=By= Vandana Shiva

Chemical corporations are trying to impose patents on all living organisms… They are trying to destroy our local food systems and replace them with industrial junk food by changing food and health safety as well as bio-safety, through ‘harmonisation’.

The only way to counter globalisation just a plot of land in some central place, keep it covered in grass, let there be a single tree, even a wild tree.” This is how dear friend and eminent writer Mahasweta Devi, who passed away on July 28, at the age of 90, quietly laid out her imagination for freedom in our times of corporate globalisation in one of her last talks.

Our freedoms, she reminds us, are with grass and trees, with wildness and self-organisation (swaraj), when the dominant economic systems would tear down every tree and round up the last blade of grass.

From the days we jointly wrote about the madness of covering our beautiful biodiverse Hindustan with monocultures of eucalyptus plantations, which were creating green deserts, to the work we did together on the impact of globalisation on women, Mahaswetadi remained the voice of the earth, of the marginalised and criminalised communities.

She could see with her poetic imagination how globalisation, based on free trade agreements (FTAs), written by and for corporations, was taking away the freedoms of people and all beings. “Free trade” is not just about how we trade. It is about how we live and whether we live. It is about how we think and whether we think. In the last two decades, our economies, our production and consumption patterns, our chances of survival and the emergence of a very small group of parasitic billionaires, have all been shaped by the rules of deregulation in the WTO agreements.

In 1994, in Marrakesh, Morocco, we signed the GATT agreements which led to the creation of WTO in 1995. The WTO agreements are written by corporations for corporations, to expand their control on resources, production, markets and trade, establish monopolies and destroy both economic and political democracy.

Monsanto wrote the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement of WTO — which is an attempt to claim seeds as Monsanto’s invention, and own seeds as “intellectual property” through patents. It has only one aim — to own and control seed and make super-profits through the collection of royalties. We have seen the consequences of this illegitimate corporate-defined “property” right in India; with extortion of “royalties” for genetically modified (GMO) seeds leading to high seed prices.

Cargill, Inc wrote the WTO’s agreement on agriculture. As a result, India, the largest producer of oilseeds and pulses, has become the biggest importer of both these produce. The edible oils being imported are GMO soya oil and palm oil — both extracted with hexane through solvent extraction; both leading to massive deforestation in Argentina, Indonesia and Brazil. We are importing dal from Canada and Mozambique, while our fertile pulse growing lands are being handed over to foreign corporations for growing bio fuel. This model destroys agriculture and food systems everywhere. We are thus destroying our health as well as the health of the planet.

The junk food industry wrote the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS) agreement of WTO. Our Prevention of Food Adulteration Act 1954 was replaced with the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), which is being used to shut India’s rich and diverse, small-scale, home and cottage industry-based food businesses, under pseudo-safety laws.

All new FTAs take away the sui generis option in TRIPS in WTO and are aimed at giving fangs to International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV), which establishes rules of uniformity, at a time when we know that diversity is vital to nutrition as well as climate resilience.

Twelve countries, including Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam, signed the Trans-Pacific Partnership FTA in February 2016. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) is an FTA between the Asean nations and their six trading partners — India, China, South Korea, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Since Asean countries are the most populous, RCEP will affect a greater number of people than other FTAs. And through RCEP, these countries may be dragged into the TPP under pressure of harmonisation, especially on issues related to seed.

The TPP requires all its signatories to join UPOV 91. It allows patents on “inventions derived from plants” which would open the floodgates of bio-piracy, as in the case of neem, basmati and wheat. The TPP has sections on “biologicals” which covers biological processes and products, thus undoing the exclusions in the WTO TRIPS agreement. Given how there is a rush to patent and impose untested and hazardous vaccines, and new GMO technologies like gene editing and gene drives, it is clear that the TPP is the instrument for the next stage of bio-imperialism.

At WTO, India managed to ensure countries could exclude plants and animals from patentability, which translated into article 3(j) in our patent laws. India ensured that UPOV could not be forced through WTO and countries had a sui generis option for plant varieties. This translated into the Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Act 2001, for which the writer was a member of the expert drafting group.

Not having achieved total monopoly on seeds through the WTO, chemical corporations (biotechnology and seed corporations) are trying to impose patents on all living organisms and all production systems based on living organisms through new FTAs. They are also trying to further destroy our local food systems and replace them with industrial junk food by changing food and health safety as well as bio-safety, through “harmonisation”.

Finally, global corporations, and those who control them, are trying to define corporations as having personhood through investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) systems, which are secret tribunals where corporations and investors can sue governments for acting according to their constitutional obligations in the interest of their citizens.

Thus, corporations are trying to replace our democracies with secret agreements and secret courts controlled by the 0.01 per cent super wealthy. The time is ripe for a planetary freedom movement that defends and protects the freedoms of all beings from this 0.01 per cent.

Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned environmental leader and thinker. Director of the Research Foundation on Science, Technology, and Ecology, she is the author of many books, including Water Wars: Pollution, Profits, and Privatization (South End Press, 2001), Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (South End Press, 1997), Monocultures of the Mind (Zed, 1993), The Violence of the Green Revolution (Zed, 1992), and Staying Alive (St. Martin’s Press, 1989). Shiva is a leader in the International Forum on Globalization, along with Ralph Nader and Jeremy Rifkin

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Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

=By= Paul Street

James Vela (CC BY-SA 2.0)

“Colored lights can hypnotize,” the Guess Who’s rock anti-anthem “American Woman” (1970) proclaimed, “sparkle someone else’s eyes.” Beneath the hypnotic glow of the endless fake-democratic presidential election pageant, the eco-cidal deep state of capitalist rule grinds on.  Let’s look behind the Wizard of Oz curtains a bit to confront two critical stories that have gotten unduly meager consideration from the reigning U.S. candidate- and election-obsessed media-politics culture.

…Global Investor Right Protection in the Guise of Free Trade  

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n February 4th, three days after the headline-holding Iowa Caucus (“Cruz Trumps Trump,”  “Sanders Fights Hillary to Virtual Tie”) and five days before the New Hampshire primaries (“Trump and Sanders Win Big”), trade ministers from 12 nations including the United States met in Auckland, New Zealand to sign the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). The signing took place under impressive police-state protection, with riot-ready gendarmes occupying key intersections to block large demonstrations against the regressive, authoritarian, and arch-corporatist measure.

The popular anger in New Zealand (and elsewhere) is quite understandable. Contrary to the neoliberal rhetoric of “free trade” and “improved standards” in which it is wrapped, the U.S.-sponsored measure isn’t really about trade. It certainly isn’t about meeting enhanced social and environmental requirements. Its real purpose is to strengthen corporations’ ability to defend and extend their intellectual property rights (drug patents, movie rights, and the like) and to guarantee that they will be compensated by governments for any profits they might lose from having to meet decent public labor and environmental (and other) specifications – something certain to discourage the enactment and enforcement of such standards. Key parts of the TPP permit foreign capital to freely and easily enter a country and for profits to be just as easily removed. The TPP would ban capital controls, which let nations block disruptive inflows of ‘hot money’ from speculative investors and then escape before the bubble they create explodes. It would also block the passage of financial transaction taxes, a method for checking speculation and for generating public revenue. The measure also legitimizes the extensive privatization of public enterprises.

The TPP is designed to help big multinational businesses attain special deals they would be unable to get through existing political processes, considered excessively democratic by global capital. A foreign corporation could sue and receive damages for anticipated profit losses resulting from an increase in the minimum wage (federal, state, or local) in the United States.

A U.S. state or Canadian province (or any other member-state jurisdiction) would have to compensate oil and gas companies for anticipated profits lost to bans on the environmentally disastrous practice of hydraulic fracturing (fracking).

Big Pharma and the big corporate media firms would be granted stronger and longer-lasting patent and copyright safeguards across the “free trade” zone.

Big multinational banking and investment firms would have to be paid by TPP governments that want to keep their nations’ financial systems safe through responsible regulation.

Food, chemical, consumer goods, and pesticide industries will be able to able to limit the ability of TPP governments to impose safety and environmental regulations on the things they sell and how they make them. The giant global and U.S.-based consumer packaged goods firm Procter & Gamble (just for one example) could demand compensation from any TPP nation (including the U.S.) that dared to subject its products and workplaces to basic social and environmental rules and regulations.

Beneath Obama’s claim that it is about creating a “level playing field,” the TPP is about a race to the capitalist bottom, a levelling down of people’s and government’s capacity to impose limits on business behavior. Like its ugly predecessor the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), it’s about what the New York Times calls “investor protection.”

Of special undemocratic significance, the TPP constructs a new legal structure that transcends the existing, nation-based legal system. Big global corporations who don’t think that American, Australian, Japanese, or Malaysian (etc.) courts can be trusted to give them a “fair deal” (translation: decisions consistent with their desired rate of profit) will be able to turn to “investor-state dispute settlement [ISDS] tribunals”: three-person corporate lawyer-staffed panels that will effectively make their own law on behalf of big business.

The panels will be kangaroo courts of and for global capital. Corporations will get to sue governments in these secret corporate-globalist courts if national, state-provincial, or local laws are passed that challenge any provision of the TPP, such as the one that prohibits privatization.

It doesn’t get much more sinister than that.

Obama might have attended the Auckland signing himself but that would have been unwise given the measure’s unpopularity at home and abroad. The treaty’s declared opponents include Bernie Sanders, most of the Democratic Party “progressive base,” Ted Cruz, Donald Trump (who has called the TPP “insanity”) and (disingenuously enough) the arch-neoliberal fake-progressive Hillary Clinton, who cannot follow her usual corporatist instincts on the measure during a primary campaign.

Consistent with its longstanding and remarkable efforts to keep the details of the TPP secret, the Obama administration is scurrying to get the measure through Congress before the elections this fall. Last year, the neoliberal president got enough Democrats votes in Congress to pass “fast-track” legislation so that Congress will have to vote on the treaty in a rapid, up-or-down, all-or-nothing way, with no time for careful study and amendment. With all four of the top presidential contenders – Sanders, Trump, Cruz, and Clinton – technically opposed to the measure for now, speed and stealth are the order for the day for Obama and his largely Republican congressional TPP allies. Media silence is critical for passage.

The Auckland signing and protests took place with remarkably little U.S. “mainstream” media coverage and commentary.  This is consistent with the national corporate communications complex’s enduring pattern of relative quietness on the TPP – a reflection of the multinational media oligopolies’ strong interest in the measure’s final approval on Capitol (Capital) Hill.

The pattern has been sustained in the media-managed Democratic Party presidential debates.  During the February 4th CNN-choreographed Bernie Sanders-Hillary Clinton “Town Hall” in New Hampshire, CNN questioners avoided the critical measure completely.  A Microsoft Word search of the event’s voluminous transcript (politicians’ hot air runs to high word counts) yields two scant hits for “TPP” or “Trans-Pacific Partnership” (two on the former, zero on the latter, to be precise). Both came courtesy of New Deal liberal Sanders, who made the following brief and passing references:

1. “Secretary Clinton has been a supporter in the past of various trade policies, NAFTA and PNTR with China. Reluctantly, and after a lot of pressure on her, she came out against the TPP, and I’m glad that she did.”

2. CNN’s Anderson Cooper: “Did President Obama let progressives down?”

Sanders: “I think in some areas, progressive — for example, in the trade area. Right now, I think they signed today the TPP in New Zealand. I think it is a continuation of bad trade policies. The president supports it, I strongly disagree with it.”

That was it. There was no further or serious discussion of the critical measure.

The TPP did not make it into either the questions or the answers to be searched in the 13,500-word transcript of the February 11th Hillary-Bernie debate conducted by the “Public” (Petroleum?) Broadcasting System’s obsequiously imperial Newshour hosts Gwenn Ifill and Clinton Foundation donor Judy Woodruff. (The second “P”BS anchor is a Clinton Foundation donor, by the way)

A Planet-Baking/Bakken Pipeline in the Upper Midwest

Meanwhile, 12,899 kilometers northeast of Auckland, in Des Moines, Iowa, the Big Carbon-captive Iowa Utilities Board (IUB) is moving toward final approval of the 1,134-mile Bakken Pipeline. The planet-cooking creation of Dakota Access LLC (itself a division of the eco-cidal corporation Energy Transfer Partners), this $4 billion project will carry 570,000 barrels of largely fracked crude oil from North Dakota’s “Bakken oil patch” on a diagonal course through South Dakota, 18 Iowa counties, and a Native American reservation to Patoka, Illinois. It will link with another pipeline that will transport the black gold to terminals and refineries along the Gulf of Mexico. Some of the “sweet crude” may be loaded onto rail cars for shipment to the east coast.

Besides contributing to the catastrophic problem of anthropogenic – really capital-o-genic – climate change (global warming driven largely by the excessive extraction and burning of fossil fuels), it helps capitalists make profits on the environmentally disastrous, water-wasting and water-polluting practice of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and threatens Iowa waterways, groundwater, and lands with terrible toxic leaks and spills. As Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement noted last year: “If the Bakken Pipeline is built, it would seriously harm Iowa’s already impaired water quality, threaten the integrity of the fertile farmland of thousands of everyday Iowans, and contribute to our dependence on fossil fuels. This steers us away from developing renewable energy infrastructure and curbing the most catastrophic impacts of climate change.”

The project includes the assertion of eminent domain whereby Iowa farmers and others will be forced to grant Dakota Access, well, access to their supposedly private property.  The pipeline requires a permanent easement 50 feet wide, with no structures allowed on the easement.  A wider, temporary easement will be corporately appropriated during construction. The company boasts that it has purchased voluntary easement agreements on nearly 80 percent of the properties along the route in Iowa.

Iowa’s Meskawki Indian tribe objects to the pipeline, which will defile the group’s burial grounds and treaty-ceded territory. Also voicing opposition is the Sac and Fox Tribe of the Mississippi, whose Tribal Chair Judith Bender told the IUB last year that the “pipeline will cross every major watershed in Iowa. It will only take one mistake and life in Iowa will change for the next thousands of years. As a people that have lived in Iowa for thousands of years, we have environmental concerns about the land and drinking water….Our main concern is that Iowa’s aquifers might be significantly damaged, We think that should be protected, because it is the water that gives Iowa the best way of life.” Indeed, as few Americans know, Iowa is one of the most watery states in the nation.

The Bakken Pipeline is part of why Big Carbon is undaunted by Obama’s decision not to approve the Keystone XL Pipeline late last year.

The pipeline’s builders are not especially worried about public opposition or the IUB’s decision. They have amassed vast quantities of material and equipment ready to go into destructive motion the minute the anticipated final thumbs-up is given. If all goes well for Dakota Access, the company will begin construction of the pipeline (to the standard environmentally oblivious applause of regional construction worker unions) this spring and complete the pipeline next fall – perhaps around the time of the culmination of the next “quadrennial electoral extravaganza” (Noam Chomsky). Maybe the company is counting in part on the state’s progressives being too hypnotized by the major party candidate madness – the endless rolling spectacle that is the US presidential election process and which counts as “politics,” the only politics that matters[1] – to pay all that much attention to unpleasantly plutocratic and environmentally catastrophic “background noise” like the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Bakken Pipeline.

In the days leading up to major party electoralists’ Iowa Caucus Holy Day, Iowa was briefly home to a large number of Sanders-backing political visitors with out-of-state license plates and banners proclaiming on the sides of their SUVs that “the Revolution Starts Here.” The slogan appeared inside an outline of the state of Iowa. I doubt that many of these politico-motorists will be returning to Iowa to engage in civil disobedience and other forms of resistance against the planet-baking Bakken Pipeline beneath and beyond electoral extravaganzas.

Iowa City author Paul Street’s latest book is They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, 2014)

Endnote
1. As Chomsky explained on the eve of the 2004 elections, “Americans may be encouraged to vote, but not to participate more meaningfully in the political arena. Essentially the election is a method of marginalizing the population. A huge propaganda campaign is mounted to get people to focus on these personalized quadrennial extravaganzas and to think, ‘That’s politics.’ But it isn’t. It’s only a small part of politics… So, in the election, sensible choices have to be made. But they are secondary to serious political action. The main task is to create a genuinely responsive democratic culture, and that effort goes on before and after electoral extravaganzas, whatever their outcome” (emphasis added).

Senior Contributing Editor, Paul Street (www.paulstreet.org) is the author of many articles, chapters, speeches, and books, including Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008); Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007; Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Routledge, 2005); Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008); The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2010); and (co-authored with Anthony DiMaggio) Crashing the Tea Party: Mass Media and the Campaign to Remake American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, May 2011).  Street can be reached at paulstreet99@yahoo.com

Note to Commenters
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Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

=By= Chuck Orloski

Archie and Edith Bunker (Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton)

Why is the TPP not front and center in the debates? A question poetically tackled by Chuck Orloski with his Archie Bunker screen set.

Midnight in D.C. –

Smithsonian History Museum glass glare,

no one around but for security cameras.

The Bunker family stayed up late,

emerged from bunker,

and took seats upon favorite chairs.

Archie’s politics stunk for Edith,

she actually “pulled her weight,”

but Archie insisted he must find out

the Iowa caucus results prior to

spinning Glen Miller records

and “pack it in for the night.”

Wearing pink bathrobe and pumps,

Edith complained,

“Why Archie… why don’t you

do something useful and sneak

over to the Capitol and find out how

the Trans Pacific Partnership fares?”

“Nag, nag, nag,” thought Archie,

“and the dingbat barely passed 8^th grade!”

“Tell me who gives Edith such ideas?

Who gets to see the T.P.P.?

Who the hell has time to read it?

Who will let me inside Xerox room?”

Mad to a killing point,

the couple stared across empty hallway

and nobody in the Homeland laughed.

“You know, Arch, uh, Trump lost Iowa tonight!”

“Ho, ho, ho!” Triumphant laughter!

“I told lazy son-in-law Meathead

that Dubuque Jews won’t go for Carson!”

Momentarily,

Edith pondered their Seacaucus wedding.

She lived unawares on TV for seven years.

She learned compliance with majorities

as well as any housewife did before her time. .

A Security Guard’s footsteps,

a Hoover/Cruz/Rubio/Jeb tap-pity-tap-tap,

and the Bunkers fled for bunker below.

Under Archie’s supervision,

Edith slammed pick into tunnel wall

and watched Potomac droplets enter space.

“C’mon, Edith, if ‘ya want me to read the T.P.P.

over at the Rotunda Bundestag-dunda,

you gotta dig – grab Iowa by the corn!”

“Iowa.., Arch?   Why I thought all along our

producers wanted to see green, not hawkeyes!”

Perhaps it was Archie’s only way

to express Free Trade Treaty love?

Frustrated,

He shook off lead (Pb) contaminated

tunnel mud from Dickie trousers,

his eyes turned red, moaned,

“Think I’ll go to Kelsey’s Bar,

chug cold ones, watch the Super Bowl

and pray none of them fruity-tootie

Ching Chongs park their Pacific Rim

asses next to mine!”

Author’s note:   In 2002, along with my two sons (ages 11 and 6) and a work friend, we toured the Smithsonian Museum of History. Of all the historical artifacts and exhibits at hand, older son Dan most remembered the “All in the Family” display, and younger Joseph was fascinated with the Greyhound Bus interior toilet.

Author Name Bio

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We apologize for this inconvenience.

Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

A blueprint for action. The central challenge for humanity is how to defeat malignant corporate power, the inevitable outgrowth of global capitalism in our age. 

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