US sends Marines to Libya after ambassador’s killing

Obama and Hillary Clinton reacting to events in Libya. Given the criminal machinations of
this nation in the region, blowback was and remains inevitable.

By Bill Van Auken, wsws.org
13 September 2012

The Obama administration has dispatched an elite unit of Marine special forces to Libya after the killing of the US ambassador and three other US personnel in the storming of the American consulate in Benghazi Tuesday.

The killing of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, the first such killing of a US envoy since the death of Washington’s ambassador to Afghanistan in 1979, together with the breaching of the walls of the US embassy in Cairo by Islamist demonstrators, touched off bitter political recriminations in Washington.

The Libyan attack is by all appearances a case of the chickens coming home to roost. Ambassador Stevens was himself very much involved in executing a policy that culminated in his own demise. The war for “regime change” that ended with the lynch-mob murder of former leader Muammar Gaddafi last October was prosecuted by means of US-NATO bombardment and the arming, training and financing of “rebels” that included Islamist elements closely connected to Al Qaeda. Now it appears that these same elements have killed Stevens.

While designed to install a puppet government subordinate to the interests of Washington and the Western oil companies and to teach China a lesson as to who runs North Africa, the war has produced what in the parlance of the intelligence services is known as blowback.

No doubt a contributing factor to Tuesday’s bloody events is the fact that the US-NATO war has brought no benefit to masses of Libyans, who are increasingly embittered over the devastation of their country.

Both the incidents in Benghazi and Cairo, together with smaller demonstrations in Tunisia, Sudan, Morocco and the Gaza Strip, were ostensibly in response to a provocative, rabidly anti-Muslim film produced in the US. A trailer for the amateurish and cartoon-like video, titled “Innocence of Muslims,” was posted on YouTube in July, and more recently was dubbed in Arabic and became more widely known after being denounced on an Egyptian television program.

Initially an individual describing himself as Sam Bacile, an Israeli-American real estate developer in California, claimed he had made the video to “expose” Islam. It later appeared, however, that no such person exists. Promoted by Christian right elements, the film appears to have been designed precisely to provoke violent confrontations.

The sequence of events in Benghazi remains somewhat murky. Initial reports attributed the attack to a militia known as the Ansar al-Sharia brigade, but the group has denied involvement.

Libya’s deputy interior minister, Wanis al-Sharif, tried to pin the blame on supporters of Gaddafi, but also suggested that the Americans were responsible for their own fate for not heeding previous warnings of attacks by Al Qaeda. “It was necessary that they take precautions,” he told AFP. “It was their fault that they did not take the necessary precautions.”

The New York Times Wednesday cited US officials as suggesting that the death of Stevens was not merely the accidental byproduct of spontaneous protest. “Indications suggest the possibility that an organized group had either been waiting for an opportunity to exploit like the protests over the video or perhaps even generated the protests as a cover for their attack,” the Times reported.

As many as 80 militiamen, armed with assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and 14.5mm anti-aircraft machine guns took part in the assault, a Libyan reporter told the BBC.

Others have suggested that the attack, carried out on September 11, may have been the work of Al Qaeda-linked elements seeking revenge for the US drone assassination of Abu Yahya al-Libi, the Libyan-born Al Qaeda leader killed in June in North Waziristan, near the Afghan border.

Sharif said that two of the slain Americans died as US security forces flown in from the capital of Tripoli tried to evacuate US personnel from a safe house in Benghazi, where they had been taken during the attack on the consulate.

“It was supposed to be a secret place, and we were surprised the armed groups knew about it. There was shooting,” Sharif told Reuters, suggesting that the attackers had good intelligence on US operations in the city.

Ambassador Stevens and another member of the US consular staff were killed in the attack on the consulate. Libyan authorities said that Stevens died of asphyxiation, apparently resulting from fires ignited by rocket-propelled grenades and homemade bombs. The consulate was left gutted and looted.

Speaking from the Rose Garden Wednesday morning, Obama emphasized that “the US is working with the Libyan government to bring the attackers to justice.”

He did not spell out what form “justice” would take. The White House ordered 50 members of the elite Marine special forces unit known as a Fleet Antiterrorism Security Team (FAST) to Libya. This may be only the first elements of a larger US intervention. A senior administration official told reporters Wednesday, “The Department of Defense is ready to respond with additional military measures, as directed by the president.”

The Pentagon is also redeploying US warships off the Libyan coast. The destroyer USS Laboon moved to a position off the Libyan coast Wednesday, while the USS McFaul is reportedly en route. Both ships carry Tomahawk missiles, which they could fire at targets on land.

Libyan officials also reported that US drones regularly fly over the North African country.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued her own statement Wednesday, expressing perplexity over the attack. “How could this happen in a country we helped liberate in a city we helped save from destruction?,” she said. “This question reflects just how complicated, and at times how confounding the world can be.”

Clinton could have answered her own question by spelling out the criminal and filthy methods that Washington employed to “liberate” Libya.

The loss of Stevens, a high-level US Middle East operative, was clearly a blow. Fluent in Arabic, he had served in various parts of the region in mid-level embassy positions, such as political section chief in Jerusalem, political officer in Damascus, consular/political officer in Cairo and consular/economic officer in Riyadh. Dispatched to Libya in 2007, he was first listed as “chargé d’Affaires” and then deputy chief of mission. Secret cables published by WikiLeaks show he held frequent meetings with Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, whom he once described an “engaging and charming interlocutor.”

Then in March of last year, barely a week before the US and NATO launched their war for regime change in Libya, Stevens was named US “liaison to the opposition” and dispatched with a US team to Benghazi. A State Department spokesman said he would “explore ways to open funding spigots for an opposition movement.”

In this military intervention, Washington and its European, Saudi and Qatari allies provided arms, training and heavy air support for the so-called rebels, which included significant numbers of Islamist fighters, some of whom had worked with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan or Iraq. If the attack on the consulate was carried out by these elements, the US ambassador and the other Americans were likely killed with arms and ammunition supplied by NATO.

Islamist militias continue to wield substantial power in Libya after elections held in July. Libya’s interim government is incapable of disarming the various armed groups or imposing its authority. In recent weeks heavily armed militiamen have brought in bulldozers to demolish shrines and mosques belonging to the Sufi branch of Islam in Tripoli, and other cities, sparking clashes that left several people dead and wounded.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney issued a statement late Tuesday night declaring his outrage over the attacks in Libya and Egypt and stating, “It’s disgraceful that the Obama Administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.”

Romney was referring to a statement issued by the US Embassy in Egypt hours before thousands of demonstrators gathered outside, scaling its walls and hauling down the US flag, which was replaced with the black banner favored by Islamist groups. The statement, which condemned “efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the feelings of Muslims,” aimed to pre-empt the protest. The embassy also reportedly called Egypt’s Salafist Nour Party, relaying this message and asking them to call off the demonstration.

In an interview with CBS, Obama responded that Romney’s criticism was indicative of a “tendency to shoot first and aim later.”

Beneath the superficial political attacks, there are no doubt deeper concerns within the American ruling elite over the implications of a US policy of “regime change” carried out by backing Islamist forces in both Libya and Syria, destabilizing the entire Middle East in the process.

Bill Van Auken is a senior political analyst with the World Socialist Web Site.

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The Method To The Post 9/11 Madness

By David Swanson

To your average educated careful consumer of U.S. news media, our militarism looks like ad hoc reactionary responses. A crisis flairs up here. We “intervene” there. An irrational foreign dictator threatens the peace over yonder. We get into wars because we have no choice, and then continue them because ending them would be somehow even worse than continuing them.

In fact, there is a method to the madness. I don’t mean just the pressure that President Eisenhower warned us would be created by massive military spending. I mean that the war planners have planned far ahead. They have lists of upcoming wars. (In 2001, according to Wesley Clark, the Pentagon sought wars in the coming years with Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. Tony Blair independently confirmed a similar list.) They invent the public excuses for those wars as the need arises. The actual motivations are not humanitarian, but driven by a crazed desire to dominate the world’s economies, waterways, and fossil fuels.

The papers of the 1990s pro-war think tank, the Project for the New American Century, fit with and explain what the United States and NATO and their allies have done for the past 11 years far better than President Bush’s speech given on the wreckage of the World Trade Center or anything announced by the White House right up through President Obama’s latest campaign speeches this week.

A new book called “The Globalization of NATO” by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya traces the development of NATO, from a supposedly defensive and North Atlantic organization, into an aggressive and global one, albeit one with some deep internal rivalries and tensions.

World War II never ended. The Nazi scientists were brought to the United States to continue developing weapons. Secret forces were left behind, within European governments (“Gladio” is the well-known name of the force in Italy), where they killed and lied in support of right-leaning governments for decades, and in support of NATO’s strength and unity.

“The Globalization of NATO” looks not only at NATO’s 1990s wars in Yugoslavia, but at the U.S. machinations during the 1980s that led to conflict there. As Nazemroaya notes, in 2009, the U.S. eagerly pointed out that the language of Moldova is essentially Romanian, but had when useful in the 1990s tried to claim that the Serbo-Croatian of Bosnia was a different language from the Serbo-Croatian of Serbia. Such claims, like outrage at human rights abuses in Syria and Iran but not in Bahrain or Saudi Arabia, are opportunistic.

When U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright learned of a massacre in a Kosovan village, Racak, she delightedly exclaimed, “Spring has come early!” NATO was able to begin its campaign of “humanitarian wars” with massive bombing of civilians. But the enemy wasn’t the people of Yugoslavia. The enemies were Russia and China and Iran. They are the enemies today. In 1999, NATO bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and that same Wesley Clark ordered British and French troops to attack the Russian military. Luckily, those troops refused that order, not wanting to be pawns in a game that risky.

World domination means controlling nations like Iraq and Libya, and placing bases and pipelines in places like Afghanistan, where they could benefit the West but hurt Russia, China, and Iran. It also means expanding Europe, NATO, and the European Union, to control the entire Mediterranean (which is how Lebanon and Syria become key targets). It means controlling the Arctic with Canada’s help. It means weaponizing outerspace. It means dominating Africa. It means surrounding Russia and China with missiles, bases, and ships, prepared to cut off their trade. It means imposing as much suffering as possible on the Iranian people. It means redefining sociopathic acts as rational inevitabilities.

Obama’s turn toward Asia, and all the new bases and troops popping up in Australia, Guam, South Korea, and Japan, began before and will continue after Obama. It is part of a strategy to surround China. It is driving a new arms race and new tensions. While China’s military spending is still only about a tenth of the U.S.’s, it has grown four-fold in recent years. The arms race has carried over to the Middle East as well, with the United States tripling its sales of weapons to foreign dictatorships last year. All of which is great for weapons makers. It’s also part of the madness of the method behind our militarism.

Which is not to say that everything goes as planned. Military operations accurately label themselves with the term “SNAFU”, and pockets of resistance have been known to spring up and grow rapidly. Ecuador and other Latin American nations, as well as Uzbekistan and other Central Asian nations, have found the strength to tell NATO to head on back to the North Atlantic. The Non-Aligned Nations representing the majority of the people on earth just met in Iran and proposed, among other things, plans for total nuclear disarmament. Perhaps the aligned nations should join the non-aligned nations in more ways than one. Perhaps the institution of NATO should join nuclear weaponry on the pile of bad ideas whose time has come and gone.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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MUST READ: Right-Wing Populism and the Republican Party

A Conversation with Ingar Solty and Max Bohnel on the Republican National Convention

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~(((( T h e B u l l e t ))))~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From August 27 to 30th, the Republican National Convention (RNC) took place in Tampa, Florida, where the party officially nominated Mitt Romney as the Republican presidential candidate and Paul Ryan as his running mate for vice-president. The U.S. foreign-correspondent for German-speaking public radio networks and progressive newspapers, Max Bohnel from New York (previously a Middle East foreign correspondent in Jerusalem), travelled to Tampa and reported on the convention. His conversation with Ingar Solty is a slightly reworked version of a piece published in the print as well as the online edition of the German daily newspaper Neues Deutschland.

…in the United States elections are won in the first instance by money, and in view of the high abstention rate, in the second, by mobilization of the base. ”

IS: The party elite reacted to this tricky situation with a demonstration of its power. In short succession all party bigwigs endorsed Romney: George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, John McCain, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy, Paul Ryan. In addition, at the start of March party strategists Ross Douthat and David Frum appeared to have taken advantage of a sexism scandal on the part of the right-wing populist and secret kingmaker Rush Limbaugh, to discipline the entire right-wing of the party. From that moment onwards Romney had the support of the right-wing. At the party convention Romney will thus find the right words to excite the party’s base. He is aware in the United States elections are won in the first instance by money, and in view of the high abstention rate, in the second, by mobilization of the base.

MB: How do you assess Romney’s decision to choose Paul Ryan as his running mate in this context?

IS: Romney’s decision in favor of the market radical Paul Ryan as his vice-presidential running mate should help to electrify the base close to the Tea Party. At the same time, with this decision Romney has probably done a disservice to his campaign, because Ryan is the extra ammunition Obama needs to be re-elected. The 2012 election boils down to a negative electoral campaign. This has to do with the fact that on the one hand about half the population rejects Romney, but Obama in view of the sluggish economic situation and the remaining unpopularity of his policies including the health care reform cannot undertake a positive campaign. On the other hand, the decision of the Supreme Court regarding campaign financing encourages this very development. The newly legalized campaign funds known as “Super-PACs” though not allowed to directly support candidates, are permitted to provide unlimited money for negative campaigning. Thanks to Ryan, Obama, as a moderate neoliberal politician espousing austerity, can now warn about the specter of the right-wing libertarian Ryan, who with his policy approach antagonized even the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

MB: How can we conceive of a right-wing intellectual who advises Romney or does the preliminary work for him and the republicans in the media or academically?

IS: Romney’s brain trust reflects his origin as an elite republican. Connections to the right-wing fringe exist only with the advisor Jim Talent. It is striking that Romney does not have any political-economic vision. In 2008 Obama early on surrounded himself with many economists with different positions, from the classic neoliberals with Wall-Street connections (Paul Volcker, Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geithner) via the Third-Way neoliberalism of Austan Goolsbee up to moderate Keynesianism (Jared Bernstein, Christina Romer and at the beginning also James K. Galbraith). In contrast, in Romney’s team the Hayek ideologue Ryan, who intended to privatize the popular Social Security and Medicare systems for retirees and only backpaddled in his RNC speech now regarding Medicare, corresponds most closely to a high-profile economic expert.

Otherwise Romney’s advisors are distinguished as being a crude mix of party cadres close to him from his time as the governor of Massachusetts and Bush administration remnants. Figures such as Cofer Black, Max Boot, Michael Chertoff, Eliot A. Cohen, Norm Coleman, Michael Hayden, Kim Holmes, Robert Kagan, Eric Lehman, Dan Senor, Vin Weber and Dov S. Zakheim originate mainly from the ‘neocon’ milieu. Most of them have a connection to the “Project for a New American Century” and to the Heritage Foundation, and come from the security apparatuses or the academic departments connected to them. Insofar as large sections of the security apparatuses were privatized during the “War on Terror,” with a Romney victory one can expect a return of the revolving-door principle in which high-ranking managers from profit-oriented private security firms such as Chertoff, Black and Hayden will (once again) assume positions in the state. To give just one example, Black is the chairman of Total Intelligence Solutions, a sister company of the Prince Group, the world’s largest security and mercenary company which during the Bush administration plundered the state by means of untendered public contracts, and was jointly responsible for the cost explosion of the over $4-trillion “War on Terror.” Next to them, there is only a number of obscure exile-Cuban lobbyists with whom Romney evidently wishes to appeal to Hispanics, in particular in the populous southern swing-states with large electoral colleges such as Florida.

MB: So no great minds in Romney’s campaign?

IS: Well, let’s say Romney’s campaign does not possess a real intellectual superstructure. His oldest and closest advisor Beth Myers – party member and wife of another very wealthy hedge fund manager – appears to be in line with the policy approach that Romney would follow: politically practical neoliberal policies domestically, and aggressive policies in matters of foreign affairs. The problem is that Obama leaves him little room to breathe on both levels. This is so because since the collapse of the green-capitalist reform agenda Obama has been pursuing a competitive export-oriented strategy based on an intensified exploitation of the American workforce domestically. This is flanked by an aggressive geopolitical strategy in the Middle East, in Central Asia and in the Asia-Pacific region. The aim is to ensure that the rise of China takes place under the global hegemony of the United States and that the U.S. option of a maritime continental blockade of China will dispel any idea of a challenge to the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency. Romney distinguishes himself only marginally from this aggressive approach to the integration and containment of China.

MB: Are there parallels between American and European right-wing populism?

IS: Right-wing populism as a manifestation of the crisis of political representation in neoliberalism is a multinational phenomenon in the advanced welfare-state capitalist countries. At the same time, it is differentiated in part by its social bases and its worldviews. In countries where right-wing populism has a stronger working-class base, such as in the Netherlands, France or Austria, it takes this fact into account insofar as it combines nationalist with anti-neoliberal demands such as opposing the raising of the retirement age.

Furthermore, as in the French National Front or the Swedish Democrats, its roots are still in part located in anti-Semitic right-wing extremism/classical fascism, while in the United States it presents itself as an authoritarian radicalization of a neoliberalism headed into crisis, and as Islamophobic instead of anti-Semitic. It is this ‘right-wing libertarianism’ flanked with Islamophobic and classist authoritarianism to which the future of the radical right belongs. In Germany, in contrast, state repression, the historic debt mortgage of the right, and the Nazi nostalgia appear to have slowed down the import of ‘right-wing libertarian’ ideology from the United States; with Thilo Sarrazin, Peter Sloterdijk, Henryk M. Broder, Ralph Giordano etc., its ideas enter society rather through the established parties of the so-called center. Right-wing populism in the United States, unlike in Europe, does not have its own political party. This is both a strength and a weakness; a strength because it can take advantage of the established republicans, a weakness because institutionalization (as the Tea Party caucus in the Congress) is usually accompanied by a de-radicalizing co-optation.

MB: What does that entail for the future of right-wing populism in the United States? Doesn’t that turn it into a dog that barks but can’t bite?

IS: It is generally the case that right-wing populism as a reactionary political project in the United States as well as in Europe, does not have an independent and coherent political project available to it, but ultimately runs on naked resentment. Incidentally, this is also why it is often futile to try and hold a ‘rational’ discussion with the right-wing populist’s core base, because the resentment fulfils a basic social-psychological need of people who are subjectively and sometimes even objectively powerless (think of the isolated small-business owner struggling under capitalist competition etc.). This is the need to channel the rage against the system, which has put them into this situation, against those further down below.

The reactionary nature of right-wing populism and, as a result, the lack of a coherent political project also explains its historical intellectual weakness. The internal contradictions are enormous and they even run through their most important ‘intellectuals.’ In the U.S., right-wing populists like Michael Savage are simultaneously protectionist nationalists and enthusiastic supporters of the American Empire, while Ron Paul promotes free trade, but as a ‘non-interventionist’ rejects the military preservation of global capitalism in the context of the American Empire. For this reason U.S. right-wing populists – analogous with historical fascism – have up to now been viewed sceptically by the ruling classes, even if, similarly to Hitler’s Nazi Party in Germany, which was financed early on by Fritz Thyssen and other large capitalists, their organizations have been generously financed by some of the richest men and women in the United States.

Right-wing populism nevertheless remains dangerous because the deeper the crisis of representation becomes, the less the political elite of the transnationalized bourgeoisie, to which Romney belongs, can keep the right-wing populists under control. Their precarious situation provides the desire to be more than simply cattle providing voters for the upper-class (party) elites. And the history of far-right movements has shown that the economically and politically dominant classes, when their grasp to power is at risk in the face of strong movements from the organized working-classes, may lose their hesitation to embrace the ‘vulgar’ people from the far right, whose hatred toward the organizations of the working-classes then comes in handy, quite quickly. •

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Stealth Corporate Coup d’Etat

By Stephen Lendman

Obama entered office promising transparency. Instead, he exceeded the worst of Bush and then some. His administration is America’s most secretive ever.”

Obama and other Washington extremists support an alphabet soup of federal and international freedom-destroying measures.

SOPA, PIPA, CISPA, ACTA, and now TPP are stealth pro-corporate, anti-populist hellish schemes.

Two previous articles by this writer called TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) ACTA 2.0 and a trade deal from hell. Another one said ACTA is worse than SOPA and PIPA. Public Citizen’s Lori Wallach heads its Global Trade Watch division. It monitors destructive trade deals like TPP. On June 27, she headlined her Nation magazine article “NAFTA on Steroids,” saying:

TPP, like other destructive trade deals, is being secretly negotiated. Most people never heard of it. Media scoundrels ignore it. Whatever corporations want they support.

TPP was “cleverly misbranded,” said Wallach. In 2008, Bush officials initiated discussions. They continue “under the radar.” By late 2009, Obama picked up where Bush left off. He backs everything he supported and then some.

He wants virtual total corporate empowerment. “Think of the TPP as a stealthy delivery mechanism for policies that could not survive public scrutiny,” said Wallach.

It provides Trojan horse cover for “grandiose new rights and privileges for corporations and permanent constraints on government regulation.”

It favors investors at the expense of public health, food safety, clean air and water, sovereign control of resources, land use, energy, and virtually everything else that smells money, power and privileges afforded both.

“The stakes are extremely high because TPP may well be the last ‘trade’ agreement Washington negotiates.” If enacted, other countries can join. If enough do, it’ll be a global “NAFTA on steroids.”

Member countries will sacrifice national sovereignty. Their laws, regulations and rights will be subordinated to TPP rules. Their use of tax revenues will also be restricted. Buy America and similar national priorities will end.

Rule-breakers will face TPP tribunal lawsuits and sanctions. Corporations will be empowered to sue countries outside their domestic courts. Private sector attorneys will become judges and juries.

TPP is an anti-fair trade measure. Trade is its least important feature. Washington has plenty of deals with other countries. TPP is about raw, unchallenged, supranational corporate power.

Obama entered office promising transparency. Instead, he exceeded the worst of Bush and then some. His administration is America’s most secretive ever.

He’s done more harm to more people in more ways than any of his predecessors in a comparable time period. Imagine what he plans in a second term.

He wanted TPP completed this year. Opposition to extreme provisions slowed things down. Australia said it won’t accept a parallel court system.

Along with New Zealand, it also rejected Washington’s drug giants empowerment provision. If enacted, it’ll let them challenge sovereign “medicine formularies’ pricing decisions.” They let other countries charge much lower prices.

Every country rejected extending drug patents. Many others won’t accept Washington’s proposal to forbid countries from using “capital controls, taxes, or other macro-prudential measures to limit” destructive financial speculation.

Nonetheless, most TPP provisions were accepted. Corporations want total empowerment. National sovereignty and democratic freedoms are on the chopping block for elimination. The stakes are that high.

On August 21, the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) asked “What Is Wrong With the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).” Nothing’s right about it. That’s what’s wrong.

EFF has been fighting it since introduced in 2008. “This agreement,” it says, “poses a great risk to users’ freedoms and access to information on a global scale” plus a whole lot more.

If enacted, its secret provisions assure destruction of freedoms most people take for granted. On August 24, EFF headlined, “TPP Creates Legal Incentives for ISPs to Police the Internet. What Is At Risk? Your Rights,” saying:

What’s known about TPP was leaked. What’s also worrisome is what remains secret and how much more damage is being secretly negotiated or already agreed on.

Besides what was discussed above, TPP wants ISPs to become online copyright protection enforcement cops. In the process, it wants Internet freedom and innovation destroyed. Its framework exceeds destructive ACTA provisions. It permits:

(1) “Three-strikes policies and laws.” They’ll require “Internet intermediaries to terminate their users’ Internet access on repeat allegations of copyright infringement.”

(2) Internet intermediary empowerment “to filter all Internet communications for potentially copyright-infringing material.”

(3) ISPs to “block access to websites that allegedly infringe or facilitate copyright infringement.”

(4) Enforcement rules for “intermediaries to disclose the identities of their customers to IP rights holders on an allegation of copyright infringement.”

TPP is a freedom destroying deal from hell. Instead of driving a stake through its heart and killing it, negotiations are proceeding toward enactment.

ISP enforcement of copyrights alone “poses a serious threat to free speech on the Internet.” It renders open platforms for user-generated content “economically untenable.”

Caution and conservative content will replace free and open commentaries and interchanges of thoughts and ideas.

Online takedown requirements “open the door to abuse.” Copyright claimants can “trump the judicial system.” They can get material they find offensive removed. Even delaying its publishing strikes a serious blow to free expression.

TPP also includes a “side-letter.” It’s an “annexed” agreement. It binds countries to strict procedures. They let copyright owners control what’s published and what’s not. They become thought control gatekeepers.

These type rules “are not only bad public policy, but have the potential to impinge on national sovereignty.” They’ll impose non-transparency. National laws will be affected. Extrajudicial authority will be empowered.

One size fits all will bind member countries to straightjacket rules. “TPP’s safe guards are not safe.” They may promote extension of ISPs’ secondary liability. Corporate bosses crave it. They’ll have rights at the expense of online freedom.

EFF says “the UN and European Court of Justice agree.” Human rights are at stake. Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights will become null and void. It states:

“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

EFF says it’s essential to let people hold opinions “without interference.” It’s vital they’re able “to seek, receive and impart information.” It’s critically important to have policies that don’t compromise personal freedoms or “impose liability on Internet intermediaries.”

They’re not judges and juries. They’re service providers. They attract and keep customers by serving them responsibly. Making them corporate cops is unconscionable.

Giving private business power over sovereign nations means freedom’s last breath has been drawn in countries agreeing to these oppressive rules.

EFF and similar organizations did heroic work beating SOPA and PIPA. They made many nations anti-ACTA. Plunging a dagger in TPP’s heart is now essential. Ordinary people can do plenty to help.

When freedom is on the line, mass support must save it. There’s still time, but it’s running out fast. Learn the facts. Know the stakes. Tell others, and join a struggle too important to lose.

http://www.claritypress.com/Lendman.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour

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