“Schizophrenic Individualism”: Lonely Connection

Children near open sewer
 large slumKibera, Nairobi, Kenya 

In search of “Solidarity,” credible kindness

Excerpting, minor editing by Carolyn Bennett

In her article in “Chronicle of a Mess Foretold,” author and journalist Silvia Swinden writes,  “The TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership) and TTIP (The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, aka U.S.-EU ‘Free’ Trade Agreement) continue hurtling toward their coveted objective:

…to create the largest “free” trade zone ever seen in the world, in reality the largest U.S. and Multinational Corporations area of total control.

Nation states will be powerless to defend themselves (see Argentina v Vulture funds dress rehearsal in the news this week).

"Shock and Awe"
U.S. in Iraq

“China and Russia [are] negotiating the formation of a bloc to slow down this new advance of predatory capitalism. They are even talking about dropping the dollar as the international exchange currency for oil and for the accumulation of reserves.

“We know how that went when Saddam Hussein (sold Iraq’s oil in Euros) and [Muammar al-] Qaddafi (wanted to establish the Gold Dinar to sell Libya’s oil) went that way.

Anti-U.S. demonstration
in Libya

“So it is not surprising that Russia and China want to look big and powerful (in this case there are WMD [weapons of mass destruction] and they will not be hidden, rather likely they will be shown prominently) if the U.S. begins to make noises about ‘protecting human rights’ or ‘bringing democracy’ to their citizens.

“This advance of the neoliberal agenda was not lost to Silo [Argentine writer, philosopher and founder of the Humanist Movement] who in 1991 wrote his ‘First Letter to my Friends’ …. It is interesting to review it," she says, "not only because of its insights about the history of economic power and violence but also because it contains a fresh point of view about the new sensitivity that is developing and the way, a nonviolent way, it can be the basis for an alternative way … ── through reconstruction of the social fabric carried out by simultaneous personal and social change.”

 

This is an excerpt from Swinden’s posting of Silo’s 1991 First Letter to my Friends

“History demonstrates that peoples have advanced when they have demanded their rights from the established powers, and that social progress has clearly not been the result of some automatic trickle down’ of the wealth accumulated by one sector of society.… 

 “The regionalization of markets, like the demands for local and ethnic autonomy, underscores the disintegration of the nation state.… Since economic processes reflect human intentions and interests, in light of events, we see nothing to support the belief that those with control over the well-being of humanity are concerned with overcoming the difficulties of others less privileged than themselves.…”

Protests al-Assy Square
 Hama, Syria 2011

C

hange, Relationships among People

Protests Tahrir Square
Cairo, Egypt 2011

“Our companions at work, school, in sports—even old friends—have all taken on the character of competitors.… 

Anti-war 

Never before has the world been so closely interconnected, yet each day individuals experience a more anguishing lack of communication. 

Never before have urban centers been more populous, yet people speak of their ‘loneliness.’ 

 Never before have people needed human warmth so much as now, but any approach to another in a spirit of kindness and help elicits only suspicion.

Protests
Algiers, Algeria, 2011

 “This is the predicament to which our hapless people [have] been abandoned, each isolated individual being led to believe in the greatest unhappiness that he or she has something important to lose—an ethereal ‘something’ that is coveted by all the rest of humanity!”

H

uman Change

“In sharp contrast to other times, so full of empty phrases meant only to garner external recognition ──today people are beginning to find value in humble and deeply felt work, work done not to enhance one’s self-image, but rather to change oneself and bring about change in one’s immediate environment of family, work, and friendship.

“Those who truly care for people do not disdain this work done without fanfare, this work that proves so incomprehensible to those opportunists who were formed in an earlier landscape of leaders and masses—a landscape in which they learned well how to use others to catapult themselves to society’s heights.

Anti-war 

“When a person comes to the realization that schizophrenic individualism is a dead end,

…when they openly communicate what they are thinking and what they are doing to everyone they know without the ridiculous fear of not being understood,

…when they approach others not as some anonymous mass but with a real interest in each person,

Protests Jordan

…when they encourage teamwork in both the interchange of ideas and the realization of common projects,

…when they clearly demonstrate the need to spread this task of rebuilding the social fabric that others have destroyed,

Iran 1979

…when they feel that even the most ‘unimportant’ person is of greater human quality than some heartless individual whom circumstance has elevated to what is, for now, the pinnacle of success—

“When all this happens, it is because within this person

A.N.S.W.E.R. USA

destiny has once again begun to speak, the destiny that has moved entire peoples along their best evolutionary path, 

the destiny that has been so many times distorted and so many times forgotten, but is always reencountered in the twists and turns of history.

Arab Spring

Sources and notes

“Chronicle of a mess foretold: TTIP and TPP seen from Silo’s 1991 letter,” posted by Silvia Swinden, June 21, 2014, in Humanism and Spirituality, International, International issues, Nonviolence, http://www.pressenza.com/2014/06/chronicle-mess-foretold-ttip-tpp-seen-silos-1991-letter/

Dr. Silvia Swinden is Pressenza London Bureau Chief, retired Forensic Psychiatrist and Coordinator of the World Centre for Humanist Studies in the United Kingdom. She is also author of From Monkey Sapiens to Homo Intentional: The Phenomenology of the Nonviolent Revolution (Adonis & Abbey, London 2006), http://www.dw.de/swinden-dr-silvia/a-17629952

Silo

Argentine writer, philosopher and founder of the Humanist Movement, Silo (pseudonym of Mario Luis Rodríguez Cobos) gave speeches and wrote books, short stories, articles and studies related to politics, society, psychology, spirituality and other topics. His years January 6, 1938 – September 16, 2010, Mendoza, Argentina, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Rodr%C3%ADguez_Cobos

Images:

Children near open sewer in Kibera, a large Nairobi, Kenya, slum

Protests (center streaked) in al-Assy Square, Hama (Hamah), central Syria 2011

Protests with flag streamer Tahrir Square, Cairo, Egypt

Protests (between buildings) Algiers, Algeria

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Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy

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TPP Coup d’tat

Insidious breakdown, takeover
Editing by Carolyn Bennett

NAFTA-ites morph into TPP-ers

Many of the same people who pushed the William Jefferson Clinton-era NAFTA have been recycled into negotiators for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) pact. Explaining the TPP, Global Trade Watch founder Lori Wallach said in June on the Democracy Now program (she also appeared today on KPFK’s “Connect the Dots with Lila Garrett”) the TPP is a “one-percenter fantasy.”

The moneyed class, she said, kept fighting and fighting with money and lobbying until they got the draft “trade” pact they wanted, a pact that is locked in, disestablishing, and everlasting.

Coup d’tat in Global Corporate Governance

The Trans-Pacific Partnership threatens to become a regime of binding global governance, Wallach said. Though it is branded a trade agreement, “it is in fact enforceable corporate global governance.

The agreement requires that every signatory country conform all of its laws, regulations and administrative procedures to what are 26 chapters of very comprehensive rules, only two of which have anything to do with trade.

The other 24 chapters set a whole array of corporate new privileges and rights and handcuff governments, limit regulation.

A leaked chapter (See website Citizens Trade Campaign, a national coalition for fair trade) sets up new rights and privileges for foreign investors, including their right to privately enforce this public treaty by ─

Suing the U.S. government

Raiding the U.S. Treasury over costs of complying with policies all U.S. companies must comply with.

These agreements, Lori Wallach said, have become “bolder, more expansive in their limits on government regulation and in granting of corporate powers,” she said. The way the agreement is being negotiated, its rules would require not only changing or getting rid all of good progressive laws in the United States; but also thwarting creation of new progressive laws in the future.

Since the process is open, other countries may enter after the deal is done; and ultimately the agreement could have the whole world in it “as a set of binding corporate guarantees of new rights and privileges ─ enforced with cash sanctions and trade sanctions.”

“This is their fight-back,” Wallach said, a document that locks in and magnifies “the bad old way.”  

LORI WALLACH

She is a well-established, well-informed and widely sought-after expert on globalization and international commercial agreements. She is author of Whose Trade Organization? A Comprehensive Guide to the WTO (2004) and contributor to numerous anthologies including Alternatives to Economic Globalization: A Better World Is Possible.

Described in the National Journal as ‘the Trade Debate’s Guerrilla Warrior’ and by the Institute for International Economics as ‘Madame Defarge of Seattle,’ Lori Wallach is a founder of the Citizens Trade Campaign, a national coalition of consumer, labor, environmental, family farm, religious, and civil rights groups representing over 11 million Americans. She now serves on its board and is also a founding board member of the International Forum on Globalization and serves on this board.

Lori Wallach is Director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch division. She launched Global Trade Watch in 1995 and is a leader in the global citizen movement for fair trade and investment policy. Public Citizen, a nonprofit citizen research, lobbying and litigation group based in Washington, D.C., was founded in 1971.

Working closely with civil society, scholars, and activists in developing countries and with U.S. congressional, environmental, labor, and other allies, Wallach has played an important role in fostering the growing debate about implications of different models of globalization on jobs, livelihoods and wages; the environment; public health and safety; equality and social justice and democratically accountable governance.

Wallach and Global Trade Watch have been U.S. leaders in successful fights against proposed ‘Fast Track’ legislation in 1997 and 1998 and, working with international partners, the defeat of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), the proposed ‘Millennium Round’ of WTO negotiations at the 1999 Seattle WTO Ministerial, the proposed WTO expansion at the 2003 Cancun WTO Ministerial and the derailing of the proposed FTAA hemispheric NAFTA expansion. Global Trade Watch’s leadership in the campaign against the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) NAFTA expansion contributed to creating a U.S. debate over that economically modest pact that required two-years, the U.S. President’s continued personal intervention and a major corporate campaign to eke out a one-vote margin of passage. CAFTA specifically and trade generally proved a prominent political issue in the U.S. midterm 2006 elections with more than 100 candidates for House, Senate and Governor campaigning on ‘fair trade.’ Current projects include efforts to stop NAFTA expansions to Peru, Colombia and Panama, as well as replace Fast Track with a new mechanism that restores Congress’ constitutional authority in trade policy-making. Other projects include empowering state legislators in numerous states to enact new procedures and policies which provide them a voice in international ‘trade’ negotiations which affect their authority and work with a global network on the WTO and especially WTO service sector privatization and deregulation negotiations.

Wallach has served as a trade commentator on Democracy Now, CNN, ABC, CNBC, C-SPAN; and regularly on All Things Considered and PBS’s The NewsHour. She is a Harvard-trained lawyer who has promoted the public interest regarding globalization and international commercial agreements in every forum: Congress and foreign parliaments, the courts, government agencies, and the media.  

Sources and notes

Lori Wallach of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch on secretive trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)

On Democracy Now!

“Breaking ’08 Pledge, Leaked Trade Doc Shows Obama Wants to Help Corporations Avoid Regulations ─ The Obama administration is pushing a secretive trade agreement that could vastly expand corporate power and directly contradict a 2008 campaign promise by President Obama,”  June 14, 2012, http://www.democracynow.org/2012/6/14/breaking_08_pledge_leaked_trade_doc

Lori Wallach biography at http://www.shesource.org/experts/profile/lori-wallach; and http://www.citizen.org/trade/article_redirect.cfm?ID=17010

Lori Wallach appeared today on “Connect the Dots with Lila Garrett,” August 6, 2012, http://www.kpfk.org/programs/67-connect-the-dots-with-lila-garrett.html

NAFTA

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is an agreement signed by governments of Canada, Mexico, and the United States, creating a trilateral trade bloc in North America. The agreement came into force on January 1, 1994. It superseded the Canada – United States Free Trade Agreement. As of 2010, the trade bloc (in terms of combined GDP of its members) was the largest in the world. NAFTA has two supplements: the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation (NAAEC) and the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC).

Criticism of NAFTA

Canada

The Vanishing Country (published by Mel Hurtig in 2002) charges that since NAFTA, more than 10,000 Canadian companies were taken over by foreigners. Ninety-eight percent (98 percent) of all foreign direct investments in Canada were for foreign takeovers.

United States

In the period 1994-2007, U.S. net manufacturing employment declined by 3,654,000. During this period, several other free trade agreements have been concluded or expanded.

Mexico

In the year 2000, the U.S. government subsidized the corn sector totaling $10.1 billion giving rise to charges of dumping and jeopardizing Mexican farms and Mexico’s self-sufficiency in food. Studies have charged NAFTA with depressing incomes of poor corn farmers, destroying peasant cooperative village holdings, and threatening to completely reverse gains made by rural peoples. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Free_Trade_Agreement#Criticism_and_controversies

Image at Press TV: Stop TPP
Image at http://www.citizenstrade.org/ctc/blog/2011/09/12/photos-from-the-chicago-week-of-action-on-trans-pacific-trade/: Lori Wallach of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch at

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Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy
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