DIGITAL APARTHEID: How the End of Net Neutrality Creates Internet Classism (UPDATED)

June 13, 2018 by Gabrielle Lafayette

Over two decades have passed since Netscape went public in 1995, triggering the revolutionary ability to browse websites. It also spurred the multi-billion dollar investments by companies like Global Crossing in the creation of undersea and underground fiber-optic telecommunications cable networks, which in-turn drove down the cost of data transmission to nearly zero.

Browser wars led to Y2K led to the dot-com crash giving birth to hacktivism, social networking, the blogosphere, the deep web and everything else. The internet has enabled open-sourcing, collaboration and innovation that even the most idealistic dreamers could have never imagined. And because we’ve all grown up within the infinitude of this burgeoning digital universe, we’ve grown to take unspoken digital liberties for granted.

Each computer effectively functions as a neuron in the massive brain of what was previously referred to as the World Wide Web. As with a hive, it is not the neurons themselves, but the connections between individual neurons that create intelligence. In allowing connectivity between computers and thus individuals, the internet has allowed for explosive leaps in awareness worldwide.

The internet likely represents the last effective tool that remains with which to oppose forces of despotism in our rapidly globalizing landscape. Unlike Corporate controlled media where the wealthy have dominated our access to information, our ability to organize, and our means of earning a living, the internet represents a force for actual democracy on a level playing field. We can attribute such liberty to Net Neutrality, which we are told officially ended this week.

What is Net Neutrality?

Near the beginning of the internet’s inception, the FCC put into place a regulation to guarantee an open and free internet. Part of that clause is called Net Neutrality, which regulated Internet Service Providers from differentiating between one site and another. Corporate ISPs want more money, and want to charge premium fees for the websites we visit. But they can’t do this as long as Net Neutrality rules remain in place. As the rules have stood for decades, ISPs cannot prioritize data on a pay-to-play system of browsing per the Title II classification of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) as common carriers. But ISPs have lobbied hard, even placing their own people into the FCC, in their constant crusade to revoke Title II restrictions. If they are successful – if Net Neutrality dies – ISPs would be granted complete power over the internet, including the ability to outright ban certain websites on their network.

Given the possible profits and power that await ISPs following the death of Title II, it is not particularly surprising that companies like Comcast, Time Warner and Verizon have pulled out every possible legal trick in the book to to overturn Title II, and now it looks like they might actually succeed.

As Jonathan Cook of Counterpunch notes:

As soon as next month, the net could become the exclusive plaything of the biggest such corporations, determined to squeeze as much profit as possible out of bandwith. Meanwhile, the tools to help us engage in critical thinking, dissent and social mobilisation will be taken away as “net neutrality” becomes a historical footnote, a teething phase, in the “maturing” of the internet.

THE REVOLVING DOOR OF CORPORATE POLITICS

The FCC, who are supposed to act as a regulator, actually protect telecom industries by proposing “reforms to Net Neutrality.” The current chairman of the FCC, Ajit Pai, was served for many years as a lawyer working for the telecom giant Verizon.

President Trump appointed Pai in 2017, but the proposed death of a free and open internet goes far beyond the Donald’s presence in Washington. The Obama Administration’s FCC Commissioner Tom Wheeler – who attempted to gut Net Neutrality rules in 2014 – was also a former cable industry lobbyist sponsored by Comcast, Verizon and the US Telecommunications Association, and hired Comcast Attorneys Daniel Alvarez and Matthew Del Nero during his tenure.

Despite these obvious conflicts of interest, not everyone at the FCC seems thrilled with the corporate takeover on the online universe. In a Los Angeles Times op-ed entitled “I’m on the FCC. Please stop us from killing net neutrality” Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel observes the persistent questions surrounding the legitimacy of anti-net neutrality public comments submitted to FCC, as well as what appear to be tens of thousands of missing comments. She now calls for voters to make sure the proposal by Republican Chairman Ajit Pai does not go through, citing overwhelming public support for net neutrality. She also proclaimed Pai’s plan “a lousy idea” deserving of a “heated response from the millions of Americans who work and create online every day.”

Montana Fights Back

In January Montana Governor Steve Bullock (D) responded to theFCC’s vote to end Net Neutrality by signing an executive order requiring internet service providers with government contracts in the state of Montana to abide by Net Neutrality rules.

As reported by Harper Neidig at The Hill:

The order makes his state the first to push back on the Federal Communications Commission’s decision to repeal the open internet rules last month.

“There has been a lot of talk around the country about how to respond to the recent decision by the Federal Communications Commission to repeal net neutrality rules, which keep the internet free and open. It’s time to actually do something about it,” Bullock said in a statement.

“This is a simple step states can take to preserve and protect net neutrality. We can’t wait for folks in Washington DC to come to their senses and reinstate these rules.”

The order says that in order to receive a contract with the state government, internet service providers must not engage in blocking or throttling web content or create internet fast lanes. Those practices were all banned under the Obama-era 2015 net neutrality order.

The fine folks at boing boing observe that the order sets up an interesting conundrum:

On the one hand, the FCC insists that it has the authority to ban states and cities from establishing public alternative networks. Since ISPs enjoy natural monopolies — there’s only so many poles and sewers to go around — most cities have one or two ISPs, and if both of them refuse to adhere to net neutrality principles, the state would seemingly have to go without internet service altogether. The question will be whether one of the duopolies in a city with government offices will betray its network discrimination conspiracy with its “competitor” in order to land state contracts — or whether the state will build out its own government network, something that the FCC seems prepared to permit.

MONETIZING SCARCITY

In a Washington D.C. Court of Appeals case – Verizon VS The Federal Communications Commission – rulings effectively put an end to Net Neutrality already, abolishing FCC regulations over telecommunications giants like Verizon and Comcast, Cox, AT&T, and Time Warner Cable. Now we’re facing the complete repeal of already compromised regulations, and we’re set to witness that repeal as soon as December of 2017.

Under the Appealed ruling, ISPs can already selectively censor the internet by throttling sites they don’t like into nonexistence, hindering cash-strapped internet start-ups from getting off of the ground, stifling innovation, killing off new competitors challenging massive corporations, and widening gap between the haves and have nots. Now income inequality threatens last bastion of free speech. Small businesses, nonprofit organizations, independent journalists and the like, will not be able to afford to pay for the “fast lane” of the internet.

ISPs will be able to discriminate between data on the final mile before the data connects to your home. The new tolls would allow ISPs to actually tax internet companies for the “privilege” of connecting with customers who are already paying for network access. Small business owners and everyone else won’t be able to compete with massive corporations. Start-ups won’t be able to compete with the pay-to-play fast-lane. An end to Net Neutrality would grant ISPs the ability to give some websites preferential treatment (faster traffic) in exchange for money. But who has all of the money in the first place?

The name of the game is Pay To Play. ISPs will be able to manipulate broadband speeds based on which organizations are willing to pony up the most dough. Our voices will become inaudible in the sea of money that has bought politicians and saturated our mental environment with the pollution of incessant advertisements for generations, literally drowning out our voices on the only frontier we have left.

Then again, wasn’t it really just a matter of time before this happened? The internet, after all, poses a significant threat to all corporate agendas. But for those of us who have come to take these services for granted, it is a sad reminder that we don’t truly know what we have until it is gone, as the old saying goes.

CORPORATIONS ARE LIKE THE MAFIA – THEY DO WHATEVER THEY WANT

The corporate giants have grown lazy in their attempts to smooth out PR. The fact remains they don’t have to issue apologies any longer. They’ve successfully implemented monopolies and laugh at every challenge to them. In a 2014 blog post, Tom Wheeler wouldn’t even defend his proposals, implicitly refusing to dispel the “interpretation” of proposed rules by not even mentioning them:

“Some recent commentary has had a misinformed interpretation of the Open Internet Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) currently before the Commission. There are two things that are important to understand. First, this is not a final decision by the Commission but rather a formal request for input on a proposal as well as a set of related questions. Second, as the Notice makes clear, all options for protecting and promoting an Open Internet are on the table.

“In its Verizon v. FCC decision the D.C. Circuit laid out a blueprint for how the FCC could use Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 to create Open Internet rules that would stick. I have repeatedly stated that I viewed the court’s ruling as an invitation that I intended to accept. We ask for comment on this approach in the NPRM.”

The courts have explicitly ruled they have the authority to change this classification, which is why they moved internet from Common Carrier classification to Information Provider, akin to any other public utility.

Wheeler went on to say:

“I do not believe we should leave the market unprotected for multiple more years while lawyers for the biggest corporate players tie the FCC’s protections up in court. Notwithstanding this, all regulatory options remain on the table. If the proposal before us now turns out to be insufficient or if we observe anyone taking advantage of the rule, I won’t hesitate to use Title II. However, unlike with Title II, we can use the court’s roadmap to implement Open Internet regulation now rather than endure additional years of litigation and delay.”

Enacting Title II of Telecommunications Act of 1996 would reclassify ISPs as utilities like phone companies and restrict them to more stringent FCC regulation. Despite his words, “hesitate” is exactly what Wheeler has done from the start. The FCC admits that actions are not commercially reasonable if they harm the consumer, like, for example, degrading other service to create a fast lane, if they harm competition, if they provide priority access to affiliate programs, or if they curb free speech or civic engagement. But as BGR’s Brad Reed points out:

“Just like with the AT&T/T-Mobile merger, Wheeler’s net neutrality rules propose giving a powerful corporate interest something it wants in exchange for agreeing to live under the vague threat of future regulations that depend entirely on the whims of the regulators who may or may not feel like enforcing them.”

NET NEUTRALITY IS NOT A MEDDLESOME GOVERNMENT REGULATION – ITS COMMON SENSE

As billions of people from different cultures are being brought into a brave, new, globalized economic landscape, the monopoly of the Anglo-American world Empire is being challenged on a daily basis by this online network of networks. But the internet doesn’t only challenge the Empire from the outside. While disinformation propaganda has filled our minds with lies for decades, the alternative media challenge the dogmatic information monopoly of corporate owned organizations like CNN, FOX and MSNBC. The internet has made it impossible for the established regime to sell propaganda to us; if the mainstream media attempts to convince us that the people of Iran are inherently evil to sell another illegal war to the American people, we can simply access the web to engage in conversations with Iranian citizens, and in doing so we ultimately arrive at the conclusion that those people in Iran are really no different from us, and desire the same things that we do. Thus the internet shows us not only that we are all connected, but that we are all one consciousness.

According to complexity theory, when simple things interact, they create unpredictability. It is expressly this unpredictability which threatens the hegemony of the Corporate state.The Corporatocracy has ten-thousand reasons to loathe a free and open internet, which is why they’re attacking it from all sides. While Microsoft and Macintosh’s computer systems have been intentionally designed with built-in back doors to NSA and GCHQ servers, open-source software like Linux challenges the dogmatic surveillance monopoly of corporate owned intelligence organizations like Booze-Allen-Hamilton. While Wal-Mart and Target drive out local businesses and bring mom-&-pop shops to their knees, eBay stores and the 3D printing revolution of thingiverse.com and the like challenge the dogmatic production monopoly of corporate owned retail outlets. While our banking systems choke out local economies and foreclose struggling families from their homes with the stranglehold that is compounded interest, Bit-Coin and other Crypto-Currencies challenge the dogmatic monopoly of the Central Banking System’s fiat currencies. The radio program you’re listening to at this very moment is yet another shining example of why the internet is so important. Without the web, this show does not exist, plain and simple. So its not hard to understand why the Corporate elite are doing everything they can to destroy internet sovereignty.

The Corporate elite view internet as something akin to Pandora opening her box. In the early days of internet regulation bills, Senator Jay Rockefeller actually said to a crowded auditorium on the subject of cybersecurity, “Would it have been better if we had never invented the internet?” Our Corporate masters are desperate to stuff the genie back into the bottle, and shove the cat back into the bag. But a mind expanded by new experience can never return to its previous dimensions, and now that the standard has been set, a reversal of the information trend will not be tolerated by the online community. Every day the internet exists, it becomes stronger, striking fear into the black heart of the oligarchs.

As the old saying goes, all good things must come to an end, and we may be witnessing the death of the internet as you read these words. The rich are attempting to control the internet by buying it, creating a new form of classism, what might be termed Digital Apartheid. If they succeed, the rest of us too poor to afford the perks of the free internet we’ve all come to take for granted, will become second-class digital citizens, unable to access information we were able to before. They don’t have to shut down websites to kill the internet. All they have to do is put an end to Net Neutrality, which is exactly what FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler announced was going to happen this week. The websites we access on a daily basis constitute the accessible internet, and Internet Service Providers or ISPs must provide equal access to everything that is online to their clients. Net Neutrality means that your Internet provider cannot limit what you view online in any way. If it is online, you can access it.

But let’s put this into perspective. What would net neutrality look like if it were applicable to telephones? It would mean that I can call a business as easily as I could call an individual. An end to telephone neutrality would mean that I could easily get through to big businesses, but would have to wait long periods of time in order to contact acquaintances, ultimately culminating in negative effects, like being put on hold for a 911 call. The bottom line here is that you cannot value communication technology on a sliding scale, although this is expressly what the end of Net Neutrality will create for us.

They’ve written a number of dress-rehearsal internet control bills, all of which were shut down by popular activism. ACTA failed. SOPA failed. PIPA failed. CISPA failed. And now with the TPP floundering in the water, it is clear that outward control of the internet is not going to work. The NSA is apprehensive to activate Quantum Copper, which is essentially the Great Firewall of China for the entire global internet, for fear of the backlash. If they suddenly shut off the internet, what would happen? They’ve discovered that they can’t control the internet openly, so now they’ve decided that it might be a good idea to exclusify information by forcing people to pay for it. Since people are barely able to make ends meet in the first place, the internet has become their only saving grace to make the rent and pay for groceries. So the idea of making people pay more for basic access on a sliding scale will break the back of our world wide web even more effectively than outwardly controlling it.

When it comes to these rulings and legislative efforts, the last people who are involved are we the people. The lobbyists and congressmen who have no conception of what the internet actually is, are writing this legislation not only for the sake of increasing their profits, but to control the even distribution of information that challenges their establishment narratives.

INTERNET CLASSISM

They’re turning this into a tiered system like cable television. These new data limits would likely be sold to us based on packages. For example, if you would like the social media package (which includes facebook and google+), you’ll have to pay an additional $9.99 in addition to the connection fees associated with your ISP. If you’ would like the streaming video package (which includes youtube hulu, and vimeo), that will cost you another additional $19.99 since steaming services require lots of bandwidth. And if you want to see smaller sites (like outerlimitsradioshow.wordpress.com) which aren’t included in these packages, you’ll just have to eat away that data. And if you’re dissatisfied with the fact that your service is slow, pay more to get faster service. Can’t afford it? Tough luck. Hope you enjoyed an open and free internet while it lasted. For the average internet user, this means that our favorite sites would take forever to load (especially if the corporations deem them a threat to the established propaganda narrative) resulting in even higher fees, justified by higher traffic and high bandwidths.

IS IT WORTH THE FIGHT?

How much longer are we going to waste our energy stopping programs that should not exist? Putting a stop to insane bills and ludicrous laws? How much longer will we read about the abuses of corporations in our headlines and think to ourselves – “this has to be stopped?” Why do we tolerate this? Occupy this. March for that. Instead of building a future on the altar of our most glorious dreams, we spend our time protesting and demonstrating, signing petition after petition, wasting all of our time and energy to stop programs and initiatives that should never have been conceived of in the first place. We’re on a hamster wheel, running harder and harder and expecting different results; expecting to go somewhere. We told ourselves that if we could stop SOPA the government would get the message and leave the internet alone. We told ourselves that if we could put an end to CISPA the government would finally get the message and leave the internet alone. But they slither and squirm their way out of every new regulation and ruling. They spend all their time conceiving clever methods of implementing their agenda. How much longer can we keep this up? I’ll give it to these lobbyists, they are very clever, but they’re not very wise. How do they think this is going to end?

The FCC would do well to appeal and win this case, but they won’t because they’ve been infiltrated by industry lobbyists. We might want to establish Net Neutrality on the books for good, somehow, and set it in stone forever. Although if we do that, they’ll just find another clever way to get around the rules and control the internet – they’ll stop at nothing until we put a stop to them, and the internet has proven to be the only means of doing that by exposing their lies on a daily basis, slowly but methodically waking up the masses one post at a time. In the meantime, here are a couple of sites you can access to make your voice heard on this issue:

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Save The Internet

Go FCC Yourself

Free Press

We are many, and they are few. The power to stop them is in the mirror. The fight is not over, but the time for waiting around to do something is. Take action.

[1] The FCC is about to axe-murder net neutrality. Don’t get mad – get even
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/24/fcc-net-neutrality-tom-wheeler-stop-rules

[2] Obama Administration Launches Plan to Make an “Internet ID” a Reality
http://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2014/05/02/obama-administration-launches-plan-to-make-an-internet-id-a-reality/

[3] The FCC Chairman’s Many Excuses: Tom Wheeler tries, and fails, to justify his execution of Net Neutrality
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/05/fcc_chairman_tom_wheeler_s_lame_excuses_for_his_net_neutrality_proposal.html

[4] FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler defends proposed Net Neutrality reform
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-fcc-net-neutrality-wheeler-20140430,0,7001552.story#axzz30gasnE7T

[5] FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler Pledges Open Internet In Face of Criticism
http://time.com/82409/wheeler-net-neutrality/

[6] If We Act Now, We Can Stop The FCC’s Horrific Proposal To End Net Neutrality
http://www.alternet.org/activism/if-we-act-now-we-can-stop-fccs-horrific-proposal-end-net-neutrality?paging=off&current_page=1

[7] Former Comcast And Verizon Attorneys Now Manage The FCC And Are About To Kill The Internet
http://www.vice.com/read/former-comcast-and-verizon-attorneys-now-manage-the-fcc-and-are-about-to-kill-the-internet

Gabrielle Lafayette is a journalist, writer, and executive producer for the Outer Limits Radio Show.

Catch the cloudcast at mixcloud.com/outerlimitsradioshow

Check out the more frequently updated tumblr page at outerlimitsradioshow.tumblr.com

Contact the research team at outerlimitsradioshow@fastmail.fm

TPP: A Totalitarian Trojan Horse

November 18, 2015 by Gabrielle Lafayette

The trip is fraught with paradox, and life is too ironic to be fully understood.

Lord Acton asserted nearly two centuries ago that “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority.”

While I find this observation to be apt, it is decidedly incomplete. It’s not only that absolute power corrupts absolutely, but also that positions of high authority have an overwhelming propensity to attract the corruptible. Sociopaths driven to dominate are motivated by a seething ambition that the rest of us simply cannot identify with.

In the 1960’s, Alan Watts discerned that:

“…nobody is more frightened of anybody else than a tyrant. He sits with his back to the wall, and his guards on either side of him, and he has you face downwards on the ground because you can’t use weapons that way. When you come into his presence, you don’t stand up and face him, because you might attack, and he has reason to fear that you might because he’s ruling you all. And the man who rules you all is the biggest crook in the bunch. Because he’s the one who succeeded in crime. The other people are pushed aside because they — the criminals, the people we lock up in jail — are simply the people who didn’t make it. So naturally, the real boss sits with his back to the wall and his henchmen on either side of him.”

Thus we can begin to conjure the philosophical reasons for the problems of the world that Socrates and Aristotle debated over two-thousand years ago: Why is it that our governing institutions are plagued with corruption to the point that fraud, depravity and exploitation seem not to be bugs of the system, but programs inherent within the system itself? Why is the emergence of ethical and benevolent leaders so incredibly rare?

Part of the problem stems from the fact that the greedy typically stop at nothing in their ruthless pursuit of power, while the wise avoid it altogether. The truly wise recognize this world for the illusion that it is, and cultivate that which is truly important for the nourishment of their soul, and material wealth and physical power simply don’t fit into that perspective. So the wise retain an extreme aversion to the pursuit of power because wisdom is inherently without greed; meanwhile, the greedy gravitate upward into positions of power and bring into being a plethora of problems because greed is inherently without wisdom.

With the internet age catapulting the evolution of human culture and ideas into today’s intimidating exponential acceleration, the possibility finally exists for the last vestiges of the old paradigm to finally fall away, including their manifestations which include parasitism, dominance, morality, war and predation. As professor Robert Solomon observes, the emergent paradigm has the possibility of a human society predicated upon the edicts of truth, loyalty, justice and freedom.

I would respectfully suggest that for this new paradigm to materialize as more than mere philosophical musings on the blogosphere, and become a concrete reality that can be seen and touched in the physical world, that the wise must change their paradigm as well, and pursue the throne for the benefit of all beings. Until that happens, the greedy, for whom wealth and power are endless pursuits, will take ever more power, resources, and wealth, and impoverish the rest of the world until they are forced by an extinction event or a mass revolution to cease their looting of the planet. The addictions of wealth, possessions and power are like salt water – the more one partakes of them, the thirstier they become – trying to fill the inner void with these unskillful means inexorably expands the void. And right now, the biggest imperial expansion in written human history is underway.

It’s called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and if you’re unfamiliar with it you might want to start asking yourself why you’ve never heard of it. Because behind those seven syllables of banality, those three innocent words, is a cleverly disguised iron fist of biblical proportions.

For many who have heard of it, the Trans-Pacific-Partnership has been sold by the Associated Press and Reuters as nothing more than a casual business deal as boring as it is innocuous. A cleverly orchestrated smokescreen of financial jargon and obfuscating legalese is drawn to calm the masses and appease the public who are wooed to complacency on the promise that the TPP has nothing to do with us.

Meanwhile, a steady campaign of apocalyptic headlines is pumped into our consciousness to distract us from the biggest corporate power grab ever, as the emergency headlines of confederate flags, ISIS attacks in Paris, and the unadulterated puerility of Donald Trump are beamed into the consciousness of the nation. Thus few have heard of the TPP or are familiar with how its passage promises to usher in a state of fascist dictatorship the scope and magnitude of which have never been witnessed on planet Earth before.

While we’re meant to think that this so-called “trade deal” is solely concerned with the mutual lowering of tariffs, it’s really a corporate ownership agreement that will change every facet of our lives. The TPP will change our laws in favor of a global legal system that caters to corporations and which is presided over by corporate lobbyists. The allowance of corporations to sue governments for impeding on their projected profits by means of secret trade tribunals is perhaps one of the most diabolical effects of the TPP. If a country has any kind of regulations on industry intended to protect environmental or social health, the corporation can sue the country for a loss of projected profits, as Philip Morris did against Uruguay last year for the country’s tobacco regulations. But under the TPP, we can expect this kind of lawsuit to become commonplace. As former Secretary of Labor under Clinton Robert Reich wrote earlier this year:

“The TPP also gives global corporations an international tribunal of private attorneys, outside any nation’s legal system, who can order compensation for any ‘unjust expropriation’ of foreign assets.”

As Joyce Nelson of Live Leak expains:

“Now the TransPacific Partnership – which is being called “NAFTA on steroids” – would award Big Pharma and other multinationals even more corporate “rights” in more countries, including the controversial investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism by which they can sue signatory governments for regulatory changes that affect their profits.

“As the Canadian website rabble.ca notes: ‘The Canadian government is currently being sued through NAFTA by Eli Lilly, an American pharmaceutical company, for invalidating the firm’s patent extensions on two mental health drugs. A Canadian Federal Court decided in 2010 that the patent extensions had not delivered the promised benefits and the drugs should therefore be opened up to generic competition. Generic drugs significantly reduce the cost for end users, but Eli Lilly cried foul and launched an ISDS claim against the government, demanding US$500 million in compensation for lost profits. The case is still in progress, but regardless of the outcome we can expect the TPP to lead to similar ISDS disputes. Powerful multinational pharmaceutical companies will use any available means to cling to over-priced drug monopolies. Greater intellectual property protections in the TPP will give these companies an even stronger quasi-legal basis to sue governments and crowd out generic [drug] competition.’”

Following the recent publication of the TPP’s 30 chapters, Ralph Nader, referring to the TPP as “the most brazen corporate power grab in American history,” explained the trade tribunals in more detail to journalist Chris Hedges:

“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 removes legislative authority from Congress and the White House on a range of issues. Judicial power is often surrendered to three-person trade tribunals in which only corporations are permitted to sue. Workers, environmental and advocacy groups and labor unions are blocked from seeking redress in the proposed tribunals. The rights of corporations become sacrosanct. The rights of citizens are abolished.”

And attorney Kevin Zeese of Popular Resistance told Hedges:

“The TPP creates a web of corporate laws that will dominate the global economy. It is a global corporate coup d’état. Corporations will become more powerful than countries. Corporations will force democratic systems to serve their interests. Civil courts around the world will be replaced with corporate courts or so-called trade tribunals. This is a massive expansion that builds on the worst of NAFTA rather than what Barack Obama promised, which was to get rid of the worst aspects of NAFTA.”

This trade deal could make any form of dissent or protest illegal, since any open act of defiance can be construed as an impediment to a corporation’s “projected earnings” and is therefore eligible for lawsuit under the ISDS provisions. But that isn’t the only way in which protesting the New World Order may become impossible with this new system of law.

Recognizing how the free flow of information threatens corporate hegemony, the TPP also promises to censor and control the internet, something the corporations failed to accomplish with all of their previous internet control bill attempts, illustrating how determined these people are to never accept “no” for an answer regardless of how much resistance they encounter from the people. When they pushed SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) the internet community rallied together and shouted “No!” Then they pushed PIPA (Protect IP Act) which failed due to popular resistance. Then they created CISPA (Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act) and the internet community shut them down again. Then they pushed ACTA down our throats (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) and again, the reaction was no different. Legislative attempts to shackle the free flow of information have failed because the internet community has consistently stood up and denounced internet control. But as long as the same corrupt bureaucrats who cooked up these schemes remain in power they will they will never stop their attempts to censor the internet, and the TPP provides them the legal loophole they need to bypass our parliamentary process altogether, effectively nullifying whatever popular resistance emerges as a result. As the Guardian’s Evan Greer reported earlier this month:

“TPP even prescribes a mechanism for that censorship to occur. A section that can best be described as “Zombie-Sopa”, due to its similarity to the failed Stop Online Piracy Act, would require internet service providers (ISPs) to play “copyright cops” and create systems for hastily taking down internet content upon a copyright holder’s request, even without a court order.”

Many ISPs such as Charter Communications are already playing the role of “copyright cops,” spying on their users activities and enabling armies of lawyers and lobbyists to threaten to sue their customers whenever the potential to monetize copyright infringement presents itself. Now the TPP codifies this borderline criminal activity into law at the expense of every internet user, and in-turn threatens to abolish free speech through a clever alteration of conceived copyright rules, as Greer also explains:

“One provision demands that TPP member countries enforce copyright terms 70 years after the death of the creator. This will keep an immeasurable amount of information, art and creativity locked away from the public domain for decades longer than necessary, and allow for governments and corporations to abuse copyright laws and censor content at will, since so much of what’s online will be subject to copyright for decades.”

In short, the TPP is a complete power grab nightmare that is so much worse than anyone could have predicted; a veritable wish-list for corporations tired of playing by the rules, sick of adhering to environmental standards, and no longer willing to tolerate the ridicule for their slave-labor practices around the world. Of all the corporate threats to humanity, the TPP constitutes the most egregious menace yet conceived, and it will transform our world into a totalitarian travesty devoid of any constitutional protections or basic human rights.

Chris Hedges summarizes how the TPP will change our world inside out:

“Wages will decline. Working conditions will deteriorate. Unemployment will rise. Our few remaining rights will be revoked. The assault on the ecosystem will be accelerated. Banks and global speculation will be beyond oversight or control. Food safety standards and regulations will be jettisoned. Public services ranging from Medicare and Medicaid to the post office and public education will be abolished or dramatically slashed and taken over by for-profit corporations. Prices for basic commodities, including pharmaceuticals, will skyrocket. Social assistance programs will be drastically scaled back or terminated. And countries that have public health care systems, such as Canada and Australia, that are in the agreement will probably see their public health systems collapse under corporate assault. Corporations will be empowered to hold a wide variety of patents, including over plants and animals, turning basic necessities and the natural world into marketable products. And, just to make sure corporations extract every pound of flesh, any public law interpreted by corporations as impeding projected profit, even a law designed to protect the environment or consumers, will be subject to challenge in an entity called the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) section. The ISDS, bolstered and expanded under the TPP, will see corporations paid massive sums in compensation from offending governments for impeding their “right” to further swell their bank accounts. Corporate profit effectively will replace the common good.

“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.”

I implore whoever is reading this to not give in to the phenomenon of learned helplessness that the system has beaten into all of us, perpetuating the myth that there is nothing we can do about this. we need to shatter this presumption, because like the elephant who learns over time through classical conditioning that being tied to a tiny twig in the ground constitutes unconditional immobility, these limitations exist solely in our imagination. It’s obvious to us that a seven-ton elephant is more than capable of freeing itself from a flimsy twig, but the elephant, having been tied to a tree at an early age, was conditioned from infancy not to question its human authorities. Nevertheless, the limitation is a figment of the imagination, and so it goes with societal obedience to the established oligarchical regime. If the people ever wake up to the power of the swarm, it could spark a global big-bang movement capable of changing the course of history away from tyranny’s predictability.

And don’t fall into the mental trap that the buck stops with the parliamentary circus of our congressional representatives; even if most of them weren’t payed off by the corporations that fund their campaigns, they couldn’t do anything about this even if they wanted to, because of fast-track authority enables President Obama to sign the agreement before Congress even has a chance to debate it. Hedges continues:

“The TPP, because of fast track, bypasses the normal legislative process of public discussion and consideration by congressional committees. The House and the Senate, which have to vote on the TPP bill within 90 days of when it is sent to Congress, are prohibited by the fast-track provision from adding floor amendments or holding more than 20 hours of floor debate. Congress cannot raise concerns about the effects of the TPP on the environment. It can only vote yes or no. It is powerless to modify or change one word.”

However we conceive the world creates the reality we see around us, but the first step is getting informed. So whatever you do, don’t give into the learned helplessness that suggests there’s nothing you can do about any of this, because that’s the television talking. When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty. There is still time to stop the TPP/NWO, but if it passes, resistance to it will define daily life for those of us who simply cannot accept the annihilation of the indomitable human spirit. If you don’t do something, you are complicit in whatever happens.

Openly opposing and preventing the TPP are just the beginning, however. If our previous experiences with internet control bills tell us anything, it’s that our owners will never take “no” for an answer. Even if we can somehow prevent the TPP’s passage, the oligarchs will draft another document that will be negotiated in secret and they will not stop until they have successfully dominated every square inch of every continent, every penny of every dollar, every action of every body, and every thought in every mind. The time has come for an explicit rejection of every system, product and personality contributing to the paradigm that is destroying the planet and every life upon it.

Gabrielle Lafayette is a journalist, writer, and executive producer for the Outer Limits Radio Show.
Catch the cloudcast at mixcloud.com/outerlimitsradioshow
Check out the more frequently updated tumblr page at outerlimitsradioshow.tumblr.com
Contact the research team at outerlimitsradioshow@fastmail.fm

You Don’t Make History By Asking Permission

May 5, 2015 by Gabrielle Lafayette

We Are Not Your Slaves!

While many school-aged children today think that May Day is about Springtime, this important day in history is concerned with more than leaving flowers on neighbouring porches, as much fun as that is.

While we might celebrate Labour Day in early September, May Day is meant to observe a far more important benchmark for worker’s rights. If we live in a free country, then equality, safe working environments, shorter work days, living wages, pensions and benefits should be part of what it means to live in a free and open society. After all, how can we call this a free country if we have the freedom to speak out about political injustices but cannot speak out at work for fear of being fired? They don’t take away our right to vote for protesting, so why can we lose our right to earn an income for simply asking the wrong questions of our employers?

Why have we always limited our ideas about a democratic society to the political sphere, while excluding it from the economic sphere? In the words of Economics Professor Richard Wolff, “After all, the place we spend most of our creative lives, 9-5 Monday through Friday, is the place where we work. And if we’re not going to have democracy there, how much of it could we have anywhere else?”

Eighty years ago Franklin D. Roosevelt granted American workers higher wages, a 40-hour work week, collective bargaining rights, unemployment, and many other hard-won benefits in the New Deal of the 1930’s. And while that momentous victory is often credited to FDR, we forget that the New Deal was not the brainchild of the establishment, but the result of thousands of coordinated strikes by labour unions and workers standing up to Corporate exploitation. Every one of the rights and freedoms we take for granted today were not simply handed over by the ownership class – our grandparents fought tooth and nail, and many died, to secure those rights.

But half a century prior to the New Deal, the true roots of the movement for which May Day is now celebrated were established. While little concern for safety existed in most factories in the early 20^th Century, it was even worse in the late 19^th century, when relative pay was pitifully low, benefits were non-existent and the work day was often 10 to 12 hours, six days a week.

In early America, labour unions were actually outlawed, and considered illegal conspiracies creating restraints to “free trade.” Sound familiar? That changed in 1842, the Hunt case ruling legitimized collective bargaining as legal, granting workers the ability to unionize. At first, these unions were concentrated in small, weak, isolated companies. Starvation wages remained the norm for the majority of America’s work force, who worked as many as 12 hours a day, seven days a week. But as the 1873 financial panic created further economic chaos on top of worsening economic conditions for labour following the Civil War, American workers became increasingly militant.

Then, the National Railroad Strike of 1877 that paralyzed the entire country proved that organizational structure was not necessarily paramount to the establishment of collective bargaining forums; it had not been led or organized by any labour union. Instead, the strike grew spontaneously and organically from the Railroad workers themselves. President Rutherford B. Hayes ordered State and Federal troops to crush the strike, resulting in the deaths of more than 100 strikers in skirmishes across the country. This prompted workers of all industries to organize, first with the Knights of Labour, who had assembled more than 700,000 strikers by the 1880’s, then with the Federation of Organized Trades and Labour Unions, which would later change its name to the American Federation of Labour (AFL).

In 1882, the American Federation of Labour called for an all-out campaign of nationwide protest actions to push into law the enforcement of an eight-hour working day, and that national campaign was set to start on 1 May 1884, whereupon huge rallies and protest marches were held in every major city in the United States. The largest May Day demonstration took place in the leading industrial city of the US – Chicago, Illinois, which would become the primary arena for labour strikes and center stage for worker’s rights in the decades to come. Over 80,000 of the city’s workers marched up Michigan Avenue with signs that read, “8 Hours for work, 8 hours for rest, 8 hours for what we will!”

Two years later Chicago was again the stage for the May Day strikes of 1886, when the workers at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company began a strike in the hope of gaining a shorter work day. On 3 May, police were used to protect strikebreakers and a scuffle broke out, resulting in one person’s death and the injury of several others. But this skirmish was just a warm-up. Nobody could foresee what would take place on the following day.

On 4 May, a large rally was planned by anarchist leaders to protest police brutality. Sound familiar? A crowd of 20,000 demonstrators was anticipated at Haymarket Square, where area farmers traditionally sold their produce. Rain and unseasonable cold kept the numbers down to between 1,500 to 2,000 and the gathering was peaceful until one police official, in contravention of the mayor’s instructions, sent units into the crowd to force it to disperse. At that juncture, a pipe bomb was thrown into the police ranks. The explosion took the lives of seven policemen and injured more than 60 others causing the police to fire into the crowds of workers, killing four.

A period of panic and overreaction followed in Chicago as hundreds of workers were detained. Many protesters were beaten during interrogations to obtain contrived confessions. In the end, eight anarchists were put on trial and seven were convicted of conspiracy to commit murder. Four were hanged in November 1887, one committed suicide and three were later pardoned by Illinois governor, John Peter Altgeld.

Thus transpired the violent confrontation between police and labour protesters in Chicago we know of today as the Haymarket Riot, which became a symbol of the international struggle for workers’ rights. It has been associated with May Day since its designation as International Workers’ Day by the Second International Labour Federation in 1889.

Five years later, the origins for our September-based Labour Day were cast when another awful confrontation, again in Chicago, saw federal Marshals and the Army kill 30 striking Pullman Railroad strikers in 1894, putting an end to the Pullman walkout strikes, whereupon Congress as well as President Grover Cleveland quickly passed and signed legislation for the holiday we know of today as Labour Day. That history is likewise rarely taught in schools.

Not long afterword, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) were established in Chicago, in 1905, by members of the socialist-led Western Federation of Miners and other groups opposed to what they saw as “class collaboration” by a co-opted American Federation of Labour (AFL). The driving force behind the IWW was William D. Haywood, the leader of the Western Federation of Miners, which had established a reputation for work stoppages in Colorado mines. Joining Haywood at the launch of the IWW, which he described as the “first continental congress of the working class,” were Eugene V. Debs of the Socialist Party, and Daniel De Leon of the Socialist Labour Party. Also present was “angel of the miners” Mother Jones, as well as Lucy Parsons, whose husband had been executed in the Haymarket riot.

Then in early 1914, Henry Ford’s Detroit-based automobile company broke ground in labour policies and made history. Against a backdrop of widespread unemployment and increasing labour unrest (sound familiar?), Ford announced that the company would pay its male factory workers a minimum wage of $5 per eight-hour day, upped from a previous rate of $2.34 for nine hours. This same policy would be adopted for female workers two years later in 1916. The news shocked many in the industry–at the time, $5 per day was nearly double what the average auto worker made–but turned out to be a stroke of brilliance, immediately boosting productivity along the assembly line and building a sense of company loyalty and pride among Ford’s workers.

COMMON SENSE

This concept is simple enough to grasp, even in our consumer-capitalist-monetary system; if your workers don’t have money, they won’t be able to buy your products. But all economic systems seem to work best when units of exchange are in motion, and tend to stagnate, deteriorate and collapse when units of exchange are hoarded. Indeed as we repeatedly sow the seeds of corporate greed, business who seek to emulate Ford’s common-sense example are berated for acting like “socialists.” For example, Dan Price – the CEO of a Seattle-based company – announced last month he would pay all of his employees a minimum annual salary of $70,000, lowering his own pay to the same from his previous multi-million dollar annual earnings. This follows Seattle city-council woman Kshama Sawant‘s successful campaign to establish a Seattle minimum wage of $15.

Despite the elite’s efforts to quash this wave of Seattle-inspired equality, protests are mounting worldwide against economic austerity. As anti-austerity protests coalesce in Spain, Greece, Turkey, and Argentina, many Americans are beginning to remember the true meaning of May Day. Yesterday thousands rallied in the streets of downtown Los Angeles for May Day marching for worker and immigrant rights with an emphasis on pushing for that $15/hour minimum wage. 3,000 miles away on the opposite end of the continent thousands of New Yorkers marched for “black lives matter” and “no justice no peace,” merging the Freddie Gray movement with May Day’s 124-year crusade for workers’ rights, likewise calling for a minimum wage hike to $15, as well as an end to tax loopholes for America’s wealthiest tycoons.

And Pope Francis declared this past Wednesday that men and women who perform the same job should be paid equally, denouncing gender-based income disparities a “pure scandal.” The Pope asked:

“Why is it expected that women must earn less than men? They have the same rights. The disparity is a pure scandal… To every woman who gave birth to every taxpayer and citizen of this nation, we have fought for everybody else’s equal rights. It’s our time to have wage equality once and for all and equal rights for women in the United States of America.”

Everything our grandparents fought to secure has been under continuous attack, and the more things change the more they seem to stay the same.

History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme; the prohibition of collective bargaining in the 19^th Century in the name of free trade mirrors our contemporary woes with NAFTA, the WTO, and the present trade deal to end all trade deals, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) coupled with the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP). The merciless crackdown on the popular majority by police, Marshals and even the military is repeating again before our eyes in the streets of Maryland, where the National Guard have been deployed and a 10 pm to 5 am curfew remains in effect following citizen outrage stemming not only from the Freddie Gray murder by Baltimore authorities, but the observation of 110 other police murders in the area in the past four years. Finally, the call for a $15 per hour wage across the country as inspired by Seattle, Washington closely mirrors Henry Ford’s revitalization of economic prosperity one hundred years ago.

Since the 1970’s wages have remained the same forcing Americans to work more jobs with longer hours while simultaneously borrowing loans at ever-increasing rates of interest just to make ends meet. Automation has given birth to the phenomena of “Technological Unemployment,” jobs are now outsourced to 3^rd world sweatshops as well as prisons, while immigration coupled with mothers entering America’s workforce have further exacerbated declining standards for employees seeking their slice of the American Dream. But none of that would be a problem if the ownership class weren’t so obsessed with their addictions to greed and power.

This is perhaps why George Carlin famously declared that we’d have to be asleep to believe in the American Dream, because it is a pyramid scheme. Despite our many decades of enjoying the benefits of what worldwide exploitation of other cultures and countries has to offer, surmounting global austerity ensures more and more that the last vestiges of the west’s Middle Class will now feel the full weight of our own system’s oppression. Now that it’s our turn to experience the horrors of inequality, the exploitation we’ve allowed to happen the world over, while conveniently ignoring the outright enslavement of people who toil over slave-made Wal-Mart products on our behalf, the situation doesn’t seem so trivial anymore.

The Death Of The Internet Will Not Be Televised

March 2, 2014 by Gabrielle Lafayette

Corporate Nationhood: How The Trans-Pacific Partnership Threatens Internet Freedom

The newest step in the elite’s quest for complete globalization is called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). It is the newest of the “Free Trade” agreements from the same multinational corporations who gave us the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades, (GATT), the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). This new TPP deal has been called NAFTA on steroids, and just another example of how these trade deals are never just trade deals. Of the 29 chapters in the TPP, only 5 of them have anything to do with trade, with the other 24 being hailed as a Corporate Wish-List. The rest set a dangerous precedent with an international tribunal to put an end to internet sovereignty. The TPP isn’t just NAFTA on steroids, it’s also CISPA on steroids. TPP will limit internet freedom by forcing Internet providers to act as copyright enforcers and cut off people’s Internet access. In fact, entire paragraphs from ACTA have been copied and pasted, word-for-word into the TPP completely verbatim from defeated cybersecurity bills. Whenever activists and communities cooperate and achieve victory together, lobbyists try again and eventually find a new way to undermine those efforts, thus sabotaging the will of the people. The defeat of SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act), PIPA (Protect IP Act), CISPA (Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act), and ACTA (Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) has accumulated in the realization that internet control will never pass if it is labeled as internet control. Although CISPA was temporarily defeated, these victories are all empty because nothing was put into place to prevent lobbying groups from trying to do it again, and the will of the people goes ignored.

Ben Still reports that in realm of internet freedom, TPP incorporates the most draconian provisions of previous legislation defeated by congress last year that would grant copyright protections to corporate created internet content for 120 years. Internet Service Providers will be enlisted into a private snooping force empowered to monitor user activity and arbitrarily remove content or even prevent access to the internet altogether. TPP will limit internet freedom by forcing Internet providers to act as copyright enforcers and cut off people’s Internet access. It gives multinational corporations everything they’ve ever wanted to make it easier to control how people use copyrighted materials. Copyright law effects everyone on the planet under this deal, since the definition of “copyright” is widely expanded under this trade deal, demonizing truly innocent acts like ripping CDs onto MP3 devices. If the new TPP Tribunal find you guilty, they charge you in court with criminal damages. This amounts to sending people to prison for committing copyright infringements to including things that don’t even cost money, and would enforce mandatory permits to download anything and everything on the internet.

Which brings us to the international court system that goes along with this. The TPP Tribunal consists of three judges (all appointed by private corporations), who would oversee Corporations suing governments and individuals for threatening profits. These Tribunals exist outside the normal courts and circumvent all national legal systems. In fact Eli Lily is suing Canada for 500 million dollars because Canadian government rejected drug patents hence preventing the sale of said pharmaceuticals. These kinds of cases are referred to as Investor State Dispute Settlements, meaning that a corporation can sue an entire nation for what it alleges is a loss of its future profits. If the Tribunal rules in favor of the Corporation, the Companies gain millions of dollars and the public ends up footing the bill since government requires people to fund it. TPP would create a completely new set of rules regulating the economies of 12 different countries on four different continents, despite the fact that few of the people living on these continents have ever heard of any of this.

On the other side of the continent, also negotiated in secret, is the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP), which is TPP for countries bordering the Atlantic Sector. Together these two trade deals compose a double-headed Trojan horse, giving birth to the concept of Corporate Nationhood. All of this was accomplished under a veil of complete secrecy, until Wikileaks released the TPP draft unfamiliar to any legislator. Most members of congress have no access to the text, and the public will never even get to see a draft of the proposed agreement until four-years after its passing, when it will be far too late to do anything about it. Not even the Chair of the Subcommittee of Jurisdiction on International Trade has had any access to the text. Like the Federal Reserve Act, the TPP was not negotiated by world leaders or lawmakers but by corporate lobbyists and bankers. Oregon Congressman Peter DeFazio says that in order to read the bill, he would have to make a special appointment, take no notes, with no staff present, and then not talk about what he had read. Nevertheless, bits and pieces of the bill have trickled into public view. Wikileaks outlined 90 pages of extremely obscure legalese outlining the attempt to impose rules for how people will use the internet for the next 20 years, in addition to also imposing rules for so-called, “Free Trade.”

TPP is a clever subversion to the United States Constitution, since Article 6 states that Treaties are the supreme law of the land. So ironically it would be theoretically constitutional under the TPP for US laws to be made to conform to provisions within the TPP, allowing corporations to sue entire governments if those governments interfere with corporate profits, even though all of this is blatantly unconstitutional. According to Public Citizens Trade Watch, TPP would allow private corporations to sue countries that pass regulations they don’t like, reward companies that send jobs overseas, and gut regulations that keep big banks in check. Dean Baker for Huffington Post contends that TPP is about crafting rules that will favor big business at the expense of the rest of the population in both the United States and other countries.

Once banking oligarchs created the European Union, they set to undermining the national sovereignty of the entire planet by working to create a series of other unions, including the North American Union (NAU) which would have encompassed Canada, the United States and Mexico to form a borderless community with a single currency similar to the Euro: the Amero. NAU was signed into law by President George W. Bush under the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), but was later shut down due to negative publicity. However, the TPP is everything that the NAU was going to be, only far worse and on a much grander scale. They’ve included the proposed North American Union into the larger TPP configuration that includes the three countries of the NAU alongside nine additional countries: Australia, Brunei, Chile Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam, and China.

WHY DO WE HAVE TRADE DEALS IN THE FIRST PLACE?

From America’s founding two centuries ago all the way up to the 1980’s, America’s economy was built on a system of Tariffs (taxes on imported goods) that protected American manufacturing businesses. Workers and businesses didn’t have to compete with cheap products or cheap slave labor from abroad. The American economy flourished until President Ronald Regan abandoned the tariff system altogether, thus ushering in the era of so called, “Free Trade.” But these trade deals are never just trade deals. And every president since has followed Regan’s lead, signing the United States into deals that are supposed to grow the economy, but instead lay waste to the industrial base. For example, on 3 December 1993 President Bill Clinton signed NAFTA into law after promising repeatedly that, “NAFTA means jobs, American jobs and good-paying American jobs!” NAFTA thereafter was directly responsible for sending 700,000 jobs to Mexico, undermining American industry. The Trans-Pacific Partnership likewise is peddled as a trade agreement while actually operating as Global Corporate Governance that is actually enforceable. The agreement requires that every signatory country conform all of its laws, regulations and administrative procedures, to 29 chapters of legalese, 24 of which set a whole new array of corporate privileges and rights, handcuff governments and limit regulations; a tool used by the .01% to shred what is left of our most basic needs and rights. They’re able to circumvent the rule of law by what is called, “Fast Tracking,” granting the authority of the US President to negotiate international agreements that Congress cannot amend or filibuster.

The Evil of the TPP doesn’t end with Internet Censorship or the Tribunals designed to regulate it. TPP expands the copyright language into the realm of patent law as well, granting corporations the ability to patent animals, which is the reason some have referred to TPP as the Monsanto Protection Act on Steroids. Even surgical methods fall into this which would forbid some doctors from performing life saving operations that are the patented intellectual property of the surgeon or doctor who invented them. TPP abolishes environmental regulation, strips away health and safety regulations, and grants the corporate New World Order, Total Power to Profit. Ever since NAFTA destroyed America’s manufacturing base, trade agreements haven’t been exactly popular because they’re so catastrophic for the people, so TPP has been kept a closely guarded secret amongst 600 corporate lobbyists and the oligarchs they serve. All the major players from the military industrial complex one might expect, including defense contractors like Haliburton and fuel corporations like Exxon, are involved in this slow-motion coup d’etat. Everything is negotiated and handled behind closed doors, written in confusing legalese, and all without so much as the possibility of oversight or transparency.

The vast majority of the rules in these trade agreements serve as delivery systems to undermine victories won by citizens movements, activism and advocacy groups in congress. Lobbyists never give up because their funding is unlimited. Lobbyists make a career out of being lobbyists, because the corporations need mouthpieces to reconcile with the media to sell the public things it doesn’t need. They will never stop, and neither can we. The TPP is for now, the trade agreement to end all trade agreements and it is being negotiated and handled without our consent. The defense of our liberty requires Constant Vigilance because the people who are trying to make this world worse are not taking a day off. So how can we?

Gabrielle Lafayette is a journalist, writer, and executive producer for the Outer Limits Radio Show.

Catch the cloudcast at mixcloud.com/outerlimitsradioshow

Check out the more frequently updated tumblr page at outerlimitsradioshow.tumblr.com

Contact the research team at outerlimitsradioshow@fastmail.fm

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Tag Archives: TPP

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The Death Of The Internet Will Not Be Televised