Have you heard about the incident at Bundy Ranch? Already formed your opinion after watching mainstream media? Now push "reset" and watch this. Different scenarios, different government entities, same action: EXTORTION! They could even be tied to the same motives: United Nations Agenda 21 and Monopoly Capitialism for the 1% aka "Fascism".
Farmageddon is about the unseen war on American Family Farmers. A documentary about the escalating fight for food rights in America.
Americans' right to access fresh, healthy foods of their choice is under attack. Farmageddon tells the story of small, family farms that were providing safe, healthy foods to their communities and were forced to stop, sometimes through violent action, by agents of misguided government bureaucracies, and seeks to figure out why.
It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy -
but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply
have to be willing to take the 10 steps.
As difficult as this is
to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of
these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by
the Bush administration.
Because Americans like me were born in
freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us
to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations. Because we
no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government - the
task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from
citizens' ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers
and professors - we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the
founders put in place, even as they are being systematically
dismantled. Because we don't learn much about European history, the
setting up of a department of "homeland" security - remember who else
was keen on the word "homeland" - didn't raise the alarm bells it might
have.
It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush
and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an
open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable -
as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it
can happen here.
And that we are further along than we realise Conason
eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am
arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other
kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events
we see unfolding in the US.
1 Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national
shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot
Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many
said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on
a "war footing"; we were in a "global war" against a "global caliphate"
intending to "wipe out civilisation". There have been other times of
crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as
during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second
world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned.
But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda has
noted, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the
pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as
open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe
itself is the battlefield. "This time," Fein says, "there will be no
defined end."
Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like,
secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler's invocation of a
communist threat to the nation's security, be based on actual events
(one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he
noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the
Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by
passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an
open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based,
like the National Socialist evocation of the "global conspiracy of world
Jewry", on myth.
It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a
severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language
used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such
as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it
is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security
threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially
threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this
makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.
2 Create a gulag
Once
you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison
system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American
detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer
space") - where torture takes place.
At first, the people who are
sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies,
"enemies of the people" or "criminals". Initially, citizens tend to
support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do
not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders -
opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are
arrested and sent there as well.
This process took place in
fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and
Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s
and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or
crushing a pro-democracy uprising.
With its jails in Iraq and
Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are
abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the
due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and
his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no
information about the secret CIA "black site" prisons throughout the
world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the
street.
Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever
larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from
first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that
people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we
are aware of and those we can't investigate adequately.
But
Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only
scary brown people with whom they don't generally identify. It was brave
of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor
Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: "First
they came for the Jews." Most Americans don't understand yet that the
destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent
for them, too.
By the way, the establishment of military tribunals
that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist
shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the
Nazis, too, set up the People's Court, which also bypassed the judicial
system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and
tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to
show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system
that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in
favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.
3 Develop a thug caste
When
leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift" want to close down an
open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to
terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside
beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout
Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a
democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs
who are free from prosecution.
The years following 9/11 have
proved a bonanza for America's security contractors, with the Bush
administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the
US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of
dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and
abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of
involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on
Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq
by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these
contractors are immune from prosecution
Yes, but that is in Iraq,
you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of
Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security
guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill
interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed
civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that
episode - but the administration's endless war on terror means ongoing
scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on
crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.
Thugs in
America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical
shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida
in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a
need for "public order" on the next election day. Say there are
protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule
out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station "to
restore public order".
4 Set up an internal surveillance system
In
Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in
communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on
ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi
needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to
convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.
In
2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York
Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens' phones, read
their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became
clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state
scrutiny.
In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being
about "national security"; the true function is to keep citizens docile
and inhibit their activism and dissent.
5 Harass citizens' groups
The
fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass
citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose
minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being
investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got
Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have
been left alone.
Other harassment is more serious: the American
Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American
anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by
agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen
peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in
its category of 1,500 "suspicious incidents". The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of
Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations
engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track
"potential terrorist threats" as it watches ordinary US citizen
activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as
animal rights protests as "terrorism". So the definition of "terrorist"
slowly expands to include the opposition.
6 Engage in arbitrary detention and release
This
scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof
and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes:
the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy
activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released
many times. In a closing or closed society there is a "list" of
dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you
are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.
In 2004,
America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a
list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if
they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two
middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator
Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government - after Venezuela's
president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.
Professor
Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the
foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic
Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and
he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this
year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, "because I was on the
Terrorist Watch list".
"Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that," asked the airline employee.
"I
explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in
September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the
web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the
constitution." "That'll do it," the man said.
Anti-war
marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential
terrorist. History shows that the categories of "enemy of the people"
tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.
James Yee, a US
citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of
mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military
before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and
released several times. He is still of interest.
Brandon Mayfield,
a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a
possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer
seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still
on the list.
It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can't get off.
7 Target key individuals
Threaten
civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe
the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did
not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged
academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so
does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students
and professors.
Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those
seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional
loss if they do not "coordinate", in Goebbels' term, ideologically.
Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being
fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically
"coordinate" early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a
Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.
Bush
supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on
regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have
been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush
administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke
up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official
publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by
threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.
Elsewhere,
a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that "waterboarding is
torture" was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to
do her job.
Most recently, the administration purged eight US
attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When
Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were
"coordinated" too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal
laws to follow.
8 Control the press
Italy
in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s,
Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s,
China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators
target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more
open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and
worse in societies that have been closed already.
The Committee
to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time
high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put
in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war
demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against
reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened "critical infrastructure"
when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in
Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush
administration.
Other reporters and writers have been punished in
other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of
leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam
Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie
Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her
career.
Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared
with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in
Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has
documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or
threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and
camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC.
While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should
pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC's Kate Adie.
In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's
Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff
members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the
news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their
staffers.
Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted
by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens
falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about
to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged
papers.
You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it
is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal
have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What
you already have is a White House directing a stream of false
information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort
out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it's not the lies that
count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from fake,
they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.
9 Dissent equals treason
Cast
dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'. Every closing
society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly
criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy"
and "traitor". When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times,
ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times' leaking of
classified information "disgraceful", while Republicans in Congress
called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators
and news outlets kept up the "treason" drumbeat. Some commentators, as
Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating
the Espionage Act is execution.
Conason is right to note how
serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall
that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai
Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is
important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last
widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists
were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for
up to five months, and "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and
threatened with death", according to the historian Myra MacPherson.
After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.
In Stalin's
Soviet Union, dissidents were "enemies of the people". National
Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy "November
traitors". And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do
not realise that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly,
foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president
has the power to call any US citizen an "enemy combatant". He has the
power to define what "enemy combatant" means. The president can also
delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to
define "enemy combatant" any way he or she wants and then seize
Americans accordingly.
Even if you or I are American citizens,
even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us
of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes
at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you
or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for
months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists
know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That
is why Stalin's gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo's, in every
satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at
Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)
We US citizens will get a
trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for
Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying
increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US
citizens fair trials. "Enemy combatant" is a status offence - it is not
even something you have to have done. "We have absolutely moved over
into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something
bad, you might do something bad, so we're going to hold you," says a
spokeswoman of the CCR.
Most Americans surely do not get this yet.
No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every
closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests -
usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything
goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV
and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn't real
dissent. There just isn't freedom. If you look at history, just before
those arrests is where we are now.
10 Suspend the rule of law
The
John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new
powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency -
which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send
Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared
in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens.
Even
as Americans were focused on Britney Spears's meltdown and the question
of who fathered Anna Nicole's baby, the New York Times editorialised
about this shift: "A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that
laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in
the dead of night ... Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now
use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural
disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any 'other
condition'."
Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse
Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal government from
using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator
Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal
martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our
system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a
monarch's soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of
concentration of militias' power over American people in the hands of an
oppressive executive or faction.
Of course, the United States is
not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that
followed Mussolini's march on Rome or Hitler's roundup of political
prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and
judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.
Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.
It
is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile
of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal
on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria
in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931.
Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while
someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing:
"dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns away/ Quite
leisurely from the disaster."
As Americans turn away quite
leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the
foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has
changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic
traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a
context in which we are "at war" in a "long war" - a war without end,
on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the
president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US
citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.
That
means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these
still- free-looking institutions - and this foundation can give way
under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to
think about the "what ifs".
What if, in a year and a half, there
is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can
declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any
party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has
passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no
less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani -
because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through
edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic
negotiation and compromise.
What if the publisher of a major US
newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort
seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years
in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from
history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be
very polite.
Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to
hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center
for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the
detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at
the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying
to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group
called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of
people needs everybody's help, including that of Europeans and others
internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration
because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home
can mean for the rest of the world.
We need to look at history and
face the "what ifs". For if we keep going down this road, the "end of
America" could come for each of us in a different way, at a different
moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to
look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it
is now.
"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive,
and judiciary, in the same hands ... is the definition of tyranny,"
wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this
road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the
banner the founders asked us to carry.
Anonymous warned us of this last year and now that it has passed, we will begin to see the scary results. The US has managed to create a NAFTA-like plan for Asia combined with a NATO-like military expansion in order to contain China and bring about a New World Order the likes of what the world saw around the time of World War I & II with the expansion of the I.G. Farben and Nazi empire, known as the Third Reich. This is a continuation of the Fourth Reich as described in detail by historian and investigative journalist, Jim Marrs. “The fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War fundamentally altered the global security environment…but regional, local and internal conflicts have been on the rise. In recent years, the rise of failed and failing states and the growing presence of increasingly capable non-state actors has presented the US and its coalition partners with new military challenges. Concurrently, US forces face an increasing number of access challenges, including geography, potential adversaries’ capabilities, and host country concerns which prohibit access to their ports, airfields, and territory in the pursuit of action, and finally: domestic US and coalition political sentiment against large troop presence in ‘non-permissive operating environments’. The closing of US bases around the world, and austere port and infrastructure; international and domestic sentiments against a large troop presence in a foreign country, or even outright denial of US military presence have all limited the number of troops placed ashore.”
It has been highly protested by Japanese and others informed citizens, afraid of the destruction brought on their markets by the economic rape, pillage, and plunder.
4000+ Japanese farmers and fishers hit the streets of Tokyo on March 13 demanding Prime Minister Shinzo Abe keep his promises to boycott the talks despite pressure from the US. Sound familiar? Obama's fast-tracking this deal brings new meaning to his campaign promise to ‘renegotiate NAFTA’.
There’s been recent news that over 400 civil society organizations representing more than 15 million Americans have written to Congress urging that Fast Track be replaced by a more democratic trade negotiating and approval process’.
Electronic Frontier Foundation lists the dangers from draconian copyright and intellectual property rules, online free speech and privacy, fair use exceptions, and much more. The leaked draft 2011 text is here(pdf).
Sandra Fulton of the ACLU called the TPP ‘the biggest threat to free speech and intellectual property that you’ve never heard of’ in this interview with EFF in September of 2012.
The leaked provisions caused Lori Wallach of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch to react with incredulity and barely suppressed rage:
“The rollback of the modest Bush-era reforms is shocking, but what is truly stunning is the new proposal to empower pharmaceutical firms to attack the medicine formulary systems that New Zealand, Australia and other developed countries have used so successfully to achieve what is ostensibly an Obama administration goal of reducing sky-high drug prices.”
Lori Wallach is interviewed in the next two videos; this one with Amy and Juan covers many of the most hideous features of the deal as leaked so far, although as I remember it they don’t cover the super-muscular power Monsanto and other GMO multinationals will have, and the powerlessness of citizens in signatory nations to fight back. There are also provisions for financial deregulation and decreased capital control, Investor State arbitration (iirc; I’ve read and watched a lot today) and a US military presence to help keep citizens pacified.
If anyone can still believe that this President gives a fuck about you, or the 40% of the citizens of the world this will negatively impact forever…I’d like you to make your case. As far as I’m concerned, it‘s treasonous.
