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Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter
November 7, 2015
Trade agreements and the corporate war on democracy
Our
focus is on the corporate rights treaties that are misleadingly sold as
trade agreements. In particular, the spotlight is on the Trans-Pacific
Partnership, negotiated in secret, and now scheduled to be
rubber-stamped by national governments on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.
The TPP is best understood as a major milestone in the long-term war
waged by the corporate elite against any form of democracy. It gives
corporations the power to block any environmental protections or health
and safety legislation that could be interpreted as interfering with a
corporation’s ‘right’ to make a profit by doing whatever it wants. It
will significantly undermine efforts to fight climate change by giving
corporations the power to block laws that would prevent fracking,
tarsands extraction, coal mining, etc. Food safety protections are
similarly attacked: banning GMO crops or imports, or even required GMO
labelling, becomes a restraint of trade. Internet advocacy groups are
calling the TPP a ‘death warrant for the Open Internet” because, in the
name of ‘copyright protection’, it gives corporations the power to force
Internet Service Providers to take down websites, even in other
countries, that are allegedly infringing copyright.
As
always, people are fighting back and will continue to fight back. That
requires organizing: as an article by Al Giordano reminds us, “Nothing
is ever won without organizing.” Also in this issue, we remember Bhaskar
Save, a farmer in India who developed organic farming methods on his
own farm which have gained worldwide admiration.
We invite you to share this newsletter with your friends. You can forward this email, or send them the link to the Other Voices home page on the Connexions website at www.connexions.org/Media/CxNewsletter.htm.
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The name of our topic of the week is more than a
little misleading, since so-called “trade agreements” have little to do
with trade. The very word “trade” is a misnomer when an ever-increasing
proportion of economic activity consists of intra-corporate transfers
within multinational corporations which have off-shored their production
to low-wage jurisdictions in many different countries. These “trade
agreements” are in fact best understood as corporate rights and investor
rights treaties whose purpose is to prevent governments from doing
anything that might inhibit corporate freedom of action or impact
corporate profits. Connexions features a selection of resources which
explore the real meaning of international trade agreements. Explore
them here
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All Rights Reserved: Now We Know the Final TTP is Everything We Feared
The
Transatlantic and Transpacific Trade and Investment Partnerships have
nothing to do with free trade. “Free trade” is used as a disguise to
hide the power these agreements give to corporations to use law suits to
overturn sovereign laws of nations that regulate pollution, food
safety, GMOs, and minimum wages. Read more
Keywords: Intellectual Property - Trans-Pacific Partnership
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'Worse than we thought:' TPP a total corporate power grab nightmare
On
issues ranging from climate change to food safety, from open Internet
to access to medicines, the TransPacific Partnership (TPP) is a
disaster. While the text is full of handouts to the fossil fuel
industry, it doesn’t mention the words climate change once. What it does
do, however, is give fossil fuel companies the extraordinary ability to
sue local governments that try and keep fossil fuels in the ground. If a
province puts a moratorium on fracking, corporations can sue; if a
community tries to stop a coal mine, corporations can overrule them. In
short, these rules undermine countries' ability to do what scientists
say is the single most important thing we can do to combat the climate
crisis: keep fossil fuels in the ground. Read more
Keywords: International Trade Agreements - Trans-Pacific Partnership
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TTIP – The Corporate Empowerment Act
The
Transatlantic and Transpacific Trade and Investment Partnerships have
nothing to do with free trade. “Free trade” is used as a disguise to
hide the power these agreements give to corporations to use law suits to
overturn sovereign laws of nations that regulate pollution, food
safety, GMOs, and minimum wages. Read more
Keywords: International Trade Agreements - Trans-Pacific Partnership
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Salvadorans Warn Canadians about World Bank's Kangaroo Court
Salvadorans
fighting against a Canadian mining multinational discuss how secretive
international tribunals allow corporations to override elected
governments and impose projects that threaten the environment and health
of local populations. Read more
Keywords: International Trade Law - Investor Protection
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Slavery, Genocide, Abuse: The Dark Side of Asia's 'Tiger Economies'
From
declining worker protections to violent labour trafficking and ethnic
cleansing, the dark underbelly of Southeast Asia's “tiger economies” is
on full display this year. Read more
Keywords: Ethnic Cleansing - Southeast Asia
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Agroecology as a Tool for Liberation: Transforming Industrial Agribusiness in El Salvador
“We say that every
square meter of land that is worked with agro-ecology is a liberated
square meter. We see it as a tool to transform farmers' social and
economic conditions. We see it as a tool of liberation from the
unsustainable capitalist agricultural model that oppresses farmers.” Read more
Keywords: Agriculture/Ecology - Organic Agriculture
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Nothing is ever won without organizing
All
organizing begins with the telling of a story. When we listen carefully
to somebody’s story, we learn what motivates him, what she is passionate
about. Listening is the first skill and duty of a community organizer.
Before we can get somebody to do something, we have to learn what he and
she want, which is usually different than what we presumed they wanted. Read More
Keywords: Organizing for Social Change - Organizing
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The Passing of Bhaskar Save: What The ‘Green Revolution’ Did for India
Bhaskar Save farmed on 14 acres of land in Gujarat, India. Using
traditional methods, he demonstrated on his farm that yield is superior
to any farm using chemicals in terms of overall quantity, nutritional
quality, taste, biological diversity, ecological sustainability, water
conservation, energy efficiency and economic profitability. Save, who
emphasized self-reliance at the farm/village level was an inspiration
for generations of farmers. Bhaskar Save died on October 24 at the age
of 93. Read more
Keywords: Organic Agriculture - Sustainable Agriculture
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The Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory
Featuring a selection of materials from the Nelson Mandela Archive, which is in the process of being digitized. Read more
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Newly discovered Malcolm X tapes
The folks at the
Freedom Archives in San Francisco recently stumbled across a couple of
unmarked reels that turned out to contain Malcolm X speeches and
interviews. Ranging from his time as a Minister in the Nation of Islam
to a couple months before his death in February 1965, these reels offer a
wonderful opportunity to hear Malcolm at different points in his
political development. Read more
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Book of the Week: Killing the Host
By Michael Hudson
Economist
Michael Hudson exposes how finance, insurance, and real estate (the
FIRE sector) have seized control of the global economy. The FIRE sector
is responsible for today’s extreme economic polarization (the 1% vs. the
99%) via favored tax status that inflates real estate prices while
deflating the “real” economy of labour and production. Hudson shows in
vivid detail how the Great 2008 Bailout saved the banks but not the
economy, and plunged the U.S., Irish, Latvian and Greek economies into
debt deflation and austerity. Killing the Host describes how
the phenomenon of debt deflation imposes punishing austerity on the U.S.
and European economies, siphoning wealth and income upward to the
financial sector while impoverishing the middle class. Read more
Keywords: Austerity - Finance Capital
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Film of the Week: Birdie
Birdie,
who sleeps in trees and sells fruits and vegetables on the streets of
Rio de Janeiro, loves the two abandoned dogs he now lives with. In
Heloisa Passos’ film, Birdie reads the minds of his two best canine
friends. See
Keywords: Dogs - Homelessness
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Copyright
Connexions 2015. Contents are licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution Non-Commercial License. This means you are welcome to share
and republish the contents of this newsletter as long as you credit
Connexions, and as long as you don’t charge for the content.
Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter, is available online here
This issue was edited and produced by Ulli Diemer.
Connexions
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