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In reply to the discussion: Time to face facts: Assange played the left like a fiddle on TPP [View all]JCanete
(5,272 posts)big business, nor should they give businesses power to arrest us or smaller nations permanently with bad environmental or labor practices for fear of lawsuits handled in special international courts, levied by the same corporations that love this shit.
Industrialization by the way, cannot be the only way to make the world a better place. We've put up a false dichotomy of either industrializing third world nations into a sweat-shop development stage of pollution and exploitation, or letting people starve, and what that is really saying is that while we have the means, we don't have the will to actually work towards improving the world, only the will towards lining our pockets with more money. Of course, when I say we here, I mean those who lobby for and write up our policies.
I'm not exactly sure how Assange has anything to do with any of that.
That said, of course the TPP wasn't all bad, and it had provisions that were almost certainly going in the right direction, and it sounds like some basic protections for workers...anti-slavery anti-child-labor etc. are examples of solid improvements. And even on the environment, it is claimed, it has some of the most robust international protections for the environment, particularly it seems, as regards habitats, overfishing etc. Again, cool, but that's not all that hot if those things take a back-seat to other interests, or if there are mechanisms that again, arrest us in other bad policy in order to protect future profits of corporations while our planet continues to boil.