Year: 2015

iPhone Users Just Love Their Walled Garden

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Even if it means that Apple is censoring what news they can read:

Metadata+, a free app that catalogues fatal drone strikes by the United States, was pulled from the App Store this morning. Users were alerted via a notification that said the app was removed because of “exceptionally crude or objectionable content.”

Metadata+ was developed by The Intercept’s research editor Josh Begley. The app listed the date and location of drone strikes, as well as the victims, and sent notifications to users when a new strike occurred.

Begley struggled to get the App Store to accept his work—Mashable reports that Metadata+ was approved this February after five rejections. The sensitive topic of U.S. drone strikes seems to have been a problem for Apple: Begley was rejected last August because his app might be “objectionable” for many audiences.

………

Begley told Mashable that an Apple Review Team employee contacted him after several rejections and told him that if the app focused specifically on U.S. drone strikes, “it’s not going to be approved.”

So, it appears that not cheerleading for US drone strikes is unacceptable content for Apple, Inc.

What happens when the FBI comes and asks for a backdoor into your private communications?

At least Android is open source, so if there is a backdoor, someone can compile a version without some back door that has elements of the US state security apparatus leering looking at your private communications.

No wonder Apple is lobbying so hard for a bill in congress that grants them immunity for sharing data.

Tervor Noah’s Debut

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I watched his debut as host of The Daily Show, and it was a real stem winder.

I am seriously impressed.

It was funny, he made some fun of himself, and he was a bit bluer than John Stewart.

Obviously, this show was the product of many weeks of prep, so I expect some hiccoughs as they go from debut to routine, but it is a very good start.

I will note that he has not yet made my list of People I Do Not Want to Piss Off yet though.

This is Satire, and it Sucks to Have to Say It

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No, the Pentagon is now requesting a budget authorization to purchase gold plated F-35s, it is parody from Duffelblog:

The Pentagon released a report today requesting Congressional authorization for 500 gold-plated F-35 fighter planes.

The F-35 Lightning II is a fifth-generation multirole stealth fighter intended to replace numerous aging aircraft, including the A-10 Thunderbolt II and the F-16 Fighting Falcon. The F-35 program has been fraught with problems, including numerous delays, cost overruns, and failure to deliver on promised operational performance.

The new variant, dubbed the F-35G, is proposed as an upgrade over existing F-35 models. In addition to 24K gold plating encasing its exterior, its cockpit is trimmed with wood grain paneling harvested from the endangered African blackwood tree and leather upholstery from the hide of the northern white rhinoceros. Its GAU-12/A 25mm rotary cannon is able to fire solid platinum rounds at a rate of 3300 per minute. Each round is handcrafted by a Swiss jeweler.

“In an ever-evolving battlefield, it is imperative to have a military equipped with tactical vehicles that offer versatility, adaptability, and mother of pearl ice buckets to keep champagne bottles cold during missions,” reads the Pentagon report. “Our service men and women deserve to fly in only the finest combat aircraft.”

Each F-35G unit is projected to cost 8.2 billion dollars, approximately twice the average annual GDP of some of the countries it is expected to bomb. The total cost, including development, procurement, operation, and sustainment, will top $15 trillion over the life of the program.

I will note that this is not that far from the truth.

Each B-2 bomber, for example, costs about $2.1 billion dollars.

With an empty weight of 158,000 lbs, and the current price of gold being $1,147.00/ troy ounce, it costs almost as much as if it were made of gold. (158,000 lbs of gold would cost $2,642,878,402.00)

Us weapons procurement is well and truly broken.

If You Treat Your Employees Like Crap, It Flows to the Customer

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It turns out that the Wal-Mart grocery business is lagging, because they suck at running supermarkets:

Wal-Mart’s grocery business is getting crushed by competitors, according to analysts.

The retailer is plagued by negative customer feedback “due to lack of convenience in shopping Supercenter formats, below-average customer service, and below-average quality, freshness, and breadth of produce,” Wayne Hood, an analyst at BMO Capital Markets, wrote in a recent research note.

As a result, Wal-Mart is losing grocery market share to rivals like Kroger and Publix, which have higher customer satisfaction ratings than Wal-Mart, according to Hood.

That’s a troubling sign for Wal-Mart, which gets more than half of its revenue from groceries, and has been consistently offering lower prices than its rivals, Hood writes.

Grocery prices at Wal-Mart are approximately 10% to 15% lower at Wal-Mart compared to Kroger, according to Hood.

But the lower prices have failed to spur growth in Wal-Mart’s grocery business, as illustrated in the graph below.

Basically, Wal-Mart sucks, but they are cheap.

Of course, dollar stores are cheaper and they are not suckier, and Target is a bit more expensive and much less sucky, and now it turns out that even the lowly supermarket chain produces stores that people are wiling to pay extra to go to.

Couldn’t happen to a more repulsive company.

John Boehner Just Issued a Big F%$# You to the Teabaggers

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I guess that it’s one way to have some fun as he is heading out the door:

House Speaker John Boehner said Sunday that there will be “no” government shutdown over Planned Parenthood funding, and signaled plans to pass the Senate stop-gap funding bill with help from Democrats.

“I expect my Democratic colleagues want to keep the government open as much as I do,” Boehner, R-Ohio, said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

The interview was Boehner’s first since announcing his resignation Friday.

The announcement came as Republican leaders spar over how to handle a series of budget extension proposals to keep the federal government operating past Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year. Moderates within the House GOP caucus had been pushing for any plan that will avoid a shutdown while more conservative members had vowed to strip funding from Planned Parenthood programs at any cost.

If Boehner was still trying to remain speaker, he would not have done this.

Never underestimate the the power of someone who has given his last f%$#.

Editorial of the Day

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Brevity is the soul of wit

Michigan State Representative Cindy Gamrat, a Teabagger from the banks of the Kalamazoo river, was expelled from the state house because she and fellow rep (and fellow Teabagger) Todd Courser (who resigned) used state funds to cover up their adulterous affair.

A special election was called to replace her, and Gamrat is running for reelection.

The Grand Rapids Press and Kalamazoo Gazette editorial on this development is remarkably concise: (click for a larger image)

No.

It’s as if Ernest Hemingway wrote this editorial.

H/t Jim Romenesko

Because We Know that Eliminating Human Physical Contact Improves the Development of Children

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Out on Mercer Island, Washington, the school district has banned the game of tag as a sweeping ban of all forms of physical contact between students:

Webster’s defines “tag” as “a game in which the player who is it chases others and tries to touch one of them who then becomes it.” Wikipedia explains that the game, also known in Britain as “it, tip you’re it” is “a playground game that involves one or more players chasing other players in an attempt to ‘tag’ or touch them, usually with their hands.”

So is the game of “tag” still “tag” if tagging is banned?

That is the question for the Mercer County School District in Washington state and for some unhappy parents.

It all started with a social media report earlier this week when a group of parents, responding to what they had heard was a ban on the game of tag in elementary schools, formed a group called “Support ‘tag’ at Recess.”

It was their impression that there was indeed a ban and the word soon spread to the news media.

………

A spokesman for the school district seemed to reinforce the impression with a statement:

“The Mercer Island School District and school teams have recently revisited expectations for student behavior to address student safety. This means while at play, especially during recess and unstructured time, students are expected to keep their hands to themselves. The rationale behind this is to ensure the physical and emotional safety of all students.

“School staffs are working with students in the classroom to ensure that there are many alternative games available at recess and during unsupervised play, so that our kids can still have fun, be with their friends, move their bodies and give their brains a break.”

“Good grief, our kids need some unstructured playtime,” mom Kelsey Joyce told the TV station. “It’s a game that practically everyone has played – but if you go to public school on Mercer Island, keep your hands to yourself.

“I totally survived tag,” said Joyce. “I even survived red rover, believe it or not.”

More significantly, the school board ignored the fact that physical touching is an necessity, particularly for developing children.

The reason that children play touching games is because children need touching.

Well, This Helps with 5th Amendment Rights

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In an insider trading scandal, a judge has ruled that prosecutors cannot force suspects to unlock their phones.

Basically, he said that the prosecution was asking for it “Just Because”, and that was not sufficient reason:

The Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination would be breached if two insider trading suspects were forced to turn over the passcodes of their locked mobile phones to the Securities and Exchange Commission, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.

“We find, as the SEC is not seeking business records but Defendants’ personal thought processes, Defendants may properly invoke their Fifth Amendment right,” US District Judge Mark Kearney of Pennsylvania wrote.

………

In the latest case, the SEC is investigating two former Capital One data analysts who allegedly used insider information associated with their jobs to trade stocks—in this case, a $150,000 investment allegedly turned into $2.8 million. Regulators suspect the mobile devices are holding evidence of insider trading and demanded that the two turn over their passcodes.

The defendants balked at supplying their passcodes, saying the Fifth Amendment protected them. The judge agreed and said that the government was going on a fishing expedition:

Here, the SEC proffers no evidence rising to a “reasonable particularity” any of the documents it alleges reside in the passcode protected phones. Instead, it argues only possession of the smartphones and Defendants were the sole users and possessors of their respective work-issued smartphones. SEC does not show the “existence” of any requested documents actually existing on the smartphones. Merely possessing the smartphones is insufficient if the SEC cannot show what is actually on the device.

The prosecution is not looking for evidence here.

What they are looking for is statements that impeach the defendants, and force them to cut a plea deal.

They want to find texts where these guys call their clients morons, or some such, knowing that they can then present this to a jury in order to make the jury hostile to their defense.

I wholeheartedly approve of this ruling.

This is a Feature, Not a Bug

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The fact that the nominee for head of the FDA has extensive financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry should come as no surprise.

The revolving door has been spinning just as fast during the Obama administration as it ever has been:

It seems to be the season of the revolving door

in health care. The latest version got some media attention, because it involves one of the most important health care leadership positions in the US government, the Director of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). However, the case actually seems much more serious than what the media has recently reported.

………

The only fly in the ointment was the matter of Dr Califf’s ties to industry. The WSJ article included,

Diana Zuckerman, president of the National Center for Health Research, a Washington-based group focusing on medical-product safety, questioned his ties to the drug industry.

‘Dr. Califf’s expertise and his close ties to the pharmaceutical industry are both well-known,’ she said. ‘His ties to industry have been a source of great concern to public-health experts when he was previously considered for FDA commissioner, and those ties raise important questions about this nomination.’


The MedPage Today article noted that Public Citizen’s Health Research Group stated,

‘During his tenure at Duke University, Califf racked up a long history of extensive financial ties to multiple drug and device companies, including Amgen, Astra-Zeneca, Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Merck Sharpe & Dohme and Sanofi-Aventis, to name a few,’ Michael Carome, MD, the group’s director, said in a statement. ‘Strikingly, no FDA commissioner has had such close financial relationships with industries regulated by the agency prior to being appointed.’

………

‘There are some who believe his relationship with [the drug industry] may be a problem, but most see it as a value-added factor in building a functional, more streamlined relationship with the industry in order to improve the speed with which truly effective and quality drugs and devices are made available, mitigate the excessive costs associated with pharmaceuticals, and influence policies and practices intended to improve health status.’

If that doesn’t scare the hell out of you, it should.

What that nameless source just said is that this is the sort of guy who could make the approval of a drug like Thalidomide go through more smoothly.

The Flies Return to the Sh%$

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By which I mean that homophobic bigot Kim Davis is officially changing her party affiliation to Republican.  Good riddance:

A county clerk in Kentucky who was briefly jailed for refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples said on Friday that she and her family have switched to the Republican Party because the Democrats no longer represented them.

Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis, 50, who has said her beliefs as an Apostolic Christian prevent her from issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, said they had changed parties last week. She was a long-time Democrat in eastern Kentucky.

“My husband and I had talked about it for quite a while and we came to the conclusion that the Democratic Party left us a long time ago, so why were we hanging on?” she told Reuters in an interview at a hotel in Washington, where she has traveled to be feted at a Family Research Council event later on Friday.

Not a surprise, really.

Since she is now making bank on being a bigot, she has to get that official American bigot membership card.

He Didn’t Jump, He Was Pushed

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In a surprise announcement, the worst Speaker of the House in the history of ……… well ……… history, John Boehner, made a surprise announcement that he will be resigning from Congress:

Speaker John A. Boehner, an Ohio barkeeper’s son who rode a conservative wave to one of the highest positions in government, said Friday he would relinquish his gavel and resign from Congress, undone by the very Republicans who swept him into power.

Mr. Boehner, 65, made the announcement in an emotional meeting with his fellow Republicans on Friday morning as lawmakers struggled to avert a government shutdown next week, a possibility made less likely by his decision.

Mr. Boehner told almost no one of his decision before making it Friday morning. “So before I went to sleep last night, I told my wife, I said, ‘You know, I might just make an announcement tomorrow,’ ” Mr. Boehner said at a news conference in the Capitol. “This morning I woke up, said my prayers, as I always do, and thought, ‘This is the day I am going to do this.’ ”

His downfall again highlighted the sinewy power of a Republican Party faction whose anthem is often to oppose government action. It also made vivid the increasingly precarious nature of a job in which the will and proclivities of politically divisive body must be managed. No House speaker since Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., who held the gavel from 1977 to 1986, has left the job willingly.

As much as I appreciate the standard line that Boehner left under his own power, I kind of doubt it.

If this was really about him being tired of a restive Congress, he would have left when he realized that he lacked the skill of vote counting, which is essential for a legislature.

I have repeatedly referred to him as the worst Speaker ever because, in the House of Congress most amenable to steam roller politics, he was constantly back on his heels, because he wanted the job of Speaker so badly that he was unable and unwilling to actually manage the house.

It simply makes no sense that he left left because he got tired. He left because some of his colleagues had “the talk” with him.

Still, if you favor the “left under his own power” theory, I would suggest that you read ​Charlie Pierce’s take on this:

Way I figure it is this. In their private chat yesterday, Boehner explained to the pope the problems he was having with the flying monkey caucus, and Papa Francesco who, after all, heads a bureaucracy with a long history as a seething cauldron of ambition, scandal, murder and betrayal, as well as a unique tradition of crazy institutional proceedings (See: Cadaver Synod), listened to Boehner’s plight and said, mildly, “Jesus H. Christ in a Fiat, my son, these people crazy. Get out while you can.” That’s the way I’m going to figure it, anyway.

It is a sane theory, but sanity does not apply in this situation.

Sanity has almost been as rare as competence during the Speakership of John Boehner.

Do You Know What Drug in Your Medicine Cabinet is Most Likely to Kill You?

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If you answered Acetaminophen (Tylenol) you would be right.

An overdose of the drug can destroy your liver, and for some people, toxic effects can be as little as twice the therapeutic dose.

Well, the FDA is looking at tightening up regulations on the drug, and the maker of Tylenol ramped up a lobbying campaign to prevent the FDA protecting the public:

Recently filed court documents show the makers of Tylenol planned to enlist the White House and lawmakers to block the Food and Drug Administration from imposing tough new safety restrictions on acetaminophen, the iconic painkiller’s chief ingredient.

 An executive with McNeil Consumer Healthcare – which counts Tylenol as its flagship product – told the board of directors for parent company Johnson and Johnson about a campaign to “influence the FDA” and block recommendations made by an agency advisory panel in 2009.

 About 150 Americans a year die by accidentally taking too much acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol. The toll does not have to be so high. Read the story.

 After Dr. Janet Woodcock, the FDA’s top drug regulator, put off meeting with McNeil executives, the company’s president, Peter Luther, sent out an August 2009 email.

 “We’re being too nice and too worried about stepping on FDA’s toes. It may be time to let members of Congress to put some pressure on FDA,” Luther wrote to other top executives. ”We have to make this our top priority and pull out all stops.”

 Acetaminophen is considered safe when taken as directed. But in higher doses, the drug can cause liver damage and death. Studies show the drug is the leading cause of acute liver failure in the U.S., with fatalities increasing seven-fold in the decade between 1995 and 2005 to more than 200 a year.

 ………

 The previously unreported lobbying campaign was disclosed as part of a trial scheduled to start today in Atlantic City that promises to draw new scrutiny to McNeil’s efforts to protect its painkiller from additional regulation and disclosures about the full extent of its risks.

 The case pits McNeil against Regina Jackson, a New Jersey state employee who claims she was hospitalized with elevated liver enzymes after inadvertently exceeding the daily recommended dose for Extra Strength Tylenol for a couple of days.

 The Atlantic City case is being watched closely as it is the first to come to trial of more than two hundred lawsuits currently pending in state and federal courts that allege McNeil knew its drug was potentially dangerous while promoting its safety.

 As detailed in a 2013 investigation by ProPublica and This American Life, McNeil has opposed warning labels, dosage restrictions and even public awareness campaigns over concerns of profitability.

 At the same time, the investigation found that the FDA has delayed implementing suggestions to improve the safety of acetaminophen, taken by tens of millions of Americans every week. Though hearings began more than 38 years ago, the agency has yet to finalize regulations for the safe use of the drug.

 ………

 The proposed lobbying campaign arose in response to a June 2009 meeting of more than three dozen scientists, researchers and pharmacists convened by the FDA to review the safety of acetaminophen.

 The panel of independent experts endorsed a sweeping set of reforms. They recommended that the FDA reduce the total daily dose of acetaminophen, and make extra-strength pills available only by prescription.

 McNeil officials viewed the recommendations as a threat to sales of Extra Strength Tylenol, according to R. Clay Milling, one of the plaintiff’s attorneys. McNeil makes about $400 million in revenue from its extra-strength line, compared with only about $14 million from regular strength Tylenol, Milling told the court, according to a transcript.

 Milling, who reviewed internal McNeil documents as part of the lawsuit, told the court that a senior McNeil executive made a presentation to the Johnson and Johnson board about a plan that included contacting the White House, the Office of Management and Budget and lawmakers.

 ………

 The current recommended daily dose for the drug is four grams per day — the equivalent of eight extra strength pills. But occasional reports in scientific literature have documented liver damage occurring after taking as little as two extra pills per day for several days.

 The agency has worried about the prevalence of acetaminophen on the market — McNeil and its generic competitors have developed hundreds of over-the-counter products that contain the drug, increasing the risk that a consumer could inadvertently ingest dangerous levels.

 The most recent FDA data show that acetaminophen remains, by far, the leading cause of acute liver failure in the United States, with the number of cases increasing.

(emphasis mine)

Pharma greed is not just some asshole hedge fund puke raising prices.

It’s also stuff like this, where companies like Johnson & Johnson call in chips to bought and paid for politicians so that they can keep killing people.

In fact, I think that the guys at J&J are worse.  Unlike Martin Shkreli they knew that they were lobbying for the opportunity to profit off of killing hundreds of people a year.

Oops!

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Someone is getting fired

On the Chicago TV station WGN, they did a story on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, and their likely soon to be fired graphics guy called up the badge that the Nazis forced Jews to wear in concentration camps:

The news director of a Chicago TV station apologized after a staff member mistakenly chose a symbol of Nazi Germany to illustrate a story about Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement.

“Regrettably, we failed to recognize that the artwork we chose to accompany the story contained an offensive symbol,” the director, Jennifer Lyons, said in an apology on Wednesday. “This was an unfortunate mistake. Ignorance is not an excuse.”

The apology came the morning after Tom Negovan, an anchor with WGN-TV Chicago, read a 20-second description of the holiday. Over his shoulder, viewers could see a graphic of a Star of David badge emblazoned with the German word “Jude,” or Jew, on striped material of the kind used in Nazi prisoner uniforms.

Un-dirtyword-believable.

Does a Bear Sh%$ in the Woods?

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The other half of the couplet is the question, “Is the Pope Catholic?”
It appears that the right wing believes that the Pope is not Catholic, because clearly Jesus embraced those money lenders in the temple:

A while ago, Rush Limbaugh declared that Pope Francis is a Marxist, which is pretty much inconsistent with being a practicing Catholic. Now Representative Paul Gosar (R-Ariz) has announced that the Pope, in concluding that climate change is a threat to the planet, is advocating socialist views. As a result, he will boycott the Pope’s address to Congress on Thursday. According to Catholic doctrine, the Pope is the head of the Church, the Vicar of Christ, and an infallible authority on Catholic doctrine. But none of that, if one can use another familiar phrase, cuts any ice with Rep. Gosar.

If Pope Francis wants to devote his life to fighting climate change, Gosar said, he should do so on his personal time — not as pope. “To promote questionable science as Catholic dogma is ridiculous,” he intoned. This seems to be the standard line among political conservatives who are suffering from cognitive dissonance now that there is a Pope whose Catholicism is in doubt because he has distanced himself from the Republican Party line. James Inhofe, Chair of the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works, has declared: “The pope ought to stay with his job, and we’ll stay with ours.” Rick Santorum adds: “I think we [Catholics] are better off leaving science to the scientists and focusing on what we’re good at, which is theology and morality.” And Jeb Bush thinks that religion “ought to be about making us better as people, less about things [that] end up getting into the political realm.”

The irony here is pretty obvious. People like Gosar, Inhofe, Santorum and Bush have been playing the God card for years. They have been happy to use Christian religion in general, and Catholicism in particular, as a recruiting device and a campaigning platform for a variety of conservative political issues. Now they want the Pope to mind his own business and stick to morality and religion. One of the many things they are missing, however, is that climate change is a moral issue.

The term for this is “Cafeteria Catholics,” and when the Catholic Church was busy doing things like denying communion to John Kerry because the only things that mattered were abortion and gay marriage, it was the conservatives who used it imply a lack of integrity.

I’ve got my weekly dose of schadenfreude over this.

This is a Truly Epic Rant

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In fact, this rant about US missteps on Syria is good enough that I forgive the blogger’s use of the Comic Sans font:

I have decided to voice my opinions on what the situations are in re the MENA area both abroad and in the US concerning Syria and Turkey. More tomorrow on Iraq. These are simply my opinions, feel free to disregard them and come up with your own:

– Petraeus wants John Allen’s wretched job? Give it him. As I understand what happened, Allen found it to be impossible to argue successfully with the WH’s collection of “those whose brains were destroyed in the process of obtaining a Ph.D in poly sci ” led by the country’s community organizer in chief. Let us see if Petraeus will do better. IMO Petraeus is a phony of the sort that David Hackworth used to describe as a “perfumed prince,” in my words, a Byzantine courtier type whose fame was generated in a largely self orchestrated media campaign. Let us see if this “Great Captain” can unravel this skein of wormlike threads that he helped create. Perhaps Broadway Joe Scarborough will turn and burn with him?

………

It goes on from there, and it is truly a thing of beauty.

I also think that it is an accurate assessment, and it shows why the President of the United States cannot blithely accept the counsel of  Council of Foreign Relations types, who subscribe to the “Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics,” which states that so long as the US maintains it will, it can accomplish whatever it wants.

It didn’t work in the Bush administration, and it won’t work now.

Uruguay is Now My Favorite Latin American Nation

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Last year, they legalized Marijuana, and now they have regected the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) international trade deal:

Often referred to as the Switzerland of South America, Uruguay is long accustomed to doing things its own way. It was the first nation in Latin America to establish a welfare state. It also has an unusually large middle class for the region and unlike its giant neighbors to the north and west, Brazil and Argentina, is largely free of serious income inequality.

Two years ago, during José Mujica’s presidency, Uruguay became the first nation to legalize marijuana in Latin America, a continent that is being ripped apart by drug trafficking and its associated violence and corruption of state institutions.

Now Uruguay has done something that no other semi-aligned nation on this planet has dared to do: it has rejected the advances of the global corporatocracy.

………

Earlier this month Uruguay’s government decided to end its participation in the secret negotiations of the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA). After months of intense pressure led by unions and other grassroots movements that culminated in a national general strike on the issue – the first of its kind around the globe – the Uruguayan President Tabare Vazquez bowed to public opinion and left the US-led trade agreement.

………

TiSA involves more countries than TTIP and TPP combined: The United States and all 28 members of the European Union, Australia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Hong Kong, Iceland, Israel, Japan, Liechtenstein, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, South Korea, Switzerland, Taiwan and Turkey.

Together, these 52 nations form the charmingly named “Really Good Friends of Services” group, which represents almost 70% of all trade in services worldwide. Until its government’s recent u-turn Uruguay was supposed to be the 53rd Good Friend of Services.

………
TiSA has spent the last two years taking shape behind the hermetically sealed doors of highly secure locations around the world. According to the agreement’s provisional text, the document is supposed to remain confidential and concealed from public view for at least five years after being signed. Even the World Trade Organization has been sidelined from negotiations.
But thanks to whistle blowing sites like WikiLeaks, the Associated Whistleblowing Press and Filtrala, crucial details have seeped to the surface. Here’s a brief outline of what is known to date (for more specifics click here, here and here):
1.TiSA would “lock in” the privatization of services – even in cases where private service delivery has failed – meaning governments can never return water, energy, health, education or other services to public hands.
2.TiSA would restrict signatory governments’ right to regulate stronger standards in the public’s interest. For example, it will affect environmental regulations, licensing of health facilities and laboratories, waste disposal centres, power plants, school and university accreditation and broadcast licenses.
3.TiSA would limit the ability of governments to regulate the financial services industry, at a time when the global economy is still struggling to recover from a crisis caused primarily by financial deregulation. More specifically, if signed the trade agreement would:

  • Restrict the ability of governments to place limits on the trading of derivative contracts — the largely unregulated weapons of mass financial destruction that helped trigger the 2007-08 Global Financial Crisis.
  • Bar new financial regulations that do not conform to deregulatory rules. Signatory governments will essentially agree not to apply new financial policy measures which in any way contradict the agreement’s emphasis on deregulatory measures.
  • Prohibit national governments from using capital controls to prevent or mitigate financial crises. The leaked texts prohibit restrictions on financial inflows – used to prevent rapid currency appreciation, asset bubbles and other macroeconomic problems – and financial outflows, used to prevent sudden capital flight in times of crisis.
  • Require acceptance of financial products not yet invented. Despite the pivotal role that new, complex financial products played in the Financial Crisis, TISA would require governments to allow all new financial products and services, including ones not yet invented, to be sold within their territories.

4. TiSA would ban any restrictions on cross-border information flows and localization requirements for ICT service providers. A provision proposed by US negotiators would rule out any conditions for the transfer of personal data to third countries that are currently in place in EU data protection law. In other words, multinational corporations will have carte blanche to pry into just about every facet of the working and personal lives of the inhabitants of roughly a quarter of the world’s 200-or-so nations.

As I wrote in LEAKED: Secret Negotiations to Let Big Brother Go Global, if TiSA is signed in its current form – and we will not know exactly what that form is until at least five years down the line – our personal data will be freely bought and sold on the open market place without our knowledge; companies and governments will be able to store it for as long as they desire and use it for just about any purpose.

Obviously, in the grand scheme of things, Uruguay doesn’t count for a whole lot, the whole country has a population is less than that of Los Angeles, but it is the first time that any country involved in the negotiations has pulled out, and should make it easier for another nation to take this step, which means that that standing up to the interests of the US, which are primarily to support data brokers, pharma, IP restrictions, and the banksters.

This is a good thing for the people of Uruguay, and if it leads to more countries pulling out of this agreement, it will be a good thing for the world.