Random Acts of Chaos

With recent revelations about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement, it is now safe to say that President Obama has surpassed George W. Bush as a champion of the flawed and offensive ideology of corporate globalization.

This argument requires some explanation. Here’s the backstory: As the Bush administration commenced in the early 2000s, many argued that his foreign policy represented a continuation of the Clinton-era approach to promoting “free trade” neoliberalism overseas. However, I contended that, especially after the launch of the Iraq war in 2003, the unilateralist bullying of the neocons represented a split from past practice.

No doubt, big arms and big oil had their needs met by the Bush agenda. But his administration was wary of multilateral institutions such as the World Trade Organization and the World Bank, which were central instruments of U.S. policy under Clinton. The Bush approach relied on our-way-or-the-highway, coalition-of-the-willing hard power. This made a significant portion of corporate America uncomfortable, especially businesses trying to navigate and expand in foreign markets. It also left the soft-power agenda of “free trade” in an uncertain state.

This was essentially the thesis of my 2008 book, How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy. Around the time the book came out, I wrote:

In October 2007…the Wall Street Journal reported that the [Republican] party could be facing a brand crisis as “[s]ome business leaders are drifting away from the party because of the war in Iraq, the growing federal debt and a conservative social agenda they don’t share.”

When it comes to corporate responses to [Bush’s] Global War on Terror, we mostly hear about the likes of Halliburton and Blackwater—companies directly implicated in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and with the mentality of looters. Such firms have done their best to score quick profits from the military machine. However, there was always a faction of realist, business-oriented Republicans .who opposed the invasion from the start, in part because they believed it would negatively impact the U.S. economy. As the [Bush administration’s] adventure in Iraq has descended into the morass, the ranks of corporate complainers have only grown.

The “free trade” elite have become particularly upset about the administration’s focus on go-it-alone nationalism and its disregard for multilateral means of securing influence. This belligerent approach to foreign affairs, they believe, has thwarted the advance of corporate globalization. In an April 2006 column in the Washington Post, globalist cheerleader Sebastian Mallaby laid blame for “why globalization has stalled” at the feet of the Bush administration. The White House, Mallaby charged, was unwilling to invest any political capital in the IMF, the World Bank, or the WTO….Frustrated by Bush’s failures, many in the business elite want to return to the softer empire of corporate globalization and, increasingly, they are looking to the Democrats to navigate this return.

My concern back then was that a Democrat (either Obama or Hillary Clinton) would be elected to office and then abandon the overt militarism and “imperial globalization” of the Bush administration, but embrace a subtler, more multilateralist “free trade” neoliberalism—reclaiming the agenda of corporate globalization. I would have been pleased if this prediction had proved wrong. Sadly, Obama has provided irrefutable evidence that he has boarded the corporate globalist bandwagon. [READ]

biyuti:

apihtawikosisan:

pewpewlasernipples:

apihtawikosisan:

In the 50s, when Canada started to want Inuit lands, hundreds of sled dogs were slaughtered.  The killings were deeply shocking to the Inuit who have a very strong relationship with their dogs, and who relied on those dogs to transport food and goods.  Without the dogs, Inuit could not hunt or move around as they had before.  It was a deliberate strategy to ‘settle’ them.

For years the RCMP and Canada have claimed that the dogs were sick and needed to be put down.  These lies, and the violence inherent in the slayings, are slowly coming to official light.

Some Inuit in Nunavik are finally receiving compensation for the slaughter, but of course these paltry sums cannot undo the damage of forced settlement and relocations.  Canada seems to believe that financial compensation obviates any need for real change.

Disgusting, and too little, too late… as usual.

Where’s PETA on this shit. Are they so caught up in making sure people can’t practice their traditions up North?

They needed the Inuit to act as ‘flagpoles’ to ensure Canada’s “claim the Arctic” was staked, particularly during the Cold War.  They even relocated families into the High Arctic and stranded them there on purpose to fulfill this goal.

Not ancient history, colonialism in Canada.  Recent and ongoing. PETA doesn’t give a shit about any of that.  They operate in a vacuum, like the rest of settler society, where injustices of the ‘distant past’ can be conveniently forgotten, and injustices of the present are invisible.

I often wondered about how/why the Inuit became settled. Now I know. :|

caraobrien:

Nestle, the world’s largest food company, said it would do more to eradicate child labor and other worker violations in its Ivory Coastcocoa supply chain after an outside report pointed out a range of problems.

The West African country provides 10% of Nestle’s cocoa, which is used to make chocolate products such as Kit Kat candies, according to an investigation by the Fair Labor Assn. But the company’s worker code is often flouted there, causing children to work under dangerous farm conditions instead of going to school, according to a Friday report from the association.

Nestle cooperated with the group, marking “the first time a multinational chocolate producer has allowed its procurement system to be completely traced and assessed,” according to the association.

“For too long child labor in cocoa production has been everybody’s problem and therefore nobody’s responsibility,” Auret van Heerden, president of the group, said in a statement.

Read more…

arielnietzsche:

“Essentially, JPMorgan has been operating a hedge fund with federal insured deposits within a bank.”
~Mark Williams, a professor of finance at Boston University

So – now … news is coming out that JP Morgan Chase’s proprietary trading losses could total $9 BILLION on a series of trades that were supposed to “minimize risk” at the bank.  Yeah … got it.  We’ve written about the huge trading losses before HERE; if you don’t know the story about JP Morgan’s huge losses … you need to read the article.

Just remember every single time you hear someone say they want to repeal the Dodd-Frank act … they are saying they believe in the idea that markets can regulate themselves.  They are saying that what happened in 2008 was just an anomaly and that if only we would not hold the banks back … America would be creating 1 million jobs an hour, everyone’s pay would double and each American citizen will receive one free vintage “Tickle Me Elmo” delivered to their door.

People who talk about repealing the Dodd-Frank law are promising you the world … and if you’re stupid enough to believe it – you deserve what you get … but do your neighbors, friends and family?  One notable campaigner in chief against the Dodd-Frank law is Mitt Romney; he has promised to unshackle these banks (who are people) from the burdensome chains of government regulation.  Of course – Mitt Romney is getting 80% of all Wall Street money right now … so I’m sure that’s all just a coincidence. </sarcasm>
Bernie Sanders says we need to break up these big banks HERE

The NY Times explains the fallout HERE:

The bank’s exit from its money-losing trade is happening faster than many expected. JPMorgan previously said it hoped to clear its position by early next year; now it is already out of more than half of the trade and may be completely free this year.

As JPMorgan has moved rapidly to unwind the position — its most volatile assets in particular — internal models at the bank have recently projected losses of as much as $9 billion. In April, the bank generated an internal report that showed that the losses, assuming worst-case conditions, could reach $8 billion to $9 billion, according to a person who reviewed the report.

With much of the most volatile slice of the position sold, however, regulators are unsure how deep the reported losses will eventually be. Some expect that the red ink will not exceed $6 billion to $7 billion.

Unlike his right wing brethren on the Court, it would appear that Roberts is ideological to the extent that ideology serves money. Most of the time that makes a majority with Thomas, Alito, Scalia and Kennedy. In this case, due to the nature of the law and its goals, it swung the other way. But Roberts wasn’t being inconsistent. He delivered.

The Supreme Court is where the real conservative revolution —- the corporate revolution —- is going to be taking place over the next several years. Today Chief Justice Roberts went a long way toward ensuring that it will have the legitimacy to get that done.

I’ll be very anxious to see how striking down the mandate under the commerce clause plays out —- I suspect Roberts is being very clever there. And, as I have always feared, the Medicaid expansion is the weak link. Everyone seems to think that the wingnut Governors won’t be able to resist the free money, but they’ve been pretty willing to forego filthy Planned Parenthood and Unemployment Insurance cash, so I’m not totally convinced. Perhaps more importantly, the mechanism that Roberts came up with (signed on to by 7 justices) is one that could have a very serious effect on the future ability of the federal government to manage national social programs. So we’ll have to see what the reverberations will be down the road.

At this moment, on this day, I’m not inclined to carp too much. It happens to be a law that will extend health insurance to some number of people who wouldn’t have been able to get it before and that’s a big fucking deal. But there’s also no doubt in my mind that it came at a price.

Say what you will about Chief Justice Roberts, but he’s not a liberal in sheep’s clothing —- he’s very smart and that he’s playing a very long game. Lifetime appointments are good for that sort of thing. The good news is that in the course of enacting his long term agenda today he has helped some average people. We take what we can get.

theamericanbear:

They won’t stop:

A group of GOP senators introduced a new version of their cybersecurity bill, the Secure IT Act, on Wednesday.

The bill, backed by Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) and others, is similar to the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) that passed the House in April. The bill is an alternative to the measure favored by the Senate Democratic leadership and the White House. 

Like CISPA, Secure IT would remove legal barriers that prevent companies from sharing information about cyber threats with one another and with the government.

The new version of the legislation, S. 3342, aims to address the concerns of privacy advocates, who had warned that the old bill would give spy agencies access to Americans’ private online information.

The Republican senators said their new bill tightens the definition of “cyber threat information” and clarifies that the government cannot use or retain the information for reasons other those specified in the bill. They also said it creates new oversight authorities to protect privacy and civil liberties.

Hutchison said the lawmakers worked closely with interest groups to draft the new version of the bill, and they believe the new Secure IT is a “consensus bill that will significantly advance the security of our government and private sector networks.”

tinfoilandtea:

In the excerpts Vanderboegh posted on his blog “which deal with the decision today,” he says of a then-potential decision upholding the health care law, “You may call tyranny a mandate or you may call it a tax, but it still is tyranny and invites the same response.” He further predicts the response of his ilk: “If we refuse to obey, we will be fined. If we refuse to pay the fine, we will in time be jailed. If we refuse to report meekly to jail, we will be sent for by armed men. And if we refuse their violent invitation at the doorsteps of our own homes we will be killed — unless we kill them first. … I am on record as advocating the right of defensive violence against a tyrannical regime.”

And the Right say that Domestic Terrorists don’t exist.