Tag: mexico
Don't Buy Coca-Cola's Plastic Trash Promise

Don't Buy Coca-Cola's Plastic Trash Promise

Former New Mexico Gov. Bruce King was renowned for his frequent malapropisms and contorted logic.

For example, he once refused to back a bill pushed by loan-shark lobbyists — but he pledged that it if the legislature passed the thing, he would sign it. Well, the bill did pass ... but Bruce vetoed it! The lobbyists swarmed him, crying that he had given his promise. Yes, the governor conceded, but "we all know that a promise is not a commitment."

Apparently, Coca-Cola executives have been studying Gov. King's verbal backflip, for the multibillion-dollar corporate behemoth suddenly announced this month that it was adopting his "a-promise-is-not-a-commitment" ploy. The beverage barons are using King's dictum to squirm out of the widely ballyhooed promise they made just a few years ago to curtail the corporation's contamination of our planet with plastic waste.

Coke has been the world's No. 1 plastic polluter six years in a row, so its previous pledge to cut its plastic trash in half by 2030 would've had a major impact. But, oops, the honchos now say that was never a commitment — just a "voluntary environmental goal." That goal, they explain, has "evolved," so now they're focused on imposing "efficient resource allocation to deliver lasting positive impact."

You don't need a BS detector to translate that corporate gobbledygook. Coke's "resource allocation" will defund its environmental efforts to further enrich its wealthiest shareholders, delivering a "lasting positive impact" for those few. And for the many who will continue absorbing the deadly petropolymers that Coca-Cola carelessly discharges into our air, water, soil, food and bodies — well, tough luck.

Don't be fooled by voluntary anti-pollution requirements. I promise you, they are hoaxes.

Let's all sing the holiday classic: "All I want for Christmas ... Is Something Not Made of Plastic."

Easier sung than done. Plastic is now ubiquitous in toys, electronics, tools, air, water ... and us. And don't forget the plastic Baby Jesus in Christmas tableaus.

What is plastic, anyway? It's a toxic synthetic material mostly manufactured from petroleum by such giants as ExxonMobil, the globe's top purveyor. So much is produced by these profiteers that plastic trash is now a planetary disaster.

But not to worry, for Big Oil's lobbyists assure us gabillions of plastic bags, bottles and such are being recycled, keeping them out of our landfills, water, bodies, etc. Swell! Except ... they're lying.

After all, Exxon is the same for-profit contaminator that lied for years that fossil fuels were not causing climate change, even though top executives knew they were. Their ethic of deceit continues today — Big Oil knows that 94% of U.S. plastics are not recycled. Indeed, they can't be.

Faced with growing public alarm about the ever-growing glut of plastic pollution, the industry has doubled down on deceit by offering a snappy new PR slogan: "Advanced Recycling." They say it's a magical process dubbed "pyrolysis." Only ... it doesn't work, it's inordinately expensive, and it increases climate change emissions. Still, Exxon exclaims its AR will soon be processing half a million tons of plastic waste! But that's not even a drop in the plastic bucket, for more than 400 million tons of plastic waste is discarded each year — and the oil industry is planning to double plastic production by 2040.

The only real way to stop runaway plastic pollution of us and our planet is to use less plastic. To learn more and help, go to Beyond Plastics: BeyondPlastics.org.

Populist author, public speaker and radio commentator Jim Hightower writes The Hightower Lowdown, a monthly newsletter chronicling the ongoing fights by America’s ordinary people against rule by plutocratic elites. Sign up at HightowerLowdown.org.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

'Enjoy Your Cheap Avocados': Trump Vows Big Tariffs On Mexico And Canada

'Enjoy Your Cheap Avocados': Trump Vows Big Tariffs On Mexico And Canada

President-elect Donald Trump announced via social media on Monday that he will enforce tariffs on goods imported from Canada, Mexico, and China.

"On January 20th, as one of my many first Executive Orders, I will sign all necessary documents to charge Mexico and Canada a 25% Tariff on ALL products coming into the United States, and its ridiculous Open Borders," the MAGA leader wrote via his Truth Social website. "This Tariff will remain in effect until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country! Both Mexico and Canada have the absolute right and power to easily solve this long simmering problem. We hereby demand that they use this power, and until such time that they do, it is time for them to pay a very big price!"

He continued, "I have had many talks with China about the massive amounts of drugs, in particular Fentanyl, being sent into the United States - But to no avail. Representatives of China told me that they would institute their maximum penalty, that of death, for any drug dealers caught doing this but, unfortunately, they never followed through, and drugs are pouring into our Country, mostly through Mexico, at levels never seen before. Until such time as they stop, we will be charging China an additional 10% Tariff, above any additional Tariffs, on all of their many products coming into the United States of America. Thank you for your attention to this matter."

Several political and economic experts slammed the president-elect's announcement.

Adam Isacson replied: "Using the same logic, Mexico and Canada could impose tariffs on US goods until we get serious about: - Reducing US demand for illicit drugs - Stopping cross-border trafficking of guns easily purchased in US shops - Curtailing money-laundering in US banks, real estate, etc."

Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) said: "Donald Trump’s first act as president will be to intentionally *raise* prices for the American people."

Economist and University of Los Angeles law professor Kimberly Clausing commented: "Policy by tweet is something we once again brace for. But the uncertainty and chaos are just part of the economic damage that these policies bring. Canada and Mexico are our largest trading partners, and these huge tariffs will raise prices for consumers."

Boston College political science assistant professor Masha Krupenkin replied: "Enjoy your cheap avocados and electronics while you can."


Mexican Army

Do Republicans Really Think Bombing Mexico Will Win Drug War?

There is no border in the world anything like the one between the United States and Mexico: a wealthy industrialized nation sharing a 2,000-mile frontier with a developing country barely able to raise its millions above subsistence-level poverty. It’s as if France were to border directly upon Algeria, or Germany upon Somalia.

American writers from Ambrose Bierce, who vanished during the Mexican revolution of 1913, to Cormac McCarthy, whose All the Pretty Horses depicted Mexico as a place of enchantment and deadly violence, have always seen it as a land of extremes. Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 film The Wild Bunch dramatizes near-phantasmagoric violence.

The brilliant Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz maintained that mutual incomprehension between the two countries was permanent and inevitable. America’s legacy, Paz wrote in The Labyrinth of Solitude, “is Democracy, capitalism and the Industrial Revolution,” while Mexico’s is “the counter-reformation, monopoly, and feudalism.”

The American belief in the inevitability of progress doesn’t really exist there, although half the Mexican population would probably emigrate to “el Coloso del Norte” if they could.

I once visited the home of a seasonal worker in a remote, picturesque village in Jalisco, whose mother insisted the whole town would follow him to California if they could.

“Todos, todos, todos,” she said. “No hay nada para nosotros en Mexico.” (“All of us. There is nothing for us in Mexico.”)

So naturally, Republicans want to bomb them. Because, of course, nothing has ever succeeded like America’s vaunted war on drugs, and looking manly and warlike is Job One among GOP politicians. Writing in The Atlantic, former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum compiles an alarming list of conservative politicians who think the best way to fix the eternal crisis at the U.S.-Mexican border is to bomb and/or invade that country.

Supposedly, presidential candidate Donald Trump has asked his advisers for a plan of attack. His mini-me rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, has proposed a naval blockade of Mexican ports. The idea is to interdict chemicals Mexican drug cartels use to manufacture fentanyl. (Suggestion: Take a look at a map showing that country’s thousands of miles of coastline on the Caribbean Sea, the Pacific Ocean, and the Gulf of Mexico. DeSantis’ suggestion is absurd on its face.)

GOP senators are breathing smoke and fire. Last year, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas wrote a New York Times op-ed arguing: “We can also use special operators and elite tactical units in law enforcement to capture or kill kingpins, neutralize key lieutenants, and destroy the cartel’s super labs and organizational infrastructure. We must work closely with the Mexican government ... but we cannot allow it to delay or hinder this necessary campaign.”

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham argues that “Our nation is being attacked by foreign powers called drug cartels in Mexico ... They are at war with us. We need to be at war with them.”

Somebody will have to tell me where and when a nation has bombed its way out of a drug addiction crisis. But then, I had the great advantage of riding in Mexican Army helicopters more than 40 years ago during “Operación Condór,” back when the drug killing Americans was heroin and the cartels were mainly a regional problem in the state of Sinaloa.

I thought they ought to call it “Operación Pato Muerto,” i.e., dead duck, because the authorities had no chance of eradicating heroin poppies grown by destitute campesinos from a remote area in the Sierra Madre as large as California, where government authority scarcely existed.

Indeed, I’ve never met a Mexican who believes that country’s government has either the will or the ability to eradicate drug smuggling as long as we Yanquis keep buying the stuff. Not even Roberto Montenegro, the courageous Mexican reporter who arranged my helicopter ride and who was murdered on the cathedral square in Culiacán a couple of months after I left.

This, too, as Frum astringently points out: Mexicans do have a democracy, and they do get to vote. What’s more, they know a whole lot more about us than we know about them, and most feel that we’ve corrupted them more than the other way around. No Mexican politician can afford to be seen as countenancing a U.S. insult to that country’s sovereignty.

“Mexicans are dying,” Frum points out, “because of American drug purchases. Mexico has about one-third the population of the United States but four times the homicide rate.” Most are dying in gang wars over market share. “Does Mexico do too little to halt the flow of opioids northward? The United States does nothing to halt the flow of guns southward.”

Every Mexican citizen knows this proverb: “Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States.”

Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of The Hunting of the President.

Reprinted with permission from Sun Times.

US-Mexico Border Remains Calm As New Asylum Rules Take Effect

US-Mexico Border Remains Calm As New Asylum Rules Take Effect

El Paso (United States) (AFP) - The US-Mexico border appeared calm on Friday as tough asylum rules come into force, with senior officials in Washington expressing confidence that the new system would work.

Thousands of people remained on the Mexican side of the frontier hoping to enter the United States, but the chaotic surge of migrants that right-wing politicians predicted failed to materialize.

"We are seeing people arrive at our southern border, as we expected, as we have been planning for," Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said Friday.

"We are screening and vetting them and if they do not have a basis to remain, we will remove them very swiftly."

Arrangements at the border changed at midnight, as the pandemic-era Title 42 -- a health provision that allowed for immediate expulsion -- expired.

In its place is a regularized immigration rule that threatens illegal border-crossers with five-year bans and possible criminal charges, and requires asylum-seekers to apply from outside the country.

"Our plan will take some time, but our plan will succeed," said Mayorkas.

Up to 10,000 people have tried to enter the country every day over the past week, border officials told the US media.

Many turned themselves in to US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) hoping to be registered and "paroled" -- let go because authorities did not have the capacity to house them or expel them.

At the airport in El Paso on Friday, Yoenny Camacaro was hunkered down waiting for a flight to Indiana to reunite with her cousin.

The 23-year-old, who has been granted an appointment with a judge in November 2024, said she was very happy to have arrived in the United States after a long and difficult journey from Venezuela through the jungle and by train.

"It's cold, you don't eat, you can't go to the bathroom, and we depended on food being thrown at us," she told AFP.

"But that's over. Now we're here, we've done it."

In among the relief, there was also tragedy.

US officials said a teenage boy had died in the custody of Health and Human Services, which takes care of children entering the country unaccompanied.

The department gave no details, but Honduran Foreign Minister Enrique Reina said a 17-year-old boy had died in an HHS facility in Florida.

'Calm And Normal'

Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said the number of US-bound migrants crossing his country was ebbing.

He said around 26,500 migrants were waiting in Mexican cities along the long US frontier, and the situation was "calm and normal."

"The flux is dropping today. We have not had confrontations or situations of violence on the border," Ebrard told reporters.

Mexico's national immigration agency has ordered its offices to stop issuing documents authorizing migrants to transit through the country, officials said, in an apparent attempt to curb flows to the US border.

Edith Tapia of the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian nonprofit group, said the new policy limiting the ways in which vulnerable people could claim asylum in the United Sates left them prey to the criminal gangs that roam northern Mexico.

This "will continue to put migrants and asylum seekers at risk and (leave them) without the possibility of... protection," she told AFP in El Paso.

The border policy shift ordered by President Joe Biden has been controversial, with his supporters on the left saying new rules are too strict while opponents on the right have claimed, without evidence, that he is "opening the borders."

His new policy came under immediate legal attack.

In Florida, a federal judge agreed to a request from the state's Republican administration and ordered the border patrol to stop granting parole to border crossers and asylum seekers -- letting them remain in the United States while their cases are reviewed, a process that can take years.

And in Texas, 13 Republican-led states filed a suit declaring parole "illegal."

Parole "creates incentives for even more illegal aliens to travel to the southwest border," they said.

Washington says it is expanding legal pathways to asylum by setting up regional processing centers, bolstering guest worker programs, and granting more admissions for refugees from Haiti, Cuba, Venezuela and other troubled countries.

For asylum seekers, it has launched an app, CBP One, to arrange immigration interviews at the border.

While many have complained of glitches, Amadeo Diaz, 62, was in Tijuana, south of California, with his family for his asylum interview.

The family, from Arcelia in Mexico's south, said they faced kidnapping and other violence in the region where drug cartels wield great power.

"There is a lot of kidnapping, a lot of killing. Innocent people are being killed and that is why we decided to come here to ask for help," said Diaz.


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