The Politics of Ocean Trash and Educated Middle Class Trash

                              

“Plastic Soup” Found in Atlantic Ocean, “Plebian Soup” Found Across Middle Class America

 Challenging the Neo-Frat Boy Corporate State's Throwaway Culture

In addition to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch discovered a decade ago, researchers have now identified another pile of floating garbage in the Atlantic. Although you can't see these unsightly, harmful plastic threats to ocean and human life from your bedroom window (like Sarah Palin can see Russia), striking similarities to America's educated middle class being tossed over rails on the Good Ship Job Outsourcing/Insourcing abound. How did America, at one time considered the Star of the Sea when it came to protecting environmental and citizens rights – sell out our safety and jobs and how can corporate America be rehabilitated?

First, let's look at the unsustainability of the Plastics Industry and the Politics of Ocean Trash (h/t David Rosenfeld at DC Bureau) as “Big Plastics” continue to wreak damage across the globe's oceans. A researcher explains:

“The debris is harmful for fish, sea mammals - and at the top of the food chain, potentially humans - even though much of the plastic has broken into such tiny pieces they are nearly invisible.

Since there is no realistic way of cleaning the oceans, advocates say the key is to keep more plastic out by raising awareness and, wherever possible, challenging a throwaway culture that uses non-biodegradable materials for disposable products.

"Our job now is to let people know that plastic ocean pollution is a global problem - it unfortunately is not confined to a single patch."

Check. Time to clean up our oceans, develop packaging alternatives/methods and redefine current industries that harm the environment and local human capital pools. I recently purchased a bottle of aspirin and a toothbrush, noting that the aspirin bottle was at least three times the size it needed to be to hold the sixty tablets. How many plastic, unbiodegradable aspirin bottles have I purchased and thrown out in my lifetime? (Personally, I rarely use the stuff but you get the point.) But a return to the days of the Apothecary could go quite the distance in vastly reducing the amount of plastic used to manufacture unnecessary bottles. Instead of using plastic bottles for drugs (both prescription and non-prescription), the pharmacist would dispense the medications into the customer's reusable metal or glass containers with each purchase. But this might be a good sustainable idea – one that would increase the demand and employment opportunities for more pharmacists, too -- but one that would surely throw an anchor on Big Plastic's Good Ship Polluting for Profit. (The toothbrush packaging practically required gardening shears to pry open the excessively thick, heavy plastic tube encasing.) Why is that?

The “Big Plastics” industry must reinvent its business model to explore sustainable packaging delivery systems just as Corporate America's Cheap Labor Junkie Lobby must rehabilitate itself from its unsustainable dependence on cheap imported labor.

Next, let's look at the damage U.S. corporations are doing to our local economies from America's divestment of local human capital resources caused by corporate America's unsustainable H-1B visa hazard (h/t Bill Snyder at InfoWorld) and compare the “Politics of Ocean Trash” to the “Politics of “Outsourced, Educated Middle Class American Trash” that are unsustainable. Over 45 million educated, middle class citizens (who have earned at least one degree from our nation's leading universities) have been tossed over the rails by the Neo Frat Boy Corporate State so that cheap labor can take their jobs (h/t Mayday at NoSlaves) and are now floating along the unemployment lines or are underemployed and uninsured. The same educated middle class citizens, who, like the floating plastic garbage are “hard to spot from the surface and spun together by a vortex of currents” as the media (both MSM and “access” bloggers/wannabes) keep the Cheap Labor Lobby out of view. The similarities are striking, in that both the Plastics Industry Lobby and the Neo-Frat Boy Corporate State's Outsourcing Educated White Collar Jobs Lobby have the same goal: ignore the ills to our environmental and local social ecosystems while a few greedy insiders profit.

To achieve sustainable investment and human labor practices, our democracy must demand the Neo-Frat Boy Corporate State undergo a thorough house cleaning and take both a moral and business model inventory of all the destructive past and current products and solutions responsible for destroying our ecosystem and local socioeconomic infrastructures. In the meantime, we have plastic trash decomposing at Sea and middle class educated trash decomposing on Our Town and a Neo Frat Boy Corporate State that digs it and their bought faux news media outlets that bury it. Who will save the oceans from socially irresponsible corporate “leaders” treating our seas like their own personal toilet? Who will save educated middle class Americans from being thrown away from the workforce like trash?

With all of the protests the media keep hyping, and speaking of Sarah Palin – When was the last time we heard her rally her audience for cleaning up the Cheap Labor Junkie Lobby's addiction to cheap “skilled” labor? Or cleaning up the oceans?

C'mon, Sarah – KRILL, BABY! KRILL!

.

.

.

I hear crickets chirping.

Party on, plebes!

-2Truthy