Stop the Trans-Pacific Partnership

Vulgarized knowledge characteristically gives birth to a feeling that everything is understandable and explained. It is like a system of bridges built over chasms. One can travel boldly ahead over these bridges, ignoring the chasms. It is forbidden to look down into them; but that, alas, does not alter the fact that they exist.

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The pressure of an all-powerful totalitarian state creates an emotional tension in its citizens that determines their acts. When people are divided into "loyalists" and "criminals" a premium is placed on every type of conformist, coward, and hireling; whereas among the "criminals" one finds a singularly high percentage of people who are direct, sincere, and true to themselves.
Czesław Miłosz

 Orwell's Kiev, Warnings from BP Employees, 4 Years of Corporate Personhood

agent provocateurs!! caveat 

Stop the Trans-Pacific Partnership

  23 January 2014

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a proposed international trade agreement, involving 12 countries and covering a range of topics including intellectual property, the environment and workers’ rights. The TPP has been negotiated in secret for almost four years.

The 12 countries are: United States, Japan, Mexico, Canada, Australia, Malaysia, Chile, Singapore, Peru, Vietnam, New Zealand and Brunei Darussalam. The TPP agreement would cover 40% of global GDP and one-third of global trade.

Last week, Wikileaks released a draft environment chapter of the TPP.

The US Trade Representative, Michael Froman, has said that President Obama, “will not support a TPP agreement that does not have strong environmental provisions.” He said this in November 2013, at a lunch hosted by World Wildlife Fund, shortly after a group of US NGOs wrote to Froman urging him “to ensure that a strong and enforceable environment chapter is included in the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement.”

The draft environment chapter is neither strong nor enforceable. Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, slammed the leaked draft in a statement:

“If the environment chapter is finalized as written in this leaked document, President Obama’s environmental trade record would be worse than George W. Bush’s. This draft chapter falls flat on every single one of our issues – oceans, fish, wildlife, and forest protections – and in fact, rolls back on the progress made in past free trade pacts.”

In May 2007, President Bush reached an agreement with the Democrat-controlled Congress about what had to be included in the environment chapter of any US free trade agreement. This included making the environmental chapter enforceable through trade sanctions. All US trade agreements since then have complied. Until now.

Obama hopes to bulldoze the TPP through using a mechanism called Fast Track trade authority, that would allow the White House to negotiate and sign trade deals without Congressional oversight. An “unlikely coalition of groups” is opposing Fast Track – click here for more information and readers in the US can sign the petition opposing Fast Track:
A discussion featuring some of these groups on a reddit_AMA (AMA = ask me anything) covers much of what is wrong with the TPP.
Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and WWF-US have highlighted four main problems with the Trans-Pacific Partnership’s environmental chapter:

• There is no enforcement. Julian Assange describes the draft environmental chapter as “a toothless public relations exercise with no enforcement mechanism.”
• It does not discourage overfishing. The draft text states that “each Party shall seek to operate a fisheries management system that regulates marine wild capture fishing and that is designed to prevent overfishing and overcapacity”. The words “seek to” and “designed to” provide a loophole the size of a factory trawler.
• It does not take a strong enough stand against trade in illegal wildlife.
• It does not go far enough to prevent illegal logging. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and other groups are calling for each country in the TPP to enact legislation similar to the US Lacey Act prohibiting the import of illegally logged timber products.

While the environmental chapter is not enforceable, other chapters are, as Professor Jane Kelsey of the University of Aukland notes:

The core chapters of these agreements, especially on investment, agriculture, intellectual property and services, impose pro-corporate rules on governments and communities. Those rules are toxic to biodiversity, ecosystems, indigenous knowledge and resources, human and animal health, water, forests fish and other natural resources, and other aspects of conservation and the environment.

The issue of Trade and Biodiversity in the TPP is important from the perspective of indigenous peoples’ rights. In a commentary on the Wikileaks website, Professor Kelsey points out that most of Article SS.13: Trade and Biodiversity is “weak and aspirational”.
Paragraph 4 of Article 13 recognises the rights of States over natural resources and rather than acknowledging the right of indigenous peoples and local communities to control who has access to genetic resources on their lands and forests, it hands over that right to the State. Similarly, in the next paragraph the right to give or withhold prior, informed consent over access to genetic resources is given to the State. And the benefits obtained from using these genetic resources are to be shared fairly and equitably with the State, not with indigenous peoples and local communities.
As Kelsey points out, this “falls far short of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples”. It undermines indigenous rights and risks leaving indigenous peoples and local communities wide open to the threat of biopiracy.
Several of the governments involved in negotiating the TPP are also interested in REDD. The TPP could have serious consequences for REDD. The financial services chapter could affect trade in carbon credits. The draft environment chapter recognises “the role that market and non-market approaches can play in achieving climate change objectives”. The environment chapter is weak on illegal logging, and the TPP could lead to increased deforestation. The TPP could make national REDD legislation more difficult, because mining, logging, or oil palm corporations could sue governments that pass REDD legislation considered to be in breach of the TPP.
Climate campaign group 350.org has produced a great info-graphic explaining the broader issues behind the TPP (click on the image to sign on to 350.org’s petition to stop TPP):

Warrior's Wisdom 

Published on Oct 27, 2013

The late Stuart Wilde delivers and inspiring talk on the Warrior's Wisdom circa 1984. It was already a copy of a copy VHS source this came from so the image is degraded from that.