Gaius Publius posted 'TPP Is a Monopoly Protection Scheme, the Exact Opposite of a "Free Trade" Deal' at Down with Tyranny blog.

I left this comment:

The most valuable commodity is information. Information about boundaries define nations and states; information about military assets ('soft' information like logistics; 'hard information of weapons plans) define military strength/power; 'popular' information (music, literature, fashion, news) define cultures; corporate/trade/safety information (patents, wages, exposure risks) define and determine profits. This being the case, any and all policy(ies) regulating trade and economics regulates information; including multi-national trade pacts. A truly free market would have near information transparency. Information transparency *may* also circumvent the need for regulation; in your example of certified measuring devices, transparency would enable consumer experience to establish valuable information/data on quality of sellers and their goods.

The original post focused on specifically on TPP. It's important to understand all policy has economic consequences.

Economic drivers of humanitarian aid

One of the major themes that run through many of these posts is how entwined economic decisions are with all personal, cultural and political life at essentially all levels. A recent interview at NPR brought to mind some of the links between economics and humanitarian aid.

Firstly, the need for humanitarian aid is often (but not always) the direct or indirect outcome of economically driven policy. Two major examples: (1) war refugees - war is often waged to forcefully take resources from another sovereign nation. Civil wars are internal conflicts for control of resources. All wars have economic winners and losers. (2) climate refugees - victims of climate change intensified natural phenomena (droughts, storms, etc.); refugees whose native ecosystem can no longer grow the food needed for survival. Climate change is the consequence of economies spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere through the consumption of fossil fuels to make stuff. The fossil fuel industry and all fossil fuel powered industry have profited from this.

Three telling points/quotes from the interview:

"In your report, you found that conflicts last two times longer than they did in 25 years ago..." 

"...the aid sector is bigger than it's ever been before, with 4,500 known relief organizations around the world..."

"...Organizations have become businesses in many ways, held back by interests that are very corporate. Success is not measured in terms of the quality of the aid you provide, or how much you're working in partnership with other NGOs. It's about how many places you're in, how much staff you have, how much is in your budget..."

Put together, it seems that rich powerful players extract wealth from the poor to the point where they exist at the barest edge of survival and forced into the position of needing external aid (aid refugees). These rich powerful people then 'very generously' donate tiny amounts of the wealth they've extracted from the aid refugees to boost their charitable/humanitarian bona fides. But as the linked interview implies, much of this is a scam. The spending of aid money has more to do with boosting the balance sheet of the organization than actually helping people in need.

The worldwide economic system is set up so that resources are stolen from the poor and the supposed return of some of these stolen resources as aid are actually ways to further launder those stolen resources back to the rich. Aside from the immorality and injustice of such a system, it's also environmentally unsustainable. Either human societies lives within the constraints of the planetary ecosystem or the ecosystem will force us to. In case of the latter, recall what Tennyson wrote... "Nature, red in tooth and claw..."

Climate change is caused by geoengineering

I occasionally comment on articles at Truthout. I've seen some interesting (meaning thoughtful) discussions. Then I read a post with an incredibly silly series of comments - no I won't link to it; I don't believe in spreading silly conspiracy theories. Suffice it to say, many comments about chemtrails, contrails, geoengineering and climate change... and the majority of them very confusing. So I just wanted to make a few points:

(1) Responsible scientists do not expect or plan for the eventuality that geoengineering will rescue the planet from global environmental collapse caused by climate change. This is because there is no way to test the accuracy of climate theory before applying it and the risk of a bad outcome because a theory was incomplete is too high. There's only one planet Earth; an inadequate geoengineering theory could cause more problems than it solves.

Here's an illustration:
A pet store has a sudden outbreak of a disease in their puppies. Without knowing if it's caused by a known virus or bacteria or something completely different, it would be reasonable to theorize they have a bacterial or viral infection and thus treat all the puppies with antibiotic and/or anti-viral medication. This is because even if all the puppies in that store die, other stores have more puppies; there is no risk of loosing that breed or all dogs. If the treatment cures the disease, then the theory is likely correct and other pet stores can use the same treatment

A collector who has the only living dog would be very careful about how they treat any illness because there are no other dogs to test medications on. If the theory of the disease is wrong, the treatment may further injure the only dog in the world. With only one planet, if the climate theory is wrong, geoengineering can make matters much worst.

(2) Climate change is caused by inadvertent geoengineering. Human activity that pumps greenhouse gases/chemicals into the atmosphere is geoengineering the climate of the planet. This proves the point that without a thoroughly tested theory of climate, any outcome of geoengineering is driven in part by accident.

(3) Given we know that pumping greenhouse gases/chemicals into the atmosphere is bad and we don't have a scientifically proven geoengineering 'easy fix', the only real solution is to stop making the problem worst and support the ecosystem as best we can to help it recover.

One of my repeating themes: climate change is the consequence of human economies. The people who control the fossil fuel industry do everything they can to create demand and sell more and more fossil fuels (source of greenhouse gases) ... so they concentrate wealth. The question in the end - what can they buy with all their wealth on an ecologically ravaged planet?