Rep. Mike Pitts, R-Laurens, makes a point as he speaks on the floor of the South Carolina House during debate over a Senate bill calling for the Confederate battle flag to be removed from the statehouse grounds Wednesday, July 8, 2015, in Columbia, S.C.
AP
COLUMBIA, S.C. -- South Carolina journalists would be required to register with the government before reporting the state's news under a bill introduced Tuesday by a Republican state lawmaker who linked his proposal to press coverage of gun issues.
The bill would establish a "responsible journalism registry" with requirements that journalists must meet before working for a news outlet in the state. Those requirements weren't laid out in the bill's summary, which was available online Tuesday. The measure's full text has not yet been posted.
Fees could be charged to be listed in the registry, which would be operated by the Secretary of State's Office. The bill also would authorize "fines and criminal penalties" for violating the law.
The bill has been referred to a committee for debate.
Bill sponsor Rep. Mike Pitts, R-Laurens, did not immediately return messages seeking comment on the proposal.
Pitts told The Post and Courier newspaper that the bill is not a reaction to any particular news story but was intended to stimulate discussion over how he sees gun issues being reported.
"It strikes me as ironic that the first question is constitutionality from a press that has no problem demonizing firearms," Pitts said. "With this statement I'm talking primarily about printed press and TV. The TV stations, the six o'clock news and the printed press has no qualms demonizing gun owners and gun ownership."
Last summer, the former law enforcement officer opposed an ultimately successful push to remove the Confederate Flag from South Carolina's Statehouse grounds following the slayings of nine black parishioners at Emanuel AME in Charleston.
Bill Rogers, executive director of the South Carolina Press Association, said he'd lobby hard against the measure, which he said he found bizarre.
"Any registration of journalists would be unconstitutional - unless you lived in Cuba or North Korea," Rogers told The Associated Press.
Ashley Landess of the South Carolina Policy Council, whose online publication The Nerve frequently posts stories critical of state agencies and lawmakers, said she feels the measure is likely aimed at publications like hers but would affect all working journalists.
"I hope that this insane attempt at shutting up any hint of criticism finally wakes everyone up to how dangerous and how out of control our legislators are," Landess said. "The fact a lawmaker in this country thinks nothing of proposing a law to set standards for what reporters are allowed to write - are you kidding me?"
In a desperate effort to save his job, Michigan’s Republican Governor Rick Snyder has released a flood of emails in an attempt to exonerate himself from his criminal negligence that lead to the mass poisoning of thousands of people with lead-tainted water. Unfortunately for him, his desperate attempt at showing some kind of “transparency” and “accountability” is just digging himself into a deeper hole.
Some 294 pages of emails were released to the public. The first problem that journalists ran into was the fact that some of the most important emails were heavily redacted, which immediately squashed any hopes that the Snyder administration would be open and honest about exactly how the decision to switch the water supply of Flint, Michigan, to the notoriously polluted Flint River, in the hopes of saving some $5 million dollars and pad one of the giant holes that Snyder’s corporate handouts and tax giveaways blew in their state budget.
The more disturbing revelation was confirmation that the Snyder administration was dismissive and belittling to the mountain of complaints that residents filed after discovering their water had turned a disturbing brackish brown, and that even after evidence began mounting, they refused to act to rectify the situation until it was far too late, playing off their concerns as “initial hiccups” and dismissing them for being overly concerned with “aesthetics.” When the city’s water plant found traces of “coliform and fecal coliform bacterium,” they simply began adding chlorine to the water. They also refused to take any responsibility for their actions, as this email from Snyder’s Chief of Staff indicates:
“I can’t figure out why the state is responsible except that [State Treasurer] Dillon did make the ultimate decision so we’re not able to avoid the subject.”
The emails insinuate that the frightened residents were in fact politically motivated, describing them as an “anti-everything” group that wanted to use the health of their children as a “political football.” There was no action taken after a nearby General Motors factory stopped using Flint’s water because it was corroding the metal in their cars; not after a hospital stopped using the water because it was damaging their instruments, nor after a university stopped for the same reason. How anyone could consider water that was literally damaging metal be safe for consumption by humans?
The final nail in Snyder’s coffin should be this email from an Environmental Protection Agency expert, Miguel Del Toral, which shows that “the state was testing the water in a way that could profoundly understate the lead levels.” Not only were they fully aware of the dangers presented by the water, the Snyder administration attempted to cover up the scandal by misrepresenting the data.
All of this simply confirms what we already knew – that Governor Rick Snyder and his administration purposefully sold water that they knew was contaminated to a majority African-American city of a hundred thousands souls, dismissed the concerns of the residents they were poisoning, and then attempted to hide the evidence until it was too late. Resignation is not enough for these men. After these explosive revelations, justice demands criminal prosecution and harsh punishments for this kind of heartless mismanagement.
But that, ladies and gentlemen, is just how a Republican governs.
By now you have heard that that the 2016 Academy Awards will be whiter than Conan O’Brien’s inner thighs.
With that said, let’s talk about ‘Straight Out of Compton’, a film that cost an estimated $28 million to make and has since raked in more than $200 million.
In case you have been under a rock, N.W.A is an 80’s collective of rappers who opted for black jeans, black hoodies and black winter hats in the dead of baby African summers. They made songs that highlighted the comings and goings of bitches, tricks, gangsters, and hoes all the while encouraging the masses to raise their middle fingers at unscrupulous members of law enforcement.
They were black for no reason black. Jheri curls dripping down foreheads while flipping through Ebony Magazine black. Red Kool-Aid in a mayonnaise jar black. Hit it from the back in black church socks and hard bottom gator shoes black.
MC Hammer once danced hard in a Kentucky Fried Chicken commercial and that moment was still not blacker than the authentic inner-city rage of ‘Niggaz With Attitudes’.
So I’m perplexed on the highest level that the film about their rise to fame, produced by two of its members Ice Cube and Dr. Dre among others—and directed by the wonderfully talented F. Gary Gray (‘The Negotiator’, ‘Set it Off’, ‘Friday’) was written by writers who are whiter than the walls of Joan Rivers’ ghost vagina.
The screenplay for ‘Straight Out of Compton’ was penned by Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff. Prior to ‘Compton’, Berloff had a writing credit for the film ‘World Trade Center’ (2006) and a short film you never heard of called ‘Domestic’ (2002). Herman has only ONE writing credit other than ‘Compton’ and it is for a film that does not come out until 2017!!
Say what now?
We have two writers here with nary a proven track record and certainly no prior work that was reflective of the African American experience. Because of course that is normally the excuse when white writers get amazing jobs writing about the blacks. The narrative is usually “well you know, they wrote ‘Titanic’ and ‘Castaway’ so we knew they could pull off a great script for Pooty Tang 3”.
Nope.
Has this gaggle of white folks even smelled Jheri curl activator before? Could they have picked Eazy E out of a lineup before getting that golden writing gig? Did they know the difference between Dr. Dre and Dr. Scholl before getting the phone call that changed their lives?
Also nominated for an Academy Award alongside Berloff and Herman are S. Leigh Savidge and Alan Wenkus who are listed as “story” contributors for ‘Compton’. You guessed it. They too have the complexion of a perfectly boiled pot of rice. Yeah, that’s them.
FOUR white people are up for Hollywood’s top prize for crafting the story of the Southern California rap group ‘Niggaz With Attitudes’. Let that sink in like the Blue Magic hair grease holding down your edges.
I promise you, nobody named Leroy or E’bangunetta had a pen on ‘Schlindler’s List’.
I’m not contending that any one particular actor or the director of this film was deserving of an Oscar nomination, so untwist your panties and/or boxer briefs and settle down. That’s not what this is about.
This is about the insanity of everyone affiliated with the film being shafted while the four people who are whiter than underage drinking, now being able to add “Academy Award nominated….” to their resumes. Oh the places their careers will go from here.
The African American writing community certainly stands in solidarity with our brothas and sistas who make a living in front of the camera. However, as we move forward with talks of boycotts and improving diversity in Hollywood do NOT FORGET US.
Far too often when the big check comes or the high profile situation crystallizes, we are the ones left standing outside with our faces pressed against the window. The actors and directors are justified in raising their frustrated voices, but let’s be real many of them still have multi-million dollar checking account balances after snatching $40 from the ATM.
Meanwhile, writers of color are working three gigs to make ends meet while simultaneously working on scripts that will likely not be given the time of day. If black actors and actresses are the step children of Hollywood, then black writers are the orphans outside on the sidewalk in sleeping bags. So keep that in mind rich black thespians when you are so moved to hit us with the “whoa is me” speech.
Hollywood sleeps well at night knowing that the stories of prominent African American figures are in the white—I mean right—hands. Case in point:
‘What’s Love Got to Do With It’ (Tina Turner biopic written by Kate Lanier—who also wrote ‘Set it Off’ by the way)
‘42’ (Jackie Robinson biopic—written by Brian Helgeland–yup that’s him pictured to the left)
‘Get On Up’ (James Brown biopic written by Jez Butterworth, John Butterworth, and Steven Baigelman— three white men)
‘Selma’ (Martin Luther King biopic—written by Paul Webb–snowy white)
‘Race’ (upcoming Jesse Owens biopic written by Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse-two more white folks)
As you are reading this, Hollywood is scouting for a white writer to tell the story of me telling this story.
On the flip side, shout out to the director Dee Rees who had her pen on ‘Bessie’ and the recently departed James L. White who wrote the screenplay for ‘Ray’. That’s what I’m talking about!
I truly empathize with the plight of the actors and actresses that feel slighted in Hollywood. “Lord Knows I DO,” in my Sophia from Color Purple voice’, but for obvious reasons I am more concerned with the plight of often overlooked African American writers.
You have NOTHING without writers. Discussions about diversity too often focus on what’s happening in front of the camera.
This is why I was so thrilled to read Spike Lee’s statement on Instagram, “….How is it possible that for the second consecutive year all 20 contenders under the acting category are white? And let’s not even get into the other branches…..”.
Yes. The other branches.
Meanwhile, let me get back to working on my screenplay about Paula Deen’s rise to soul food cooking prominence as told by Hulk Hogan through Caucasian translator Mel Gibson. Because we all know damn well I ain’t getting the Natalie Cole gig.
"We will show the world what black people can do when they work in freedom, and we shall make of Congo the pride of Africa”
– Patrice Lumumba
Source: Telesutv.net / The Dawn / January 18, 2015.- Fifty five years ago, agents of the Belgian secret services and the CIA put the body of patrice Lumumba in a barrel of acid and made it disappear. Congo could have been headed towards a democracy but, on the contrary, it was led to one of the worst African dictatorships in the XX century.
He was the first Head of State of the Democratic Republic of Congo. He wanted the decolonization of his country from Belgium and to completely destroy the European colonialist power present in Africa, to eradicate the violations and pillages that his country had endured for centuries.
In 1958, Patrice Lumumba decidedly started the struggle for the decolonization of Congo using the scarce possibilities of social action that weren’t repressed by the Belgian colonial authorities. So, he created the Congolese National Movement, which supported the creation of an independent and secular State, with unitary political structures that could help overcome the tribal differences and create a national sentiment.
After the independence of Belgium in 1960, Congo held elections and Patrice Lumumba, leader of the independentists struggle, won the presidency with a nationalist and leftist programme.
Lumumba could not prevent that the withdrawal of the Belgian army gave way to political conflict with military pronouncements, attacks on white-skinned population and generalized disturbances.
Lumumba asked the UN for help, and the international organism responded by sending a small contingent of blue helmets who were incapable of restoring peace and order. Therefore, he resorted to the Soviet Union, and this was seen as a direct threat by Western powers.
The then President of the U.S., Eisenhower, then gave the order of eliminating Lumumba.
And for that, he sent CIA agent Frank Carlucci, who would then be Secretary of Defence under the administration of Ronald Reagan.
A coup d’Etat overthrew Lumumba in September 1960. He was tortured and shot by Belgian mercenaries, who dissolved his body in acid and disseminated his remains so that he could not be recognized.
Until very recently, in November 2001, the Belgian Parliament did not acknowledge the government’s responsibility in the murder of Patrice Lumumba.
He was murdered because of the great political and ideological struggle that he carried forward to propose unity as an instrument for the liberation of the African people, of the colonial yokes that were vigent by the time he began his struggle and that are still in place, such as the neocolonialism that was then being born and the North-American imperialism that was beginning to enter the African countries to add to the pillagers of the riches of the continent.
The ideas of Patrice Lumumba constituted a threat to the Western potencies that exploit the African people. Half a century later, US authorities acknowledged their implication in the overthrow and murder of the Congolese leader. Seen at a distance, his struggle is the same one that we are fighting today in Our America for a true independence.
Chicken farms in the US are notoriously hard to access if you're not involved in the industry. But one American farmer, contracted to a meat processing company, has thrown open the barn doors. He claims firms routinely mislead customers about the conditions the birds are reared in and their health. Maria Finoshina went to meet him.
The screenings still take place despite turning up few weapons and a major drop in crime rates.
Students line up to enter the John Jay building, which houses four smaller high schools, in Park Slope, Brooklyn
On the coldest morning New York City has seen this winter, a stream of teenage students hit a bottleneck at the front of a Brooklyn school building. They shed their jackets, gloves and belts, shivering as they wait to pass through a metal detector and send their backpacks through an x-ray machine. School safety agents stand nearby, poised to step in if the alarm bleats.
It’s an everyday occurrence for more than 100,000 middle and high school students across the city.
On this morning, as on every school day, senior Justin Feldeo prepares to be pulled aside for separate screening by a hand wand. Feldeo is studying to be a firefighter and the boots he wears for class trigger the metal detectors.
Fifteen minutes after the formal start of the school day, students are still pouring in, even later for having to go through the machines.
Almost as many New York City students run the gauntlet of x-ray machines each day as pass through the scanners at busy Miami International Airport. And the procedure is numbingly similar. Students must remove belts, shoes, and sometimes bobby pins as the wait stretches as long as an hour.
One of two metal detectors at the main entrance of the John Jay building.
A ProPublica survey found that the daily ritual is borne disproportionately by students of color; black and Hispanic students in high school are nearly three times more likely to walk through a metal detector than their white counterparts.
Nearly 21 years after a fearful city installed them at the front doors of more than 80 schools, there are growing questions about whether the security precautions do more harm than good. Today, by ProPublica and WNYC’s count, students at more than 236 New York City schools are required to pass through metal detectors.
“There are a lot of things that are done in the name of student safety that don’t view the students as the people who need to be protected, but view the students as the people somebody else needs to be protected from,” said Jill Bloomberg, principal of Park Slope Collegiate, a secondary school with 423 students in grades 6 through 12. She is trying to get the scanners removed from her building in Brooklyn.
The metal detectors were first installed in the early 1990s when crime rates were much higher and have stayed in place even as crime in the public schools has fallen 48 percent over the past 10 years. Crime in schools in the last year alone has fallen 11 percent, according to the New York Police Department.
Since 1998, only two permanent metal detectors have been removed. And their necessity appears almost never re-evaluated: The scanners have remained after the schools in which they were installed shut down and entirely new schools opened in the same buildings.
And while some principals say the security measures provide a critical line of defense at schools with particularly volatile mixes of students, few believe more than 200 New York City schools still meet this bar.
" Black and Hispanic students in high school are nearly three times more likely to walk through a metal detector than their white counterparts."
In a report called “Security With Dignity,” a task force created by New York Mayor Bill de Blasio recommended last July that the city remove some metal detectors. The NYPD agreed to study the issue, but has provided no timeline. And nearly six months later, the Department of Education has yet to publicize criteria for removing them.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Education would not comment on a plan for removing the metal detectors. “We will continue to ensure students are in safe environments where they can learn and succeed,” said Toya Holness, a deputy press secretary.
The recommendations have faced stiff opposition from the union which represents the New York City school district’s over 5,000 safety agents, who are technically part of the NYPD.
“‘Security with dignity,’” said Greg Floyd, the head of Teamsters Local 237. “I don’t know how you have the two in the same sentence.”
Floyd said the metal detectors are working as an effective deterrent and warned that the task force should be wary about cheering their removal. “In this case, they better very well hope they work, because if they don’t, then they all have problems,” he said.
And Floyd brushed aside the complaints that the scanners are used primarily in schools serving low-income black and Hispanic students. Children from those neighborhoods, he said, often require them.
“Would I say, put metal detectors in Brooklyn Tech? I would not,” Floyd said, because the students there, “some from affluent neighborhoods,” are “committed to learning, they’re not committed to fighting. That’s not the case in every New York City public school, and you can’t say, ‘Treat the children the same’ because we don’t do that.”
Despite the widespread use of the scanners, the amount of contraband found is low. In the approximately three million scans conducted in the first two months of this school year, only a tiny number of contraband items were discovered, according to a NYPD document obtained by ProPublica. Among the 126 possible weapons seized at schools that scan daily — some found hidden on school grounds, others by scanners — were an unloaded handgun, 73 knives, 21 boxcutters, three BB guns and an assortment of loose bullets and razor blades.
Some school officials believe the daily security checks actually lead to behavior problems among the students. Until recently, Tyler Brewster was a dean of discipline and a math teacher at the School for Democracy and Leadership in Brooklyn, which has metal detectors. She now works at The James Baldwin High School in Manhattan, which does not. Brewster said she doesn’t believe students at either school should be forced to go through the scanners, and that it brands whole groups of students as untrustworthy.
“We didn’t have to go through the metal detectors as teachers, and I’m no less or more human than our students. Why do you trust me to have a bad day and handle it the right way versus the kid having the bad day?” Brewster said. “I wonder how much of the tone is set by having metal detectors in the first place.”
"In the approximately three million scans conducted in the first two months of this school year, only a tiny number of contraband items were discovered."
Kamaya Sanders, a student at the Secondary School for Journalism in Brooklyn, said that she sometimes felt suspicious of her fellow students as they stood in line to get checked.
“Sometimes you want to say your school's safe, but you have the metal detectors, so you never know. Then let’s say someone in front of you gets stopped, then you’re like, ‘Oh, they may have something.’ You get scared,” Sanders said. “It does make you feel safe in a way, but sometimes it’s not worth it.”
At Democracy and Leadership, Brewster said, the scanning led to daily altercations, some of which have ended with arrests.
“There were maybe 3,000 students in my building and every single person had to be scanned,” she said. “On rainy days, the kids were gonna have to wait in line. In some cases, they had to take their shoes off, but the floors were wet so then there would be an argument between the safety agents about not taking their shoes off, and then not being allowed into the building and then that would escalate.”
The dilemma of the scanners is on display at a massive brick building in the heart of Park Slope in Brooklyn. The building, which takes up an entire city block, once housed a single high school, John Jay, with a tumultuous reputation. Now four new schools share the building. One of the schools, Park Slope Collegiate, would like to remove the metal detectors, the others don’t.
Bloomberg, Collegiate’s principal, said the neighborhood, which is now filled with trendy shops and restaurants, has changed significantly and that fights or weapons in the building are now rare.
For reasons the NYPD did not explain, the John Jay campus was not among the school sites listed as having a metal detector, so it was unclear if any weapons had been recovered from the building in the first two months of the school year.
The metal detectors send a message to the students that “we don’t trust you. And even if we trusted you, we don’t necessarily trust the guy behind you.” That message, she said, runs counter to what her school is trying to teach and “it’s alienating.”
Bloomberg said she has been against the metal detectors since she became principal at the school a dozen years ago. She said her colleagues, the principals at the other schools, are worried that something could happen if the metal detectors are removed.
“It’s very hard to have a rational conversation when you’re talking about the possibility of something happening,” Bloomberg said. “They make a lot of peoplefeel safe: it doesn’t mean they make them safe and it doesn’t mean that they’ve considered what they give up.”
The story of how New York City came to install metal detectors at middle and high schools across the city traces to a February morning in 1992.
It wasn’t even 10 a.m. before two students were shot to death at Thomas Jefferson High School in the East New York section of Brooklyn. By the afternoon, a third teen had died after accidentally shooting himself in his house.
That day, everything that could have gone wrong did. Then-Mayor David Dinkins had been scheduled to address the Jefferson students as a preventive measure after a separate shooting at the school killed a 16-year-old boy two months earlier. After that shooting, the school began performing security scans on students with hand-held devices. But on the day of the mayor’s visit, principal Carol Burt-Beck called off the scans, convinced they would send the wrong message to students. Fifteen security guards and police officers were present in the school. That morning, gunfire erupted just a few feet away from them.
The city was quick to respond. The Board of Education approved a $20-million plan to install metal detectors, x-rays and electromagnetic doors at an additional 40 schools, vastly expanding a program that had involved just 16 schools, usually large and in the most crime-ridden areas of the city.
In the years that followed, the installation of metal detectors became the answer to every new slashing or stabbing. Twenty more schools added them in 1993, bringing the total to 81.
The rise in serious incidents at the city’s schools in the 1990s ran counter to the city’s dropping crime rate. Over the 1991 school year, 3,193 weapons were confiscated in public schools, 189 of them firearms. The following year, violent incidents in schools rose 16 percent to 5,761.
Dinkins, up for re-election against Rudy Giuliani, who was campaigning on a “tough on crime” platform, put police officers in all of the city’s then 1,069 schools where they have remained ever since.
Over the next three years the city steadily added metal detectors to its schools. By 2003, 88 middle schools and high schools had them. Some of these schools have since been replaced by multiple smaller schools, yet the scanners remain.
Thus far, none of these schools has removed the metal detectors outright and the current plan includes a gradual reduction in use. NYPD Assistant Chief Brian Conroy, of the School Safety Division, said the police can reduce scanning in a school to three or two days, then even further to random scanning.
One Bronx building, called JHS 113 Richard R. Green, that houses four middle schools, has already reduced its scanning, so far without ill effects, according to an assistant principal at one of the schools.
“The chancellor came to the building in the fall, and noticed it was a pretty calm place,” said Dr. Marvin Jennings, assistant principal at The Forward School. “Kids were in classrooms. Teachers were teaching. Learning was happening. It added to the feeling and sentiment that daily scanning was not necessary, and could be scaled back.”
The Forward School is emerging from a rocky past. Since 2012, it has been labelled a “persistently dangerous’’ school by state officials and has had four different principals in five years. But Jennings said the environment has improved and that kids feel safer in the school even with less scanning. The NYPD data obtained by ProPublica notes only two items found on site during the first two months of the school year, a knife and a “tool” found in a flowerpot outside the school.
For Jennings, what matters most is the students’ mindset as they go through the detectors.
“It won’t be the first time they get scanned, it won’t be the first time that someone looks at them in a way that’s less than complimentary” because of race, gender or ethnicity, he said. “Helping them learn how to cope with that, and seeing themselves as bigger than the opinion of another man or woman is what I think gets them through.”
One of the few school buildings that has managed to remove the scanners, the former Eastern District High School in Brooklyn, did so by enlisting students in the effort to quell violence. In 2006, the high school was on its way to be shut down and replaced by three smaller schools in the same building. The three new principals joined forces with elected local officials, parents and persuaded the Board of Education to remove the machines.
“We came in as wide-eyed, idealistic, newbies, and we wanted to change things,” said William Jusino, principal of Progress High School, one of the schools that moved into the building. Eastern District, he said, used to have such a bad reputation as a “dumping ground for difficult children and staff” that local shops would close down when school got out only to reopen later. “We wanted to make sure that we avoided that,” Jusino said. “That we didn’t grow into that type of situation.”
Jusino and the other principals took a stance that the metal detectors had to go even though everyone was “never 100 percent sure it was a good idea.” District officials gave the new schools their chance to rethink school safety.
For the first two years, Jusino recalled, students were reminded on a daily basis: They were being trusted to not bring in weapons into the schools.
“We’ve been on high alert ever since,” Jusino said, “You’ve gotta make sure that there isn’t a serious incident, god forbid, and how could you make sure? How could you guarantee that? You really can’t. What you could do is invest in your children.”
The most serious challenge to the scanner-less approach came last January when two Progress High School students were shot in connection with gang activity a few blocks from the school. Deans ushered kids inside and pop-up metal detectors were stationed in the building.
“Folks were genuinely afraid and anxious, and I understood it. I’m anxious every day,” Jusino said, recalling a emergency staff meeting at which several faculty members expressed their desire to have metal detectors back. “But the answer is not the machines, the answer’s the relationships. The answer’s giving kids options in the school.”
“Weapons will get into the building without metal detectors. Weapons will get into a building with metal detectors,” Jusino said. “The idea is ‘What do you do. What programs do you do. What’s the trust and values you have in your school.’”
Plastic garbage collected from research plot to assess plastic pollution, Eastern Island, Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge, Northwest Hawaiian Islands.
Yes, you read that correctly.
In case you need further evidence that mankind is doing a remarkable job of destroying the planet, consider this: If we continue our ways, the world's oceans will soon be home to more plastic than fish.
"The best research currently available estimates that there are over 150 million tonnes (165 million tons) of plastics in the ocean today," the report reads. "In a business-as-usual scenario, the ocean is expected to contain 1 tonne (1.1 tons) of plastic for every 3 tonnes of fish by 2025, and by 2050, more plastics than fish (by weight)."
In other words, in just 34 years, plastic trash in the ocean will outweigh all the fish in the sea.
The study describes plastics as the "ubiquitous workhorse material of the modern economy" and finds that after a short first-use cycle, 95 percent of plastic packaging material value, or $80 billion to $120 billion annually, is lost to the economy.
At least 8 million tonnes of plastics -- equivalent to one garbage truck every minute -- leak into the ocean each year, according to the World Economic Forum.
The 36-page report, "The New Plastics Economy: Rethinking the future of plastics," also offers hope.
By redesigning materials and developing new technologies, the research shows it is possible to eradicate plastic waste.
Achieving such systemic change, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation said in a statement, will "require major collaboration," including from consumer goods companies, plastics manufacturers, businesses involved in collection and recycling and policymakers.
"This report demonstrates the importance of triggering a revolution in the plastics industrial ecosystem," Dominic Waughray of the World Economic Forum said in a statement, "and is a first step to showing how to transform the way plastics move through our economy."
Today, only 14 percent of plastic packaging is collected for recycling, according to the World Economic Forum. In comparison, the global recycling rate for paper is 58 percent, while that of iron and steel is 70 percent to 90 percent.
Say what now?
