Surviving Capitalism (Not) : The Final Leaked TPP Text is All That We Feared

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Monday, October 12, 2015

The Final Leaked TPP Text is All That We Feared

Click here to access article by Jeremy Malcolm from Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Today's [Friday 10/9/2015] release by Wikileaks of what is believed to be the current and essentially final version of the intellectual property (IP) chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) confirms our worst fears about the agreement, and dashes the few hopes that we held out that its most onerous provisions wouldn't survive to the end of the negotiations.

Any pretense of a democratic government must have as a prerequisite a government that provides unfettered access to journalists about what it is doing so that the people can hold their governors accountable. Sadly this is not the case with most any existing government, and certainly not in relation to the US government. This phenomenon is a direct result of class structured society which provides access to power by people based on some distinct characteristic.

Under capitalism the "ownership" of economic property is this characteristic which has created a deep fissure in our society, and has caused extreme inequality of wealth and power. Those who control our society have huge concentrations of ownership, and with this comes overwhelming power to control what happens. The problem for these powerful "owners" is that they rule over a population that has been led by them to believe that our society is governed by democratic principles and therefore legitimate.

Under the circumstance where there is a pretense of one form of government, but another form actually exists, then the requirement of secrecy is absolutely vital. Before the conclusion of WWII this was largely accomplished by the "ownership" class through their ownership of the media and their control of all other institutions. But since then we have seen the growth of secret agencies within the government to the point where very little functions as portrayed in schools, media, and even entertainment. Thus, we see people like Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and many other whistleblowers of government misconduct and publishers of state secrets so persecuted and hounded. Thankfully, there exists Wikileaks to help us unravel their dirty secrets.