Urie provides a devastating attack on all the justifications and theories used by capitalist elites and their agents such as Obama to eliminate all vestiges of citizen control over their respective nation's economy.
Understanding what Western elites really want from the TPP and TTIP is crucial. President Obama argues that either ‘we’ write the global trade rules going forward or the Chinese will. Point one is that trade rules are not ‘free-trade’ in the sense of an absence of rules— what is being negotiated is ‘managed’ trade. Point two is that the ‘we’ writing the rules are corporate representatives— Bank of America and Monsanto do not represent the public interest and the assertion that they do is profoundly anti-democratic. And despite lip service to the contrary, the ISDS mechanism of these (and past) trade agreements is designed to preclude effective environmental and labor regulations by allowing corporations to sue for wholly imagined ‘lost profits’ that might result from them. In other words, and with apologies to George Orwell, (economic) freedom is slavery.However, I must take issue with the way he writes. The problem I always have with his articles is their difficulty in comprehension, and I am probably better able than most ordinary people to comprehend them. Too often he uses obscure language and long convoluted sentences. While his attack on capitalist propaganda is very revealing and his exposures of the real effects of the neoliberal trade treaties very useful, considering his writing style he seems to be addressing only an academic audience. Academics are very much controlled by department heads and boards of directors (Board of Regents) that are heavily populated by capitalist agents.
Implied in Mr. Obama’s view is a unipolar world run by multi-national corporations for their own benefit. Wall Street would be near the top of this food chain— the same Wall Street that got everything it asked for in terms of ‘freedom’ from oversight and regulation and nevertheless killed the global economy in 2008 and exists today on public guarantees, transfers and implied future too-big-to-fail bailouts.
I think he should be writing clearly to ordinary people because it is these people who can bring about real change. And as he finally concludes, the only real solution is revolution.
For those of us stuck on the choice between Hillary or Jeb, Democrats or Republicans, what they can do— all that they can do, is drop bombs, exacerbate environmental catastrophe and be really mean to poor people. There is truth in the idea that societies are judged by how we treat the ‘least’ among us, not in some cosmic accounting, but by how we live our lives in the present. From one side the question is: how much crap do ‘we’ really need and from the other, what is the true cost of it and who pays this cost? Vote if you care to, call ‘your’ representatives to vote down trade agreements if you think doing so is useful, but revolution is the solution.
