America the Beautiful: A Fire Sale for Foreign Corporations
This may be one of the most important stories ever ignored by the so-called “lame-stream, liberal” media. It’s unlikely you’re losing sleep over US trade negotiations, but the unfolding business agreement among the US and eight Pacific nations -the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) - should cause every US citizen, from the Sierra Club to the Tea Party to get their pitch forks and torches out of the closet and prepare to “storm the Bastille.”
The TPP negotiations have been going on for two years under extreme secrecy, no information has been made available to either the press or Congress about the US position. But on June 12, a document was leaked to the watchdog group, Public Citizen, revealing the current US position and the reason for the secrecy. The contents are surreal, shocking and prima facia evidence for how corporations have become the master puppeteers of our government.
The leaked document reveals that the trade agreement would give unprecedented political authority and legal protection to foreign corporations. Specifically, TPP would (1) severely limit regulation of foreign corporations operating within US boundaries, giving them greater rights than domestic firms; (2) extend incentives for US firms to move investments and jobs to lower-wage countries; and (3) establish an alternative legal system that gives foreign corporations and investors new rights to circumvent US courts and laws, allowing them to sue the US government before foreign tribunals and demand compensation for lost revenue due to US laws they claim undermine their TPP privileges or their investment “expectations.”
Anonymous Claims Access to Every Secret Government Database
Via Gizmodo:
Anonymous has been meek and quiet since the great Sabu treachery, failing to even threaten much of anything. But in a new interview, one of the group’s last remaining leaders says Anon has a nuclear card up its sleeve.
World War 3.0 – Control of the Internet
Michael Joseph Gross describes the war for control of the Internet, for Vanity Fair:
I. Time Bomb
In 1979 the Dubai World Trade Centre dominated the skyline of Dubai City, on the horn of the Arabian Peninsula. Today, the World Trade Centre looks quaint, like an old egg carton stuck into the ground amid a phantasmagoric forest of skyscrapers. But come December the World Trade Centre will once more be the most important place in Dubai City—and, for a couple of weeks, one of the more important places in the world. Diplomats from 193 countries will converge there to renegotiate a United Nations treaty called the International Telecommunications Regulations. The sprawling document, which governs telephone, television, and radio networks, may be extended to cover the Internet, raising questions about who should control it, and how. Arrayed on one side will be representatives from the United States and other major Western powers, advocating…
Century of the Self is a excellent BBC documentary on Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew. Bernays is essentially the inventor of modern propaganda and public relations. He was admired by both the Nazi’s and Roosevelt for his theories on how to control the the masses by pandering to their unconscious urges. I’m really suprised this was produced by a major media outlet such as the BBC.
The government scooped up hundreds of billions from taxpayers, redistributed it in the name of creating jobs, then attached a series of requirements that made job creation much more expensive and therefore unlikely. The predictably miserable results should have, but did not, shame a broad swath of the political class into a long-overdue facing of facts: Governments the world over are worse than no good at “creating jobs.”
Perry’s God Strategy May Be Effective. Science Explains Why
Social psychologists from Duke found that the when devout people view their government as in turmoil, they turn to God to fill the gaps in trust:
“Although there are undoubtedly multiple causes of religious belief, one cause may be that when people perceive their government as unstable, they turn to God or other religious deities to fulfill a need for order and control in their lives,” says Aaron Kay, an associate professor at Duke University.
Rick Perry and his prayer rally (which was well-received among attendees) is likely be capitalizing on those feelings, inadvertently or not. When religious Americans view the nation’s problems as “beyond our power to solve”, their psychology points them to candidates that share their trust in a higher power.
(via The Intersection)
(via jtotheizzoe)
Curbed, Pinboard and a host of other sites went down after the FBI raided a Virginia data center and carted off three racks of servers. The Feds were reportedly targeting just one individual user. Talk about heavy handed.
This should hardly come as a surprise, but a new paper that analyzes money being spent on Homeland Security finds that it’s incredibly wasteful(found via Julian Sanchez). You can read the full report (pdf) by John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart, which probably confirms what most people were already thinking. Basically, Homeland Security has ratcheted up spending at a massive rate, and there’s little to no effort to judge that spending against the actual risk reduction. That is, there’s simply no one doing any sort of real cost-benefit analysis on this spending. The report seeks to do some of that, and what it finds isn’t pretty
P.S. Techdirt is an awesome site. Check it out sometime.
