is.

These people and the system they govern cannot solve any of the problems that humanity and the natural world face today. They are the epitome of violence and destruction.