With each successive municipality that rejects bans on plastic bags, the environmental lobby championing the measure grows increasingly more desperate, more willing to lean on despicable political tactics to advance a radical agenda.
From Illinois to Texas, activists seeking to cripple an industry are finding themselves dependent on these lowball maneuvers. Take 12-year old Abby Goldberg of Illinois. She rose to internet fame in the pro-bag ban domain for launching a petition for her home state to ban plastic bags. Buoyed by the support of a new, innocent face, it soon notched over 158,000 signatures and Goldberg even got a meeting with Governor Pat Quinn.
But all was not as it seemed.
The reality is that a pre-teen has been used as a human puppet by an increasingly desperate environmental lobby. Per an interview with Goldberg herself, Ben Zolno, a Huffington Post blogger noted for literally stating that plastic bags only “damn…children and their planet for eternity,” was the originator of the petition. When asked about the hard-hitting rhetoric found within its text, stated that “not all of them were exactly my words…Ben edited them and he changed it and I agreed to it, too.”
To boot, she had earlier pointed out that Zolno himself crafted the idea of petitioning the state for a bag ban while she was vacationing with family in Israel.
Such tactics now only seem par the course for a brigade seemingly dedicated to bringing down an entire sector of American manufacturing for an initiative that remains unproven scientifically.
Using children as human props ranks as disturbing at best and should be bagged along with the bans it’s being used to perpetuate.
Then there are the alarming attempts of bureaucratic strong-arming and misdirection taking place in Texas.
The city of Dallas’s recent plan for managing solid waste not only set forward a lofty, and likely unreachable, goal of zero waste by 2040 but pursued such means as banning plastic bags. Amid concerns with the plan itself emerged members of the group supposedly responsible for drafting the plan stating “that they had little or no input.”
Further investigation from the Dallas Morning News, unavailable online, shed light on the smoke and mirror tactics being played by supporters of an out of touch agenda.
As the report notes, the plan’s cost was to the tune of $160,000, and was made to look as though “it came together with the assistance of a diverse advisory committee representing business, government and environmental groups.”
But two listed committee members stated that they had no part in the process and two others claimed membership but pointed out that a brief meeting yielded “little, if any, opportunity to offer substantial input or discuss the city’s future waste policy.”
Behind closed door strategies at work to cloak the truth for the sake of a misguided agenda. Surprised?
Luckily enough for domestic jobs, not to mention common-sense, the controversy may have led to the demotion of longtime sanitation director Mary Nix.
Though there was no mention of the plan’s controversy as a reason for her move to an assistant director position in the municipal public works department, the change came only four days after the revelation of the committee’s real level of involvement. Furthermore, the city passed the plan, albeit after removing timeliness for accomplishment of goals that included a ban on plastic bags.
Given the trajectory already charted by activists such as Ben Zolno, and the bureaucrats backing their agenda, such disgraceful efforts are likely to continue as cities and states resist these dangerous bans. Plastic bag production is a strong engine of American manufacturing, as it employs 30,000 domestically alone, and protecting those jobs remains paramount.
As such, the exposition of strategies as radical as the ideas must go on.
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