Guest Post by Jesse
The need for a third party in the US becomes more compelling every day. Or a bipartisan effort to stem the corrosive, anti-democratic influence of Big Money.
But I do not see the forces for reform cohering yet. The attraction and example of power politics and money is too embedded in the mindsets of those whose thinking flows from the status quo.
Even the reformers can fall quickly into a model of force and compulsion, and heavy handed techniques in pursuing a ‘freedom’ which they seek to define and control, too often ignoring history and reason.
The sign of this is the attitude that there is an elite who, operating in secret and with autonomy, can best decide the meaning of value, and the course of economic events. It is ironic to see ‘reformers’ eager to replace one form of oligarchic rule with another that they believe will be more friendly to their own policy decisions, but somehow more benign and resistant to corruption without firm checks and balances on power.
Sustainable good does not flow from more effective rules but from a better choice of and commitment to a priori values. Honesty, openness, toleration, justice and kindness are values. Right over might is an enduring act of balance in human affairs.
Watch what they do, and not what they say. If a ‘reform movement’ is quick to engage in censorship and deception, intolerance and harshness, creating more and cleverer rules and complex theories to achieve their ends, it is most likely another face of the same underlying problem of injustice, no matter what self-delusions they may choose to promote.
As historian Christopher Dawson noted, ‘As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy.’
In point of fact, complexity and ‘cleverness’ are often the very models of a false premise as much as the simplicity of the Big Lie. What is presented as new and modern is too often the same old thing wrapped differently. The truth is often hidden in between, but actions speak loudly.
It will be interesting to see how this situation develops.
TPP Is Not a Free-Trade Agreement
Dean Baker
27 December 2014
People in places like rural Kansas and downtown Washington, DC often have a misplaced trust in authority and elected officials. They are inclined to take their comments at face value, not realizing that these people often have ulterior motives.
The Washington Post gave us an example of this confusion in a front page article on President Obama’s effort to push the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which it repeatedly refers to as a “free-trade” pact. The piece follows the administration’s line in telling readers that:
“the president threw his full support behind the pact as part of a broader effort to rebalance U.S. foreign policy to the fast-growing Asia-Pacific region.”
This assertion makes little sense since the administration is simultaneously pursuing a similar trade pact, the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Pact, with Europe. What both deals have in common is that they are primarily about imposing a business-friendly structure of regulation on both our trading partners and the United States. The more plausible explanation is that President Obama is trying to get more business support for the Democratic Party…
Read the entire article here.
The two major U.S. parties will never allow a 3rd party to rise. You can bet on it.
Probably true Westcoaster, but things can happen.
There are so called born leaders. You never know when such a charismatic type appears and captures the imagination and fancy of a population weary of the buffoons they have before them.
A Long Shot, but possible, especially with the internet as an aid as to recognition and crowd funding.
TPTB have a bullet with the name of a 3rd party candidate that rises to support the people. The system is beyond fucked and the majority of the population does not give a shit. The only change possible is utter collapse, or attack by a foreign power collapsing the federal government.
I really wish I had somewhere to run to. There is nowhere to run from this tyranny.
Don’t despair. The most amazing things happen and you rarely see them coming.
Glad to see some of you still have hope. I used to, but this farce has gone on much, much longer than I ever imagined. From a conventional point of view I’d say we’re fucked. That doesn’t mean some unforeseen force/event enters our paradigm out of the blue (as in miracle). Even so, we the sheeple are up against almost unimaginable power that will not willingly give up that power.
Here is another global trade agreement that has so far flown completely under the radar and could be worse than both of the others combined: TiSA
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LEAKED: Secret Negotiations to Let Big Brother Go Global
The ugly ramifications of the Trade in Services Act (TiSA)
December 25, 2014
Much has been written, at least in the alternative media, about the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), two multilateral trade treaties being negotiated between the representatives of dozens of national governments and armies of corporate lawyers and lobbyists (on which you can read more here, here and here). However, much less is known about the decidedly more secretive Trade in Services Act (TiSA), which involves more countries than either of the other two.
At least until now, that is. Thanks to a leaked document jointly published by the Associated Whistleblowing Press and Filtrala, the potential ramifications of the treaty being hashed out behind hermetically sealed doors in Geneva are finally seeping out into the public arena.
If signed, the treaty would affect all services ranging from electronic transactions and data flow, to veterinary and architecture services. It would almost certainly open the floodgates to the final wave of privatization of public services, including the provision of healthcare, education and water. Meanwhile, already privatized companies would be prevented from a re-transfer to the public sector by a so-called barring “ratchet clause” – even if the privatization failed.
More worrisome still, the proposal stipulates that no participating state can stop the use, storage and exchange of personal data relating to their territorial base. Here’s more from Rosa Pavanelli, general secretary of Public Services International (PSI):
The leaked documents confirm our worst fears that TiSA is being used to further the interests of some of the largest corporations on earth (…) Negotiation of unrestricted data movement, internet neutrality and how electronic signatures can be used strike at the heart of individuals’ rights. Governments must come clean about what they are negotiating in these secret trade deals.
Fat chance of that, especially in light of the fact that the text is designed to be almost impossible to repeal, and is to be “considered confidential” for five years after being signed. What that effectively means is that the U.S. approach to data protection (read: virtually non-existent) could very soon become the norm across 50 countries spanning the breadth and depth of the industrial world.
Big Brother Goes Global
The main players in the top-secret negotiations are the United States and all 28 members of the European Union. However, the broad scope of the treaty also includes Australia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Hong Kong, Iceland, Israel, Japan, Liechtenstein, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, South Korea, Switzerland, Taiwan and Turkey. Combined they represent almost 70 percent of all trade in services worldwide.
An explicit goal of the TiSA negotiations is to overcome the exceptions in GATS that protect certain non-tariff trade barriers, such as data protection. For example, the draft Financial Services Annex of TiSA, published by Wikileaks in June 2014, would allow financial institutions, such as banks, the free transfer of data, including personal data, from one country to another. As Ralf Bendrath, a senior policy advisor to the MEP Jan Philipp Albrecht, writes in State Watch, this would constitute a radical carve-out from current European data protection rules:
The transfer and analysis of financial data from EU to US authorities for the US “Terrorist Finance Tracking Programme” (TFTP) has already shaken EU-US relations in the past and led the European Parliament to veto a first TFTP agreement in 2010. With the draft text of the TiSA leak, all floodgates would be opened.
The weakening of EU data protection rules through TiSA goes further than “only” the financial sector. According to sources close to the negotiations, a draft of the TiSA “Electronic Commerce and Telecommunications Services Annex” contains provisions that would ban any restrictions on cross-border information flows and localization requirements for ICT service providers. A provision proposed by US negotiators would rule out any conditions for the transfer of personal data to third countries that are currently in place in EU data protection law.
Given Edward Snowden’s startling revelations of the scale and scope of NSA snooping on European citizens, companies and political leaders – much of it facilitated by its junior surveillance partner, the UK’s General Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) – the prospect of completely unhindered cross-border information and data flows should set off alarm bells across the old continent. Unfortunately that isn’t the case, for the simple reason that most people are blissfully unaware of it, thanks in large part to the near-complete absence of mainstream coverage and public debate on the issue.
The End of Privacy As We Know It?
As for the EU, divining its real intentions concerning data protection is an almost impossible task. Publicly it is in favor of strengthening data protections. There have even been proposals to introduce changes to the routing of internet data packets, so that they take a certain path and remain within the EU. In the European Parliament an amendment was tabled by the Green Party to encrypt all Internet traffic from end to end and was adopted as part of a compromise on the committee vote in February.
As regards national security, the Council of Europe ministers responsible for media and information society stated in November 2013 that:
Any data collection or surveillance for the purpose of protection of national security must be done in compliance with existing human rights and rule of law requirements, including Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Given the growing technological capabilities for electronic mass surveillance and the resulting concerns, we emphasise that there must be adequate and effective guarantees against abuse which may undermine or even destroy democracy.
In private, however, EU trade negotiators – that is, the people with real power – are coming under intense U.S. pressure to sign away virtually all European data protection rights. As Bendrath notes, U.S. lobbying efforts, through groups such as the Orwellian-named “Coalition for Privacy and Free Trade”, have been pushing for “interoperability” between European and American rules on both sides of the Atlantic. That basically means a mutual recognition on the respective rules on both sides of the Atlantic. The only catch: in the United States there are currently no comprehensive data protection laws in place.
If the U.S. negotiators get their way – and let’s face it, when it comes to its dealings with its so-called “allies,” Washington invariably does – multinational corporations will have carte blanche to pry into just about every facet of the working and personal lives of the inhabitants of roughly a quarter of the world’s 200-or-so nations. Such a prospect should worry us all: exploitation of big data serves today to shape our consumption; it can reveal our whereabouts at all times, our conduct, preferences, feelings or even our most intimate thoughts. If TiSA is signed in its current form – and we will not know what that form is until at least five years down the line – that data will be freely bought and sold on the open market place without our knowledge; companies and governments will be able to store it for as long as they desire and use it for just about any purpose.
Perhaps the most perverse irony is that while the corporations and their servants in our elected (or in the case of the EU, unelected) governments seek to turn our lives into a vast open book of actionable or monetizable data, their own actions are increasingly being conducted behind an impenetrable blanket of darkness and secrecy. And as John F Kennedy once said during a little known speech on the grave threat posed by the Soviet Union, “the very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society.”
The privacy aspects of this might be troubling, but that’s not what this is about. The big deal is the infrastructure for cashless societies worldwide. Imagine a world where the too big to fails get, at a minimum, a swipe fee for every transaction. Organized crime never had it so good. Not that this is a criminal goal. Debit cards sure are convenient.