The data expose a dangerous malfunction in capitalism's engine room. Banks, mutual funds and investment firms used to ensure that citizens' savings were transformed into technical advances, growth and new jobs. Today they organize the redistribution of social wealth from the bottom to the top.
Today, WikiLeaks released the secret draft text for the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) Financial Services Annex, which covers 50 countries and 68.2% of world trade in services. The US and the EU are the main proponents of the agreement, and the authors of most joint changes, which also covers cross-border data flow. In a significant anti-transparency manoeuvre by the parties, the draft has been classified to keep it secret not just during the negotiations but for five years after the TISA enters into force.
Despite the failures in financial regulation evident during the 2007-2008 Global Financial Crisis and calls for improvement of relevant regulatory structures, proponents of TISA aim to further deregulate global financial services markets. The draft Financial Services Annex sets rules which would assist the expansion of financial multi-nationals – mainly headquartered in New York, London, Paris and Frankfurt – into other nations by preventing regulatory barriers. The leaked draft also shows that the US is particularly keen on boosting cross-border data flow, which would allow uninhibited exchange of personal and financial data.
The Russia Chairperson of the Health Working Group is Minister of Health Veronika Skvortsova, while her American counterpart was Admiral-Doctor Nicole Lurie of the United States Commissioned Corp of the US Public Health Service (USCCPHS), until her dismissal from this posting by Obama on 11 September when he announced new sanctions on Russia.
Exclusively for Russia Insider, Dutch journalist Eric van de Beek interviews the senior German editor who is causing a sensation with his allegations that the CIA pays German media professionals to spin stories to follow US government goals.
At the meta-level, the Ebola crisis is a perfect case study of why the UN (including the out-of-control Specialized Agencies such as the World Health Organization — WHO), the European Union (EU), and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) need their own internal intelligence (decision-support) capabilities, and how corrupt intelligence has become at the Member State level — the US, specifically, lacks intelligence with integrity on Ebola, and no one in the White House or Congress has the intelligence — or the integrity — to see this as “core.”
I think article below is spot on, but I also don't think it will matter. Given the current national trajectory, it will take another Kasserine Pass, another Task Force SMITH, to get America to pay attention to T.R. Fehrenbach (“… young men in the mud. …”), to the eternal truth that the ultimate arbiter of foreign policy and international diplomacy is a man with a rifle and bayonet. And then, the refresher learning will only be transient. I hate to be present Santana as an inviolable sage with respect to history, but I's sure this is one of those cases where he is right. And, in the interim, funds and focus will be diverted to trendy left-wing social issues. …