TPP – The Burning Platform

US vs. THEM

“I’ll show you politics in America. Here it is, right here. “I think the puppet on the right shares my beliefs.” “I think the puppet on the left is more to my liking.” “Hey, wait a minute, there’s one guy holding out both puppets!”” – Bill Hicks

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Anyone who frequents Twitter, Facebook, political blogs, economic blogs, or fake news mainstream media channels knows our world is driven by the “Us versus Them” narrative. It’s almost as if “they” are forcing us to choose sides and believe the other side is evil. Bill Hicks died in 1994, but his above quote is truer today then it was then. As the American Empire continues its long-term decline, the proles are manipulated through Bernaysian propaganda techniques, honed over the course of decades by the ruling oligarchs, to root for their assigned puppets.

Most people can’t discern they are being manipulated and duped by the Deep State controllers. The most terrifying outcome for these Deep State controllers would be for the masses to realize it is us versus them. But they don’t believe there is a chance in hell of this happening. Their arrogance is palatable.

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NAVIGATING THROUGH THE STORMS

Several weeks ago I had to drive west on the Pennsylvania Turnpike to pick up my son after his sophomore year at Penn State. I’ve made this trip a dozen times over the last few years, since this is my second son attending Penn State, with a third starting in the Fall. It’s a tedious, boring, protracted, four hour trek through the rural countryside of the Keystone State. During these trips my mind wanders, making connections between the landscape and the pressing issues facing the world. I can’t help but get lost in my thoughts as the miles accumulate like dollars on the national debt clock.

More often than not I end up making the trip in the midst of bad weather. And this time was no different. The Pennsylvania Turnpike is a meandering, decades old, dangerous, mostly two lane highway for most of its 360 mile span. Large swaths of the decaying interstate are under construction, as the narrative about lack of infrastructure spending is proven false by visual proof along the highways and byways of America.

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VOTING TO DESTROY THE ESTABLISHMENT

“The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“I know that history is going to be dominated by an improbable event, I just don’t know what that event will be.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Nassim Taleb is a prickly arrogant SOB who doesn’t give a crap what intellectuals, academics, and other establishment elitists think about him. He has an Ivy league MBA, but despises everything about the curriculum of Ivy League MBA programs. He has a PhD, but scorns academics and their worship of theories and models. He enjoys poking holes in the storylines of the propaganda spewing corporate media. He glories in ridiculing the predictions of captured “experts” mouthing the talking points of whichever corporate interest is paying them blood money.

I read his brilliant Black Swan book back in 2008. It was a difficult read, but there were so many gems of wisdom throughout the book, it was a powerful tome predicting the financial collapse in real time. He wrote it in 2006. He understands the world doesn’t operate the way Ivy League models say it is supposed to operate. The world is propelled by black swans, not a normal distribution of the world. He was right in 2006 and he’s right now. The paragraph below has been making the rounds in the alternate media this past week. The establishment media would never publicize it, as their job is to protect the crumbling social order.

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TPP WILL DESTROY FREE SPEECH

Guest Post by Stilton Jarlsberg

obama, obama jokes, political, humor, cartoon, conservative, hope n' change, hope and change, stilton jarlsberg, tpp, censorship, copyright, freedom of speech

The TPP (which allegedly stands for Trans-Pacific Partnership even though we’re more familiar with those first two letters having a different and more accurate association) is the bizarre, mostly-secret trade agreement which our current anti-capitalist president is ramming through. It’s long, complex, and, like Obamacare, deliberately written to be misunderstood – so we just want to focus on one seemingly teeny-tiny element which was recently changed (and which the Obama administration is no doubt hoping will fly under the radar).

You can read all about it here, but in a nutshell the TPP will allegedly extend “copyright protection” for things like online content by allowing the government to bring charges against anyone suspected of copyright infringement even if the “copying” (like a simple link to a news story) does no harm to the copyright owner and, indeed, may even be encouraged by the copyright owner.

In other words, Hope n’ Change could be shut down for linking to the dry story about the TPP above, let alone linking to stories about more sensitive issues like Hillary’s criminal wrongdoing or how “Bathhouse Barry” got his nickname. And if you share one of our cartoons, even though we explicitly encourage you to do so, the government could come and get YOU, too. A very tidy way to curtail bothersome political speech, don’t you think?

Despite vagueness in many other areas, the TPP is quite clear about what the government can do to you if it finds you in potential (or even imaginary) violation of their new copyright standards:

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BLACK GUNS MATTER

Rob and myself finally did it. We went to a gun show. We had to park about a half mile away, because the crowds were so large. They even had shuttle buses running in the parking lot. I kept looking for Obama’s gun show loophole, but I couldn’t find it. What we found were a couple thousand American citizens who still believe in the 2nd Amendment and their right to exercise that freedom. We also found this shirt that reflects the thinking of hard working decent middle class white people.

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The people I saw haven’t benefited from some phantom white privilege. These were people who get up every day, go to work, pay their taxes, stay married, raise children, and reflect the true American spirit. They aren’t bitter about their lot in life. All they ask is to be left alone by an overreaching hostile government that considers them potential domestic terrorists because they know how to use guns, believe in liberty and follow the U.S. Constitution. This is what Barack Obama thinks of them:

“It’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” – Barack Obama – 2008

His hope and change sloganeering in 2008 didn’t fool these people. I don’t think I’d be far off in estimating there wasn’t a single Obama supporter in that massive expo center. He despises and scorns working class white Americans. His quote above captures his disdain for us. His entire presidency has been the most divisive in history. He has instigated the race baiting. He hails Islam as a religion of peace while attending mosques and pisses on Christianity at every opportunity.

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5 Stories the Media Missed While Obsessing over the #StarbucksRedCup

Guest Post by Claire Bernish

(ANTIMEDIA) U.S. Inc. — When billionaire presidential hopeful Donald Trump inexplicably decided this week that boycotting Starbucks over the ‘de-Christmas-ization’ of their ubiquitous red holiday coffee cup was somehow a matter of national importance, the internet exploded — and American mainstream media fanned the flames.

People from every conceivable walk of life suddenly found themselves with a reason to rise up against the establishment coffee chain and scream in indignation about this newly-neutral — and cheerlessly Grinch-ified — affront to humanity. As if this inane insanity over an innocuous paper cup weren’t an embarrassing enough commentary on the U.S.’ populace’ lack of priorities — by Wednesday morning, the corporatocracy ever-so nobly answered the outrage: Dunkin’ Donuts unveiled its decidedly cheerful, appropriately Christmas-ized version of its holiday cup.

Yes, indeed. Starbucks’ apparent war on Christmas has now fully morphed into a de facto corporate Battle of the Paper Cups. People immediately responded by declaring their undying allegiance to either Team Grinch or Team Santa, conveniently ignoring the fact that these mega-corporations just figured out their most lucrative holiday marketing strategies — weeks before Thanksgiving even crossed people’s minds.

But the passion these warring coffee cup factions have managed to muster is indisputably misplaced, especially considering the bevy of pertinent issues that directly affect us all and are inherently more deserving of outrage. Though the month isn’t yet halfway behind us, there are already myriad concerns in need of your immediate attention — and none have anything whatsoever to do with a commercialized holiday that’s still well over a month away.

Here are five things exponentially more deserving of your indignation than a paper cup — no matter its design (or lack thereof):

1. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)

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The Re-enserfment of Western Peoples

Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts

The re-enserfment of Western peoples is taking place on several levels. One about which I have been writing for more than a decade comes from the offshoring of jobs. Americans, for example, have a shrinking participation in the production of the goods and services that are marketed to them.

On another level we are experiencing the financialization of the Western economy about which Michael Hudson is the leading expert (Killing The Host). Financialization is the process of removing any public presence in the economy and converting the economic surplus into interest payments to the financial sector.

These two developments deprive people of economic prospects. A third development deprives them of political rights. The Trans-Pacific and Trans-Atlantic Partnerships eliminate political sovereignty and turn governance over to global corporations.

These so called “trade partnerships” have nothing to do with trade. These agreements negotiated in secrecy grant immunity to corporations from the laws of the countries in which they do business. This is achieved by declaring any interference by existing and prospective laws and regulations on corporate profits as restraints on trade for which corporations can sue and fine “sovereign” governments. For example, the ban in France and other counries on GMO products would be negated by the Trans-Atlantic Partnership. Democracy is simply replaced by corporate rule.

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The Most Brazen Corporate Power Grab in American History

Guest Post by Chris Hedges

A 2014 protest in Tokyo against the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. (Shizuo Kambayashi / AP)

The release Thursday of the 5,544-page text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership—a trade and investment agreement involving 12 countries comprising nearly 40 percent of global output—confirms what even its most apocalyptic critics feared.

“The TPP, along with the WTO [World Trade Organization] and NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement], is the most brazen corporate power grab in American history,” Ralph Nader told me when I reached him by phone in Washington, D.C. “It allows corporations to bypass our three branches of government to impose enforceable sanctions by secret tribunals. These tribunals can declare our labor, consumer and environmental protections [to be] unlawful, non-tariff barriers subject to fines for noncompliance. The TPP establishes a transnational, autocratic system of enforceable governance in defiance of our domestic laws.”

The TPP is part of a triad of trade agreements that includes the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA). TiSA, by calling for the privatization of all public services, is a mortal threat to the viability of the U.S. Postal Service, public education and other government-run enterprises and utilities; together these operations make up 80 percent of the U.S. economy. The TTIP and TiSA are still in the negotiation phase. They will follow on the heels of the TPP and are likely to go before Congress in 2017.

These three agreements solidify the creeping corporate coup d’état along with the final evisceration of national sovereignty. Citizens will be forced to give up control of their destiny and will be stripped of the ability to protect themselves from corporate predators, safeguard the ecosystem and find redress and justice in our now anemic and often dysfunctional democratic institutions. The agreements—filled with jargon, convoluted technical, trade and financial terms, legalese, fine print and obtuse phrasing—can be summed up in two words: corporate enslavement.

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QUOTE OF THE DAY

“The TPP is the most brazen corporate power grab in American history. It allows corporations to bypass our three branches of government to impose enforceable sanctions by secret tribunals. These tribunals can declare our labor, consumer and environmental protections unlawful, non-tariff barriers subject to fines for noncompliance. The TPP establishes a transnational, autocratic system of enforceable governance in defiance of our domestic laws.”

Ralph Nader

How the TPP Could Lead to Worldwide Internet Censorship

Guest Post by Michael Krieger

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On Monday, we learned that global “leaders” had come to an agreement on the infamous Trans Pacific Partnership, or TPP. While discouraging, this doesn’t mean the game is over — far from it.

Although politicians have come to a secret agreement, this democracy killing, corporate monstrosity still has to pass the U.S. Congress. So it’s now up to all of us to create an insurmountable degree of opposition and make sure this thing is dead on arrival.

The more I learn about the TPP, the more horrified I become. In case you need to get up to speed, check out the following:

U.S. State Department Upgrades Serial Human Rights Abuser Malaysia to Include it in the TPP

Julian Assange on the TPP – “Deal Isn’t About Trade, It’s About Corporate Control”

Trade Expert and TPP Whistleblower – “We Should Be Very Concerned about What’s Hidden in This Trade Deal”

As the Senate Prepares to Vote on “Fast Track,” Here’s a Quick Primer on the Dangers of the TPP

If that wasn’t enough to concern you, here’s the latest revelation.

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