is man, one of God's blunder?

These shoes belong to the victims of Birkenau Auschwitz gas chambers . . . The Nazi said because they were born as Jews, and they had to be eliminated as a "final solution". In other cases, in other historical juncture, it may be us who possesses so much hatred and "collect the shoes" of others . . . just because they were born as Chinese, Arabs, Bosnians, or because they chose to be communists, pro-indepence Timorese, non-believers, etc. It is the barbaric impulses that drive us to hate and to eliminate all otherness . . . Human being, perhaps, one of God's blunder

End of Season Sale

"Dagang sapi" seems to be the only game in town now! . . . everyone's soul is for sale . . . and you can watch politics bears a very close resemblance to the oldest profession in human civilization.

Campaign 2009

The Democratic Party, Indonesian Chapter, is eyeing alternative coalitions with other key major political groups, in case the current Yudhoyono-Kalla pairing turns sour. Coalitions with the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) or the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) would be possible options, a senior official in the Headquarter of Democratic Party, Obama, told a discussion in Kennedy Center, Wahington D.C. on Friday. Obama was of the opinion that the Democratic Party, Indonesian Chapter, would have several options if Golkar were to choose another running mate. Speculations about new allegiances is only one consequence of the current political tensions between Yudhoyono's Democratic Party and Golkar, which Vice President Jusuf Kalla chairs. Obama, did not rule out a Democratic Party link up with the PDI-P if Kalla decided to run as president. "If Golkar leaves, the Democratic Party will not be alone," Obama told The Wahington Post.

Meanwhile, high-rank executives of the Prosperous and Justice Party (PKS) mentioned that their party would be more than willing to form a strategic alliance with the Democratic Party as long as could support PKS's political platform which include a national program to revive the true national identity such as to use right hands for eating and drinking.

Political jokes is society protecting itself against the irrationality of politics and politicians rationality . . .

. . . and man is nothing else but a construction of his -- limited, underdeveloped, and definitively stupid -- imagination of himself in its relation to universe ( Feb. 12, 2009 )

On Global Neoliberalism Crisis

. . . and here comes a scary sky
hangin' over a no-mercy city
where the winners take every best , the losers beg for the rest,

and the sacred panopticons are all at rest

gone are those starry starry nights . . . gone are the songs of yesterday. . .

Breaking News:

Obama supporter died in Jakarta

A staunch supporter of Democratic Party died of heart attack in Jakarta lastnight, minutes after Obama delivered his victory acceptance speech. Witness reports that his last words were: " O my ghoooost, what we've done, what went right? . . . we started a joke. . . but now look, he become a US President for real. . . what went right . . . who's gonna be responsible for this?

Political jokes is society protecting itself against the rationality of politics and politicians irrationality . . .

Hell Beneath Captalism Promised Heaven

 

The Price of Free Trade (Part Two)

Lori Wallach,
Free Trade—The Price Paid
April 13, 2005, © Big Picture TV

Summary
Lori Wallach discusses the impact of unfair trade rules such as those of NAFTA and the WTO, established in 1994 and 1995 respectively. She gives examples of how biased trade regulations can affect the interests of different member states, including such instances as baby food sold in Guatemala, foreign-owned patents in India and hormone-treated meat in Europe. Any multi-national corporation can effectively challenge any country in which it operates at a WTO court. Countries are forced to comply by the threat of trade sanctions. As a result, government authority is weakened and corporations are empowered.

Transcript
Now the implications of these agreements, which again aren’t about trade, are so broad that the implications are very different in different countries. So for instance, in India where the Constitution explicitly forbid the patenting of life forms or medicines or seeds, they’ve been required to implement the WTO agreements to basically change in the world’s largest democracy and put into place patent laws that basically violate what the Constitution says, or the country of Guatemala, which was one of the countries that had done one of the best jobs implementing the so called UNICEF Nestlé’s Code, this was the code that was developed after lots of citizen campaigning that had to do with the plain marketing of breast milk substitutes, so baby formula, there used to be very tricky labeling of fat babies so that illiterate mothers would be tricked into thinking it was better to use the formula instead of breast milk, and then after a couple of weeks, their milk would dry up, they’d be hooked on having to buy this stuff, and then they killed their baby, because when you mix dirty water with formula, the baby dies from infant diarrhoea. So this was like a catastrophe, a global, just catastrophe of unneeded child deaths, and there was this huge campaign, and Guatemala implemented this health treaty, World Health Organization UNICEF treaty, into the domestic law, and they were a poster child for decreasing infant mortality.
In comes the US saying, excuse me, we’re here representing Gerber Baby Foods, and under the WTO’s intellectual property agreement, they have a trademark on the fat baby face, and we’re so sorry, but you’ll have to allow them to violate your domestic law implementing your health treaty because your WTO obligations require you to allow the fat trademark baby face even though it violates your health treaty and your domestic law, so you can either do this now in advance and we will save you the million dollars you’re trying to defend your law to WTO, or else we’ll take a formal challenge and make you do it.

Well, unfortunately, as is the case now, ten years into the WTO, almost any time a company gets a country to file one of these attacks, because in fact, that’s how it works, a country can challenge another country’s laws as not conforming, and then the country that loses has to change their law or faces permanent trade sanctions. Now when there is a threat basically, particularly in poor countries, the country just says, I give up, I’ll change my law.
And not just poor countries, I mean there’s a classic European Union one like that where the US basically threatened to challenge of the ban on a particularly inhumane kind of fur trap that was banned all across Europe, it’s allowed in some US States, they’re just like a dreadful torture device, and in this instance, the European Union, after the thing had gone through the union, through the commission, the parliament approved it, it was ready for implementation, and like inches before it was actually going to be published, the US and the EU negotiated for a one year delay, then a three year delay, and now it just basically died in the cradle, and this humane trapping law directive EUI had gone through everything, has never gone into a fact because of a WTO threat.
Similarly, Korea basically threw out two important food safety laws after the US threatened to challenge them. They said, don’t even bother, we’re not even going to defend. Meanwhile, there have been 90 formal cases of trade challenges where one country goes after another at the WTO, and in that record, there is only one case when environmental health, a public interest protection was ever saved.

In every other instance, they were struck down. So the US implementation of the CITES Treaty on endangered species through our Endangered Species Act was struck down. Our Clean Air Act regulations and the cleanliness of gasoline were struck down with the WTO.

The European ban on artificial growth hormones in meat was struck down as a WTO violation. These are all non-discriminatory things where a country just said, in Europe they said, we’re not eating meat containing artificial growth hormones. Our farmers can’t use it, you can’t import meat that has it, we’re just not eating it. It’s not discriminatory, just doesn’t, we’re not treating foreign goods differently. It’s just we’re not eating that stuff. We’re not sure what it does to you and we don’t want to find out the hard way, so keep it out.
Well, you can’t do that under the WTO. The US won that case on behalf of the Beef Cattlemen’s Association. Same thing, the Caribbean banana trade system that had been negotiated with the European Union was struck down in the WTO, basically saying, no, you can’t have a development agenda, you have to follow exactly the trade rules word for word.

So law after law, country after country. India’s basically law saying no patenting of life forms, drugs and seeds, struck down. So all of these different important laws and policies, and in fact any time there’s a leading edge policy, right now Europe is rewriting chemical, a chemical regulation through a program called REACH, which will basically require the registration of every chemical that’s used in a certain volume.
WAbout Lori Wallach Director, Global Trade Watch Lori Wallach is one of the best known and most vocal critics of many of the trade agreements associated with corporate globalization. She is the Director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, a non-profit organization founded in 1995 to promote government and corporate accountability in the globalization and trade arena. By profession a trade lawyer, she has written a number of books and articles on trade and her comments have been widely broadcast on CNN, ABC, CNBC and CSPAN.hat most people don’t realize is that all of our countries’ chemical regulations went to effect basically only going

forward. So if there was already a chemical on the market in the 70s or 80s when a European or a British or a French or a US law went to place, then the testing and registration requirements only went forward, so everything that was already on the market was in grand fathered.

We have no idea what some of those things do, and we’ve accidentally found out some of them are actually quite deadly, so the idea is to actually test everything that you use over a certain volume. So for things you just use a little of, those are outside the law, but anything that’s a major volume chemical, it doesn’t matter if they started using it in 1918 or in 2001, has to be tested, and for those that are most hazardous, there’s a special system, but for the other ones, you just have to list what’s in them and make sure they’re safe.
Well, the European industry, chemical industry has gotten in cahoots with the US chemical industry and the US trade representative to basically blow up this law by claiming to WTO violation before it ever gets implemented. Well, this is the law that should set the forward pattern for all the rest of the world. The US needs to update our laws. Our laws are totally backwards. You guys actually in Europe are going to do it right first, and then we should follow. Instead, the US industry is using the WTO to kill it. So this gives you some idea of the so called free trade regime, and it has very little to do with trade, and it’s certainly not free.
— Lori Wallach

About Lori Wallach Director, Global Trade Watch Lori Wallach is one of the best known and most vocal critics of many of the trade agreements associated with corporate globalization. She is the Director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, a non-profit organization founded in 1995 to promote government and corporate accountability in the globalization and trade arena. By profession a trade lawyer, she has written a number of books and articles on trade and her comments have been widely broadcast on CNN, ABC, CNBC and CSPAN.

The Price of Free Trade (Part One)

Lori Wallach,
Free Trade—The Price Paid
April 13, 2005, © Big Picture TV

Summary
In the first part of this two-part series, Lori Wallach explains how the name of free trade was usurped by multinational corporations and right-wing think-tanks in the early 1990s. In 1995 the post-war trade agreement known as GATT was incorporated into the WTO at the Uruguay Round. This endorsed a much wider neo-liberal corporate agenda that stretched far beyond trade issues. It imposed radical new obligations on trading partners and in particular the developing world.

Free Trade was a beautiful Trojan horse because in parliaments around the world, nobody had any idea what they were getting themselves into. . .

Basically, the good name of trade was used as a Trojan horse. If you can imagine that the original trade rules which came under a thing called the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1947 dealt only about trading goods between countries, and those rules focused on tariffs and quotas, traditional trade measures. A tariff is a tax charged when a good crosses a border, and a quota is a quantitative limit about how much of an import you’ll take. And so in the past, trade agreement said for instance, we all the countries signing this agreement agree we’ll only charge a 3% tariff tax and blah, blah coming over the border, and we’ll all allow 1,000 pairs of shoes or whatever the quota is, it’s actually in tonnes or in millions of pieces, and those limits were then negotiated and traded and swapped and set over time.

Only starting in the early 1990s did the WTO and NAFTA explode the boundaries of what was in a legitimate trade agreement. And there is a back story to this, which is, that the Reagan and Thatcher so called revolutions, the neoliberal world view which involves trying to have worldwide an entire package of policies, the goal of which is to basically get people and their governments out of the markets, that the markets know the best, if you can just totally deregulate and liberalize everything, we’ll all be happier for that kind and gentle hand at the market. And so this world view involves a whole package of policies to implement it. Trade liberalization, finance liberalization, which means liberalization of currency trading and of a variety of instruments of trading, of investment liberalization, who can own what, who can sell and buy things, from land to different properties, new protections for property, both for investors but also for intellectual property, deregulation of social standards or harmonization of regulatory standards to one global environmental or worker safety or food safety standards that you can work on a global single unified market level with a multinational corporation, the commodification of new tradable units by patenting things and allowing you to trade things that were seen as, my own genes for instance, or to have commodification of things with human rights, basic services like the right to drinkable water and creating all these new units, and also getting the government out of the business of actually having a role in the marketplace, so getting privatization of any kind of factories and companies but also of services, so the things in many of our countries, the phone systems, the energy utilities, the water utilities that are government run or heavily regulated private not for profits are regulated monopolies, all of that needs to be gotten rid off through privatization and deregulation of services.

That mix of policies was being pushed back by parliaments throughout the world including by the US Congressmen. Reagan was trying to shove it down their throats. And so, very cleverly, the right wing think tanks and the big multinational companies who jointly sought for different purposes, one ideological, one for profit motives, to implement this world view into real policies, came up with the idea of using the obscure trade negotiations, the GATT, because ever since 1947, the GATT would have periodic negotiations every seven to ten years where it would sort of add some new issues or cut some more tariffs. And so one of those negotiations had started in Uruguay, and everyone in the world thought it was another of those snoozerama situations where they basically are in there cutting tariffs on socks, woohoo, no one’s paying attention to that. But really what was done is the entire agenda was rewritten, and the Reagan and Thatcher guys basically said, hey, let’s have a different kind of trade agreement. Let’s make the GATT just part of what’s implemented, and they created the World Trade Organization, a freestanding international body which would implement 17 different agreements, only one of which is really about trade, the GATT. It’s now submerged under the WTO. The other 16 agreements have to do with, there’s a whole agreement limiting what kind of domestic environmental standards you can have, a whole agreement limiting what kind of domestic food safety standards you can have, a whole agreement limiting how you can spend your tax dollars in procurement policy. Can you have green procurement? Can you try and not do business with companies that are human rights violators? So a whole agreement on privatization and deregulation of services, there’s a whole agreement on intellectual property protections, new patent protectionism, new copyright rights. There’s a whole agreement on how you can treat foreign investors inside your country, the trade related investment measures. All of these are non-trade related issues, but they’re now enforced through these different trade agreements like NAFTA and WTO. It was a beautiful Trojan horse because in parliaments around the world, nobody had any idea what they were getting themselves into.
— Lori Wallach

Adam Smith was even better than you: market fundamentalists!!

Adam Smith's works is often regarded as key source of neoliberalism. But he has been oversimplified by his critics. One fact should not be left alone: he is a professor not of economics but of moral philosophy; and he offers a vision of how to advance the social good, not through self-interest, as he would later argue in his magnum opus The Wealth of Nations, but through systematic social benevolence; and in this sense, he was morally better than today's greedy neoliberals or market fundamentalists:

…Merchants and master manufacturers are … the two classes of people who commonly employ the largest capitals, and who by their wealth draw to themselves the greatest share of the public consideration. As during their whole lives they are engaged in plans and projects, they have frequently more acuteness of understanding than the greater part of country gentlemen. As their thoughts, however, are commonly exercised rather about the interest of their own particular branch of business, than about that of the society, their judgment, even when given with the greatest candour (which it has not been upon every occasion) is much more to be depended upon with regard to the former of those two objects than with regard to the latter. Their superiority over the country gentleman is not so much in their knowledge of the public interest, as in their having a better knowledge of their own interest than he has of his. It is by this superior knowledge of their own interest that they have frequently imposed upon his generosity, and persuaded him to give up both his own interest and that of the public, from a very simple but honest conviction that their interest, and not his, was the interest of the public. The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers. To widen the market may frequently be agreeable enough to the interest of the public; but to narrow the competition must always be against it, and can serve only to enable the dealers, by raising their profits above what they naturally would be, to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens. The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it (Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book I, Everyman’s Library, Sixth Printing, 1991; pp. 87-88, 231-232)