Posts tagged Globalization
Posts tagged Globalization
The evil inside the White House operative, Cass Sunstein, is out this morning with a short essay in WSJ.
Under the guise of filling us all in on what his White House department is doing to “clear away red tape”, the evil bastard is really informing his followers about the advancements in one world government and a North American union:
In an interdependent global economy, diverse regulations can cause trouble for companies doing business across national boundaries. Unnecessary differences in countries’ regulatory requirements can cost money, compromising economic growth and job creation. Think of divergent requirements for car headlights, or the labeling of food, or standards for container sizes.
Recognizing this, President Obama’s Jobs Council has called for U.S. agencies to better align U.S. regulations with those of our major trading partners. And today the president is issuing an executive order, “Promoting International Regulatory Cooperation,” with a simple goal: to promote exports, growth, and job creation by eliminating unnecessary regulatory differences across nations.
The order makes clear that we will not undermine American laws or compromise our national prerogatives. But it emphasizes that international cooperation and harmonization can increase trade and job creation, eliminating pointless burdens without creating a regulatory race to the bottom. From now on, an interagency working group chaired by the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs [Note; Sunstein chairs this agency-RW] will be a forum for reducing this red tape.
Here’s the advancing of the North American union:
More generally, President Obama has worked closely with his Canadian and Mexican counterparts to create High-Level Regulatory Cooperation Councils with both countries. The councils are developing and implementing plans to eliminate or prevent the creation of unnecessary burdens on cross-border trade, streamline regulatory requirements, and promote greater certainty for the general public and for businesses in the regulation of food, pharmaceuticals, nanotechnology and other areas.
The U.S. and Canada have already agreed to harmonize their rules with respect to fuel economy, building on a long history of collaboration on national emission standards for new vehicles. This step will avoid divergent requirements and unnecessary costs on both automobile companies and consumers.
Here’s the advance of the One World government:
The U.S. is also working closely with the European Union to eliminate unnecessary differences in U.S.-European regulatory requirements. Last February, the Obama administration announced an agreement with the EU under which organic products certified as such in Europe or in the U.S. may be sold as “organic” in either jurisdiction. This is not just a victory for those who grow and eat organic broccoli. The trans-Atlantic partnership, involving the two largest organic food producers in the world, will help support jobs in the years to come.
Whether the issue involves chemicals or vegetables, nations can do a far better job of harmonizing regulatory requirements to make it easier for companies to do business, and without sacrificing public health, safety and the environment. We hope that today’s executive order provides a new model for eliminating red tape and promoting trade and job creation. Let’s get to work.
Bottom line: You have been warned by the evil insider, himself, the march towards a North American union and a one world government continues.
EFF, OpenMedia.ca, CIPPIC and a number of civil society organizations have declared this to be ‘Stop Cyber Spying Week’ in protest of several controversial U.S. cybersecurity legislative proposals, including the bill currently before Congress and the Senate called CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing & Protection Act of 2011. While ‘Stop Cyber Spying Week’ is focused on U.S. initiatives, Canadians should be concerned as well as the adoption of a privacy-invasive U.S. cybersecurity strategy is likely to have serious implications for Canadian civil liberties. For this reason, Canadian civil society groups have joined the protest. In general, Canadians would do well to remain vigilant.
Using the guise of ‘cybersecurity’, CISPA aims to mobilize Internet intermediaries to institute a sweeping, privacy-invasive, voluntary information-sharing regime with few safeguards. The U.S. cybersecurity strategy, embodied in CISPA and other legislative proposals, also seeks to empower Internet companies to deploy ill-defined ‘countermeasures’ in order to combat these threats. Use of these powers is purportedly limited to situations addressing ‘cybersecurity’ threats, yet this term is so loosely defined that it can encompass almost anything – even,potentially, to investigate potential breaches of intellectual property rights!
The cornerstone of the privacy-invasive CISPA component is the establishment of private-public partnerships for information sharing. This creates a two-tiered regime that, on the one hand, facilitates the collection of personal Internet data by private Internet companies as well as the sharing of that information with the government and, on the other, allows government agencies to share information with private companies.
To enable information flows from Internet companies to government agencies, CISPA will grant Internet companies immunity from civil or criminal liability for any monitoring or sharing of user activity—as long as it is done in ‘good faith.’ Specifically, CISPA authorizes companies to “use cybersecurity systems to identify and obtain cyber threat information.” Aggrieved users who sue Internet companies for wrongfully handing over their data to the government willhave to meet the incredibly high bar of proving the decision comprised ‘willful misconduct.’
The U.S. cybersecurity strategy will also permit Internet companies to employ dubiously defined ‘countermeasures,’ provided they are justified with equally vague and undefined ‘defensive intent.’ Internet companies will be permitted to deploy ‘cybersecurity systems’ – products designed to ‘safeguard…a network from efforts to degrade, disrupt, or destroy’. While it is unclear exactly what this would permit an Internet company to do, it could allow blocking of specific websites or individuals or even a much broader range of filtering. Given the potentially all-encompassing and inclusive definition of ‘cybersecurity’, it would not be surprising if these ‘countermeasures’ were ultimately used to block online entities such as Wikileaks or sites accused of copyright infringement. The inclusion of ‘degrade’ in the definition of permissible ‘cybersecurity systems’ could even raise net neutrality concerns, as ISPs have, in the past, claimed ‘network degradation’ as justification for the throttling of downstream services such as peer-to-peer applications. Indeed, U.S. cybersecurity laws have a history of being employed by private Internet companies to stifle downstream competition.
In sum, the U.S. cybersecurity strategy envisions a voluntary cooperative regime where Internet companies are given broad-ranging immunities to surveil Internet users and downstream online services. This amounts to an erosion of personal privacy safeguards currently in place. Under this regime, an online company need only to assert a vague ‘cybersecurity objective’ and it will have carte blanche to bypass domestic laws and protections against privacy invasion.
A University of Zurich study reports that a small group of companies – mainly banks – wields huge power over the global economy. The study was completed by Stefania Vitali, James B. Glattfelder, Stefano Battiston at the Swiss Federal Institute in Zurich
The study is the first to look at all 43,060 transnational corporations and the web of ownership between them – and created a ‘map’ of 1,318 companies at the heart of the global economy. The study found that 147 companies formed a ‘super entity’ within this, controlling 40 per cent of its wealth.
All own part or all of one another. Most are banks – the top 20 includes Barclays and Goldman Sachs. But the close connections mean that the network could be vulnerable to collapse. In effect, less than one per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network.
Economists such as John Driffil of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, stated that the value of its study wasn’t to see WHO controlled the global economy, but the tight connections between the world’s largest companies.
The collapse of 2008 showed that such tightly-knit networks can be unstable, Some of the assumptions underlying the study have come in for criticism – such as the idea that ownership equates to control. But the Swiss researchers have simply applied mathematical models usually used to model natural systems to the world economy, using data from Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors.
1. Barclays plc
2. Capital Group Companies Inc
3. FMR Corporation
4. AXA
5. State Street Corporation
6. JP Morgan Chase & Co
7. Legal & General Group plc
8. Vanguard Group Inc
9. UBS AG
10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc
11. Wellington Management Co LLP
12. Deutsche Bank AG
13. Franklin Resources Inc
14. Credit Suisse Group
15. Walton Enterprises LLC
16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp
17. Natixis
18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc
19. T Rowe Price Group Inc
20. Legg Mason Inc
21. Morgan Stanley
22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc
23. Northern Trust Corporation
24. Société Générale
25. Bank of America Corporation
Title: Does One “Super Corporation” Runs the Global Economy: Study claims it could be terrifyingly unstable
Publication: Mail-On Line, 10/20/11
Author: Rob Waugh.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2051008/Does-super-corporation-run-global-economy.html
Title: The Network of Global Corporate Control
Authors: Stefania Vitali, James B. Glattfelder, Stefano Battiston
Publication: Public Library of Science
Date of Publication: 26 October 2011
URL:http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0025995
Student Researcher: Sean Lawrence, Sonoma State University
Faculty Advisor: Peter Phillips, Sonoma State University
