The Awokening– A Climate Change Change Short Story

We didn’t notice it at first.  I certainly didn’t notice, not at the beginning.  I mean how could you notice anything if you didn’t know anything was happening, that there was anything to look for, or what to look for?

We were thinking about things like sea level rise, how it was locked in, so it was a question of thinking about how much sea level rise, how fast, where it would be experienced worst– sea level rise is not just the melting icecaps, it's also that warm water expands, it’s “thicker”– The local tides also factor in with tide-funneling coastline shapes causing some areas to be affected worse– And we were thinking about how to adapt.

Figuring out where to move and when, how long it could make sense to wait, were questions on almost everyone’s minds. Areas that we’d thought of as cool and alpine were warming up.  Anywhere could be where there’d be fires next.  Lots of areas were drying out with local vegetation that evolved in wetter climates becoming dry dead fuel.  And then there were more and more areas that looked like they’d be, unpredictably, at times, too wet and too low lying when floods came.  Ironically, it was sometimes impossible to find potable, unpoisoned drinking water in some of those same areas.

Everyone was aware of the hopelessness and the resignation.  I mean, even if we didn’t consciously acknowledge it, it was there as a sense we all had.  If nothing else, you knew it without knowing it.

Those of us who knew enough, who weren’t listening to the national network, cable or legacy internet programs as our news sources, blamed the fossil fuel companies.  We blamed what we understood was their psycho-graphic control.  We remembered, in the early days, how swathes of people didn’t believe that there was climate change, or if they believed it, they didn’t think it was man made, or maybe they did think humans were causing it.  Maybe they thought it would be good, or not so bad.

Maybe some people thought it would be bad, but not for them.  Or they thought they’d get some personal benefit from what was happening, the way they were plugged into the system, so that the good for them would outweigh the bad. . . Some people, a lot, said it was happening, but didn’t think they could do anything about it.  Others suspected they could do something about it, but just couldn’t figure out what that was.

Some of us did something about it by voting for politicians who said they were going to do something about it but then didn’t.  We voted for those kinds of politicians more than once.  And we spent a lot of time figuring out who to believe as we voted.  It seems we could never be right.  It was a no-win proposition every time.  Many of us just didn’t have time for all of it.  Life was increasing taxing with people struggling to make ends meet.  Or we maybe we did have the time, but we somehow never got around to doing anything.  Escapist fantasy was especially popular.  We could watch it on our tablets indoors while our air conditioners ran.  Life spent with super heroes saving worlds around the universe, frequently earth itself, and CGI generated versions of our favorite old movie stars was a tad more soothing . .

. . . There were a thousand things that could be picked from, essentially an infinite menu of reasons not to do anything about climate change that the fossil fuel companies could deliver in tailored packages to suit our individual personalities and disable us.  “Nano-targeting” was one phrase for it.  The social media companies, data-collecting marketers like Amazon, the search engines, our phone and door bell trackers, provided the manipulators with everything necessary to know about any of us.  They picked our leaders for us too.  It meant they also picked and had a hand in which charismatics were sent into bubble oblivion, maybe assigned small personalized ineffectual followings to be dispensed with at the same time.

We knew they were doing it.  You could tell.  I mean, if you cared to pay attention, you knew.  You didn’t need hints from those occasional leaks.  Besides, some of those leaks were themselves meant to make you think certain things and why get entangled?  Yes, sure, go ahead and connect the dots as proof if you were compulsive about proving things.  But, otherwise, just go with the big overall picture.  You could tell.  You could just easily tell.

First, I’ve got to say that it didn’t seem like anything when you stopped running into people who wanted to tell that there was no climate change, that it wasn’t man made, or wouldn’t be so bad, anything from that whole list of crap.  After all, it made sense that people were simply out of rope to believe the impossible; That was clearly explanation enough. . .

That explanation went far enough to cover that much. . .

 . . I remember young, red-headed Edgar excited about his new job.  Truly excited.  Really?  He was working on solar capture fabrics.  An anomaly?  I remember that first and best.  Then Shaheen was excited about her job— It involved road and highways generating energy, multiple ways actually.  Hester was working on storage, with weights elevating on rails that could spin flywheels coming down.  Her eyes had a certain gleam.

It was the sense of optimism that was disorienting. Each time it seemed unexpected, and now the  repetitiveness of such encounters just made it seem much more improbable. – People, I mean a different kind of people, were actually going back into government and interested in doing all sorts of things there, a ton of it having really positive implications rippling out in all directions for the climate.  Also respecting government, you, of course know the names of the new capable and charismatic leaders who arose.  They emerged pretty much right away.

My friend Joshua had no knack at all for engineering, but his enthusiasm for things that others were achieving got him involved in promoting and spreading the word.  Technically, he was “advertising” the new technologies to help make them successful in finding a market, and, indeed, he was now working at a legacy advertising firm that had taken this on as its specialty. PR firms were going the same route. 

You almost didn’t need the advertising or PR firms: People were hungrily seeking out news everywhere, because there was so much that was terrifically good to learn and potentially take advantage of yourself by finding new endeavors to plug into.  Journalists were plying a new skill: solution identification.  They were doing a real good job to investigate, find and bring solutions to the surface.  A lot of surfaced solutions, or near solutions, were combining with others to make even better ones.

Renewables had already essentially been cheaper than fossil fuel.  The flip over to zero fossil fuel use occurred fast.  Elimination of the subsidies for fossil fuels might never even have been required.  But is was more than that: With the flip, came a vast increase, an upward dizzying spiral, in the efficiency of energy production at lower and lower cost with less and less environmental impact. The energy storage problem for renewables was quickly solved in multiple scores of ways.

We soon had so much extra energy, a vast surplus, beyond what was needed for all our economic needs that it was obvious that there was only one thing to do with it.  We started up all sorts engines and devices to extract carbon from the atmosphere and our oceans. At first the methods for extracting carbon from the seawater took the lead.– Either worked: The oceans, in a continual rebalancing, grabbed carbon from the atmosphere so it was the same thing.  Carbon extraction was easier than dealing with the methane.  Nevertheless, the fact was we were on track to get it all satisfactorily done.

There were a lot of jobs, with attendant excitement and enthusiasm, in the carbon extraction business too.  The work that had once been done to determine the cost to the world of dumping carbon into the atmosphere like trash was handy in setting a price for what people could be paid per ton of carbon extraction.  As the cost of the technology came down, profits attracted wider and wider scale participation.  We turned back the clock.  That was what people said: "We turned back the clock."    The climate catastrophe chaos was reversed.  The planet restored itself to what had been climate normalcy for all the tens of thousands of years any form modern human civilization has existed.

I felt dumb at first not to realize it.  Where the change came from was obvious.  Why the change was so sudden and complete was obvious. But, when you are in the middle of a whirlwind, recognition can come with obstinate slowness.  I, like others, had been so habituated to blaming the fossil fuel industry for the way they commandeered psycho-graphics to immobilize the population and continue their plunder unimpeded, I wasn’t immediately ready to change the lens through which I viewed the world.

It was obvious, truly obvious.  What was obvious was that some other group had taken power behind the scenes.  All those psycho-graphic tools still existed, but now they had been wrested from the fossil fuel industry.  The psycho-graphic tools, the ability to manipulate human beings in a fine tuned personalized way across a huge spectrum of personalities, was being turned around and used for purposes exactly opposite to how the fossil fuel industry had used them.  Through psycho-graphic tools every individual’s strengths in terms of personality and skill, where they might fit in in terms of solving the climate change emergency, was systematically identified and assessed so that they could be tipped into taking the most appropriate personal actions they could take.

It worked.  It worked.

My problem with all this, is that it wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen.  I revile psycho-graphics.  I had this problem with it when it was being used by the fossil fuel industry to keep us consuming fossil fuels.  I had the same problem when it was being used to keep us perpetually at war with huge amount of runaway military spending.  I still have a problem with psycho-graphics.  I ask you, where is the democracy in a group of powerful people, a coordinating elite, deciding the direction that everyone should take?

Where is the democracy?  I thought it was all supposed to happen starting bottom up, grass roots, the wisdom of crowds when people listen to each other.  Where is the democracy?  Is this the way it was supposed to happen?

* * * *

From the Kickstarter page for "The Truth Has Changed" tour.

 Author's Note: The idea for this short story came to me after I saw a Brooklyn performance of Josh Fox’s “The Truth Has Changed.”  It was in Brooklyn, in Mr. Fox's theater company's rehearsal space, because, with some strange controversy involved, his show was kicked out of The Public Theater in Manhattan.  I give credence to Fox’s statements that the eviction probably came about because of the show’s content.

Fox’s one man show (think echos of a Spalding Gray performance) is, in part, about the climate crisis emergency.  He’s written an accompanying book, which has a foreword by climate activist Bill McKibben.  Fox’s show is also largely about information control, the kind that is directed at manipulating the public.  Information control and manipulation of public opinion is charging ahead with the development of new techniques so fast that it is hard to separate a short futuristic science fiction story like this from yesterday’s news.  That aspect of Fox’s show gives it a fair amount of overlap with the issues of censorship, information control and dumbing down the public that have been concerns for Citizens Defending Libraries, of which I am a co-founder.

I will note that Fox’s show is a strenuous tour de force and challenging in the bleakness of some of its urgency.  Project Censored has begun grappling with the notion that negative news reporting that eschews the provision of “solutions” is a form of news abuse.  It results in “negative news overload” that enervates the public, a form of control in itself.  Fox is interested in solutions too.  The program notes for “The Truth has Changed” explains that one of his other endeavors is “The Solutions Project,” co-founded with Mark Ruffalo, Mark Jacobson and Marco Krapels.  Similarly, with respect to the climate crisis, Project Censored notes that there is “The Drawdown Project.”  Personally I believe many solutions would presently be unfolding at a quickening pace if we had a fossil fuels tax and were looking to start paying people to extract carbon from the atmosphere and oceans and I think the two should be related.

Fox’s show does not leave the subject of potential solutions entirely unaddressed, but it is mostly more about the urgency with which we need to find them.  His show does not identify or present the questionable solution posed by the short story above. I hope it leaves your thoughts provoked.

The show was shut down at The Public.  Content too challenging?

Big Changes!: And The More Things Change, The More They Are Changing In the WRONG Direction- GLOBAL WARMING and INCREASING WEALTH INEQUALITY

The news didn’t wait to come out on the day of Mr. Trump’s inauguration (if that’s what you were expecting): Last year we got the news on January 20th.  This year we got the news today. . . .

Last year, on January 20th, we learned that 2015 had set the record for the world’s warmest year ever, eclipsing 2014, which, in turn, had been the world’s warmest year ever.

This year we learned today: 2016 is the world’s warmest year ever.  That makes it three years in succession that the temperature has set escalating records.

When this was announced last year, we were told that the odds were starkly against the phenomenon of "two back-to-back record years," that they were only 1 out of 1,500 unless. . .  climate change with the ever present prospect of continually increasing temperatures is undeniably here. -

. . . so what are the odds of THREE successive years of annual increase?  What’s worse is that the New York Times reports that record-setting figures of 2016 were “trouncing” those set a year earlier.

Last year, National Notice looked at this frightful record setting with respect to our climate and connected it to another dismal trend in setting records: News had come out that world wealth inequality had increased to the point that just 62 of the world’s richest were as wealthy as as half of world's population.  See: Hot News Connection: 62 Billionaires Now Own More Than Half The Planet's Population And 2015 Far Outpaced 2014 as Planet's Hottest Ever Year (January 23, 2016).

Well, this week similarly brought news that last year’s record of wealth inequality has been trounced by this year’s record as well.  Now just eight individuals have as much wealth as the poorest half of the world’s population:  World's 8 Richest Have as Much Wealth as Bottom Half, Oxfam Says, by Gerry Mullany, January 16, 2017

Eight individuals (including Michael Bloomberg, who was hardly even on the map of wealth before becoming NYC mayor)?. .

. . .  Only six years ago in 2010 this power of holding as much wealth as half the world's population was dispersed among 388 multi-billionaires.

Are these racing increases in wealth inequality related to the fast racing increases in climate change?  Yes, they are.  That was exactly what I wrote and explained when I wrote last year in National Notice about those records being broken.. . .  Consider this just an update about how increasingly out of hand the situation is getting.

BTW: In a related vein, if you want to read about how one of the world’s most bizarrely wealthy man is buying a central destination library from the New York Public Library, which will be snuffing out its major science library just when what we need to know about climate change is vanishing from the libraries, there is a Noticing New York article you should read.

Hot News Connection: 62 Billionaires Now Own More Than Half The Planet’s Population And 2015 Far Outpaced 2014 as Planet’s Hottest Ever Year

Headlines and accompanying graphs that document significant progressions of some unwelcome change- Are hey related

This week brings two jaw-dropping headlines accompanied by graphs that document significant progressions of some unwelcome change.  With the news of each, arriving together, one must wonder about the possible relationships between the two. .

The Guardian reports that, according to a new report by Oxfam, our accelerating inequality means that the richest 62 people in the world are now as wealthy as half of world's population.  What's more, 1% of people on the world own more wealth than other 99% of the population combined.  See: Richest 62 people as wealthy as half of world's population, says Oxfam- Charity says only higher wages, crackdown on tax dodging and higher investment in public services can stop divide widening, by Larry Elliott, 18 January 18, 2016.

More than half the world's wealth held by just 1% and just 62 people owning as much as half the world's population?  If you believe that we live in a world where money is power and probably increasingly so, then an exceedingly small set of individuals hold an awful lot of power.  As for how fast this situation is getting worse, the Oxfam report tells us that only five years ago in 2010 this power of holding as much wealth as half the world's population was dispersed among 388 multi-billionaires.

On this side of the Atlantic the New York Times has just reported that 2015 was earth's warmest year by the widest margin on record; outstripping 2014, the previous record setter.  This means we have "two back-to-back record years," the odds against which are 1 out of 1,500 unless. . .  Yes, worsening climate change with the prospect of annually increasing temperatures is undeniably here.  See: 2015 Far Eclipsed 2014 As Wordls Hottest Year, Climate Scientists Say / 2015 Was Hottest Year in Historical Record, Scientists Say, by Justin Gillis January 20, 2016.

Climate change is definitely here.  It is phenomenally destructive to our planet and yet the world is doing very little about it.  Why?

The Oxfam report on the increasing concentration of wealth tells us a little bit about climate change:

. .  while the poorest people live in areas most vulnerable to climate change, the poorest half of the global population are responsible for only around 10 percent of total global emissions. Meanwhile, the average carbon footprint of the richest 1 percent of people globally could be as much as 175 times higher than that of the poorest 10 percent.

Another Oxfam report cited in a footnote to the above amplifies that, "The richest 10% of people produce half of Earth’s climate-harming fossil-fuel emissions,"  See:  World's richest 10% produce half of global carbon emissions, says Oxfam,  the Guardian, December 2, 2015.

Probably more important than the correlation between wealth accompanied by disproportionate consumption, and therefore much larger carbon footprints, is that the poorest in the world are the most vulnerable to the costs of climate change.  That's exceedingly relevant because, if money is power, then those worst affected by climate change are those least powerful to compel civilization to adjust and chart a better course.

It is clear that large carbon footprints and excessive consumption can be laid at the doorstep of the wealthiest, even citing the those amongst the tippy-top 1% with alarmingly cavalier consumption.  A recent hard-to-believe report, "Elite Emissions: How the Homes of the Wealthiest New Yorkers Help Drive Climate Change” by the Climate Works for All coalition concluded that with NYC buildings being responsible for "70% of New York City’s emissions" that generate the "greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming . . a mere two percent of the city’s one million buildings use 45% of all of the city’s energy."  See: New York Post- Rich New Yorkers' homes are ruining our air, by Hana R. Alberts, November 20, 2015.

Using the Forbes’ World’s Billionaires list to investigate The Elite Emissions report was able to present a list of  buildings with their high energy consumption figures.  It includes buildings with the homes of those ranking among the top 62 wealthiest people in the world, among them: The apartment building housing the home of David H. Koch (740 Park Avenue- the building made infamous by a book and an Alex Gibney documentary about it,) Alice Walton (515 Park Avenue in a a $25 million apartment), and Donald Trump (721 5th Avenue- "Trump Tower").  David Koch, along with is equally wealthy brother Charles, are, in whatever order you want, the sixth and seventh wealthiest multi-billionaires in the world.  Alice Walton is the eleventh.  Christy Walton and Jim Walton are higher up the list than Alice, right after the Kochs.  Climate science denying Donald Trump, with only an estimated $4.5 billion to his name, is way down the list of the world's wealthy at #405 with only a fraction of their wealth.

Of much more concern than whatever may be the aggregate personal carbon emissions are of these particular, exceedingly wealthy individuals, is the effect these individuals have on what systemically contributes to and establishes the societal infrastructure for climate change throughout the world.

An article in the New York Times wrote about how the richest multi-billionaires are now so wealthy that they are forming their own political parties: How Billionaire Oligarchs Are Becoming Their Own Political Parties,
by Jim Rutenberg, October 17, 2014.  Certainly, many already perceive the Tea Party, in view of its funding, as being essentially the party of Koch.

Of course, there is very visibly also Trump.  And, now, apparently, goaded or "galled by" the success of the relatively small-change Trump in this election cycle, Michael Bloomberg (multi-billionaire #14 on the Forbes list of the world's wealthiest) has disclosed renewed ambitions to run for Unite States President.  Mr. Bloomberg's credentials are environmentally dubious despite a lot of PR to the contrary.  Endorsed fracking he was  then appointed `Climate Change Envoy’ by the United Nations.  Bloomberg is looking to run as an independent candidate declaring that he would spend "at least $1 billion" of his estimated $35.5 billion fortune to run.  Mr. Bloomberg reportedly doesn't like the Wall Street-critical Sanders and 'laments' what he considers Hillary Clinton’s "lurch to the left" to keep pace with Sanders. See: Bloomberg, Sensing an Opening, Revisits a Potential White House Run, by Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman, January 23, 2016.

Trump, Koch and most particularly Bloomberg present examples of the cycle of how money and power reinforce each other.  Some may regard Bloomberg's $1 billion proposed to be spent on his campaign, or the cash similarly splashed around Trump as expenditures.  Others may view it as an investment that will more that repay itself no matter who is elected.  When Bloomberg declared his interest in politics to launch his career he was not exceptionally wealthy, but when he completed his third term as mayor he was, having for a time become the richest man in the city.  In the process he far outpaced the wealth increase of most others on Forbes list.

From Noticing New York: Two charts overlaid, showing how Bloomberg's increasing annual wealth makes the increasing annual average wealth of the rest of the "Forbes 400" look virtually flat by comparison

   
The question is what these multi-billionaires do with the huge influence they wield. In theory climate change will adversely affect everybody.  Indeed, we have heard some billionaires tell us they are mobilizing efforts to do what they think should be done to curtail climate change.  See: Bill Gates forms billionaires' super league against climate change- With the COP21 conference starting today in Paris, wealthy investors including Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Mark Zuckerberg team up to give governments a helping hand, by Adam Gale Monday, 30 November 2015 and Top 10 Billionaires Saving the Planet, by Sarah Backhouse, August 21, 2015.

That doesn't necessarily mean that one should agree with the solutions the multi-billionaires promote, or trust their motivations.  One reason to be skeptical about the solutions that get fielded when multi-billionaires mobilize is if you believe that, as we grapple with climate change, there won't be one "silver bullet" top-down solution.  Instead there will be a "mosaic of solutions" generated myriad fashion mostly from the bottom up. What's more Jane Jacobs ("The Economy of Cities") suggested that one upside to large populations is the multiplication of individuals and groups who can innovate to advance society and improve what we do.  If that's a theory you subscribe to, then leaving the half the world's population high and dry of a share of resources with which to participate negates that advantage.

Whatever good some billionaires like Tom Steyer may do with respect to climate battles like Mr. Steyer's opposing the Keystone XL oil pipeline there is all the weight of what is being done to counteract their better efforts.  Steyers is way down the Forbes list of the wealthy (#1190) and not even a multi-billionaire, with only an estimated $1.61 billion to his name.

We find this assessment of the fight between our financial giants at Bill Moyers' Moyers and Company site:

Fred Wertheimer, a long-time advocate of campaign finance reform, tells the Times that a political world where billionaires set the agenda is not a democracy. "This is about as far away as we can get from `representative government,'" he said. And when it comes to politically active billionaires, it would seem that there are more who profit from inaction on climate change than who want to see that action happen - not a good sign for those who agree with Steyer's politics.

See: Bill Moyers- The Billionaires on Both Sides of Climate Change, by John Light, February 19, 2014.

The Koch brothers are the prime example of such "politically active [multi-]billionaires."   With their combined wealth that exceeds that of any individual on the plant they are politically active, spending to fuel climate science denial and inaction about how we are raising the temperature of the earth and they are also fighting public health care (probably it's actually the same thing).

It is not just the first 62 multi-billionaires who are as wealthy as half the world.  What is remarkable is how many more multi-billionaires are up there on the Forbes list in the top sliver of the 1% fraction that holds more than half world's wealth.  You would probably not have to go far down the list before you had collected yet another small set of outrageously wealthy individuals who also collectively own and control more wealth than the poorest half of the world's population. The frightening thing is that many of those multi-billionaires also are either joining the Kochs in stymieing effective measures to address climate change, or they are doing little to prevent it.

For example at #100 on the list we find Stephen A. Schwarzman, head of the Blackstone Group, with an estimated personal wealth of $9.8 billion who lives in the same hugely energy inefficient building as David Koch.  (Great as Schwarzman's wealth is, it is just 8.76% of the combined wealth of the two Koch brothers, and far less than the $121.7 million which is the estimated combined fortune the three Waltons command.) Along with promoting fracking and a list of other objectionable activities, Mr. Schwarzman has been involved in selling off New York City Libraries.  The Oxfam report on escalating income inequality calls for a "three pronged approach" to counter that trend, one prong of which is "higher investment in public services."  Certainly the disinvestment of selling libraries (with Mayor Michael Bloomberg's approval) is the opposite of of such investment and what is otherwise called for if we are to start restoring equality.  The other two prongs called for by the report: are "a crackdown on tax dodging" and "higher investment in public services; and higher wages for the low paid.". .

. . .  As for tax dodging, Mr. Schwarzman has been famously aggressive in promoting what are viewed as dodgy tax loopholes. Mr. Schwarzman may be low on the Forbes list in terms of his wealth, but Forbes has compensatingly ranked him higher on another of its lists:  On the Forbes list of those with power in the world Forbes ranks Schwarzman as number 62.

It seems that Mr. Schwarzman has predilections to tilt the playing field on at least two fronts: Against those who could be trying to catch up and close the gap with him, and secondly, in favor of the tax system advantages that will continue to move him even further ahead.

Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary under Clinton, has a new book out, "Saving Capitalism For the Many, Not the Few," that addresses the escalating income inequality we see in the United States.  Median national household income is declining (after adjusting for inflation, an American family earns less in 2013 than it did in 1989) while productivity gains from economic growth collect at the top.  Mr. Reich tells us to remember these recent changes are not because of economics per se, but because of the way that the rules of the market are being written by those with wealth and power, people like Mr. Schwarzman.  . .

. . . Studying the law of property and property ownership in law school and urban planning school I was taught that the rules of property ownership are formulated based, in part, on concepts of what will ultimately benefit society, husband its resources and forestall waste.  The current decimation of our environment while wealth concentrates in the hands of a very few who mostly encourage this devastation or who sit idly by should be viewed as evidence that the rules we have now are not working and need to be rewritten.

Computer Hacker Takes Twisted Advantage of `Get The Rich Out Quick’ Scheme To Fleece Select Gaggle of the World’s Biggest Big-Wigs

"Rescue" helicopters winding up at an island at the bottom of the world?  Priceless. . because there are some things that maybe money just can't buy!

Here’s an astounding story that’s being downplayed and with good reason, given who is embarrassed and what nobody was ever supposed to know about the plans these potentates of power had for themselves . . . plans to that were to launch when/if civilization as we know it was coming to an end.  A computer hacker who had a good dollop of inside knowledge manipulated, leaving only the lightest of fingerprints, to turn a stand-by rescue plan for the world’s wealthiest and most privileged mucky-mucks into their private privilege to be roundly and soundly fleeced.  Over $53.5 billion has disappeared, transferred. . .  Where? . . .  For a while the fleeced tycoons, the hoity–toityest of the ultra-ultra had also themselves disappeared, but now, pretending they never left, they have been creeping back from an unplanned visit to an island at the bottom of the earth, a visit that only slightly resembled the trip they really planned.

What the hacker knew about and took advantage of was a company catering to a need the very wealthiest have evaluated and made contingency plans for that’s far beyond the ken or wherewithal of the rest of us: What happens when the world is coming to an end and society crumbles, civilization as we know it unraveling?  Maybe it’s the particular country or countries that normally serve as your home base where things have headed for terminal kerflooey, or maybe the troubles and political unrest are more infectiously pandemic?  What do you do?  You flee!  But first you need to be notified of the troubles, and you want to be notified before anyone else: No sense being caught up in a traffic jam.  In fact, you don’t want to worry about the kind of traffic that may jam at all, so you are prepared to take to the skies, lifted up the first leg of your journey commencing with a helicopter pickup.

That’s where the premier planning and services of Rapture U.S. come in, an American company that assures its super-elite clientele that it has an inside track on a need-to-know basis from the NSA on everything the privileged will need to know first in order to spirit themselves away to be essentially invulnerable as they decamp to the safety of private sanctuaries in the face of any pending collapse of world or political order.  The services of Rapture U.S. are two-fold: privately providing the informational cue that it is time to leave, and providing the aeronautic wherewithal to lift the financially eminent out of whatever location they are in to locations far away from conflict on privately-owned islands.

The benefits of private islands for the wealthy being written about in the New York Times in February.

Every detail of the escapes was represented to be thoughtfully attended to in advance.  For instance, there was no need to be concerned about emigration and customs matters due to arrangements Rapture, with its connections, put in place in advance.  The islands to which the monarchical magnates will retreat?: The islands together with all the secure structures erected upon them to pamper their arrivals all rise many meters above the significant escalations of sea-level rise predicted to come with severe climate change and a melting of the polar ice caps. Climate change is more than a planned-for possibility to be contingently dealt with through Rapture’s promised assurances, the inevitability of its arrival is described in Rapture’s promotional literature as a driving reason to sign up for its services.  This literature, available on an invitation-only basis, was sent to reporters after the hacking, apparently by the hacker himself.  It reads, in part:

In the relatively near future, climate change is predicted to bring about world-wide shortages of everything from food to inhabitable regions of the earth.  We can confidently predict that front-running the materialization of the very worst of these problems will be war, conflict, extreme political instability and the downfall of governments where the wealthy and their previously recognized privileges will undoubtedly be targeted for elimination. We know even now from our sources at the surveiling NSA that there is much chatter in numerous quarters too organic and diffusely disseminated to expect with a sufficient degree of certainty that biases in this direction will always be successfully squelched year after year into the future.

Through Rapture’s notification, even before the exact nature of the underlying base intelligence is declassified or otherwise revealed, you will be alerted and steered to an appropriate course of action prior to cataclysm-triggering events.   At Rapture’s cue and with Rapture’s help you will have initiated self-preserving sanctuarial action before world leaders have been informed of any set of unfolding imperatives, before they or others may be undertaking any alteration to the status quo potentially disruptive to your essential future options.

In essence, Rapture, with all the systems, procedures and all the pending protocols it put in place loaded the gun, and all the hacker had to do, breaking into its systems, was to pull the trigger and launch the sanctuarial rescue events sequences into operation with only slight modifications.   The helicopters rendezvoused with their pick-ups at designated locations, transported them to private airports with waiting planes and the planes ascended just as planned. This also triggered the "Part II payments" owed to Rapture by these sovereign czars of capital in the event of the rescue program’s activation.  That’s the money that, diverted from Rapture’s own bank account, seems to have gone missing.

Tasmania the island state south of the Australian continent, a day's boat trip from Melborne

Since the “rescues” were always supposed to be conducted with the utmost secrecy and based on information traded out to a few corporate partners including Rapture by the NSA without a compromising disclosure of the parameters of the intelligence gathered, it was days before the traveling barons of the one-percent’s-one-percent or those piloting them fully realized what had happened.  The first clue was that they were not transported to the expected private islands, but, after a longer trip than expected, to the island state of Tasmania part of and south of Australia, in one of the most remote parts of the world.  Transferring from a larger airport on the island's North West Coast with a flight to another nearby private airport, the arriving dignitaries were greeted with what was described as an “orientation” briefing, a lecture about how, after the Europeans arrived eliminating its native Aboriginal inhabitants, Tasmania had been one of Britain’s most notorious penal colonies, known at that time as Van Diemen's Land.  The “orientation” was given by a local historian and tour guide who said he had been hired via email with no knowledge about or reference to Rapture or its operations at all.

The hacking might never have happened at all.  The hacker, considering himself provoked, informed reporters in a transmittal that he conceived it out of a desire for vengeance.  Hitherto the hacker had been working as a reconnaissance photographer in New York City photographing and logging private airplane tail numbers for a financial information company that compiled and translated the data into financial investment advice utilizing the fact that the wealthy and corporate elite are increasingly using corporate and privately owned jets to facilitate private, face-to-face meetings with key deal makers and investors.  Data-collecting via the photography the company ascertained and used the flight plans of companies with corporate jets flying from “money centers” or other key corporate locations to predict such things as pending mergers and acquisitions or stock and bond maneuvers.   (See: Corporate Jets and Private Meetings with Investors.)

From this planespotting website.

In another corporate guise, Rapture U.S., via its sister corporation, Private Skies, Inc., made coordinated and more conventional use of the aviation assets Rapture might one day use.  Rapture and Private Skies, Inc. considered the data collection about its flight paths an infringement. Accordingly, it was a simple matter for them to exercise their influence and connections to have the NYC Department of Transportation eliminate the sidewalk space along the curb of the private airport road where photographers congregated to photograph the planes, thus eliminating the source of the photographers' livelihood.  The hacker, who had been free-lancing to sell his photographs under the assumed name of Justin Chase, apparently had limited other options for work for some reason relating to his use of the assumed name.  That’s when his research and hacking into the systems of  Private Skies, Inc. led the hacker to learn about Rapture U.S. and its operations, in connection with which he extracted his vengeance and, it may be presumed, vanquished any need for future employment.

The story of the get the rich out quick rescue scheme is being denied across the board by various official spokespersons for the world’s wealthy, but the hacker who sent reporters documenting details promised to send more confirming evidence of the Rapture U.S. scheme and the hack that overrode it, together with information that will disclose his actual identity.  The day that information is promised to be provided is today, April 1st.

Cloud Silver Linings Corporation Says Global Warming And Climate Change Won’t Be Bad As Was Feared Provided It Engineers Expected Benefits

Cloud Silver Linings Corporation man-made clouds to counteract climate change?

You were feeling glum about climate change?  You feared your grandchildren would grow up on an earth with nary a resemblance to the one humankind has inhabited over the millennia? . . . 

. . .  Your worries are over.  Cloud Silver Linings Corporation says it has perfected an answer: With a little ingenious engineering coupled with what it refers to as the “elbow-glitz” of some good old Madison Avenue know-how, it’s rising to the challenge and some obvious market investment opportunities presented.  It says it can guarantee that global warming and climate change won’t be anywhere near as bad as many nay-sayers were predicting.  In fact, for the luckiest who get in on the ground floor and buy in early, there is a chance to participate in some real profit.

Cloud Silver Linings started with the pertinent observations that clouds have always had some “really important benefits that those who think simplistically readily tend to overlook,” according to spokesperson Peter Strasser.   What's often overlooked?: The significant cooling effect clouds provide.

After 9/11- No contrails results in no clouds formed as a result

Contrail formation of clouds over Europe

Strasser, who eccentrically wears a small Belle Époque goatee and mustache, tends to finger his beard when he talks.  He noted how, with the 9/11 attacks, climatologists realized they had an unprecedented opportunity to scrutinize how the contrails from jets form clouds and lower global temperatures by dimming the light of the sun actually reaching the earth.  When for several days no planes were allowed to fly over the continental United States after 9/11, cloud formation from contrails ceased and the temperature of the United States consequently rose.

Scientist Beate Liepert in “Dimming The Sun” researching records relating to climate change in a library. 

The effect of clouds to reduce sunlight and accordingly reduce temperature has been proved.  Overall, in recent decades there has been an increase in clouds across the world that has been preventing sunlight from reaching the earth and that’s known as “global dimming.”  See: “Dimming The Sun” (video here).  To date, scientists are reasonably certain that “more than half the warming effect of our greenhouse emissions has been masked by the cooling effect of particle pollution.”  But, as Strasser points out, that’s only half the job needing to be done, and, what’s more, scientists predict the masking effect is temporary because when the man-made pollution resulting in the global dimming clears up the counteractive effect will end.

“Dimming The Sun” research records relating to climate change in a library. 

Cloud Silver Linings Corporation is ready to close the gap with man-made clouds.  The clouds would be permanent fixtures in the sky and carefully designed to be more highly reflective of sunlight than the ordinary clouds that come courtesy of Mother Nature.  “The `Silver Linings' part of our name isn’t just metaphorical,” says Strasser: “Because of the of the high degree of reflectivity of the clouds we manufacture the edges of our clouds will literally glint with a pleasing silvery brilliance.”  

The chemicals that were finally decided upon as being best to ensure cloud brilliance were actually discovered accidentally when experimenting with retardants to find what might make the clouds fire resistant. Maintaining brilliance is important because clouds tarnishing and turning brown will not only look like trouble on the horizon, they will actually absorb heat and put into the atmosphere.

Strasser said ideas for "geoengineering" solutions of this sort go back decades and include ideas like reflective films that would be let out in outer space, or sulfur, aerosols, or particulates that would be pumped up into the upper atmosphere.   (See: Scientists Dream Up Bold Remedies for Ailing Atmosphere, by William J. Broad, August 16, 1988, The Energy Challenge-Exotic Visions- How to Cool a Planet (Maybe), by William J. Broad, June 27, 2006 and Engineering a Cooler Planet, by Eric Etheridge, October 21, 2009.)

“Our solution is much more natural,” says Strasser.  “For instance, it doesn’t engender any changes of the sky color to purple or white as some proposals would.  Mankind was meant to live under a blue sky and it's probably evolutionary that blue skies make people feel happy.  People would just see more clouds in the sky, but the new clouds would be of a more beautiful variety.”

Furthermore, the clouds could be provided where most desirable and would be provided free.  The clouds could be steered away from areas designated by agreement for solar power collection. 
Silver Linings’ clouds technically wouldn’t be true clouds.  Engineered with a structure of ultralight nanotubes and nanofibers based on the chemical composition of spider silk (stronger that steal) the clouds would be able to retain shape.  Additionally, they would retain the positions in the air or navigate to new ones by integrating nanites or nanobots, microscopic solar powered flying machines that would cooperate, working together using simple swarm technology algorithms.  According to Silver Linings’ press releases the flying nanobots have already been largely developed by another company, Parthenogenic Solutions, which is readying the small flyers to replace bees for pollination when colony collapse disorder has done its worst.

To provide the clouds absolutely free and without cost to the public Cloud Silver Linings will produce them in the shape of advertisements that spell out the names of sponsoring corporations.  Cloud Silver Linings already has an exclusive contract for its first decade of operation to fill the skies with names of some biggies: Exxon Mobil, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, Conoco Phillips and Gazprom.  The smallest sponsor whose name you’ll see above?: An early investor in the corporation, T. Boone Pickens.  Pickens, a heavy promoter of hydrofracking who has also recently been making a name for himself by investing in the water resources that fracking makes much more scarce.

Pickens says he stands willing to invest in everything and anything, “it's all a matter of supply and demand” and on this, “the sky isn’t the limit, but the starting place to invest.”

Cloud Silver Linings’s claim to the sky space is already legally firmly locked up.  It litigated the matter under the provisions of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Treaty’s provision that allows foreign corporations to seize natural resources for corporate purposes like mining.  For those who where unaware that it is already possible to litigate these matters in secret tribunals prior to actual passage of the TPP, Strasser points out that since the provisions of the TPP under negotiation are being treated as “classified” there is a lot that people don’t know about the TPP, including its retroactive provisions.  “I can say no more,” said Strasser. (Working as a subsidiary of HD 'n Burg technologies Cloud Silver Linings has been structured to operate as a foreign corporation no matter where it is doing business in the world to ensure treaty protections.)

Bitcoin dividends?

Cloud Silver Linings is taking one other innovative leap into the future.  Its stock will be issued in exchange for U.S. dollars, but its dividends will be paid in bitcoin.  Borrowing a page from Bitcoin’s playbook using artificial scarcity to generating perceived value, Cloud Silver Linings will restrict issuance of its stock, issuing only annually on the same day of every year (provided it’s a weekday), April 1st.

Same clouds twenty minutes earlier

Dated on upper right hand corner of sky

If the Government Shutdown Wasn’t About Obamacare (And It Isn’t), Then It Was About?. . . Ready To Be Hot Under The Collar?

Montage above: Koch funded anti-healthcare creepy Uncle Sam ad, David and Charles Koch from Forbes 400 and from a story about  Koch funding of climate change science denial.

After a national election in which the Republican Party substantially lost the presidential election, lost the U.S. Senate, and lost the popular vote for the U.S. House of Representatives, the Republican Party has been deferring to a fractional extremist fringe within its ranks, allowing that faction to steer the whole country into a government shutdown and near default on all its financial obligations, theoretically to prevent the enactment of “Romneycare” (now renamed “Obamacare”).  Really?  Romney/Obamacare is a healthcare plan that was originally developed by and sought by the Republican Party.  It was ultimately adopted by President Obama as a concessional compromise that gave the Republican Party what it once said it wanted.

This is really why the government was shutdown and we went to the precipice of default at huge financial cost to the country?  That’s why we risked complete and total chaos in the economy?

Really and truly?

Absolutely not.  Think again.

There are quite a few theories about why the Republicans, chose to prostrate themselves before their Tea Party faction, shutting down the government.  None of them actually accurate.  They are:

    1.    Republicans believed that the Romney/Obamacare would be a complete and total disaster so damaging to the country that it was worth bringing the country to its knees, incapacitating it and threatening the very worst in order to prevent its rollout.

    2.    Republicans actually believe the opposite, that Romney/Obamacare will be a tremendous success, that Americans will wind up loving it and will become (as predicted by Republican Senator Ted Cruz) addicted to its “sugar” when implemented, making it impossible to repeal.  Since even Republicans, including very possibly subcategory Tea Party members might, when actually experiencing the law, decide they sincerely like the result of having healthcare, it is important to nip this in the bud . . .  because, if the Republican and Tea Party constituency realize that the doctrinaire lies they have been fed about Romney/Obamacare aren’t true, it could, among other things, undermine the future credibility of the Republicans and the Tea Party on other matters was well as this.

    3.    Republicans believe that being generally obstructionist will always benefit them in the polls.  (Not exactly the way things are working out.)

    4.    As expressed in a recent Paul Krugman column, Republicans are “deeply incompetent,” so much so that they “can’t even recognize their own incompetence.”  (See: The Boehner Bunglers, October 6, 2013.)

    5.    Shall we, for the sake of a more profound debate, stay away from the perception, often expressed by comedian-commentator Bill Maher (however much unfortunate truth may actually be in it) that Republicans oppose everything Obama does simply because Obama is black?

What is really going on?

Sometimes things in this world turn out as no one could expect, chance having its way, and unexpected results coming out of the blue.  But there are many other times when it is instructive to look at outcomes and assume they were intended from the start.  In this regard, it is valuable to note the recent and well-documented New York Times report that orchestration of the current shutdown crisis was planned way in advance, going back to at least January/February of this year.  According to the Times, “The billionaire Koch brothers, Charles and David, have been deeply involved with financing the overall effort.”  See: A Federal Budget Crisis Months in the Planning, by Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Mike McIntire, October 5, 2013, accompanying timeline graphic here: House Republican Efforts to Repeal or Weaken the Health Care Law, October 5, 2013.

So, are we to believe that the number one priority of the Koch brothers for which they would shutdown the United State government is denying healthcare to American citizens?

Within days of the Times article the Koch brothers through their chief corporate spokesperson issued a denial of involvement in the shutdown as part of an attack on the healthcare program with an October 9, 2013 letter.  Notwithstanding, when that letter is read carefully against the documented facts it is really not much of a denial.  See: Kochs Deny Pushing for Shutdown Over Health Law, October 9, 2013.

One hint that the manufactured crisis was never really truly about opposition to the Democrats’ passage of a  Republican-formulated healthcare law is that in the waning days of the crisis, as an immediate default on government obligations was about to be avoided, the dialogue had readily shifted from being about the healthcare bill to being about other things, mainly broader government spending and general budget matters.  Like defense spending?: No, that wasn't talked about. . .   One of the problems for the Republicans when they tried to halt the roll-out of Obamacare by defunding the government is that Obamacare is self-funded and therefore rolled out nonetheless.  The other indication of what all of this craziness this is really about is that resolutions sought by the Republicans involved kicking the can down the road with deferral of dates so that the nation will potentially be kept in a state of constant crisis with more of this craziness almost guarnteed to transpire again in the future.

If all this drama and damage to the country has not actually been about the Koch brothers wanting to block a healthcare program, what is it really about?   . . .   Instead of believing that the Koch brothers have an intense, burning and paramount desire to deny healthcare to Americans (which seems rather absurd), let's think about what the Koch brothers are really interested in and where they direct most of their other political spending: They direct that money to climate change science denial and to the frustration of any efforts to societally address the issue of global warming.

The Koch brothers are vastly wealthy and their wealth comes principally from the extraction of fossil fuels.  With an estimated personal wealth of $36 billion each this year, Charles and David Koch are now tied for fourth place on September’s Forbe’s 400 list.  If we think of them as a single united unit of family wealth then the Koch’s jump to the head of that Forbes list alongside of Bill Gates and place well ahead of the $58.5 billion that earns Warren Buffett his Number Two status on this list. Lesson to us all: The Koch’s wealth has been rocketing up concurrent with their involvement in politics.

Would American industrialists really do something as outrageous as wrecking the government for the sake of advancing their personal wealth and private industrial pursuits?  Is that so very different from putting the fate of the entire human race and the rest of the planet at risk with climate change— or simply a mere subset of such behavior?

How is the attack on healthcare and the government shutdown connected with efforts to fend off people doing something about climate change?  Just think what would be happening if we had not been embroiled in this silly mess about preventing Romney/Obamacare from going into effect: With a working government we would very likely be proceeding to the biggest priorities at hand.  We might therefore be taking measures to deal with climate change at this very moment.  Even if we weren’t dealing with climate change right now we’d certainly be getting to it considerably sooner.

For how many weeks and months has the issue of the pending government shutdown been consuming all the oxygen in the media for any discussion of anything else?  Attention everywhere has been diverted as we heard about this silliness 24/7 in ad nauseam detail.

It goes further than that.  At the same time that we haven’t we heard anything about what the government ought to be doing about climate change we also haven't heard about the reverse: We haven’t heard anything about the Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty (TPP) which will go a long way to prevent government from doing something about climate change.  In fact, most Americans are probably unaware that the TPP exists at all or that it is a stealth corporatist attack on government regulation, including government regulation of such fossil fuel climate change game-over business activities as hydro-fracking.  It is, if you will, another envisioned form of government shutdown, intended to replace government control of corporations with corporate control of governments.  See: Saturday, October 12, 2013, The Other Government Shutdown Now In The Works (One You Are Not Hearing About): A Corporate Replacement Of Government Via The Trans-Pacific Partnership Treaty.

At first blush it might seem odd that John Boehner, Speaker of the Republican House, would have sacrificed so much of the Republican Party's reputation, deferring to the Tea Party faction, the extreme end of his party financed by the Koch brothers, rather than letting majority rule solve the problems.  Of course, the analysis is offered that with such things as gerrymandered districts, average and middle-of-the-road Republicans are more afraid of being ousted in primaries than in being perceived by the general electorate as extremist, but it is important to know that the Kochs don't just finance the Tea Party.   The "moderates" are beholden to the Kochs as well, even before you consider whether Koch brother money can be used to threaten in primaries.

The visuals below are for the purpose of illustrating something the last set of election results have probably not significantly changed: How the Koch brothers have contributed to over half the members of the House and half the members of the U.S. Senate.  They are from the one-hour Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer) 2012 documentary “Park Avenue: Money, Power & the American Dream” about income inequality in America, including very particularly its corrosive effect on politics.

The Zeitgeist of the Tea Party, and now the Republican Party as well, is an extreme refusal to allow the government to work.  One can't help but notice that for the Koch brothers and their fossil fuel industries gridlock that preserves the status quo is a win.  So, yes, in this regard, those who perceive a working healthcare program as a threat to Republicans are in a sense right: Because if your goals is to have a dysfunctional government you want the public to see as few examples of successful government programs as possible.

But, I suggest to you, in the end, crippling the government is only an intermediate goal:  The end goal is to defer the day of reckoning for the industries like the Kochs' that are fast and furiously bringing us climate change that, unaddressed, we are less and less likely to survive.  Feel any heat under your collar?

The Other Government Shutdown Now In The Works (One You Are Not Hearing About): A Corporate Replacement Of Government Via The Trans-Pacific Partnership Treaty

It sounds like a science fiction vision of a futuristic dystopia, the kind of story whose horrific elements have been slathered on thickly to emphasize the “cautionary tale” a creative writer has dreamed up, one of those, not now, not here, not just yet, but “could be” essays commenting on what might go wrong in the future given the seeds we can observe in today’s society:

A select army of coordinating and elite-trained corporatist operatives, 600 strong, deploy around the world planning to replace government control of corporations with corporate control of governments.   Having found their more nefarious goals stymied by democracy and public debate, the corporations plan a secretive end-run around public process to supplant government with corporate supremacy and, in one fell swoop, enact, unfettered, their long wish list of desires, even at the cost of public health, welfare and the environment.  In the end, even the earth itself may be doomed as a result of this power grab.

The only problem is that this is not science fiction.  It is actually happening.  What I have just described is the move toward passage of something called Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty (“TPP”) and though it may sound like pure paranoia, the fact that political adversaries Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Occupy Wall Street are both among those very concerned about its effects should be a pretty good indication that the nightmare threats are very real.

The TPP gives corporations the right to tell governments to stand down from their functions of protecting the public.  That’s because, in the corporatist view, governments should not be allowed to interfere with the expectations that corporations and their investors have of receiving profits.  It has been described as giving corporations a new “corporate bill of rights” to make profits notwithstanding public detriment.

So, for example, in August New York’s Mayor Bloomberg wrote an Op-Ed published in the New York Times fearful that one result of the TPP’s passage would be that New York City could no longer regulate smoking the way it does because doing so would interfere with the profits the tobacco companies want to make.  The NYC Bloomberg era ban on smoking is considered a signature and, in retrospect, very popular (82% approval) achievement of the mayor’s administration, copied elsewhere around the world.

The TPP’s provisions are actually secret from those who are not among the 600 corporatists working on it, a problem we will get to in a moment.  Mr. Bloomberg, who apparently knew something about what was actually in the TPP about regulating smoking at various times, commented:

The early drafts of the agreement included a “safe harbor” provision protecting nations that have adopted regulations on tobacco — like package warnings and advertising and marketing restrictions — because of “the unique status of tobacco products from a health and regulatory perspective.” This provision would have prevented the tobacco industry from interfering with governments’ sovereign right to protect public health through tobacco control laws. 

(See: Op-Ed Contributor: Why Is Obama Caving on Tobacco? By Michael R. Bloomberg, August 22, 2013.)

Unfortunately, as Mr. Bloomberg was also aware, the tobacco industry successfully lobbied to have the provision removed.  Mr. Bloomberg complained about the agreement's alternative:

weak half-measures at best that will not protect American law — and the laws of other countries — from being usurped by the tobacco industry, which is increasingly using trade and investment agreements to challenge domestic tobacco control measures. 

    . . .  not only will cigarettes be cheaper for the 800 million people in the countries affected by the trade pact, but multinational tobacco corporations will be able to challenge those governments — including America’s — for implementing lifesaving public health policies. This would not only put our tobacco-control regulations in peril, but also create a chilling effect that would prevent further action, which is desperately needed.

There is actually something wrong with this picture of Bloomberg championing protection of the public health: It is Mr. Bloomberg’s very narrow focus about what is wrong with the TPP.  Tobacco is certainly an addictive poison the use of which governments would do well to curtail, but under the TPP it is not just anti-smoking measures, but virtually all public health protections that would be sacrificed or in jeopardy if they conflicted with a desire for corporate profit.

Elsewhere in his Op-Ed Mr. Bloomberg commends that (in his view):

The pact is intended to lower tariffs and other barriers to commerce, a vitally important economic goal.

And later he says:

I could not be more strongly in favor of trade agreements that expand economic opportunity here and around the globe.

In actuality, most of the TPP does not concern itself with these issues of trade.  The current version of the TPP has 29 chapters.  Of these, only five reportedly have to do with trade. The other 24 chapters involve a wide range of grabs by the corporations. Days ago Naked Capitalism commented that the TPP has been mis-branded as a “trade deal”:

The reason the label is misleading is that trade is already substantially liberalized; the real point of the TPP and its cousin, the pending EU-US trade agreement, is to weaken the power of nations to regulate, which will allow multinationals to lead a race to the bottom on product and environmental safety.

(See: Thursday, October 10, 2013, Will China’s Gambit to Undermine the Trans-Pacific Partnership Succeed?)

In this race to the bottom, what else would the TPP override in terms of public protections?  That’s where the problem of secrecy comes in.  Discussion of the treaty’s provisions is very difficult because the provisions under negotiation are being treated as "classified."  The army of 600 corporatist soldiers working on the document may be intimately familiar with the wish list items they are inserting, but the public is not allowed to know anything about them.  A good starter guess though is that anything that has to be secret is not good news for the public.

Said Senator Elizabeth Warren in September:

For big corporations, trade agreement time is like Christmas morning. They can get special gifts they could never pass through Congress out in public. Because it's a trade deal, the negotiations are secret and the big corporations can do their work behind closed doors. We've seen what happens here at home when our trading partners around the world are allowed to ignore workers rights, wages, and environmental rules. From what I hear, Wall Street, pharmaceuticals, telecom, big polluters, and outsourcers are all salivating at the chance to rig the upcoming trade deals in their favor.

Why are trade deals secret?  I've heard people actually say that they have to be secret because if the American people knew what was going on, they would be opposed.  Think about that.  I believe that if people would be opposed to a particular trade agreement, then that trade agreement should not happen.

Congress, which has exclusive authority to approve treaties (in this case both houses), is being asked to “Fast Track” the approval of this treaty  “But until this June, they were not even allowed to see the draft text,” according to Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, who explained that, after 150 members of Congress made a tremendous fuss, the situation now is that:

    . . members of Congress, upon request for the particular chapter, can have a government administration official bring them a chapter. Their staff is thrown out of the room. They can’t take detailed notes. They’re not supposed to talk about what they saw. And they can, without staff to help them figure out what the technical language is, look at a chapter.  This is in contrast to, say, even what the Bush administration did. The last time we had one of these mega-NAFTA expansion attempts was the Free Trade Area of the Americas. And in that instance, in 2001, that whole draft text was released to the public by the U.S. government on the official government websites. So, this is extraordinary secrecy, and members of Congress aren’t supposed to tell anyone what they’ve read. So, for instance, you know, Alan Grayson, who was one of the guys who helped to get the text released, Alan Grayson said, "I can tell you it’s very bad for the future of America. I just can’t tell you why." That’s obscene. 

(See: "A Corporate Trojan Horse": Obama Pushes Secretive TPP Trade Pact, Would Rewrite Swath of U.S. Laws, Democracy Now October 4, 2013.  A full Democracy Now transcript of the video below is available.)


The Obama administration reportedly wants to push through the “Fast Track” authority that would delegate Congressional authority for the treaty review to get it adopted by the end of this year-. . . That’s just months, practically a matter of weeks away, and yet the public knows virtually nothing about what that would mean.  “Fast Track” authority would limit the congressional lawmakers to an up-or-down vote on the TPP.  BTW: The current government shutdown may be a distraction from what is going on but it reportedly isn't slowing down the efforts to bring about this other envisioned shutting down of government functions via the TPP.

What kinds of things are crammed into the TPP?  TPP has been referred to as “son of SOPA” because it contains most of the intellectual property rights restrictions that corporations tried, and ultimately failed, to lobby through as part of “SOPA,” the “Stop Online Piracy Act.”  Remember that fight?  That was when Wikipedia and other internet sites shut down for a day to call attention to that law's proposed Draconian provisions (See: Wikipedia Blackout: 11 Huge Sites Protest SOPA, PIPA On January 18.)

The hotly debated SOPA amounts to 38 pages coming out of my printer.  Think of that as just one of the 25 non-trade related chapters of the TPP!  The money and the corporatists wanted to see that law passed but the public was against it.  Listed on Wikipedia 125 organizations supported the law while 222 opposed it and many others refused to support it: List of organizations with official stances on the SOPA and PIPA.

Here is a list of the corporate end-runs presently understood to be in the TPP that will give you an idea of why the TPP is often referred to as “NAFTA on steroids.”  Note that although there are 25 chapters full of non-trade related provisions, the list below doesn’t approach that number:

    1.    Limitations on food quality and food safety regulation.
    2.    Limitations on regulation of agriculture and forestry practices.
    3.    Limitations on environmental standards, and environmental protections (including provisions whereby corporations expect to be able to avoid having to pay for environmental damage).
    4.    Limitations on the regulation of toxins and poisons.
    5.    Limitations on climate policy measures.
    6.    Limitations on regulating energy markets.
    7.    Establishment of corporate rights to seize natural resources, including for such things as mining.
    8.    Protections for corporations to charge high and unregulated prices for such things as water, gas, energy, transportation and other utilities (unless government provides them to the public entirely without a fee).
    9.    Limitations on regulation of banks and the financial industry, including back doors for those institutions to get around what presently exists.
    10.    Restrictions on taxes such as a ban on the proposed “Robin Hood” tax on speculative Wall Street investments.
    11.    Restricting measures governments undertake to make medication affordable, including limiting generics and affordable medicines.
    12.    Limitations on other consumer health laws like those that deal with cigarettes. (Prevention of gun control regulation Mr. Bloomberg?)
    13.    Restrictions on internet freedoms and intellectual property rights (The “son of SOPA” provisions).
    14.    Effects on labor unions (see discussion below).
    15.    Give corporation new rights to sue governments that try to regulate them and entitle corporations to taxpayer-funded damages for such unpermitted regulation.
    16.    Elevate rights of corporations to a higher level equating them with governments.  It looks as if foreign corporations would thereby wind up empowered with greater rights than U.S. companies in the United States. 
    17.    Turn adjudication and resolution of these corporate rights matters over to new pro-corporate international foreign courts outside of and not bound by the existing legal systems.  The idea is that the those representing corporations seeking to assert their rights would rotate through taking their turn as the adjudicating judges.

Full-fledged world-wide dystopia as was described at the outset?  The twelve countries negotiating to put the TPP into effect (Australia, Brunei, Chile, Canada, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam) comprise about 26 percent to 30 percent of world GDP), but that overall reach can be expanded, partly, as Naked Capitalism points out, with the implementation of other parallel treaties.   The exploits of the James Bond super-villains, most of whom all had their own super-corporation empires, once seemed satisfyingly fantastical in scale, but most of them would have picked more sparingly from the above menu in concocting their world-domineering schemes. (In 2008's “Quantum of Solace,” my candidate for the most disappointing of the Bond franchise films, you had a fairly exact match for just one of the schemes above: The villain was a counterfeit environmentalist named “Greene,” whose goal was to monopolistically corner the market for water in Bolivia so as to be able to charge the populace higher prices.)

The above list, generically covering all the bases, manages to be automatically comprehensive about protecting all the worst possible corporate behaviors.  So, for example, those who perceive hydro-fracking to be a threat to our health, water, and with climate change the survival of much of the life on this planet, would lose all possible tools to address the practice.  The hard-fought fight to prevent fracking in New York State?: The industry would have achieved an end-run around it.

When I and others write to say that the TPP contains such disturbing provisions, are we wrong?  If they’d only make the TPP provisions public we’d know exactly what to worry about with accuracy and specificity.  Otherwise we just leave it to those working for Halliburton and Monsanto to assure us that the unpublished provisions they are stuffing into the bill will be as good for us as they will be for them!

Would foreign corporations doing business in the U.S. gain greater rights than domestic corporations?  Days ago, without bring up the advent of the TPP as a possible contributing reason, the New York Times was reporting:

From New York to Silicon Valley, more and more large American corporations are reducing their tax bill by buying a foreign company and effectively renouncing their United States citizenship.

(See: New Corporate Tax Shelter: A Merger Abroad, by David Gelles, October 8, 2013.)

The effect of TPP on jobs and labor unions in the United States under the TPP is not a simple discussion.  Many blame NAFTA for draining jobs out of the U.S.  It is true that when jobs go overseas other jobs can be created here in ways that are complicated and not easy to measure.  Many economists believe a liberal approach to free trade usually results in a net plus.  However, when our domestic labor unions compete with workers in other countries where workers rights are not enforced or don’t exist there is a serious race to the bottom problem.  The subject is too long and complex to debate in this short article, but that complexity too is another example of why passage of this secretly formulated corporate wish list cannot be rushed through without due and proper discussion and airing.

What then might the concerned citizen want to do about the TPP?    Contact your senators and congressmen.  Tell them you are concerned and that, at a minimum, the TPP should not be "Fast Tracked."

Here are sites at which to further educate yourself:

 •        Expose the TPP

 •        Public Citizen’s TPP Trade Watch site

 •        Sierra Club TPP page

 •        Occupy Wall Street TPP page

 •        Citizens Trade Campaign TPP page

 •        Amnesty International TTP information

 •        Public Knowledge TPP page 

 •        Electronic Frontier Foundation TPP webpage and petition

 •        Infojustice.org

 •        Food and Water Watch TPP page

There is a MoveOn Petition you can sign calling for no "Fast Tracking" of the the TPP:

  •        MoveOn Petition: Congress: Don't renew "fast track" authority

Here is a short, simple video to send around through social media: "Why you should care about the TPP."