to read Evan Greer's article published in The Guardian on May 8, 2015, click on
http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/2015/may/08/trans-pacific-partnership-obama-irony

The TTIP agreement between the EU and the US creates a parallel private arbitration system where corporations can sue states for lost profits and decisions are irrevocable. Labor and environmental regulations can be invalidated as “takings” or “indirect expropriation.” Public interest laws can be chilled or invalidated as infringements of the “human right to profit” of foreign investors.

Fast Track, TPP and TTIP Should Be Scrapped!

The TPP is a massive, legally binding, agreement involving 12 countries that has been negotiated entirely behind closed doors by government officials and industry lobbyists. The text of the TPP agreement is classified. The public can’t see it. Even members of Congress’ access to the text is severely restricted, and they face criminal prosecution if they tell their constituents what they’ve read.

In fact, the only portions of the TPP text the public is able to see are those released by Wikileaks, an organisation President Obama has all but personally chased to the ends of the earth. Thanks to the leaked draft texts, we know the TPP could impact everything from internet freedom, to jobs, to national sovereignty, and even how much we pay for the medicines we need.

Voting down the trade disaster gives us a future where public interest laws aren't violations of the "human right to profit." Labor and environmental regulations would have been stylized as "takings" or "indirect expropriation."
Thanks Senate Dems for not speeding up the race to the bottom!

The Economy of the Hamster by Mauro Gallegati, WEA Books
https://rwer.wordpress.com/2015/05/11/the-economy-of-the-hamster/

About the book

This book imagines an economy that could be possible if we managed to emancipate ourselves from the hegemony of living to consume - and thus working to consume - instead of living well. It imagines a change of paradigm, which would result from us understanding that we are in a finite world, in a Malthusian environment mitigated by process innovations, where humanity interacts with the environment. Only by imagining that human needs are infinite, and non-renewable resources are also unlimited, can we conceive the possibility of endless growth of production. In a finite world like ours, the second law of thermodynamics still stands and, therefore, even if technology could develop indefinitely, sooner or later it would clash with the limits of non-reproducible resources. What this book tries to outline is that, even though there is no upper limit, or number of product units, or GDP, to enforce the sustainability of growth, we take possession of the future which, as a generation, is not ours. But there's more. While acknowledging that energy and resource-saving technological progress is able to shift the possible GDP (defined as that level of product which does not compromise reproducibility), we must question ourselves on the role of economy as being functional to man and not vice versa, where we work to live (well) and not vice versa.

About the author

Mauro Gallegati is a Professor of Economics at the Polytechnical University of Marche, Ancona. He was a pupil of Giorgio Fuà and Hyman Minsky. He was a visiting professor at several universities, including Stanford, MIT and Columbia. On the editorial board of numerous scientific journals, coordinator of several European research projects, he is now responsible for a task force of INET on the Great Recession. His research includes analysis of the economy as a complex system, economic fluctuations, nonlinear dynamics, models of financial fragility and interacting heterogeneous agents. He is considered one of the pioneers of economic modeling based on agents (Agent Based Models). Gallegati is well known for his widely cited work with Joseph E. Stiglitz and Bruce Greenwald on information asymmetries, financial crises and the ABM. On the scientific committee of BES (Equitable and sustainable well-being), he addresses the issue of sustainability. He is the author of several monographs and his articles have been published in international journals on economics, econometrics, economic history, history of economic thought, mathematics, complexity and econophysics.

"Growthism" and "Post-Crisis Economics" by Steven Keen are two other books from WEA. They are all priced at $10!

more at www.freembtranslations.net, www.openculture.com, www.kickitover.org, www.worklessparty.org, www.alternativetrademandate.org and www.onthecommons.org

http://www.truth-out.org
www.submedia.tv