Big Surprise: Obama Administration wants to gut climate change agreement

Jorgo Riss, director of Greenpeace EU, said: “These leaked documents confirm what we have been saying for a long time: TTIP would put corporations at the centre of policy-making, to the detriment of environment and public health. We have known that the EU position was bad, now we see the US position is even worse. A compromise between the two would be unacceptable.”

Long standing environmental protection is dropped

The “General Exceptions” rule, enshrined in the GATT agreement of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), is absent from the text. This nearly 70-year-old rule allows nations to restrict trade “to protect human, animal and plant life or health", or for "the conservation of exhaustible natural resources" [2].

No place for climate protection in TTIP

If the goals of the Paris Summit to keep temperatures increase under 1.5 degrees are to be met, trade should not be excluded from CO2 emissions reduction specifications. But nothing about climate protection can be found in the obtained texts.

I know. Shocking, right? Surely Obama wouldn't be against universal health care too!

The UK Parliament may not have the power to stop or reverse the privatisation of the NHS if the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership passed at EU level, Unite has warned.
The union cites a letter from Lord Maude of Horsham, the minister for trade and investment, in response to a query from a constituent of Labour MP Jim Fitzpatrick about how TTIP would pass into law in the UK...
“All such agreements are subject to Parliamentary scrutiny before they are finalised,” the spokeswoman said.
But similar agreements such as the EU-Korea free trade agreement have shown that trade agreements can be “provisionally applied” before being ratified by national parliaments.

The good news is that GMO food will be protected under TTIP

TTIP uses the euphemism of ‘modern agricultural technology’ to refer to genetically modified (GM) food, and the US is demanding that all producers of GM food have automatic access to the regulatory procedures of the EU. Not only this, but the European Commission will be required to provide GM producers with full details of what they need to do to get their products approved:

“Where a Party requires a product of modern agricultural technology to be approved or authorized prior to its importation, use or sale in its territory, the Party shall allow any person to submit an application for approval at any time.

Where a Party requires a product of modern agricultural technology to be approved or authorized prior to its importation or sale in its territory, each Party shall make publicly available:

(a) a description of the processes it applies to accept, consider, and decide applications for approval or authorization;

(b) the competent authorities responsible for receiving and deciding applications for approval or authorization.”

TTIP opponents completely left out of the negotiations.

The Vampire Squid seeks to target retail investors

Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N), the banking gold standard for the world's elite, sees a future in less prosperous investors.
A creative strategy taking shape inside the bank calls for it to partner with small brokerages and wealth management firms to lend money to their clients, many of whom have far less wealth than what's in the typical Goldman private bank account.

Or to put it another way: "We'll want people who previously didn't know where we were." -Blankfein

The Kurdish situation is complicated

On April 26, I published an article highlighting comments by Kurdish official Hiwa Afandi suggesting that it was not in the Kurdish interest to defeat the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) because Shiite volunteers were a greater danger.

Really complicated

In the weeks before ISIS seized Mosul, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) apparently supplied some weaponry, like Kornet anti-tank missiles, to ISIS in order to weaken the central government with whom [President of the Iraqi Kurdistan Region] Masoud Barzani was locked in a political dispute.

Really, really complicated

Amid renewed fighting across Syria on Thursday, clashes broke out between Kurdish militias and Syrian government forces, potentially opening a new front in the already complex conflict.