Ralph welcomes Bill Crosier of the Foreign Policy Alliance to discuss how to turn US foreign policy away from intervention and toward diplomacy, law, and cooperation. Then chemist, Paul Palmer, joins us to explain that we need to replace the “corporate scam” of recycling with the concept of “zero waste.” Plus, Ralph answers an important listener question about Medicare for All.
Bill Crosier is co-founder, along with Barry Klein, of the Foreign Policy Alliance— a nonpartisan organization formed to educate and advocate for turning US foreign policy away from intervention and toward diplomacy, law, and cooperation.
We are part of the left- right [coalition]. I mean, that’s the amazing thing we need to emphasize– this is not a left versus right issue, or a Democrat versus Republican, or Libertarian, or Independent issue. People across a political spectrum agree on the major points that we have at Foreignpolicyalliance.org on reducing nuclear weapons, reducing military spending, stop being the policeman of the world, those sorts of issues.
Bill Crosier, Foreign Policy Alliance
Especially with the pandemic, [we had] greatly increased our national debt and cities have been hurt, counties and states have been hurt. Because the money that could be going to them to help with really human needs is going to the military.
Bill Crosier, Foreign Policy Alliance
[The Nuclear Freeze movement] was quite a spectacular demonstration and civic action. And a lot of it took place under the Reagan administration. In fact, Reagan got the word when he looked over pictures of hundreds of thousands of people marching down streets in Manhattan and Washington, D.C.. And he said “Hey, there are a lot of well-dressed Republicans here that want [an] arms control treaty with the Soviet Union. And he became an advocate.
Ralph Nader
There is a kind of curled upper lip among circles in this country, when you use the word “diplomacy” like it’s weak. It doesn’t work. You have to have peace through strength. Yet the history of diplomacy has been far superior to the history of warmaking.
Ralph Nader
Paul Palmer is a chemist and the founder of the Zero Waste Institute— an organization that advocates for designing reuse into all products so they can be used perpetually. His book on the subject is Getting to Zero Waste.
Major environmental groups] have been totally hornswoggled by this recycling theory. Recycling is a corporate scam. It has never solved a single problem of waste… Recycling is just completely useless, but it serves a great purpose. It puts the public to sleep. It allows this ‘delusion of status’ as I call it, which I’m sure you’re quite familiar with. The delusion that we can just continue our normal wasteful consumption, we can take endless automotive trips, we can fly through the skies… and we can just waste everything. Because at the end of the story there’s going to be a magic solution– it’s called recycling. We just take whatever we produced and we just magically, somehow, destroy it.
Paul Palmer, Zero Waste Institute
Under today’s form of capitalism, manufacturing is a Wild West of decision-making. You can make anything you want for the best or most trivial of reasons, and release it for sale into the marketplace, and no one says “boo.” In the 60s Vance Packard gave us the concept of planned obsolescence and it’s gotten worse since then. Every product has a built-in early-failure defect built into it just so that it can be discarded early. But no one does anything about it. The socially necessary response is not hard to find– we need to change the design of all products.
Paul Palmer, Zero Waste Institute
You put your finger on the way to jumpstart this whole effort. Apple is an out of control company… So sometimes you know, like when I went after General Motors, people say “Why do you go after the biggest auto company?” Because if you could change them, you could change the whole industry.
Ralph Nader
Citizen Driven Foreign Policy/Zero Waste