To Bribe A Mockingbird

Have you wondered why laws change so frequently? To keep the general public confused, yes. To abolish the possibility of innocence, absolutely. But a more mundane reason that goes hand-in-hand with 2020’s coup by the managerial Deep State, is plain old everyday bribery.

Newsom signs nation’s most sweeping law to phase out single-use plastics and packaging waste

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By Susanne Rust & Anabel Sosa for the Los Angeles Times, 30 June 2022

The beaches are clogged with trash… ships must navigate around “plastic-bergs”… the air is so polluted that people double-mask voluntarily… but enough about China. Let’s talk instead about the intolerable pollution problems of a nation as clean as Switzerland! (Not counting San Fransicko)

Striking a blow against a pernicious form of pollution, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law Thursday the nation’s most far-reaching restrictions on single-use plastics and packaging.

The legislation heads off a November ballot measure that many lawmakers and the plastics industry hoped to avoid, and it puts California at the forefront of national efforts to eliminate polystyrene and other plastics that litter the environment, degrade into toxic particles and increasingly inhabit human blood, tissue and organs.

No, no, that’s the Pfi$er vaxx.

The California Senate approved the bill Thursday morning with 29 ayes and zero “nos,” after the Assembly passed it 67 to 2 late Wednesday. Backers in both houses applauded the bill’s historic nature and bipartisan support, as did Newsom.

This state isn’t just a one-party system. It’s a “Jerry Brown’s Little Girls Club” party system. Politicians are getting reelected at such a high rate that they’re morphing into crime families.

For the past six months, a team of roughly two dozen negotiators . mostly women . hammered out language designed to reduce plastic, increase recycling and shift the economic burden of waste disposal to plastic producers and packagers. They also sought to find language that would satisfy those producers, as well as waste managers, packaging companies and environmentalists.

The boldfaced phrases are worth second glances but the part I’m gonna requote is “language that would satisfy those producers”.

The bill requires that by Jan. 1, 2028, at least 30% of plastic items sold, distributed or imported into the state be recyclable. By 2032, that number rises to 65%. It also calls for a 25% reduction in single-use plastic waste by 2032 and provides CalRecycle with the authority to increase that percentage if the amount of plastic in the economy and waste stream grows.

The Deep State grows when government officials surrender their authority to unelected bureaucrats.

In the case of expanded polystyrene, that number needs to reach 25% by 2025. If the number isn’t hit, the ubiquitous, hard-to-recycle foamy plastic will be banned.

“It’s a de facto ban,” said Jay Ziegler with the Nature Conservancy, of the bill’s polystyrene recycling requirement. He added that current recycling rates for polystyrene are in the low single digits, making it improbable that a 25% recycling target could be met in three years.

“Language that would satisfy those producers” = “we’re de facto banning their products.”

And “three years” means “after the 2024 election cycle”. The idea is that businesses about to suffer product bans will have the “opportunity” to contribute to those “reelection funds” in return for another “extension”. Hence the constant rewriting of such laws… to encourage regular bribery of officials.

[Plastics] waste pollutes marine environments and clogs landfills, in part because of challenges in recycling plastics, including China’s decision to end imports of plastics waste several years ago.

In the beginning was “recycling is good for the environment!” But what actually happened is government officials collected recyclable trash at taxpayer expense then sold it to China for private profit.

Thus began the Great Recycling Grift.

But then, China industrialized enough that it can produce its own trash, thank you, so that grift has failed. Time for a new one!

The bill is based on a policy concept known as Extended Producer Responsibility, which shifts the responsibility of waste from consumers, towns and cities to companies manufacturing products with environmental impacts. It also gives plastics companies extensive oversight and authority in terms of the program’s management, execution and reporting, via a Producer Responsibility Organization, which will be made up of industry representatives.

Sounds like a double protection racket. “Yo industry reps! We’ll ban your products if you don’t pay up… but if you do then we’ll help you recoup the losses by screwing the customer.”

Among various duties, the group will be responsible for collecting fees from its participating organizations to pay for the program, as well as an annual $500-million fee that will be directed to plastic pollution mitigation fund.

There’s the bribes.

CalRecycle has ultimate authority over the program.

There’s the grifters.

Negotiators, including Heidi Sanborn, founder of the National Stewardship Action Council, said past failures in Extended Producer Responsibility laws influenced how this legislation was written, enabling the authors to identify areas that could be abused or ignored.

And there’s the… victims not playing ball?!

In 2010, the state created a similar producer responsibility law mandating carpet recycling. Overseen by the industry, the target was 24% recycling by 2020. Recycling rates decreased after the program was instituted. CalRecycle sued the group for $3.3 million in 2017 for failing to meet its target, and in 2021, they settled for $1.175 million.

What happened?

Yep. When the corruptocrats bypassed the government’s authority to rule, they also bypassed the government’s authority to punish. Helping the victims afford billion-dollar bribes is less valuable to the victim than not having to pay those bribes in the first place.

In another case that involved California’s Paint Care program, the manufacturers ultimately sued the state and used the funding from the program to cover their litigation costs.

OUCH! This one even fought back by re-involving the government! *checks* Gay Area governments tried to force major paint manufacturers to pay for the remediation of old homes containing lead paint despite the trivial, irrelevant fact that such paint was legal to use at the time.

Language in this new plastic bill includes clear dates and consequences for failure, including a $50,000-per-day fine on any company or “entity” not in compliance with the law, as well as directions for how collected fees can and cannot be used.

“We’ve learned from mistakes in the past,” said Sanborn. “This legislation is solid.”

Not everyone is happy.

The American Chemistry Council’s vice president of plastics, Joshua Baca, issued a statement on Wednesday saying that although his organization had worked alongside Allen and the negotiators for months, the final version “is not the optimal legislation to drive California towards a circular economy.”

He said the law’s definition of recycling “needs to be improved and made clearer so new, innovative technologies that keep hard to recycle plastic out of the environment and landfills count in achieving the circularity goals in the legislation.”

Big Man doesn’t want to clean up the environment. Big Man doesn’t want to replace his decades-old recycle grift with new technologies. Big Man wants his ten percent and you bet he’s gonna get it!

Environmental justice groups had expressed concern that the bill left open the opportunity for waste companies to try to recycle plastics by employing polluting methods such as pyrolysis and gasification, which convert plastics into fuel, energy or other forms of plastic.

QED

“The bill, with my committee’s amendments, bans chemical recycling and includes recognition of the protection of disadvantaged and low-income communities,” said Assemblymember Luz Rivas (D-North Hollywood). “I would not let the bill out of my committee if I felt that a chemical recycling plant could be built in my community.”

Big (Wo)Man even has a name. Luz Rivas is not even pretending that the goal of “environmental justice” is effective, permanent solutions. She holds a degree in electrical engineering from MIT yet doesn’t want to consider new recycling technologies? Maybe that EE degree was mere social justice and her real background is her other degree, a Master’s in Education from Harvard.

Other critics say the bill doesn’t explicitly single out plastics but includes language that could pull in other materials such as paper, cardboard and glass.

Materials “that are not tossed out as trash should not be treated as solid waste, and the Legislature must act to eliminate any confusion about that,. said Melinda Andrade, executive director of the Assn. of California Recycling Industries.

Feature, not bug. Once the plastics grift gets going, it’ll be time to expand, and not needing to buy another bill from the Legislature will be a serious cost-saver.

Kevin Messner, with the Assn. of Home Appliance Manufacturers, voiced a similar concern. He said the language of the bill, which includes all packaging material, will hurt his clients and create a disincentive for them to use non-plastic materials, which are often heavier, bulkier and more expensive.

But but but it’s “language that would satisfy those producers”.

We know what non-plastic, single-use plastic containers means: a return to single-use glass containers. Broken plastic is squishy but broken glass has sharp edges. As if Gay Area streets aren’t already overflowing with sharps hazards in puddles of excrement….

By the way, do you remember how those brown tides started? With the original bans on single-use plastic bags, which the homeless had used as toilet liners.

But environmentalists, including Anja Brandon with the Ocean Conservancy, said the bill takes an important step toward ensuring all single-use items are recycled.

“We have set up the system so that everyone who creates single use packaging pays, but they pay at a different rate,” she said. “We’re investing in building a recycling infrastructure and getting away from extractive practices that focus on virgin material.”

Nick Lapis of Californians Against Waste said that passage of the bill sets the bar for the rest of the nation. But for it to be successful “it will be incumbent on us and the regulators to keep industry’s feet to the fire,” he said. “We absolutely cannot claim a victory and walk away.”

Of course not! That would leave nobody else to blame, not to mention bribe money on the table.

However, there’s one other option available to industry: stop doing business in California entirely. There comes a point when losing 25% of the American marketplace becomes a smart decision, and that point gets reached when the local governments breathe constant, open-ended threats against everybody who does business there.

And frankly, I doubt it’s still 25%. Illegal immigrants are not engines of prosperity.

But never mind! What’s important today is that the Narrative was forced upon society by fanatic eco-Nazis while politicians wealthy far in excess of their annual salaries get another decade of riding the pork. Bennies for us today, consequences for you tomorrow!