This evening's music features Louisiana swamp bluesman Slim Harpo.

Here are some stories from tonight's post:

TPP - A Threat to Peace?

When we look at conflicts, we look at why they happen to begin with – the root causes. A simple way is to look what our basic human needs are. We know air, water, food, clothing and shelter are needed for survival. Beyond those we can look at security, identity, well-being and self-determination. If those are not met, it is argued, then people engage in conflict. As currently practiced and implemented, free trade agreements contribute to structural violence – the violence where social structures and institutions prevent people from meeting their basic needs. The agreements protect the interests of elites over the vast majority of people and the planet; consequently, the potential for conflict is increased. Now it becomes a little clearer that the debated provisions of TPP can be linked directly to social conflict, unrest and instability: resource exploitation, labor rights and income inequality, agriculture, environmental issues and national, regional and local community democratic decision-making powers.

Trade and economies have the potential to lead to peace as well as violence and war. Peace through trade can become a realistic idea when connected to basic principles of a peacekeeping economy as outlined by political economist Lloyd Dumas. The principles are: (1) Establish balanced relationships – everyone gains benefit at least equal to their contribution and there is little incentive to disrupt the relationship; (2) Emphasize development – Most of the wars since WWII have been fought in developing countries. Poverty and missing opportunities are breeding grounds for violence. Development is an effective counter-terrorism strategy, as it weakens the support network for terrorist groups; (3) Minimize ecological stress – The competition for depleteable resources - most notably oil and increasingly water - generates dangerous conflicts between nations and groups within nations. It is proven that war is more likely to happen when there is oil. Using natural resources more efficiently, developing and using non-polluting technologies and procedures, and better not bigger economic growth can reduce ecological stress. ....

The current debate on the Trans Pacific Partnership suggests that the agreement will lead to immense social conflict, unrest and instability. Trade is not the issue. People and societies have always traded and will continue to do so. The trade relationships and mechanisms are at the core of whether trade drives violent conflict and war or contributes to peace.

West's offer to rebuild Ukraine faces reality check

Western powers are preparing what they say may be their most potent weapon against Moscow's interference in Ukraine - a multi billion dollar aid package to rebuild a near-bankrupt state and realize the European dream cherished by many Ukrainians.

There is just one problem: foreign governments and international financing institutions are not willing to pour money into a dysfunctional state. Only this week the businessman brought in by the new authorities to clean up the tax service was himself suspended pending a corruption inquiry. ...

"There's strong resistance because many people in various ways benefited from the old, inefficient and largely corrupt system," said Kalman Mizsei, the head of the EU's advisory mission to Ukraine.

Ukraine is one of the world's most corrupt places, ranking as 142 out of 175 in Transparency International's corruption perception index. By some estimates, the shadow economy accounts for up to 60 percent of economic output. ...

"The public administration needed to run a state is simply not there," said one Western donor consultant working in Kiev, who described mid-level bureaucrats responsible for implementing projects as "ineffective, demotivated and underpaid".

In Midst of War, Ukraine Becomes Gateway for Jihad

In the West, most look at the war in Ukraine as simply a battle between Russian-backed separatists and the Ukrainian government. But the truth on the ground is now far more complex, particularly when it comes to the volunteer battalions fighting on the side of Ukraine. Ostensibly state-sanctioned, but not necessarily state-controlled, some have been supported by Ukrainian oligarchs, and others by private citizens. Less talked about, however, is the Dudayev battalion, named after the first president of Chechnya, Dzhokhar Dudayev, and founded by Isa Munayev, a Chechen commander who fought in two wars against Russia.

Ukraine is now becoming an important stop-off point for the brothers, like Rizvan. In Ukraine, you can buy a passport and a new identity. For $15,000, a fighter receives a new name and a legal document attesting to Ukrainian citizenship. Ukraine doesn’t belong to the European Union, but it’s an easy pathway for immigration to the West. Ukrainians have few difficulties obtaining visas to neighboring Poland, where they can work on construction sites and in restaurants, filling the gap left by the millions of Poles who have left in search of work in the United Kingdom and Germany.

You can also do business in Ukraine that’s not quite legal. You can earn easy money for the brothers fighting in the Caucasus, Syria and Afghanistan. You can “legally” acquire unregistered weapons to fight the Russian-backed separatists, and then export them by bribing corrupt Ukrainian customs officers.

“Our goal here is to get weapons, which will be sent to the Caucasus,” Rizvan, the brother who meets me first in Kiev, admits without hesitation.

Net Neutrality Is Here — Thanks To an Unprecedented Guerrilla Activism Campaign

Malkia Cyril, the executive director of the Center for Media Justice, stresses that the strength of the net neutrality movement relied on the diversity of its coalition. She says Color of Change, National Hispanic Media Coalition, immigrant rights’ groups, activists from Black Lives Matter and communities of color “took it to the streets, to the doorstep of the ISPs.” ...

Tim Karr, who has worked on net neutrality advocacy for over a decade, also emphasized the role of a large coalition, “from librarians to free speech advocates,” with a shared interest in Internet freedom. “It also took a host of different tactics,” he says. “Protests in Philadelphia, protests in San Francisco, people making videos on YouTube — not coordinating in some centralized fashion, but many groups using their own creative strength and reaching out to their own constituents around this goal of convincing the FCC to reclassify Internet access providers under Title II.” ...

Much ink has been spilled over the tactics around major policy debates of the Obama years. For many critics, the top-down approach favored by the administration has doomed many of the president’s own priorities.

Harvard professor Theda Skocpol pins the blame for the failure to pass major climate change legislation on “CEOs and Big Enviro honchos” who eschewed grassroots organizing in favor of backroom deals. She notes that the proponents of climate change legislation used an “insider-grand bargaining political style that, unbeknownst to its sponsors, was unlikely to succeed given fast-changing realities in US partisan politics and governing institutions.”

Following Obama’s first election win in 2008, the president retired his grassroots “Organizing for America” army of volunteers into a wing of the Democratic National Committee, and reportedly pressured activist groups not to publicly criticize his administration.

The past year of organizing around net neutrality defied this strategy.

NAFTA’s specter may haunt Keystone verdict

TransCanada could harness trade deal's Investor-State Dispute Settlement, and U.S. taxpayers could foot the bill.

President Barack Obama may decide to kill Keystone XL for good, but that could be no easy task — thanks in part to the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The 21-year-old free-trade pact allows foreign companies or governments to haul the U.S. in front of an international tribunal to face accusations of putting their investments at risk through regulations or other decisions. The CEO of Keystone developer TransCanada has raised the prospect as a potential last resort if Obama rejects the $8 billion project, although for now the company is focused on getting him to say yes. ...

Such a challenge would go before a tribunal of privately chosen arbiters who could award TransCanada damages paid by U.S. taxpayers, but it would not have the power to approve Keystone. ...
Meanwhile, U.S. environmentalists who are confident Obama has their backs are also aware that a trade-deal tribunal process they have never liked could complicate Keystone’s post-rejection politics. The same groups fighting Keystone are also working to stop a $250 million NAFTA challenge filed by a U.S. energy company, Lone Pine Resources, against a fracking moratorium in the Canadian province of Quebec.

“We are very strongly opposed to these provisions being in trade bills” in the first place, Natural Resources Defense Council international program director Jake Schmidt said in an interview. “A company could challenge any environmental law in the U.S. on the basis of lost profits and not have to go through the normal U.S. court system.”