Lawyers and lobbyists for giant multinational corporations have been working up the TPP and promoting it for nearly a decade. The measure would join the United States along with 11 other nations along the Pacific Rim (Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam) in a “free-trade zone” covering nearly 40 percent of the world’s economy. Obama and his largely Republican “free trade” allies say the TPP will open foreign markets to American goods and “level the playing field by forcing Asian competitors to improve labor and environmental standards.”

But that’s just blatantly deceptive business propaganda. The measure isn’t really about trade and it certainly isn’t about improved standards. Its real thrust is to strengthen corporations’ ability to protect and extend their intellectual property rights (drug patents, movie rights, and the like) and to guarantee that they will be compensated by governments for any profits they might lose from having to meet decent public labor and environmental (and other) standards – something certain to discourage the enactment and enforce of such standards. Key parts of the TPP permit foreign capital to freely and easily enter a country and for profits to be just as easily removed. The TPP would ban capital controls, which let nations block disruptive inflows of ‘hot money’ from speculative investors and then escape before the bubble they create explodes. It would also block the passage of financial transaction taxes, a method for checking speculation and generating public revenue. The measure also legitimizes the extensive privatization of public enterprises. More

The county power movement, as it’s called, is centered on some 70 western counties that are surrounded by the public domain and are defiantly declaring their independence. It’s a kind of mini-secessionist movement, charged by anger at federal authority and environmentalism. No better example of this insurgency can be found than in Wallowa County in eastern Oregon. Bounded on one side by Hells Canyon, the deepest gorge in the United States, and on the other by the serrated, snow-capped peaks of the Wallowa Mountains, Wallowa is one of the most remote and isolated counties in the nation—fifty miles of hard driving from the nearest highway.

Forty years ago, ranching, logging and mining formed the economic backbone of Wallowa County. Over the past two decades, however, Wallowa County has been undergoing a dramatic structural transformation. First, the small sawmills closed, victims of their own rapacious appetite for old-growth Ponderosa pine, which had been nearly eliminated from the region’s mountains by the late 1980s. Then in the early 1990s, the corporate mills, owned by transnational timber giant Boise-Cascade moved out. While the corporate executives blamed the closures on environmental regulations and lawsuits, the prime factor was a desire to find more efficient locations (such as the forests of the Sierra Madre in Mexico) for their new high tech mills. More

I met LaVoy Finicum in Cedar City, Utah yesterday (1/13/16) when I thought he was in Oregon engaged in an armed occupation of a federal facility at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon.

How could this be?

Listening to the radio on the way to pick up my kids from school and there he is, LaVoy, the Public Information Officer of the Malheur standoff, on a local afternoon conservative talk radio show. I did a double-take-listen to hear where the interview was taking place. Sure enough, it was in studio, in Cedar City, and not Finicum from the Malheur. More