The corporate-influenced TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP),exposed earlier this week as "an enormous corporate power grab," looks increasingly precarious.

French President François Hollande reportedly said Tuesday that he would "never accept" the current agreement, citing its negative implications for "the essential principles of our agriculture, our culture, of mutual access to public markets."

"At this stage [of talks] France says 'No,'" Agence France-Presse quoted Hollande as sayingat a meeting of left-wing politicians in Paris. 

Subsequently, French trade minister Matthias Fekl said a freeze in TTIP talks was the "most likely option" without concessions from the United States. 

Fekl told French radio that the agreement on the table is "a bad deal," the Guardianreported. "Europe is offering a lot and we are getting very little in return," Fekl said. "That is unacceptable."

He also warned that the TTIP could could "unravel" the climate change agreement that was agreed to in Paris and signed last month.

Climate justice advocates on both sides of the Atlantic have issued similar critiques. Monday's Greenpeace leak suggested that "hard won environmental progress is being bartered away behind closed doors," as Greenpeace Netherlands campaigner Faiza Oulahsen put it.

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/05/04/pro-corporate-ttip-ropes-top-french-officials-lambaste-bad-deal

In his article "You’re witnessing the death of neoliberalism – from within", Aditya Chakrabortty sees something bad coming our way but he misses the point of what it really is. He mistakes — like the "economists" of the IMF — the troubles of the system as the death of Neoliberalism, but it is democracy that is taking the can. Neoliberalism is doing fine and is feeding the rich more than ever more. So all the economists and apologists of the IMF are waking up to the concept of empire. They have not realised yet that Empire through neoliberalism does not equate democracy.

 

 

...“Neoliberalism: Oversold?”.

The very headline delivers a jolt. For so long mainstream economists and policymakers have denied the very existence of such a thing as neoliberalism, dismissing it as an insult invented by gap-toothed malcontents who understand neither economics nor capitalism. Now here comes the IMF, describing how a “neoliberal agenda” has spread across the globe in the past 30 years. What they mean is that more and more states have remade their social and political institutions into pale copies of the market. Two British examples, suggests Will Davies – author of the Limits of Neoliberalism – would be the NHS and universities “where classrooms are being transformed into supermarkets”. In this way, the public sector is replaced by private companies, and democracy is supplanted by mere competition.

 

Here, the mistake lies in the name of the game... What has been sold to us since World War Two, has been labelled "democracy". What has really been sold to us is "Neoliberalism". What is dying is not Neoliberalism, but pure and simple democracy. We clearly see this in New South Wales, where the premier is running the state like a little Hitler with his lieutenants from ministers to administrators who have taken over the wishes of the councils of people. Because the people have shown their discontent, the new administrators are now planning a crackdown, by limiting the access to the chambers, have security guards and possibly mounted police. 

Meanwhile the "state", under instruction from the premier, is selling the assets of the people to the highest or various bidders — all rich members of the neoliberalism opportunistic clique — as long as cash comes in. The sales come in various formats from 35 years leases, 99 years leases to full-on sales of assets, in various ways. Public lands are shrinking at an astonishing rate. 

We would not see the same desecration of places in some of the most despotic countries as we are witnessing today in Sydney for the sake of installing a 1920s technology through the streets. All this is done for profits of the neoliberal kind. A few rich people cash in while the rest of the people do not have any say in the "progress". 

 

Not only they act as if they "own" the process, some ministers tell us where to go by hugging a compliant media. Here Rob Stokes, Minister of the NSW state writes in the Sydney Morning Herald, after thousands of protesters gathered at Sydney's Town Hall to rally against a host of Premier (Hitler) Mike Baird's most controversial policies. :

 

To paraphrase Mark Twain, recent reports of the death of Sydney are greatly exaggerated. 
In fact, if there is a demise we must lament it is the absence of progressive voices in the Emerald City willing to offer solutions to the important debate about Sydney's future.
In a growing trend, reactionaries are raising their voices in our town, yearning longingly for a bygone era. A stick-your-head-in-the-sand style attitude is their preferred approach – ostensibly a Carr-esque "Sydney is full" argument coupled with a new-must-equal-bad undertone. 

---------

Awful words in anyone's understanding, terrible warming from a minister of the crown hell-bent in bulldozing the place to rebuild with more high rise everywhere, trying to match these ghost towns in China, all for providing profits to a few developers — mates of the neoliberals running this country. The process borders on corruption considering that the people have been disengaged from the process. Democracy is dying. We are now encouraged to vote for a more neoliberal PM or a lesser one...

Time for a revolution.

 

 

The US Navy has allegedly installed pirated copies of 3D virtual reality software on “hundreds of thousands” of its computers without permission, a German technology company claims. The firm is suing the military for $600 million in unpaid licenses.

Washington has taken a tough stance on software piracy over the past few years, pressing to criminalize copyright infringement and restrict access to copyrighted material. Now, it is the US military facing a $600-million lawsuit over alleged use of pirated software in a massive scale.

In a lawsuit filed in a US Federal Claims court last week, Bitmanagement, a German-based software provider, claimed the US Navy has been extensively using unlicensed copies of its virtual reality application called BS Contact Geo, TorrentFreak news outlet reported on Wednesday. 

BS Contact Geo is capable of converting geographical information into 3D virtual reality maps retrieving data from land surveys, satellite imagery or airborne laser scanning, according to the company’s website. 

The US Navy has long been interested in the software’s capabilities, the lawsuit says, and in 2011 and 2012 Bitmanagement agreed to hand over just 38 licenses “for the purpose of testing, trial runs and integration into Navy systems.” 

After testing the application for a while, the Navy launched negotiations on additional licenses, promising purchase of a sizeable amount of copies.

However, before any deals were made, the software provider learned in 2013 that the Navy had already installed the BS Contact Geo on at least 100,000 computers “without Bitmanagement’s advance knowledge or consent.”

Later that year, Bitmanagement executives began receiving email notifications saying that the software had been rolled on at least 558,466 computers on the Navy’s networks.

“Even as it negotiated with Bitmanagement over the proposed large-scale licensing of its product, the Navy was simultaneously copying and installing that software, without Bitmanagement’s advance knowledge or authorization, on a massive scale,” the complaint, dated July 15, reads.

 

https://www.rt.com/usa/352443-us-navy-pirated-software/