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colonialism
The UN Plastics Treaty Must Confront Fossil Fuel Power
As delegates gather in Geneva, Switzerland for what is expected to be the final round of negotiations for a United Nations treaty to address the plastics crisis, the stakes could not be higher.
Aug 08, 2025
The United Nations Plastics Treaty is billed as the world’s best chance to tackle plastic pollution, but unless it confronts the power of the fossil fuel industry, it risks becoming little more than a recycling plan with a new logo.
With over 99% of plastics being made from oil and gas, the reality is that plastic is the fossil fuel industry’s plan B. As the world is under pressure to transition away from fossil fuels, oil and petrochemical giants are doubling down on plastics to secure their profits and perpetuate a destructive business model for decades to come. Industry projections show plans to dramatically expand plastic production—locking in emissions just as climate scientists warn we must phase out fossil fuels. Already, plastics account for around 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Without intervention, that figure could double by 2050 as plastics rise to account for 20% of global oil and gas consumption.
This is why the U.N. Plastics Treaty negotiations are a critical moment in the broader fight to reduce pollution, put a cap on greenhouse gas emissions, and fight for climate justice. Cutting plastic production is not only vital to cleaning up oceans and coastal areas, but is also about dismantling a key pillar of the fossil fuel economy.
Yet, the same corporations that created this crisis have infiltrated the process meant to solve it. Hundreds of industry lobbyists have attended the treaty talks, working to strip away any mention of production limits. Over 200 industry lobbyists are in attendance at this year’s negotiations. Their preferred outcome is clear: a weak agreement focused solely on waste management, leaving the root cause untouched.
If the world truly wants to end plastic pollution, it must start by ending the unchecked production of plastic itself.
The human cost of bowing to the influence and demands of the fossil fuel and petrochemical industry is well known. From frontline communities across Asia, Africa, and Latin America to the infamous “Cancer alley” in the United States, plastics poison air, water, and soil, disproportionately harming low-income, Black, brown, and Indigenous communities. In the Global South, countries bear the additional burden of waste colonialism: imported waste they did not create. Just like the climate crisis, this is a story of systemic exploitation: profits for a few, toxic impacts for the many.
The fossil fuel and petrochemical industry’s false solutions to the crisis only deepen this injustice. Recycling rates remain negligible, and new schemes like “plastic credits” mimic the failures of carbon markets—financial smokescreens that do nothing to reduce production. These false solutions keep the burden off the culprits, shifting focus to only the very end of the plastics lifecycle rather than tackling every stage of it. Embracing these false solutions means entrenching the problem rather than solving it.
What’s needed is unequivocal: a legally binding cap on plastic production. Anything less leaves fossil fuel companies with an open runway to continue extracting, refining, and polluting. Such a cap would not only curb emissions and pollution, but would set a precedent for challenging corporate power in other arenas of the climate crisis.
The treaty negotiators face a clear choice and responsibility. They can side with the communities poisoned by plastics, the workers demanding a just transition, and the growing global movement to end pollution and secure climate justice. Or they can allow the fossil fuel industry to hijack yet another international agreement, leaving future generations to choke on its consequences.
If the world truly wants to end plastic pollution, it must start by ending the unchecked production of plastic itself. Delegates can engage in the path of a just transition and true system change that centers people and the planet, sending a strong message to the fossil fuel industry that its time is long gone and its hijacking of agreements and treaties is over. Anything less is not enough.
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The Trump Administration Wants to Turn US Cities Into Occupied Territory
The logic is imperial, and familiar. Invent an enemy. Inflate the threat. Justify the war. Except this time, the war zone is your own backyard.
Aug 07, 2025
By any rational measure, the Trump administration’s internal Department of Homeland Security memo—obtained by The New Republic—reads less like a briefing on immigration enforcement and more like a blueprint for domestic occupation.
Strip away the bureaucratic throat clearing and what you find is blunt language: “homeland defense,” “personnel detailed within ICE and CBP,” “Al Qaeda or ISIS cells operating freely inside America.” The lines are being drawn. The administration is preparing to turn American cities into zones of military containment.
Los Angeles, it turns out, was the test run. National Guard and Marines were deployed there under the excuse of protests, and the memo declares it a “good indicator of the type of operations (and resistance) we’re going to be working through for years to come.” Note the calm normalization of “resistance.” That word is doing a lot of work. It doesn’t mean gang violence. It doesn’t mean cartel shootouts. It means Americans. It means Angelenos, New Yorkers, Chicagoans, Houstonians—anyone who finds themselves in the path of a bloated, paranoid state looking inward for its next war.
This is the West Bank model imported home. Use the military, not as a last resort but as a daily presence. Coordinate the Pentagon with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection. Have Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s brother, a barely vetted MAGA functionary, walk into meetings with the Joint Chiefs and demand “urgency” and “lockstep” planning. Sell the public on the fiction that MS-13 and child smugglers are the same as jihadist cells, then treat American neighborhoods like insurgent terrain. What Israel perfected in Gaza and the West Bank—constant surveillance, movement checkpoints, raids, mass detentions—will be replicated block by block in South Central and East New York under the same justification: security.
The machinery of repression is humming—but many of the engineers are morons.
The logic is imperial, and familiar. Invent an enemy. Inflate the threat. Justify the war. Except this time, the war zone is your own backyard. The memo doesn’t describe law enforcement. It describes counterinsurgency doctrine. It imagines Department of Defense personnel “embedded” within immigration agencies, not for support, but for command and control. It uses the language of terrorism to override constitutional limits. And it pretends that dragging immigrants onto military aircraft for public spectacle is ordinary governance.
What’s most chilling isn’t the language. It’s the preparation. There is no longer an attempt to hide the playbook. DHS knows it is “skirting the line”—Carrie Lee from the German Marshall Fund said it plainly. They just do not care. In fact, they are proud of it. The document’s authors are pushing the Pentagon to discard even the pretense of legal restraint. They are testing the limits of the Posse Comitatus Act the way they once tested court orders blocking the first Muslim ban. Every limit is a speed bump. Every failure is a rehearsal.
This is how military occupations work. They start with “urgent meetings.” They escalate through “coordination” and “information sharing.” They grow bureaucratic vines until no one is accountable for anything and everyone has a mission statement. Pretty soon, you live in a city where helicopters buzz overhead at midnight and soldiers in camo check your bags at subway stops. You do not remember when it started. You just know it never ends.
And yet, there’s one bleak source of hope. The Trump administration is profoundly, deeply incompetent. This is a regime that leaks its own illegal memos to the press. That puts family members in senior policy roles not because they are clever Machiavellians, but because they are available and loyal. That spends billions building walls no one maintains and writing executive orders that collapse on contact with any judge not wearing a MAGA hat. The machinery of repression is humming—but many of the engineers are morons.
That might save us. Not rule of law. Not institutional bravery. Just a consistent failure to execute. The danger isn’t that President Donald Trump’s people are masterminds. It’s that they’re learning. And this time, they’re not planning a weekend spectacle of troops on the border. They’re planning a daily occupation of the interior. Of where we live.
They’ve already told us what they’re going to do. The only question is how long we pretend not to believe them.
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The US Must Understand: The Story of the Gaza Genocide Did Not Begin on October 7
When those who seek to help resolve a conflict are captive to one side’s definitions and perspective, it’s a recipe for continued tension and ultimately disaster.
Aug 05, 2025
Our understanding of an historical event’s meaning is a function of two factors. The first is what we choose to identify as the starting point leading up to the event. The second is the lens through which we view it. This should be obvious, but unfortunately it is not, and the failure to acknowledge or understand it has consequences in everything from public policy to personal relationships.
This truth can be ignored due to thoughtlessness, blindness to one’s biases, or just plain ignorance. On some occasions there can be malign intent, including efforts to deliberately hide what one knows to be an event’s antecedents for political or personal reasons.
Before examining the issue that prompted this column, I want to share an example. The comedian Dick Gregory once noted that despite what we were taught in school, “Columbus didn’t discover America, because it wasn’t lost.” His point seems simple enough, but upon closer examination it reveals deeper truths.
“Columbus discovered America” erases the history, civilization, and contributions of the Indigenous groups who populated the lands that Europeans came to call the New World. Even the term “New World” was a thinly veiled masking of their imperial self-understanding and intent. “We discovered these lands, and they are ours to take, name, and exploit.”
U.S. reporters appear to be required to include a line in their stories that reads, “The hostilities began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas militants attacked Israel killing 1,200 and taking 250 hostages.”
The American history we were taught was an extension of European history. It began with Columbus. Then moved to the Spanish, British, and French colonialists, culminating in the Revolutionary War and the birth of the United States. The native peoples were treated as bit players in the unfolding story—at times, a footnote, at others an inconvenient obstacle.
This story of American history results from choosing Columbus as the starting point and using a lens so Eurocentric that it only sees the Indigenous peoples who populated this land as less than human and therefore less deserving of defining their own history or even remaining on their land. They were removed and massacred, their humanity was ignored, and their treatment was justified because they were of less worth than the Europeans who displaced them.
This reflection was prompted by the way Israel’s war on Gaza continues to be reported in the press and discussed in policy circles. U.S. reporters appear to be required to include a line in their stories that reads, “The hostilities began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas militants attacked Israel killing 1,200 and taking 250 hostages.” It isn’t accidental that this line (or something very close to it) occurs in almost every U.S. print story.
We all must agree that what happened on October 7 was traumatic for Israelis. It was a shock that their security was breached and that some horrible and condemnable atrocities were committed by Hamas and others who joined in their attacks. But history didn’t begin or end on October 7.
Recall that just a few weeks before that the Hamas attack, then-U.S. President Joe Biden’s national security adviser noted that the Middle East was the calmest it had been in years. This statement gave short shrift to the Palestinian reality and made clear the biased lens through which he saw the region. He was ignoring Israel’s continued economic strangulation of Gaza (which made Palestinians increasingly dependent on Israel or Hamas for their livelihood) and the growing threat of settler violence, settlement expansion, and land confiscations in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
A few weeks after October 7, I met with this same individual and listened to him describe the pain and fear of Israelis and how October 7 evoked the traumas of their history. I told him that I completely understood and agreed that Hamas stood rightly condemned for what they had done. I cautioned him, however, not to ignore the trauma of the Palestinians—their pain and fears—and their history of dispossession. He became angry, waving off my comments as “what aboutism.”
As the weeks and months wore on, when I would write a comment about: the growing Palestinian civilian casualty toll; or the bombing of hospitals; or the denial of water, food, medicine, and electricity; or the deliberate destruction of more than 70% of Gaza’s buildings; and the repeated forced expulsions of families—the responses I would receive invariably included “Hamas started it,” “What about the hostages,” or worse. In other words, Israeli lives were all that mattered. And the Israeli narrative became the only acceptable one. In other words, since the story began on October 7, what followed was a justifiable response.
The Israelis’ ability to control the narrative has long characterized the conflict. They would say: “The Balfour Declaration gave Israel a legal right to Palestine”; or “In 1948, tiny Israel was attacked by all surrounding Arab armies”; or “In 1967 Israel was only defending itself.” All of these Israeli-defined “starting points” are fictions that ignore everything that led up to them and the stories they tell are seen only through the biased lens of those who have imposed them.
This problem of false narratives based on biased histories isn’t just a problem for Israel or the U.S. It is unfortunately all too common, especially in conflict situations. When those who seek to help resolve a conflict are captive to one side’s definitions and perspective, it’s a recipe for continued tension and ultimately disaster.
Peacemaking requires that an effort be made to rise above false narratives, self-serving starting points and the biased perceptions of one or another side. That’s not “what-aboutism”—it’s leadership. And it’s been sorely lacking in the U.S.
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