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Opposition in Belgium has collapsed. The ‘Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement’ (CETA) is to be passed after all. It’s really not surprising. In fact, it was inevitable. There can be little doubt that all the other secretive, underhand, so-called ‘Trade’ agreements will also eventually pass into law.

Had it not been for WikiLeaks no-one, except those few individuals privy to the negotiations, would have known what was involved until the contents were eventually made public – if ever. It’s ironic that, in just over a week, elections will be held by the major power behind these clandestine agreements. Elections held in the name of democracy.

That same power has been blasting Middle Eastern nations apart for the last few decades in the guise of ‘spreading freedom and democracy’. The phrase has become synonymous with ’empire-building and subjugation’. America, in the form of the United States, has changed the very meaning of ‘democracy’ in its bid to control all the nations of the planet. It sees itself as the ultimate force for good against those who would live by different rules – those it regards as ‘evil’.

For that’s what America’s engaged in today, the fight of good against evil. But only as it sees the world, not as the world truly is. Torture, napalm, depleted uranium, white phosphorus, incarceration without trial, sexual humiliation, assassination by remote control, even the pigeon-holing of many thousands of dead innocents as ‘collateral damage’ – are these the tools used by ‘good guys’ fighting evil? No! They are the very embodiment of evil – the tools of evil, the weapons of some of the worst, most evil, criminals in our history.

Not only is the United States, together with its puppet allies, waging evil war for its own gain, it has another arrow in the bow of supreme domination – that of economic control. Super-Capitalism has become the other weapon in the armoury. Huge corporations, expanding like cancerous growths in the body of humanity, seek new markets and fresh businesses to engulf and swallow like some grotesque, science-fiction, monster devouring all in its path.

US telecoms giant AT&T has announced that it will buy entertainment group Time Warner for nearly $86bn (£70bn).
The deal – one of the biggest this year – still needs approval from regulators.
If the takeover goes through, it would combine AT&T’s distribution network with content from the Warner Brothers film studios and the cable TV channels HBO and CNN.
AT&T’s chairman described it as “a perfect match” but critics say it concentrates too much media power.
The deal is likely to be closely scrutinised by US antitrust regulators. AT&T is already the third largest cable TV provider in the US.
Randall Stephenson, who is both chairman and chief executive of AT&T, said he did not anticipate any regulatory obstacles, saying any concerns could be overcome if concessions were made.
“This is a perfect match of two companies with complementary strengths who can bring a fresh approach to how the media and communications industry works for customers, content creators, distributors and advertisers,” he said. ^[1]

The merger of AT&T and Time Warner is just the latest mega-deal in the pipeline. Note that the deal is to be “closely scrutinised by US antitrust regulators.” It will almost certainly pass that scrutiny, even though some publicity may be given to certain ‘concessions’. And we can forget the baloney spouted by Mister Randall Stephenson (who, not-incidentally, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a major think-tank advising the U.S. government on foreign policy issues). This merger is all about profits.

The Western world, though large, has geographical limits on corporate ambition. Where to find such corporate succour when America and the West are no longer large enough to sustain it?

Hence the welcome mat rolled out in the form of CETA, and the TPP, and all the other ‘Trade’ agreements that will follow in time. A world of free trade where U.S. companies can devour their rivals abroad with impunity. Once these ‘Trade’ agreements are passed there’ll by no more ‘regulators’. It’s been cleverly written into CETA and the TPP that any government regulation stifling profits will cost the tax payers dear. We are witnessing the greatest hand-out of power to the Masters of Super-Capitalism the world has ever seen.

Can it be stopped? No, it can’t. Many have tried, but all have failed. Once, it could have been stopped at the ballot box. But then there was still democracy. Democracy is now dead. When Americans go to the polls on November 8th, who will they be voting for? In truth, two evils. There is no ‘lesser’.

Clinton is a proven war-hawk and has been working hand-in-glove with her President for the last four years to bring the Trans-Pacific Partnership and The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (now neatly relabelled CETA and served up as stew instead of goulash) to fruition. She says she’s no longer in favour of it, but she is lying through her teeth. It’s one of Clinton’s greatest assets. It’s why the corporations, usually Republican, are backing her over Trump. They know she’ll lie for them easily once she becomes president, as has the present incumbent. A glib, lying, tongue, capable of sounding sincere in public, has become a U.S. president’s greatest asset.

Trump also states he’s not in favour. He may not be now, but he’ll be ‘persuaded’ to change his mind if he’s ever elected – which is highly unlikely as the big guns of corporate power have been blasting away at him from the time of his nomination.

The electorates of the world are easily manipulated. Gone are the days when ordinary folks were prepared to die for their rights. Now, it’s much easier just to complain to each other on Twitter or Facebook.

It won’t happen overnight, but the time is approaching when we will all be forced to face the truth of what’s happening to the world we inhabit. CETA and TPP are just steps on the way to new forms of government – corporate government, where all that matters is profit, and broken human lives are just more ‘collateral damage’.

^{[1] “AT&T seeks to buy Time Warner for nearly $86bn” BBC, October 23rd 2016}

Chrystia Freeland doesn’t just reside in Canada. She also inhabits Cloud Cuckoo Land.

The latest news on the ‘Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement’ (CETA) is that the European Union says it’s hopeful it will still go ahead despite being blocked by Walloon and two other French-speaking areas of Belgium. This will please the Canadian Minister for International Trade, Chrystia Freeland, who’s been pushing hard to clinch a deal with the E.U..

It’s difficult to comprehend why Ms Freeland is so keen to hand Europe and Canada over to the corporations, given that back in June 2013 she gave a talk condemning plutocracy and suggesting “we [the people] need a New Deal.” Below are some excerpts:

…we’re living in the age of surging income inequality, especially at the top. What’s driving it, and what can we do about it?

One set of causes is political: lower taxes, deregulation, particularly of financial services, privatization, weaker legal protections for trade unions, all of these have contributed to more and more income going to the very, very top.

A lot of these political factors can be broadly lumped under the category of “crony capitalism,” political changes that benefit a group of well-connected insiders but don’t actually do much good for the rest of us. In practice, getting rid of crony capitalism is incredibly difficult…

…I’m even more of a fan of globalization. This is the transformation which has lifted hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest people out of poverty and into the middle class, and if you happen to live in the rich part of the world, it’s made many new products affordable — who do you think built your iPhone? — and things that we’ve relied on for a long time much cheaper. Think of your dishwasher or your t-shirt.

Globalization and the technology revolution, the twin economic transformations which are changing our lives and transforming the global economy, are also powering the rise of the super-rich…One of the things that worries me is how easily what you might call meritocratic plutocracy can become crony plutocracy. Imagine you’re a brilliant entrepreneur who has successfully sold that idea or that product to the global billions and become a billionaire in the process. It gets tempting at that point to use your economic nous to manipulate the rules of the global political economy in your own favor. And that’s no mere hypothetical example. Think about Amazon, Apple, Google, Starbucks. These are among the world’s most admired, most beloved, most innovative companies. They also happen to be particularly adept at working the international tax system so as to lower their tax bill very, very significantly. And why stop at just playing the global political and economic system as it exists to your own maximum advantage? Once you have the tremendous economic power that we’re seeing at the very, very top of the income distribution and the political power that inevitably entails, it becomes tempting as well to start trying to change the rules of the game in your own favor…

…Those same forces that are creating billionaires are also devouring many traditional middle-class jobs. When’s the last time you used a travel agent? And in contrast with the industrial revolution, the titans of our new economy aren’t creating that many new jobs. At its zenith, G.M. employed hundreds of thousands, Facebook fewer than 10,000. The same is true of globalization. For all that it is raising hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the emerging markets, it’s also outsourcing a lot of jobs from the developed Western economies…

Today, we are living through an era of economic transformation comparable in its scale and its scope to the Industrial Revolution. To be sure that this new economy benefits us all and not just the plutocrats, we need to embark on an era of comparably ambitious social and political change. We need a new New Deal.^[1] [my bold]

This woman is living in Cloud Cuckoo Land. She admits the rich are getting richer at the expense of the rest of us. She then lays out the political causes (low taxes, financial deregulation, etc.), which are due to weak and corrupt government bending to the lobbyists and corporations, yet she’s happy to push CETA which will hand even more power to the corporations.

She then refers to globalization as lifting “hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest people out of poverty and into the middle class,” before berating Amazon, Apple, Google, and Starbucks for being “adept at working the international tax system so as to lower their tax bill very, very significantly,” because, “Once you have the tremendous economic power that we’re seeing at the very, very top of the income distribution and the political power that inevitably entails, it becomes tempting as well to start trying to change the rules of the game in your own favor.”

She seems totally oblivious to (for example) the 100,000 employees at the Chinese mega-company, Pegatron, who work sixty to eighty hours a week for $1.60 an hour, making the iPhones and iPads for Apple, one of our “most admired, most beloved, most innovative companies.” I doubt that those 100,000 workers have yet made it to the middle class. And that’s from just one Chinese factory. What of the numerous clothing-factory workers in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri-lanka, etc., etc., whose lives are miserable due to foul working conditions and beggarly wages, so Westerners can buy cheap clothes from Asda, Walmart, and many other retail chains whose board members grow wealthier by the minute? This is the real-life globalization.^[2]

Yes, indeed, it becomes all too tempting once one has economic power, “and the political power that inevitably entails,” to start trying to change the rules of the game in your own favor.”

That’s very true, Ms Freeland. We see it all the time since the advent of globalization. We see corporations banding together for even greater political power. We see them coercing heads of state – even the President of the United States, himself – into pushing secretly concocted ‘Trade’ agreements like the TPP, TTIP, and let’s not forget, CETA, onto the people who elected them democratically. These ‘agreements’ will do nothing for those people, but hand so much power to the corporations that democracy will be killed off and wealth will continue to flow ever more readily into the coffers of the stinking rich.

Frankly, Ms Freeland, if this is your ‘New Deal’, it can only be because you’ve sold out your principles to the corporations you obviously pretend not to represent.

^{[1] “The Rise Of The New Global Super Rich Chrystia Freeland, TED Talks, June 2013}

^{[2] “Apple making big profits but Chinese workers’ wage on the slide” China Labor Watch, August 24th 2016}

The BBC, along with other media outlets, has been attempting to whitewash a trade deal (ostensibly between the E.U. and Canada) known as CETA, and bemoaning the fact that after nine years of negotiation one small enclave of Belgium is preventing the ‘Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement’ from becoming a working reality.

Media outlets that represent the people, rather than big business, are lauding the efforts of the Belgium region of Walloon (pop: 3.6 million) in blocking CETA, even though the E.U. Commission is desperate to go ahead with the deal.

Others, like the German nationalistic news Service, DW, print lies to try and demolish opposition to CETA:

It is an extraordinary political spectacle: a region that makes up only 0.7 percent of the European Union population is holding the rest of the half-a-billion people in the bloc hostage…^[1]

Well, that might be true if the “half-a-billion people in the bloc” were in favour of it. According to polls, most of them aren’t.

Or, Tim Worstall writing in Forbes:

Euro-crises have a habit of working this way. Some region, country, states that such and such will never happen and everyone scrambles around for a few days shouting at each other. At which point some deal to build a bridge with EU money, locate a European ministry or some such is announced and the grumbles all go away. At best this is the way that the arguments about Ceta are going to resolve. At worst, of course, everyone might actually obey the law as it is and allow Wallonia, that region of 3.5 million people, to deny the benefits of free trade between Canada and the EU to the other 500 million of the EU and the 35 million of Canada. ^[2]

Again, apparently, we poor folk are missing out on this great deal because a few million European plonkers are holding us to ransom.

There are some who will benefit from these so-called ‘trade agreements’. The well-off business people and corporate executives of this world stand to become much wealthier and more powerful at the expense of us ordinary folk. People like Carolyn Fairbairn, for example.

In an article on its website from June this year (one week prior to the E.U. referendum), the BBC argued the case for CETA by quoting the mouthpiece of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), Carolyn Fairbairn.

Fairbairn is exactly the right person to ask about CETA, if all you want is gushing praise for the trade agreement. She just happens to be an ex-BBC executive, an ex-ITV (second-largest U.K. TV company) executive, an ex-Lloyds Bank executive, an ex-Financial Services Authority (FSA) executive, is now Director-General of the Confederation of British Industry, and is married to a multi-millionaire property developer – who just happens to be Canadian.

She’s not the ideal personage for the BBC to call on to give unbiased advice to the British public on a highly controversial trade deal with Canada. Also, what she says makes no sense at all. Note the quote attached to the above image:

The Leave campaign has said we should be more like Switzerland, Norway, Canada, or even perhaps Albania, but all these countries say they’d rather be like the UK. ^[3]

How can the countries she mentioned “…be more like the UK.”? The U.K. was still a full member of the E.U. and the referendum a week away when this was said. Is she suggesting Norway and Switzerland would prefer to be full members of the E.U.? No, she’s obviously not suggesting any such thing. This is Fairbairn’s ‘plausible propaganda’ designed to persuade the British people that CETA would be right for them, even if they decide to leave the European Union.

Far-right Tory government ministers, members of the Brexit campaign, were already lauding the agreement as great for Britain if it left the E.U., as the BBC quotes:

According to Conservative MP David Davis, Ceta “would be a perfectly good starting point for our discussions with the Commission”.
Ex-London mayor Boris Johnson [now Foreign Secretary] has also praised the Ceta model.

So why is CETA a bad deal for everyone, except the corporations? ‘War On Want’ explains:

CETA is a major new business deal that was negotiated in secret between the EU and Canada over five years from 2009 to 2014. It stands for the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, and it represents one of the ‘new generation’ of trade treaties on behalf of big business that are set to undermine our democracy and destroy our basic rights…

… CETA is a backdoor for TTIP, the horrific EU-US deal that has generated so much anger and opposition across Europe and the UK, and became a major referendum issue.

Negotiations on CETA started back in 2009, and concluded with a ceremony in Ottawa in September 2014. A number of EU governments were unhappy with the final text agreed by the negotiators, but it was rushed through regardless. No MPs or MEPs were allowed to take part in the talks, which took place in secret, and no one was granted access to the text of the agreement until it was too late. Key elements of our public services have been bargained away without a shred of public debate.

CETA includes the toxic investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism, which allows companies to sue governments over any new law or policy that might reduce their profits in future. In a public consultation held in Europe, over 97% of respondents rejected the introduction of this new power for business. Yet the EU has gone ahead with it anyway, and CETA will introduce ISDS not only for Canadian companies but also for any US firms with offices in Canada (which is most of them).^[4]

The real crux of the matter is in the last line. While this is a Canadian-E.U. agreement (designed to make us all feel more secure about it) it will include any other businesses with offices in Canada, and that means virtually every major corporate conglomerate in existence.

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) failed to pass because public pressure binned it. Waiting in the wings was CETA, a more clandestine approach designed to kid us all into believing it was less toxic than the TTIP. It isn’t. It’s the TTIP cloaked under another name.

We need to send a clear message that the people of Europe want no more of these dirty deals.

And that includes the people of the rest of the world, including the United States, who will soon have the Trans-Pacific Partnership (note the word ‘Trade’ has now been dropped) thrust upon them if Clinton gains control of the White House.

^{[1] “Opinion: The EU’s Walloon CETA disaster” DW, October 21st 2016}

^{[2] “Plucky Little Wallonia Is Still Blocking The Canada – EU Trade Deal, Ceta” Forbes, October 22nd 2016}

^{[3] “Reality Check: Would Canada’s deal with the EU be a good model for the UK?” BBC, June 17th 2016}

^{[4] “What Is CETA?” War On Want, undated}