RIP Tony Benn: A True Man of Principle

I’m not usually one for bestowing praise or otherwise upon the death of politicians or celebrities, but today has seen the passing of a true political hero – Tony Benn (1925-2014). It would be a massive undertaking to give an adequate account of how truly brilliant this man was; a man the political establishment in this country could sorely do with. Benn was never afraid to adapt his views as experience and facts would dictate, and bucked the parroted ‘wisdom’ that one becomes more conservative as one gets older – in his own words “I’ve gone more to the left as I’ve got older”.

UKIP change name to UKUNT

News Toad

United Kingdom Independence Party leader Nigel Farage has today announced a renaming of his party to “United Kingdom Under Neath the Tweed” or UKUNT until September’s referendum on Scottish independence with a possible view of changing it back again in the event of a “no” vote.

Speaking on Andrew Neil’s weekday political show ‘Afternoon Bollocks’ Mr Farage explained “If we bang on about the United Kingdom being separate from all other influences and then part of the United Kingdom decides it’s going to become independent from us, then that makes the whole thing seem ridiculous and quite unfair. I personally hate going to Scotland since they tried to put me in a wicker man that time, so I would never stray north of the river Tweed anyway.

“There’s  no point including them in  deciding our careful blend of knee jerk policies, jingoistic diatribes and borderline racism if they’re only going…

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As Seen on TV

In case you didn’t know, Godfrey Bloom is the dickslap that goes on about stopping foreign aid to “bongo-bongo land” and thinks women are “sluts”. He famously hit reporter Michael Crick over the head with the noted brochure at last years UKIP conference.

Why the Whole World Should Fight the Trans-Pacific Partnership

Sometimes a story comes up which leaves you wondering where the hell to begin, and that’s exactly the kind of story we love to cover here on Politicoid. Having received much love from Australia of late, I’ve decided that now is the time to tackle one such monster: The imminent disaster that is… the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). I can already hear my non-pacific readership beginning to snore – but don’t. This monumental crock of effluvia affects you too, more than you can know (literally), not just because of the ramifications of the TPP but also due to the upcoming (drumroll) Trans-atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). More on that later…

This is one of those issues that touches on everything that is important to stand up and be counted for in ‘developed’ democracies today: economics, government corruption, the buyout of democracy, corporate power, income inequality, the 99%… and the list goes on. Under the somewhat ironic guise of a Free Trade treaty, multinational corporations are seeking to consolidate their monopolies and, as the Guarian’s George Monbiot has said, instigate a “full-frontal assault on democracy”. If you haven’t heard of it yet, let me give you a brief rundown of what the TPP is:

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is currently an agreement between a small number of pacific nations, designed to encourage trade. Well, hey that’s great, isn’t it? Everybody’s having fun. OK, maybe not, but stay with me: It is now being broadened and re-negotiated to include other nations – namely the US, Australia and Japan – ostensibly to strengthen ‘free trade’. Beyond that, what do we know? Well, officially, nothing. Why? Because the negotiations are going on in secret – and I mean really secret.

To give you an idea of exactly how secret, in the US it took years for Congress to be allowed even to view – let alone be involved in negotiating – the draft text of the agreement. Not only that, but when they finally were allowed to view it, they were permitted only limited time, under supervision, and were not allowed to take any copies. That’s the United States’ Congress – the people’s representatives – completely excluded from the development of the treaty and expected to vote it up or down based on almost no information. Remember, these deals are being negotiated in your name. If you need any more vivid picture of the corporate takeover of our democracies, just imagine, if you will, corporate security and lawyers guarding the TPP draft as our representatives beg for more time only to be told to shove it.

I could write an entire article as to why the parties to the treaty have implemented this deal in secret (hint: it’s because they can’t get it through any other way – they’ve tried). Sadly though, transparency issues are, as it turns out, the least of our problems. Thanks, once again, to the stellar work of Wikileaks, we have finally been able to trawl the depths of the corporate wet dream that is the TPP. I want to get to the real meat of this, so in the meantime here’s a quick warm up. If you need more in depth, follow the links or watch the fascinating and scary interview from Truthloader with Glyn Moody at the end of the article. So, let’s go, shall we?

Patent Law

Strengthening of patents to make it harder to, for example, make cheap generic drugs. That’s right, the bastards want poor people to die so they can turn a buck.

It will become easier to acquire a patent, so you could patent not only your product, but every aspect of that product.

Extension of patents to cover things like patenting animals (*sigh*) and surgical methods, which could result in surgeons being unable to perform operations for fear of breaching Intellectual Property law.

Copyright Law

Extension of copyright term limits from 70 years post-death of the author (originally, it was 14 years) to over 100 years.

Strengthening Digital Rights Management (DRM) to make copying – not necessarily pirating – harder. Unless, of course, you happen to be the government. Who coulda guessed?

Inclusion of any digital copy under copyright laws; this pretty much means that any data moving through your computer or phone – for example, YouTube videos – could be subject to an infringement enforcement.

Massive increases in civil and criminal damages for copyright breaches, with the concurrent extension of the term ‘commercial’ to include activities that don’t make money (er, what the- actual-fuck?). If you haven’t worked it out yet, that means that you could be fined or jailed for your personal mp3 collection.

There is much, much more, but I’m trying hard enough not to smash shit up just thinking about it. This clusterfuck of wrongness has been gleaned from one single chapter of the leaked TPP draft. It has 29 in total. But despite the clear contempt that the MegaCorps hold the consumer in (cross them, go to jail; if you’re poor, then just fucking die), these clauses are but the stink emanating from the true cackpile – cunningly disguised as investor-state dispute settlement. Contrary to the yawnsome title, investor-state dispute settlement (henceforth ISDS) is in fact by far the most egregious contravention of our rights.

What it means, in essence, is that corporations can sue sovereign governments if they feel that government regulations will impede their profit-making abilities. They will do this in privately run, supranational courts. It may not be new (such agreements already exist in other treaties, such as NAFTA), but the TPP extends ISDS to a much larger sphere and for fellow Atlantic coast-dwellers, the aforementioned TTIP intends to implement it across the rest of the western-aligned world. One should immediately start to get an idea how utterly disastrous this could be: For one, it places corporate adjudication above and outwith the level of national or international courts, a fact which challenges the very concept of national sovereignty. And by the way, who do you think pays the damages? Thats right…

As I mentioned earlier, this is already happening. In Australia, after the decision to market cigarettes in plain packaging (but for the hideous health warnings), tobacco giant Philip Morris sued the Australian government for lost profits. In Canada, Lone Pine of the US sued the government for $250m in lost profits over it’s fracking moratorium, under the auspices of NAFTA. Similar examples of corporate free trade madness can be found in El Salvador, Argentina (a particularly shocking example) and others. To understand how these ‘people’, as corporations are legally defined (!), could possibly justify this batshit behaviour just remember; corporations are amoral entities. They give not-a-fuck for anything other than providing their shareholders with ever-larger dividends and if that means engaging in morally reprehensible, destructive and conceited behaviour, then fine. To get an idea of how any government can be prepared to sign a treaty which robs them of their own power and our sovereignty, then I suggest you google ‘corporate lobbying’ and educate yourself – your democracy is being stolen from right under your nose. In the United States, the corporate buyout of democracy is all but complete, and here in Britain the posh nobs in charge are showing similar contempt for representative democracy.

In conclusion then, now that we know for sure what is in parts of the draft agreement, it can be accurately stated that within a couple of treaties time we can expect the practical destruction of the free market (I mean the actual free market concept, not the horribly disfigured parody that we see), the relegation of democracy to a rubber stamp, the end of environmental and health regulations as well as other consumer protections and the criminalisation of anyone who doesn’t play by the rules of the corporate oligarchy. Do you seriously need more reason to get up and scream “WHAT THE-LIVING-FUUUUCK!!!”?

What can you do? In the short term, there are literally hundreds of campaigns in opposition to the TPP – Avaaz, Electronic Freedom Foundation and exposethetpp.org are but three. Public dissent to previous attempts to legalise a corporatocracy (SOPA, PIPA, ACTA) is the very reason that they have been forced to take the ultra-secret route, so it can be done. In the longer term, support efforts to take money out of politics and curb the influence of lobbyists. But remember, these guys don’t ever give up, and the price of freedom is, as they say, eternal vigilance.

The Paracas Skulls – An Object Lesson in Critical Thinking

I’ve gone and got my panties in a twist again (What? They feel nice against my skin…). I’m just really bloody tired of having to do other peoples’ thinking for them. Now before you get all excited and puckered-up about that statement, let me explain myself. Across a gamut of topics on Facebook ranging from radioactive tuna to chemtrails to bad science, I have discovered a disturbing trend; I call it Post First, Ask Questions Later (or possibly not at all). If you’re here often, you might have noticed that I tend to get a little, shall we say, pissy when otherwise intelligent and educated folks just swallow outrageous claims without so much as an ‘Are you sure about that?’. An article doing the rounds on Facebook this week has proven to be the turd to break my otherwise calm demeanour.

Wingnut of the Week – Australian PM Tony Abbott

Aussie politics is a strange bugger. Far be it from me to comment on the politics of another nation (ahem)… but I just can’t help it when my wingnut detector goes this ape. I’m not sure that you can even fit Australian politics into a traditional Overton window – Liberal in Australia seems to mean economically neo-liberal, as opposed to socially and democratically liberal, as we’d been led to believe.