Canada targets tar sands critics in new criminalization of dissent

Canada’s Harper régime has invented the new crime of being a member of an “anti-Canadian petroleum movement,” and equating such a stance with terrorism. Evidently believing it is in danger of losing the fight against pipeline projects intended to speed up Alberta tar sands production, its response is to place environmentalists under surveillance.

A secret report prepared by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the country’s national police agency, claims that public activism against the problems caused by oil and gas extraction is a growing and violent threat to Canada’s national security. The report goes so far as to challenge the very idea that human activity is causing global warming or that global warming is even a problem. At least 97 percent of environmental scientists agree that human activity is causing global warming. The basis on which a police force can declare otherwise is surely not clear.

The Alberta tar sands (photo by Howl Arts Collective, Montréal)

Whether police officials truly believe they understand the global climate better than scientists who are expert in the field or are merely providing “intelligence” [sic] that the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper wants to hear, I will leave to others more familiar than I with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Regardless, the RCMP report, leaked to Greenpeace, makes for amusing reading. For example:

“[T]here is an apparent growing international anti-Canadian petroleum movement. In their literature, representatives of the movement claim climate change is now the most serious global environmental threat, and that climate change is a direct consequence of elevated anthropogenic greenhouse gases which, reportedly, are directly linked to the continued use of fossil fuels.” [page 5]

And whom might the police rely on for that statement? No, not those pesky scientists who refuse to say what is demanded of them by oil and gas companies and the right-wing governments who love them. Instead, the RCMP quotes the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, cites a poll commissioned by a foundation connected to the oil industry, and a columnist at the Toronto Sun, a hard-right tabloid in the Murdoch mold. The Sun columnist, as quoted in the police report, said “environmental radicals” seek “to undermine the development of Canada’s oilsands — an insignificant contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions.”

Actual experts in the field would disagree. A Scientific America analysis that quotes several climate scientists reports that if all the bitumen in the Alberta tar sands were burned, 240 billion metric tons of carbon would be added to the atmosphere. The total amount of carbon that has been thrown into atmosphere by humanity in all of history is estimated at 588 billion tons.

Are going to believe the police or your lying eyes?

The Globe and Mail of Toronto quoted a Royal Canadian Mounted Police spokesman denying any intention of spying on peaceful protestors:

“There is no focus on environmental groups, but rather on the broader criminal threats to Canada’s critical infrastructure. The RCMP does not monitor any environmental protest group. Its mandate is to investigate individuals involved in criminality.”

But the newspaper’s report noted that the spokesman “would not comment on the tone” of the report, which even The Globe and Mail, a leading establishment publication, found difficult to accept as it earlier in the article noted the RCMP report’s “highly charged language.” Moreover, Canadian human rights organizations filed complaints earlier in February over spying on opponents of the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline, a project intended to move tar sands oil from Alberta to a port in northern British Columbia, passing through hundreds of miles of environmentally sensitive lands.

Environmentalists and Indigenous peoples have been subjected to spying by the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, according to a complaint filed by the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association. The association is also opposing a new measure, the Anti-terrorism Act 2015, or Bill C-51, intended to “dramatically expand the powers of Canada’s national security agencies.” The association reports:

“Bill C-51 makes massive changes to many aspects of Canada’s spying and security system. Any one of the changes – making it easier to lock people up without charge; criminalizing expression; vastly expanding the powers of Canada’s spies; gutting privacy protections – is significant, raises constitutional questions, and must be the subject of serious debate. Lumping them all together into one bill, and proposing to speed that bill through Parliament, virtually guarantees that democratic debate on these proposed measures will be insufficient.”

Such speed is consistent with the Harper government’s attitude toward activists. A previous environment minister, Peter Kent, called parliamentary opponents of tar sands “treacherous” and had a long history of dismantling every regulation he could. The current environment minister, Leona Aglukkaq, while less inclined to frontal attacks, nonetheless also doubts climate change.

From smoking is good for you to the weather is just fine

Global-warming denialism is well-funded, with oil and gas companies often the heaviest contributors to “think tanks” that specialize in doubting scientific evidence on behalf of their corporate benefactors. An excellent roundup of these deniers, written by physics professor John W. Farley for the May 2012 edition of Monthly Review, noted that Exxon Mobil Corporation, the Koch brothers and other special interests have spent tens of millions of dollars.

One of these corporate-funded “think tanks” is the Heartland Institute, which began life as a Big Tobacco outfit issuing reports denying links between smoking and cancer. Another global-warming denial outfit, The George C. Marshall Institute, originated as lobby group for Ronald Reagan’s crackpot Strategic Defense Initiative, more commonly known as the “Star Wars” program. Another was the now-defunct Global Climate Coalition, which included major oil companies, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and automobile manufacturers; it actually operated from the offices of the National Association of Manufacturing.

A scientist who is often trotted out by global-warming deniers is Wei-Hock (“Willie”) Soon, who was recently revealed to have taken more than $1.2 million from the fossil-fuel industry. The New York Times reports that at least 11 papers Dr. Soon has published since 2008 omitted disclosures of this funding and at least eight violate the ethical guidelines of the journals that published him. The Times reports:

“[D]ocuments show that Dr. Soon, in correspondence with his corporate funders, described many of his scientific papers as “deliverables” that he completed in exchange for their money. He used the same term to describe testimony he prepared for Congress.”

The world is facing an environmental catastrophe as it is; increasing production from the Alberta tar sands will only hasten it. The capacity of railroads to ship oil is reaching its limit (and in itself is dangerous as a recent flurry of crashes demonstrate). Thus pipelines are critical for tar sands expansion. Not only the Keystone XL pipeline across the United States, but the Northern Gateway and other proposed pipelines that would cross Canada to eastern ports. U.S. President Barack Obama’s February 24 veto of a congressional bill designed to force Keystone construction by no means puts that issue to rest; the State Department’s inaccurate claim that the pipeline would not add to global warming and falsehoods that tens of thousands of jobs would result remain an official document.

Opposition to the Keystone XL pipelines has not slackened and strong resistance continues against the Northern Gateway, which would not only send oil through sensitive mountains and forests, but would require ocean tankers to travel more than 100 kilometers just to reach the Pacific Ocean from the pipeline terminus in northern British Columbia. From there, the oil would be shipped to Asia. First Nations peoples, who have the right to block projects from crossing their lands, are leading that fight, and vow physical resistance.

TransCanada Corporation, the same company that wants to build Keystone XL to the Gulf of Mexico, is also proposing an Energy East pipeline that would carry tar sands oil to terminals in Québec City and St. John, New Brunswick. This project, if it comes to fruition, would alone produce the same amount of carbon each year as seven million new cars on Canada’s roads, according to 350.org. Some of this project would use existing natural gas lines; these are not designed for oil, a heavier substance, elevating the risk of ruptures.

The RCMP reports asserts that “extremists pose a realistic criminal threat to Canada’s petroleum industry.” Advocating for clean air and water is a crime? The fight against one of these pipelines must be a fight against them all; increased oil profits surely won’t be compensation for drowned cities and farmlands turned to dust bowls.

Sorry, Google, I won’t spy on myself for you

I turned down a chance to spy on myself for Google. This was a real offer: Google, picking my address at random (or so it says) offered me a modest sum of money if I would let them install a monitor on my computer that would report on everything I did online.

Google claimed it wanted to better understand what users do online so as to provide a better Internet experience, or something to that effect. It wasn’t hard for me to turn this offer down, despite Google sending me two letters and having someone call me on my home phone. I was not gentle in turning down the offer but, so far, my Internet connection has not been cut off in revenge.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see the real reason for Google taking a personal interest in me and, presumably, untold thousands of others: Advertising.

Google evidently seeks further refinements in the algorithms it uses to “tailor” advertising to its Gmail and other users, based on what you are reading or the content of your e-mail. And likely for other, more nefarious purposes. It is disquieting how accepted corporate breaches of privacy seem to be accepted. A son-in-law of a friend, prompted by being asked what he does for a living, actually saw himself as providing a necessary service when he explained how he works for a technology company to tailor advertising to the profile of a user, complaining that non-tailored advertising “would be a waste” — for the recipient of the advertising!

We’ve gone far down a slippery slope when being bombarded by corporate advertising is considered a public service.

This is simply one logical outgrowth of the concept that corporations shouldn’t be taxed. Bus stops, building walls, the insides and outsides of public transportation vehicles, even the sidewalks, are crammed with advertising — city governments ask them to buy advertising space instead of taxing them. National governments borrow from the wealthy and from corporations instead of taxing them; less so can local governments, given the damocles’ sword that corporations can dangle. Tax us? We’ll just move our factory. Voilà! No more pesky taxes to pay.

The ‘right’ to do whatever you want to others

There is no reason to expect technology companies to act any different from those in older industries. It’s not surprising that many Silicon Valley millionaires style themselves as libertarians: What more fundamental “right” could there be for such people than the “right” to be left alone, i.e., to not pay taxes or submit to regulations. Never mind that their newly minted piles of money are built on infrastructure created by government agencies and paid for by taxpayers. The Internet was invented in a Pentagon laboratory; the World Wide Web in a European research laboratory. Global positioning satellites, products of government space programs, are the basis of many a private profit.

The working people whose taxes paid for these technologies aren’t receiving renumeration, but Silicon Valley millionaires certainly are.

So it’s more than a little hypocritical for eight technology companies (AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo) to suddenly declare opposition to government spying programs. The eight corporations grandly call for limiting governments’ authority to collect users’ information; for oversight and accountability; transparency about government demands; respecting the free flow of information; and international treaties to harmonize privacy rules.

It is not beyond notice that these corporations said nothing on this topic until Edward Snowden provided the world with details of spying programs by the U.S. National Security Administration, Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters and others. Indeed, the president of a lobbying group, the Center for Democracy and Technology, admitted in an interview with The Guardian that the eight companies are motivated by a fear of losing business in the wake of revelations of their routine facilitation of U.S. government spying.

The extent to which they have lost some of their public standing due to the uncovering of their cozy relations with spying agencies has resulted in this public-relations effort. Nonetheless, Silicon Valley millionaires’ libertarian principles hasn’t stopped them from using “free trade” agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (which has very little to do with trade and much to do with tightening corporate control over society) to get some of their fondest wishes snuck in through the back door.

Technology companies are well represented among the 605 corporate lobbyists who have access to the otherwise secret Trans-Pacific Partnership text, through their own executives and through organizations such as their Information Technology Industry Council.

Why is corporate spying different than government spying?

There is not one word in the jeremiad about privacy from corporate spying. Facebook and some other social-media websites collect more personal information than does the NSA. These torrents of personal information have one core use — to be monetized by Facebook and its cohorts. Advertisers would love to have your personal information in order that they can tailor the advertisements shown you, and follow you with their ads whenever you are online. The more information you willingly hand over to social-media networks, the more they are going to profit from you and the less privacy you have.

Google has decided to supplement its data gathering through direct spying conducted by software directly installed on your home computer. The ability to profit from your detailed personal information by selling it to advertisers and who knows whom else is valuable enough to Google that it is willing to part with minuscule crumbs from its cash hoard to induce you to provide it to them. Maybe next year, Google will offer a small payment if you’ll provide a DNA sample. Many a pharmaceutical company would like to have such information and we should not fall out of our chairs in shock if the libertarian heroes of Silicon Valley are willing to get it for them.

We are outraged by government spying. As we should be. Why, however, is there pervasive silence over corporate spying? Big Data is watching you, and is likely more efficient at it than Big Brother. Is it because capitalist ideology has so inculcated the world with the idea that government is always bad and the private sector is always good? Is it because that ideology’s insistence that creating a profit is the sum of human existence, regardless of who is hurt? It it because corporate domination of every sphere of life has become so taken for granted that it is no more noticed than the air we breath? Is because everything of human creation is being reduced to a commodity, even our own privacy?

Government spying and corporate spying lie along the same continuum. Government is not some disembodied entity floating above society; it is a reflection of the most influential and powerful entities and groups within a given society. The largest industrialists and financiers are those most powerful in a capitalist country — governments thus act on behalf of those interests in opposition to the interests of the working people who comprise the vast majority.

The world system of capitalism requires a center; that center, the United States, necessarily goes the furthest in accommodating these elite interests. It is then no surprise that so much of the spying conducted by U.S. spying agencies concentrates on gleaning industrial and trade secrets from other countries and on suppressing domestic peaceful political dissent. The technology companies are among the beneficiaries, making their sudden privacy advocacy naked hypocrisy, nothing more. I’ll no more spy for Google than for the NSA.

When you are on top, ‘might makes right’ is ‘rule of law’

The Obama administration’s moralistic paeans to the “rule of law” concerning whistleblower Edward Snowden would carry considerably more weight if the United States weren’t continuing to harbor an assortment of ex-dictators and a terrorist who killed dozens in an airplane bombing. As soon as we look under the hood, we see “might makes right” at work, not “rule of law.”

Cartoon by Carlos Latuff.
http://tales-of-iraq-war.blogspot.com/2008/01/its-not-torture-when-us-forces-are.html

If the U.S. government actually cares about the sanctity of international law, it could start by handing over Luis Posada Carriles, convicted of blowing up a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people, to the government of Venezuela. Not only has Mr. Posada has been living in Florida for many years, he has at times worked for the U.S. government since escaping from a Venezuelan jail. Shortly after escaping prison (allegedly thanks to bribes paid by members of the Miami Cuban exile community) he was hired to work on Oliver North’s illegal Nicaraguan Contra supply network, and is suspected of involvement in an attempt to assassinate Fidel Castro in 1994 and a string of tourist-hotel bombings in the Havana area in 1997.

Mr. Posada, who trained with the CIA in the 1960s, gave an interview to three major U.S. newspapers in 1997 in which he admitted to some of activities. Writing about this topic in 2002 in an article published in BigCityLit, I wrote:

“The Miami Herald, Los Angeles Times and New York Times reported Posada’s revelations, which detailed a series of bombings and other terror acts and connections with Cuban exile groups in Miami. Posada, then 70 years old, ‘revealed that key Cuban American lobbyists in this country financed his activities, in apparent violation of U.S. law, while the FBI and CIA looked the other way,’ according to a Los Angeles Times report.”

The National Security Archive, a project of George Washington University that publishes declassified U.S. government documents, provided further details in 2005:

“The National Security Archive today posted additional documents that show that the CIA had concrete advance intelligence, as early as June 1976, on plans by Cuban exile terrorist groups to bomb a Cubana airliner. The Archive also posted another document that shows that the FBI’s attaché in Caracas had multiple contacts with one of the Venezuelans who placed the bomb on the plane, and provided him with a visa to the U.S. five days before the bombing, despite suspicions that he was engaged in terrorist activities at the direction of Luis Posada Carriles. …

“[A] report from the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research on the bombing of Cubana flight 455 … noted that a CIA source had overheard Posada prior to the bombing in late September 1976 stating that, ‘We are going to hit a Cuban airliner.’ This information was apparently not passed to the CIA until after the plane went down. There is no indication in the declassified files that indicates that the CIA alerted Cuban government authorities to the terrorist threat against Cubana planes.”

They said he’s a terrorist, but gave him a pardon anyway

The Cuban and Venezuelan governments have long requested extradition of Mr. Posada, to no avail. Another Cuban exile leader, Orlando Bosch, was granted a pardon by President George H.W. Bush in 1990 and lived free in the U.S. for three decades until dying in 2011. Mr. Bosch was also suspected in the Cuban airline bombing and in a series of other terroristic acts. Duncan Campbell, writing in The Guardian, reported a decade ago on him:

“According to US justice department records: ‘the files of the FBI and other government agencies contain a large quantity of documentary information which reflects that, beginning in the early 1960s, Bosch held leadership positions in various anti-Castro terrorist organisations. … Bosch has personally advocated, encouraged, organised and participated in acts of terrorist violence in this country as well as various other countries.’ ”

Lest we be tempted to chalk the above up simply to the U.S. government’s bipartisan obsession with Cuba, we’ve only scratched the surface of U.S. hypocrisy over the “rule of law.” Bolivia, for example, has requested extradition of former president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada. At the time already responsible for the deaths of dozens of protestors, President Sánchez sent his security forces to put down a peaceful rally opposing the selling off of Bolivian gas reserves; 67 were killed and more than 400 injured. He later fled into exile and was formally charged in 2007 with genocide.

The Obama administration refuses to send him back. A report by Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian states:

“Bolivia then demanded his extradition from the US for him to stand trial. That demand, ironically, was made pursuant to an extradition treaty signed by Sánchez de Lozada himself with the US. … The view that Sánchez de Lozada must be extradited from the US to stand trial is a political consensus in Bolivia, shared by the government and the main opposition party alike. But on [September 7, 2011], the Bolivian government revealed that it had just been notified by the Obama administration that the US government has refused Bolivia’s extradition request.”

Then there is Warren Anderson, former chairman of Union Carbide, who is wanted in India in the wake of the explosion of his company’s Bhopal pesticide plant that killed thousands of people and injured tens of thousands. Indians courts have issued warrants for his arrest, which have been met with silence while he shuttles between houses on the U.S. East Coast.

It’s not only terrorists and corporate criminals who enjoy safe havens in the United States. Amnesty International, in a 2002 report, US is a ‘Safe Haven’ for Torturers Fleeing Justice, estimated that at least 150 torturers were living in the county then, none of whom was brought to justice. The number of torturers that the U.S. has trained, at its School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, is far higher. At the SOA (currently operating under the name of “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation”) the U.S. Army trains Latin American military and police officers in torture techniques as part of its curriculum; the countries with the worst human rights records consistently send the most trainees.

If they don’t like terrorists, why do they train them?

The watchdog group School of Americas Watch, in an investigative report written by Bill Quigley, summarizes the work of the SOA:

“[G]raduates of the SOA have been implicated in many of the worst human rights atrocities in the Western Hemisphere, including the assassination of Catholic bishops, labor leaders, women and children, priests, nuns, and community workers and the massacres of entire communities. Numerous murders and human rights violations by SOA graduates have been documented in Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Paraguay among others. These horrendous acts correspond to part of the school’s curriculum: systematic use of torture and executions to neutralize dissidents.” [page 2]

An article in The Washington Post, a newspaper (despite its long-ago Watergate reporting) that often acts as if it were an official publication of the U.S. government (and which has eagerly joined in the attacks on Edward Snowden), nonetheless reported straightforwardly on the use of torture manuals released by the Pentagon under pressure:

“U.S. Army intelligence manuals used to train Latin American military officers at an Army school from 1982 to 1991 advocated executions, torture, blackmail and other forms of coercion against insurgents, Pentagon documents released yesterday show. Used in courses at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas, the manual says that to recruit and control informants, counterintelligence agents could use ‘fear, payment of bounties for enemy dead, beatings, false imprisonment, executions and the use of truth serum.’ ”

That was the summation of a newspaper that ordinarily rushes to defend U.S. foreign policy. The techniques it described were not a small part of the curriculum, nor an aberration, as the Post article implied in an attempt to soften the revelation. A former SOA instructor, Major Joseph Blair, told The Progressive:

“I sat next to Major Victor Thiess who created and taught the entire course, which included seven torture manuals and 382 hours of instruction. … He taught primarily using manuals which we used during the Vietnam War in our intelligence-gathering techniques. The techniques included murder, assassination, torture, extortion, false imprisonment. … Literally thousands of those manuals were passed out. … The officers who ran the intelligence courses used lesson plans that included the worst materials contained in the seven manuals. Now they say that there were only eighteen to twenty passages in those manuals in clear violation of U.S. law. In fact, those same passages were at the heart of the intelligence instruction.” [“School of the Americas Critic,” July 1997]

He killed 1,000 a month, but he’s ‘dedicated to democracy’

The SOA continues to operate. One of the graduates of the school is Efrain Ríos Montt, the most blood-thirsty of a series of brutal dictators who ruled through terror in Guatemala. Each of these dictators ruled with the full support of the U.S. following the CIA-organized overthrow of the democratically elected Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán at the behest of the United Fruit Company, which had previously been the country’s de facto ruler. The succession of dictatorships killed more than 200,000 Guatemalans. The régime of President Ríos Montt murdered more than 1,000 people a month during 1982, with Ríos Montt himself hailed by U.S. President Ronald Reagan as “totally dedicated to democracy” and unfairly the target of “a bum rap.”

Simultaneously, the Guatemalan military intensified its assaults on Indigenous communities. For example, SOA Watch reports, a Guatemalan special forces unit with extensive ties to the SOA, the Kaibiles, carried out this operation:

“[The unit] entered the village of Las Dos Erres, systematically raped the women, and killed 162 inhabitants, 67 of them children. Current President of Guatemala Otto Peréz Molina, also a graduate of the SOA, spent much of his time in military service as a member of the Kaibiles. This military unit was developed by the Guatemalan government in 1974, and its initial leader was a fellow SOA graduate.”

Among the techniques used by Guatemala’s dictators, according to the book Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America by Juan Gonzalez, were dropping mutilated bodies from helicopters into crowded stadiums and cutting out the tongues of people who inquired about the “disappearances” of friends and family.

And let us not forget the loyal sidekick of the U.S., Great Britain, which seeks to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to Sweden merely for questioning at the same time it refuses to extradite a convicted pedophile, Shawn Sullivan, to stand trial in Minnesota, claiming that the U.S. justice system has a civil commitment program for sex offenders that is too draconian. The Daily Kos reports that the suspect is charged with raping a 14 year old girl and sexually assaulting two 11 year old girls in 1994, but escaped to Ireland.

In no way is Edward Snowden, a whistleblower who has provided a service to humanity, comparable to the murderous rouges gallery described in this article, but the Obama administration might want to meet its obligations under international law before it further strong-arms other countries. But then “rule of law” in a world in which force maintains vast inequality is a euphemism for “rule of the most powerful.”

Spying? Who cares? Profits are at stake!

Actions do speak louder than words, and thus the start of European Union-United States trade talks as previously scheduled would seem to hold more weight than European political leaders’ displays of public anger at the extent of the spying against them.

Resignation to their subordinate status, the extent of their own spying networks and the knowledge that considerable dirty work is necessary to remain a leading capitalist country are among the contradictory factors at work here. So, too, is a willingness by European leaders to rely on the U.S. to perform much of the dirty work, while European big business needs to sell to U.S. consumers. Business is business at the end of the day. Or at the (hoped) end of the scandal.

With the stream of new revelations showing no signs of stopping, the end of the scandal does not appear anywhere in sight. Nor does the spectacle of contradictory behavior by European countries, most dramatically exemplified by France.

On the one hand, the French government declared revelations that the U.S. has spied on E.U. offices and computer networks “completely unacceptable” and demanded a delay in the start of the E.U.-U.S. trade talks, intended to form a “Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.” Yet France not only meekly agreed to the trade talks beginning on time but acceded to U.S. arm-twisting that it close its air space to the plane carrying Bolivian President Evo Morales on the mere suspicion that whistleblower Edward Snowden was aboard.

How much of the complaints from France, Germany and elsewhere in Europe are posturing and how much is genuine anger is an open question, but perhaps ultimately irrelevant. Le Monde has revealed that the France intelligence agency DGSE spies on the French public’s phone calls, e-mails and Internet activity in a manner similar to that of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). And Mr. Snowden has revealed that German spy agencies are “in bed together” with U.S. spy agencies.

The chief of Germany’s foreign intelligence agency has confirmed that his agency works closely with the NSA, Der Spiegel reports, with the U.S. agency using several German locations to engage in data collection. The arrangement is justified by the “fight against terrorism,” the favorite all-purpose excuse to trample constitutional norms and privacy concerns, both of which tend to be taken more seriously among Europeans than United Statesians. In its report, Der Spiegel asked:

“Is it really conceivable that the German government knows nothing of what the NSA is doing on its own doorstep? Last month Interior Minister [Hans-Peter] Friedrich said in a parliamentary debate on the NSA snooping: ‘Germany has fortunately been spared big attacks in recent years. We owe that in part to the information provided by our American friends.’ Sentences like that reveal a pragmatic view of the US surveillance apparatus: What the NSA gets up to in detail is secondary — what counts is what its snooping reveals. And that information, intelligence officials admit, is indispensable.”

The German government sees itself as dependent on the U.S., and that counts for more than public displays of anger that culminated in a German minister condemning revelations of U.S. spying on Germany as “methods used by enemies during the Cold War.” Whatever momentary anger her government may have felt, Chancellor Angela Merkel has not wavered in her support for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) talks. Germany’s economy, after all, is dependent on exports — increasingly so during the past decade as German workers have absorbed a decade of wage cuts — and German manufacturers are likely salivating at the thought of increased exports to North America.

You can be angry, but you’re still subordinate

After all the displays of anger and assertions of sovereignty, European government showed themselves not only subordinate to the U.S. but to their own industrialists and financiers. The U.S. government is similarly a captive of its own big business interests — that is what right-wing calls to “starve” government are about. It was all smiles on July 8 as the TTIP talks began, on schedule, with embarrassing discussions of spying relegated to a “parallel” track, separate from what really counts, the main negotiations to dismantle regulations.

Both newly seated U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman and European Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht made the ritualistic grand claims of the benefits that will fall from the sky if the TTIP is implemented, and business groups competed with themselves to issue the highest “estimates” of the increase in wealth. The Centre for Economic Policy Research in London, for example, claimed the TTIP would stuff pockets with more than US$100 billion a year from added growth.

Similar pie in the sky promises were made for the North American Free Trade Agreement and many other trade deals, so, dear reader, all is forgiven if you are skeptical about such claims. “Free trade” agreements elevate corporations and investors to equal status with governments on paper, and above governments in reality because disputes between businesses and governments are sent to unaccountable tribunals controlled by organizations like the World Bank and in which the judges are frequently lawyers who specialize in representing corporations in disputes with governments.

Ambassador Froman, the new U.S. trade representative installed by the Obama administration, will not represent any change in direction. The American Enterprise Institute, a leading lobbyist for multi-national corporations, gave its seal of approval:

“No white smoke floated up from the White House when the president announced that he had chosen deputy security adviser Michael Froman as the new US Trade Representative; but there was a huge, collective sigh of relief from all elements of the US business and trade policy communities. … Michael Froman is an excellent choice. He is close to the president, was deeply involved in passage of the Bush [free-trade agreements] with [South] Korea, Colombia, and Panama.”

Ambassador Froman’s neoliberal credentials are assuredly in order. He worked as chief of staff to former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who played a leading role in the Clinton administration’s deregulation of the financial industry, and before that was a managing partner at Citigroup. He seems to have done well at Citigroup, receiving more than $7.4 million from the company from January 2008 to when he joined the White House early in 2009, including a year-end bonus of $2.25 million.

Full speed ahead! The U.S. Chamber of Commerce — a hard-line organization that has never seen a regulation it likes or a tax that is justified — had already called for a speedy agreement before any pesky elections get in the way. Eurochambres had declared that it sought “the highest possible standards of protection for investors” — thinly disguised code for an elimination of rules and regulations. As Systemic Disorder has previously noted, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, intended to go beyond NAFTA and formally codify the maximization of corporate profits as the central principle of governments, is the model for the TTIP, and it is unlikely that it is a coincidence that the two giant trade pacts are being negotiated simultaneously.

Some country has to be the top dog

The growth of spying operations and the shrinking of democratic spaces that accompanies bilateral and multilateral trade agreements progress hand-in-hand. The capitalist system has always required a center to hold it together. Capitalism has had a succession of dominant centers; each successive center has been bigger to be able to cope with increasingly complex tasks.

When London succeeded Amsterdam as the financial center, the financial center became located within a country with a powerful military, not only a large merchant fleet as Amsterdam’s United Provinces possessed. When New York succeeded London, the country at the center became continental in size, possessing a military that can be projected around the world, further intensifying the links between financial and military power that had solidified during Britain’s rise to dominance.

The projection of, and willingness to apply, force is crucial to the maintenance and expansion of the capitalist system. That force nowadays may be more often financial and commercial rather than military, but the military and intelligence services are in reserve. From the dozens of coups in Latin America to the forcible installation of regimes willing to do U.S. bidding in Iran and Iraq decades apart to propping up dictatorships around the world, the common thread has been using power to gain advantage for U.S. multi-national corporations. “Free trade” agreements are another methodology to the same goal.

All of the world’s advanced capitalist countries are a part of this system. They acquiesce in it however much they sometimes chafe at their subordinate status (in relation to the U.S.); their willingness to enter into trade pacts binds them to the dominant power. No single country is large enough or possesses a big enough military to challenge U.S. domination; today, only a unified Europe could challenge U.S. hegemony. European capitalists desire the ability to challenge the United States for economic supremacy, but cannot do so without the combined clout of a united continent.

The E.U., in its current capitalist form, is a logical step for business leaders who desire greater commercial power on a global basis: It creates a “free trade” zone complete with suppression of social accountability while giving muscle to a currency that has the potential of challenging the U.S. dollar as the world’s pre-eminent currency.

Thus the proposed TTIP is in the interest of industrialists and financiers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean at the same time that its approval would spell disaster for working people — more concentration of power in the biggest corporations; less ability for citizens to influence government policy; and weaker labor, safety and environmental regulations. Concentration of power and shriveling of democracy can’t be accomplished without a stifling of dissent, which in turn requires, inter alia, more spying and less accountability by spying agencies.

There are common interests at the same time that spying is also deployed to gain competitive advantages for favored corporations; the latter is exemplified by U.S. bugging of E.U. offices. Those shared interests in maintaining the system, however much the advanced capitalist countries may compete, tend toward cooperative relations. Thus although countries like France and Spain demonstrate their subordinate status in humiliating fashion by closing their air spaces under U.S. orders, the blocking of President Morales’ plane is not reducible to only that subordination; European governments have shared interests in maintaining the system. That force is what maintains it speaks for itself.