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Moyers & Company
Nov. 1, 2013
MoyersandCompany
A cornerstone of President Obama’s plan to create more American jobs is a new agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), referred to by some as “NAFTA on steroids.” While negotiations are being carried out in secret and very little about the terms has been leaked, enough is known to worry about its possible effect on trade unions and our copyright and patent laws, not to mention environmental, health and safety regulations.
This week on Moyers & Company, Bill discusses the TPP with two perceptive observers of the global economy. Yves Smith is an expert on investment banking who runs the Naked Capitalism blog, a go-to site for information and insight on the business and ethics of finance. Dean Baker is co-director of the progressive Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC.
Also on this week’s broadcast, a preview of Robert Greenwald’s new documentary, Unmanned: America’s Drone Wars. It’s release coincided with a first: victims of deadly drone attacks testified at a special briefing for members of Congress. In this week’s show we feature clips from the film, which shares testimony, stories and alarming news on the fatal impact of our drone strategy.
see
New Film Exposes Secret U.S. War + Unmanned: America’s Drone Wars
Drone Island in the East River by David Swanson
#TPP: Back-room Deal for the 1%
Obama Pushes Secretive TPP Trade Pact–Lori Wallach: The #TPP is A Corporate Trojan Horse
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With prospects of seniors ending up buying pet food in order to stay alive, pet food companies will be laughing all the way to the bank. What an anti-social country! No morals, no ethics, no compassion…
Easier said than done. The poor don’t have the money to buy the products and those desperate for jobs will work for any starving wage offered by any company. It is a vicious circle. Go after the real culprits: the corrupt politicians.
Very true peskyvera, a devastating crisis is erupting. Hence the necessary emphasis I would urge, on community values, self-sufficiency, sharing, transition tactics, business ethics, innovation, inspiration, demonstrations of solidarity & resistance ~ and the grave need for coherent resilience.
Political “orgasms” can be faked, and jingoistic displays of establishment “authority” ~ but not the living integrity of the Earth.
You are right of course about corrupt officials in particular; the most powerful weapon as Aristotle suggested, is satire.
So, go for the jugular…why not?
One clear conclusion needs to be drawn here.
The world is far too big, too complex and too unpredictable to be coerced by a single top-down organizing principle. The corporatized “spaceship Earth” paradigm is simply not adequate to the task.
It may be predictable, but not inevitable, that industrial magnates will attempt to harness all of our global productive energies, and attempt to control the destiny of Earth-life by condemning the majority to perpetual serfdom. Tycoon logic is not the only form of discourse. In fact, it is neither logical nor really discursive at all. It is dictatorial and ideologically fanatical, driven by dogma, prejudice and statistical disinformation. Far more coherent narratives exist, and need to be voiced more widely.
Chris Hedges advocates civil-disobedience, and for worthy reasons. There are other ways to protest though, and I would suggest that a most powerful and effective method is to boycott goods produced by companies whose practices are both ecocidal and genocidal.
If we don’t like their capitalist policies and totalitarian practices, we should starve them of their illicit profits and the “oxygen” of glamorous publicity; since desperate greed is their prime motive, threats and compulsion their pragmatic method, & propaganda their only means of persuasion.
Don’t buy it!