Features

TRANS-PACIFIC PARTNERSHIP: STRICT SECRECY

by Pete Dolack, Systemic Disorder

The secret Trans-Pacific Partnership is about to become even more secret, perhaps seen as a necessity in light of plans to make it easier for tobacco companies to sue while making health care more difficult to obtain.

Stop TPPThe governments negotiating the draconian TPP still don’t want you to know what’s in it. Many of them issued cheery press releases congratulating themselves for the "progress" they made last week in Brunei. But you will search in vain for any information on what TPP negotiators are up to. They will now end their practice of "consultation"—the August 23 to 30 negotiations (the 19th round) are the last scheduled. Instead, negotiators will begin to meet in unannounced meetings.

In other words, not only is the text of the TPP to remain a secret, the negotiations themselves are to now be secret.

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GLOBAL WARMING'S ARCTIC FEEDBACK LOOP

Supertankers to Ply the Great White Slushie

by Michael I. Niman, ArtVoice

Global warming has triggered an array of environmental feedback loops, such as one starting with the melting of permafrost, which exposes frozen bogs, unleashing ancient methane—a greenhouse gas with 20 times the climate impact of carbon dioxide—whose subsequent increase in the atmosphere accelerates warming, causing more permafrost to melt, exposing more bogs, releasing more methane.
 
While the speed at which some of these environmental loops have kicked in has caught scientists by surprise, predictions of their emergence has long been central to climate science. Less predictable, however, are the insane human behavior feedback loops, where the warming climate triggers a self-destructive pathological greed within corporate culture, ultimately driving humans to find new ways to accelerate climate destruction, and ultimately, the destruction of their own societies.

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GUANTANAMO JUSTICE: NO JUSTICE AT ALL

by Caitlin McNamara, Jurist

This year will mark the twelfth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks, yet the five men accused of planning those attacks may not go to trial for years. At Guantánamo, where a military commission has been created to try the accused, the prosecution and defense are still arguing basic procedural issues, like how the defense lawyers can communicate with their clients.

In August, I watched at Guantánamo as days of argument were devoted to preliminary issues such as which witnesses should be compelled to testify, to what types of information parties are entitled, and whether the military commission itself violates the US Constitution. But the proceedings were dominated by constant complaints from defense counsel about a lack of access to important information and attempts to resolve procedural issues.

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SYRIA: IT'S STILL A REVOLUTION, MY FRIENDS

Syrian civil resistance

by Mohja Kahf, Fellowship of Reconciliation

No matter what your position on the potential US strikes on Syria (I'm against), all I ask is, DON'T be a hater who denies the existence of the grassroots youth who began the Syrian revolution out of hope for real freedom and out of their rising expectation for real change, hope that had nearly died in the fifty-year police state that has ruled Syria. Try to remember to have some compassion for a Syrian who might be in the vicinity, before you mouth off in the abstract on the issue; we face news every day of our friends and our relatives being killed and imprisoned. Take time to get to know about a few of them, the Syrian rev youth activists who started it all, in hundreds of towns across Syria, before you speak about Syria based on what happened in Iraq or Lebanon or Country X.

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SOLIDARITY BETRAYED

How Sections of the Left Came to Abandon Syria

by Martin Pravda, International Socialist Network, UK

On the same day as it was announced that the ousted Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak will be released from prison following the massacres of hundreds of supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, reports circulated that the Syrian regime under the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad had embarked on a chemical attack on its population. Disturbing footage quickly emerged of hundreds of dead and dying people in the opposition-controlled area of Ghouta just outside of Damascus. Images of some of the bodies showed skin turning yellow with visible white foaming at the mouth, proving the reports to be accurate. As the hours went on it emerged that over a thousand people had died as a result of being gassed. This was immediately broadcast across Western media outlets as international pressure once again built up against the regime.

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REVOLUTIONARY EGYPT

The Worst of Times, the Best of Times…

by Matt Meyer, New Clear Vision

There is a reason why so many internationalists have had hard times writing clearly about Egypt since the end of June 2013. There is a reason why in English the words "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times" resonates so. The cultural chasms and the political complexity of Egypt's ongoing revolutionary moments will not lend themselves easily to short statements or translated sound bites... but we remain distant from, or dispassionate about these events at our own grave peril. Nothing less than our collective, twenty-first century understandings of such terms as "democracy," "revolution," and "violence/nonviolence" are being forged on the streets of Egypt today.

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HISTORY REWRITTEN

Egypt's Battle Over Narratives

by Ahmed Kadry, openDemocracy

CAIRO — Egypt has been blown in various different political and ideological directions for over two and a half years. Yet, despite these tumultuous changes in its ever-complicated political paradigm, the date of January 25 2011 seemed forever immune to whatever was happening in the present, the undisputed start date of Egypt's glorious, peaceful revolution—until now.

The ouster of President Mohamed Morsi on July 3 sent events in Egypt into overdrive, and for the first time, the narrative of the January 25 Revolution finds itself under suspicion. The revolution was revered as a demographically inclusive movement against tyranny and corruption—against continued nepotism and social injustice—a refusal to allow Egypt to continue to be governed as if it were one man's personal fiefdom.

Yet, for the first time, under the auspices of General Abdel Fattah El Sisi, the head of Egypt's military and the country's most powerful man, the narrative on January 25 has begun to be mixed in with the restrictive and biased binaries that currently plague Egyptian politics and its domestic life alike.

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MILITARY SEEKS EGYPTIAN THERMIDOR

by Kevin Anderson, International Marxist Humanists

On August 14, 2013, Egypt's military-police apparatus stormed two largely peaceful encampments of the Muslim Brotherhood, using live ammunition and armed bulldozers to kill thousands and injure many thousands more.  On that horrific day, the entire revolutionary process that began in 2011 reached a crisis point, one that held the possibility of its unraveling in the face of outright counter-revolution.

The military's desire to move the country back toward the iron dictatorship of the Mubarak era was troubling enough, but what made August 14 a tragedy in the deepest sense was that they seemed, at least for the moment, to enjoy the support not only of Mubarak loyalists, but also many elements of the revolutionary and democratic movements that traced their origin to the non-Islamist wings of the 2011 revolution.  This was especially true of Egyptian liberals.

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