Exxon knew of climate change in 1981. Funded climate change deniers to manage the information.
Alternet reports:
Not 3 lines, not 5,7,5 syllables either.
Haiku:
While I was writing my last post ["TISA mroe scary than TPP]I did a search for Ben Beachy and the wikileaks articles and I got 10 pages of ads. I had to spend about 10 minutes getting past google and refine my search terms to get an actual search. Wonder why? It's probably because Google, Netflix, Bing, Microsoft, etc... are writing TISA. Anyway here is the text of the public citizen News Release with my comments:
http://www.citizen.org/documents/press-release-tisa-leak-july-2015.pdf
It would be helpful if policymakers acted with some recognition that the 2008-2009 financial crisis actually occurred. It shouldn’t be hard. In the United States alone, nearly $20 trillion in wealth was lost, between lost output and lost home equity; unemployment peaked at 10 percent; millions of families lost their homes. The situation was worse in much of the world, with severe problems continuing in many countries, notably in Europe."
On the contrary the interests who are writing TISA with the support of revolving Door Trade Representatives learned from the Financial Meltdown that they can get away with three part frauds:
They are using this method in country after country to practice a sort of financialized neo-liberalism. Instead of:
"Learning from the crisis means not repeating the deregulatory and non-enforcement mistakes that led up to it. Yet a secret international trade agreement, the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA), threatens to adopt and impose a global financial deregulatory standard."
The Service Industry doesn't see the meltdown as a mistake. It was a highly successful swindle that left the swindlers billionaires. The only thing the financial services industry and it's little toys (companies owning telephone, internet, roads, bridges, infrastructure, software, etc...) have learned from the financial meltdown is that burning off real wealth by mixing it with paper wealth is a great way to acquire assets and shift ownership of real wealth to themselves while punishing victims such as homeowners in the USA or little colonial enterprises like Greece.
Almost nobody guilty went to jail. No billionaires were forced to return their treasure, the chests were buried in offshore beaches and pirate havens, for later retrieval and now they have a tried and true method to extract wealth from all over the earth and accumulate power to themselves. They can do all this, and then come in and pose as saviors, piling on more debt by loaning people their own money at interest to pay the interest on the money they were loaned at interest that they couldn't pay before. They can enslave a few politicians and use them to enslave the whole world. That is the lesson this industry learned. And TISA is another round of laws that will provide all the loopholes they need to keep doing this cycle til they can declare themselves a world aristocracy formally.
Rubin and his disciples, playing the left and Friedman, Greenspan and his disciples playing the right, perfected this sort of privateering corrupt regulation in the name of de-regulation starting in the 70's. In a free-booting world you can bet on anything. Exchange rates, whether businesses will fail, etc... and if you are savvy you can make money from other folks money and other folks failure. Even better people will welcome you as a savior when you spread the money around. When a person is desperate for money they will take any terms on a loan. And when you are unscrupulous you can always find public officials to Greece, especially if you can saddle the public with those loans. Banks loan people their own money and they are grateful for it. But the key is, to get laws changed and make it all nice and legal. TISA will be a letter of Marquee for modern piracy worldwide just as de-regulation provided such letters for Enron and even crazier frauds..
"Our analysis of a leaked version of the draft agreement, along with a draft annex on financial services, identifies threats to rules and policies ranging from limits on overall bank size to consumer protections, from prophylactic protections against new speculative financial instruments to limits on transfers of personal financial data."
Of course.
"It is unimaginable that such an agreement is under negotiation while the global economy is still recovering from the most severe crisis since the Great Depression, and while Greece and other countries are still reeling from developments related to the crisis."
"Yet, thanks to the publication of the TISA texts by WikiLeaks, we know that such negotiations are in fact underway."
Once you understand that the giant banksters got away with it. It is not only imaginable, but not a surprise at all.
"Post-crisis, the United States and countries around the world have tightened their domestic financial regulations, imposing somewhat tougher restraints on Wall Street and financial centers around the world. TISA is an effort by Wall Street and its global counterparts to undo those positive steps in a forum absolutely closed to the public."
Actually the United States has had trouble implementing reforms. And with TISA they won't be able to.
"To analyze the TISA text is to see that negotiators are ignoring the lessons from the financial crisis, and to see how vital it is to shine a light on the secret TISA negotiations. These leaks show that it is imperative for TISA negotiators to suspend their efforts, publish all texts under negotiations and not resume until there is a proper public debate about their radical deregulatory maneuvers."
The "New World Order" is not the Right Wing or Left Wing fantasy. Just international piracy involving Kochs, Republicans, and the wealthy of all advertised ideologies; and it works through trade agreements like TISA.
The Trade In Services Agreement is designed to "fix" some problems with previous trade agreements from the Point of view of the corporations involved. The Service Coalition Board says about it [https://servicescoalition.org/negotiations/trade-in-services-agreement] in their "What is TISA section;
"The Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) is the most promising opportunity in two decades to improve and expand trade in services. Initiated by the United States and Australia, the TISA is currently being negotiated in Geneva, Switzerland with 51 participants that represent 70 percent of the world's trade in services."
But that says very little. The reality is that, as always, the devil is in the details. And the details are of more neo-liberal ideology seeking to give impunity and immunity to international corporations by shifting governing powers from local government to these for the private, separate gain public corporations.
"As WikiLeaks puts it, the regulations together create "international legal regime which aims to deregulate and privatize the supply of services—which account for the majority of the economy across TISA countries."
This is privateering on an international level. Treaties like this are pirate treaties promising to turn the World Trade Organization into the Confederate Corporations of the World. That might be an improvement over the current chaotic oligarchy but it is the institution of hierarchical oligarchy and the institutionalization of wealth and power into rulership. It won't end war or solve hunger, but it will give more power to the already powerful for their separate enjoyment as they fly over the rest of us.
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Common Dreams, an Anti TISA Website reports:
"As with Wednesday's documents, Thursday's batch of texts reveals 'a concerted attempt to place restrictions on the ability of participating governments to regulate services sectors, even where regulations are necessary to protect the privacy of domestic populations, the natural environment or the integrity of public services,' WikiLeaks declares." [http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/07/02/tisa-leaks-part-deux-more-evidence-concerted-attack-democracy?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=socialnetwork]
The website goes on to list initial negotiating companies, but the says:
"TiSA is based on the WTO's General Agreement on Trade in Services ( GATS ), which involves all WTO members. This means that if enough WTO members join, TiSA could be turned into a broader WTO agreement and its benefits extended beyond the current participants." [http://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/in-focus/tisa/]
Common Dreams alleges that:
"the corporate aim [is] to use TISA to further limit the public interest regulatory capacity of democratically elected governments."
They then quote Ben Beachy:
"TISA would expand deregulatory 'trade' rules written under the advisement of large banks before the financial crisis, requiring domestic laws to conform to the now-rejected model of extreme deregulation that led to global recession."
—Ben Beachy, Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch
The services in question "relate to regulation of financial services, e-commerce, telecommunication, and maritime transport." These are powerful public services, many of which are within the public realm and are vital services that are also natural monopolies. They have to be regulated or they tend to be run as feudal kingdoms.
De-regulating them would put some of them back in the state they were in the 19th century and would allow 19th century style impunity and immunity for newer services like e-commerce and telecommunications, both of which are extensions and modernizations of the concept behind the Post Office and have traditionally been associated with the Post Office and been so important and powerful that they demand their own organ of government out of reach of both legislature and post office under normal circumstances. Deregulating them creates a power that is part of rule and gives it to private individuals, establishing kings.
The Euro folks said:
"Like any other trade negotiations, the TiSA talks are not carried out in public and the documents are available to participants only." [http://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/in-focus/tisa/]
Like with TPP I've been hoping that the Wikileaks were premature and the allegations were going to be proved false but it seems that the secrecy that is still around TISA should be a warning that the allegations are liable to be true. Nobody goes to such extremes to hide a treaty unless there is something sketchy about it. This sort of thing goes all the way back to the Jay Treaty, which the Washington Administration tried to keep secret because they knew it would infuriate many Americans.
...more on this in my next post "Going Greek on the Whole World" [http://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2015/07/going-greek-on-whole-world.html].
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| Source: Facebook article [https://www.facebook.com/WorldTruthTV/photos/ |
It's hard to believe but we almost achieved the goal of free higher education for qualified students. All that changed in the 60's. A deliberate multi-pronged attack on the middle class was launched then. And the centerpiece of this pirate attack was a privateering attack on the very notion of Free Higher Education. Substituting for free education was a system of loan guarantees that pretended to guarantee loans for students, but were designed to guarantee profits for investors and saddle students with debt. The changes weren't by accident. In a review by Aaron Bady and Mike Konczal titled From Master Plan to No Plan -- the Slow Death of PUblic Higher Education encapsulates the message in Christopher Newfield's book.
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They note that Ronald Reagan ran for Governor in 1966:
"...after running a scorched-earth campaign against the University of California, Reagan vowed to “clean up that mess in Berkeley,” warned audiences of “sexual orgies so vile that I cannot describe them to you,” complained that outside agitators were bringing left-wing subversion into the university, and railed against spoiled children of privilege skipping their classes to go to protests" ... "it was the University of California at Berkeley that provided the most useful political foil, crystallizing all of his ideological themes into a single figure for disorder, a subversive menace of sexual, social, generational, and even communist deviance." [Dissent Magazine Review]
Reagan vowed to cut taxes. He claimed that cutting taxes would counter-intuitively increase revenues. And he went after Higher Education with a vengeance. Reagan's program was Nationwide. It involved a paradigm shift from the Right Wing of the country. Where previously they'd supported notions of equality. They now saw equality as dangerous. Reagan's policies marked a shift in policies from free education for poor and middle class to:
cutting "state funding for higher education, laid the foundations for a shift to a tuition-based funding model, and called in the National Guard to crush student protest, which it did with unprecedented severity. But he was only able to do this because he had already successfully shifted the political debate over the meaning and purpose of public higher education in America. The first “bums” he threw off welfare were California university students. Instead of seeing the education of the state’s youth as a patriotic duty and a vital weapon in the Cold War, he cast universities as a problem in and of themselves—both an expensive welfare program and dangerously close to socialism. He even argued for the importance of tuition-based funding by suggesting that if students had to pay, they’d value their education too much to protest."
Essentially, in the propaganda of the Reagan years Students were parasites, welfare queens and needed to be disciplined. Essentially this was preliminary to the theme we have now of the middle class as "takers." But it also was part of a program of abusive lending laws that eventually made education loans difficult to impossible to discharge in bankruptcy, starting with legal changes in 1998 that made Federal loans non-dischargeable and completing with changes in 2005 that applied those changes to private loans. [student-loan-debt_b_1403280.html]
So, if you don't like the fact that a decent education now costs even more at a State College or University than some private ones, thank the Gipper and his allies in the GOP. This was their plan.
This was win/win for the Cons.
There is much more to the book than a discussion of how the Republicans privateered higher education. It's also about how the Far Right dominated and conquered academia. It's worth reading. And the reality is that we middle class folks know the value of a public education, and if government officials abandon us, we've looked elsewhere:
"For-profit education flooded the market only after the state began to abandon its responsibility to create sufficient institutional capacity in the public system. The problem is not government action, but inaction. As the government gave up its Master Plan responsibility to educate California students, the for-profit sector expanded to fill the demand."
