Plastic, Profit and 'Progressive Nonsense!' oh, my.

[The below was written as a(n expanded) response to a story on NPR (and a comment from a Conservative critic railing against "Progressives" and their/my agenda against 'Free Enterprise and the American Way'), regarding the banning of Bottled Water containers movement that is growing on college campus'. <http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/02/12/146692656/battling-the-bottle-students-and-industry-face-off-over-water>. ]

Ah, "Conservatives!' Things like 'conserving the ecosphere' don't appear in their agendas. 'Conserving' profit, however, always does. 'Saving American Jobs' always does too, while these same 'Conservatives' either help to/ or are directly related to shipping 'American Jobs' to Third World countries, and the China they were so rabidly against (until it became a 'hugely profitable market.'

They don't want to ban plastic bottles, and where I live in Santa Monica, Ca., rail against the banning of plastic bags. 'Outrage!' they say. 'People should be able to buy whatever they want to!' they cry (when it effects their same bottom line about not beiing able to sell another kind f plastic -- most of which ends up either in the trash, or worse yet, gets ejected as soon as it gets out of the store ('I gotta right to it. I pay for it.' Yes, you do. All of us do.)

Which leads us to the Pacific Plastic Gyre. As big now as the state of Alaska (imagine that) and still growing, it is quickly polishing off the Pacific and its ability to recycle air, as well as, yes, ending up in the seafood you eat (which I haven't now  since sixteen -- Oh, the 'Conservative' horror! I've been a vegetarian since then). This, along with the killing of the Gulf of Mexico from, first the runoff from the Mississippi and the factory farming all along its length, to the BP oil spill (which seen from space in NASA photos whose trail of death is shown to be reaching almost to the Yucatan Peninsula and Belize).

That profit eclipses ecology comes as no surprise, but the depth of the self-serving-ness of these 'Conservatives' for some reason always does.