I believe democracy needs transparency.

That’s why I was so excited when I heard that Greenpeace Netherlands was releasing to the public secret documents from the United States’ current trade negotiations with the European Union. The deal is called the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP for short) and once it’s agreed upon it will govern the U.S.-European economic relationship for years.

You can check out the documents obtained by Greenpeace Netherlands here.

And what these leaked documents tell us is that right now it’s not looking like a good deal for the environment, democracy, or the public in general.

It’s also clear that U.S. negotiators have been consulting with industry behind closed doors. These secret negotiations for the TTIP put corporate interests ahead of the public and undermine basic principles of transparency and open debate that are fundamental to our democracy — just like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) did.

What are the first conclusions from the documents?

From an environmental and consumer protection point of view, four aspects are of serious concern:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) used industry-funded research to conclude that the herbicide chemical glyphosate is not likely to cause cancer in humans—contradicting findings by the World Health Organization (WHO)—according to an analysis the EPA posted to, then swiftly removed from, its website on Friday.

"EPA's determination that glyphosate is non-carcinogenic is disappointing, but not terribly surprising—industry has been manipulating this process for years," said Nathan Donley, a scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD). "The analysis done by the World Health Organization is more open and transparent and remains the gold standard."

The agency's since-deleted analysis (pdf), which includes an October 2015 memorandum from its Cancer Assessment Review Committee (CARC), states:

The epidemiological evidence at this time does not support a causal relationship between glyphosate exposure and solid tumors. There is also no evidence to support a causal relationship between glyphosate exposure and the following non-solid tumors: leukemia, multiple myeloma, or Hodgkin lymphoma.

Groups cited in the analysis include private biochemical firms like Inveresk Research International, Nufarm, and Arysta Life Sciences.

WHO reported the exact opposite in a groundbreaking March 2015 study, which prompted a wave of measures against the use of the chemical. California placed it on the state's public 'cancer list' in September, while workers around the country lined up to sue Monsanto for conducting what they called a "prolonged campaign of misinformation" to convince farmers, consumers, and the government that its Roundup line of products was safe to use.

Q: What is the left and what kind of language can we use to describe our movement and our positions to others?

CHOMSKY: Well, the Left is the movement that is in favor of all decent things—freedom, justice, peace. Of course we have to define it for ourselves, but traditionally it’s the movement that’s been in favor of more freedom, more justice, more equality, more participation, more control over our own lives—all decent things. That’s the Left.

Why are Mexicans coming to the U.S.? Well, there’s something called NAFTA, which was established in 1994, rammed through by the liberals over the opposition of the American public, the Mexicans, and the Canadians. There were alternatives proposed by the labor movement, but the media wouldn’t even report them. So Clinton managed to ram through the executive version of NAFTA. If you look at the background, it’s pretty clear what it was about.

When NAFTA was established, it was understood that it was going to destroy Mexican agriculture and Mexican business. Mexican agriculture couldn’t compete with U.S. agribusiness, which is massively state subsidized under NAFTA, so, of course, it devastated the economy and people began to flee. Where are they going to flee to? They’re not going to Guatemala, so they’re going to the U.S.

What do you do about it? Clinton understood exactly what to do about it. The border between Mexico and the U.S. had been a pretty open border. It was established, of course, by conquest and pretty much the same people lived on both sides so people were mainly crossing to visit their relatives.

In 1994, the year NAFTA was passed, Clinton initiated the militarization of the border—Operation Gatekeeper. Why? Because anybody could see that the impact of NAFTA was going to be harmful and was going to lead to a flow of immigrants, which would have to be stopped by force. That’s the immigrant issue, that’s the basis for it.

The fact of the matter is that when an immigrant comes in, it leads to economic growth. They do a lot of the dirty work of society for low wages and in bad conditions. They can’t complain for obvious reasons—they’re undocumented—so they are easily exploitable. They send back remittances and they spend money, so their net effect, from an economic point of view, is beneficial to the economy—and they take jobs from no one.

How this pans out depends on us. Do we want to spend millions a year to build cities in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan to ensure that we control the region along with military bases, torture chambers, and so on? That’s up to us—our choice. Do we give up? or do we push for more freedom, more justice, more equality, more participation, more control over our own lives—all decent things?

The Clintonian era which began under Bill Clinton in the 1990s was marked by the Democratic Party’s open advocacy and implementation of neoliberalism, as a continuation of the “trickle down” ideas of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. The Clinton administration passed devastating policies like NAFTA, with its brutal effects on workers and the environment; the 1994 crime bill with its dramatic expansion of incarceration; and the destruction of welfare with its inhuman effects on the poor and particularly single mothers. Such laws were part of an overall agenda of attacks on social services and on the interests of the working class and people of color. Bill and Hillary Clinton were political partners in that process, as they are political partners in Hillary’s election campaign today.

As a U.S. Senator, Clinton voted for the Iraq War, the Patriot Act, the Patriot Act re-authorization, for new “free trade” deals (including the 2008 Panama agreement which helped perfect it as a tax haven), for bank deregulation, the Wall Street bailouts (TARP), the 2006 border fence legislation, and the list goes on. As Secretary of State she was perhaps the administration’s most aggressive proponent for interventions in Libya and Syria that fueled the humanitarian crisis in the region. She acted as a global spokesperson for fracking, and in spite of considerable pressure from Sanders has not backed down from this environmentally devastating practice.

Hillary won the admiration of Bloomberg Businessweek for her corporate advocacy as Secretary, noting that “Clinton turned the State Department into a machine for promoting U.S. business,” and sought “to install herself as the government’s highest-ranking business lobbyist.”

How can anyone seriously argue that we can continue our political revolution by supporting one of the highest profile opponents of that revolution, who has essentially vowed that the things we’re fighting for will “never ever happen”? Hillary Clinton’s actual policies will not be rooted in whatever platform is passed at the convention, but will be based instead on her own neoliberal politics and on the influence of Wall Street and the billionaire class that have funded her campaign. In fact, the Clinton camp has already responded to Sanders, rejecting attempts to push Hillary to the left.

Major turbulence seems to be the name of the game in 2016. Yet the current turbulence may be interpreted as the calm before the next, devastating geopolitical/financial storm. Let’s review the current state of play via the dilemmas afflicting the House of Saud, the EU and BRICS members Russia, Brazil and China.

What’s left for the House of Saud is to play for time. High up in Riyadh the feeling is that relations with Washington won’t improve while Obama is president; the next president – whether Hillary or The Donald – will be a much better deal. So Plan A for now is to keep posing as essential to Washington in the “war on terra”; that means King Salman falling back on Mohammed bin Nayef, the Crown Prince, way more adept at it than the Warrior Prince, the conductor of the disastrous war on Yemen.

In parallel, Turkey’s Sultan Erdogan keeps advancing his play to take over oil in Iraqi Kurdistan, eventually diverting the whole supply to make Turkey energy independent – and thus a regional superpower. Moreover, in Pipelineistan terms, Erdogan absolutely also needs the Qatar gas pipeline through Saudi Arabia and Syria to gain energy independence from Russia. That also happens to be a major US goal. And that also portends perennial trouble for the Syria peace process.

Erdogan already has the German superpower at his feet in the shape of a groveling, begging Chancellor Merkel. Were Turkey on its way to become an energy power, Merkel would prostrate herself on that Ankara palace golden ground non-stop. The CIA intimates as much, when it analyzes how Turkey will keep “expanding its influence” in Iraq through the militias they support, at the expense of Iraq’s security and political unity.

Walking Dead Europe, meanwhile, subcontracted and/or externalized a policy of refugee repression, thus unleashing the largest mass deportation since WWII, complete with camps financed by EU taxpayers and managed by the Great Democrat Erdogan. The missing link is now in the open; everything is proceeding under control of NATO-linked think tanks.

As appalling as it may be, this is hardly new. It was already inbuilt in agreements that the EU imposes on African nations, “upgrading” their status to border Cerberuses. That’s the key mission of the Frontex agency, which is progressively delocalizing the external borders of the EU – to the east and to the south – to better repel migrants. Not a dot connected to NATO’s neo-imperial wars of choice, of course.

No wonder Noam Chomsky has noted that support for formal democracy in the West is dwindling, because they are not real democracies. All major decisions affecting the EU are taken by unelected eurocrats in Brussels. In a groundbreaking book published in Spain, Mercado-Estado-Carcel en la Democracia Neoliberal Espanola (Anthropos), Daniel Jimenez, doctor in Juridical Sociology at the University of Zaragoza, details how the new institutional local order is about de-democratization, denationalization and dependency; NATO, IMF, World Bank, the Paris club, BCE, the European Commission, the Fed, they are part of a global web of institutions, private but self-described as public or public but managed by private interests (such as the Fed). Michael Hudson, among others, has detailed how the EU never developed sustained mechanisms of transfer of capital from the wealthier economies towards poorer members.

No wonder the astonishing spread of Chinese economic power has left assorted Exceptionalists – from neocons to neoliberalcons – totally deranged. Washington has absolutely nothing to offer to nations across Asia, Africa and Latin America – to the whole Global South for that matter. They have all seen how Beijing is not in the market demanding Mob-style compound interest on sovereign debt; “support” for neo-imperial moves by NATO or the UN; one more extra-territorial hub for the US Empire of Bases; or total domination of their central banks.

On the other hand, they have seen what Washington does offer; endless war; the progressive smashing of the nation state; democracy blasted to smithereens; and technocratic governance by the 0.00001%.

Yet all this is just the calm before the storm. The Empire is already striking back. There’s serious blood on the tracks ahead.

Last year, the attempt of Greece’s newly elected radical-left government to resist austerity policies imposed by the European Union institutions and the International Monetary Fund put the country at the center of world attention. This battle was definitively lost when Alexis Tsipras capitulated in July to the demands of the creditors, signing up to a third memorandum only days after a referendum in which Greeks had rejected a softer EU proposed austerity package.

Since that moment, the plight of Greek society has only deepened. But it is now a silent suffering, deprived of the expectation of change and hope that had fueled the mobilizations of recent years.

But 2016 again made Greece headline news, this time for a different reason. The laboratory of neoliberal shock therapy is also Europe’s entrance gate for the millions of people leaving countries devastated by war and poverty.

According to the available figures, between 15,000 and 17,000 people died in the Mediterranean between the late 1980s and 2012, before the recent exodus from the Greater Middle Eastern area. More than 10,000 have died since, 2015 being the peak year with 3,800 deaths.

This dark side of the “European project” has been so far the least visible and debated one, except for those networks of courageous activists and researchers who have been working on the situation of migrants. The “refugee crisis” — a term which assumes that migrants and refugees pose an inherent threat to order — has at least the merit of politicizing the European project and putting it at the center of public debate. This has been the case in Greece, which found itself, once again, at the frontline of a battle of much wider proportions.

Seen from Greece, the “refugee crisis” reveals in the most brutal way the nature of the European Union as an entity for the surveillance, the policing, and the hierarchical categorization of the population. At the same time, it uncovers another dimension of an allegedly “left government” which, following its shameful surrender to the blackmail of the EU and the IMF, has aligned itself at all levels with the dominant logic of “crisis management.”

In an October 2015 article, Stiglitz and Adam Hersh added:

Imagine what would have happened if these provisions had been in place when the lethal effects of asbestos were discovered. Rather than shutting down manufacturers and forcing them to compensate those who had been harmed, under ISDS, governments would have had to pay the manufacturers not to kill their citizens. Taxpayers would have been hit twice — first to pay for the health damage caused by asbestos, and then to compensate manufacturers for their lost profits when the government stepped in to regulate a dangerous product.

According to Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, the TPP ISDS “tribunals are staffed by private lawyers who are not accountable to any electorate, system of legal precedent or meaningful conflict of interest rules. Their rulings cannot be appealed on the merits. Many ISDS lawyers rotate between roles – serving both as “judges” and suing governments for corporations, creating an inherent conflict of interest.”

Allowing trade lawyers to have the final say on cases that threaten our health and well being as well as the health of the ecosystem and its ability to support all life forms is insane! This disastrous settlement process tramples democracy and sovereignty and prioritizes profit over our health and well being as well as our ecosystem and its ability to support life. An old Cree prophecy seems relevant:

Only after the last river has been poisoned,
Only after the last fish has been caught,
Only then will you find money cannot be eaten.

If this corporate-designed settlement process doesn’t convince you to oppose the TPP, consider its rules for financial services. According to Public Citizen, these rules were written under the advisement of giant banks and work to undercut legislation meant to re-regulate Wall Street. Thus the TPP would expand the reach of failed policies that played a major role in creating the disastrous 2008 financial crisis. The TPP rules would also prevent nations from protecting their currencies in time of crisis. It’s as if the 2008 crisis didn’t happen.

Millions of the poorest, most vulnerable people in Ethiopia are once again at risk of starvation. Elderly men and women, weak and desperate, wait for food and water; malnourished children lie dying; livestock, bones protruding, perish.

According to a statement issued by the World Food Programme (WFP) on February 6th, over 10 million of the most vulnerable require urgent humanitarian assistance. This figure was published in the Joint Government and Humanitarian Partners’ Document (HRD) in December last year, and does not take into account the seven and a half million people who annually receive cash or food from Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP), (established in 2005 to enable, “the rural poor facing chronic food insecurity to resist shocks, create assets and become food self- sufficient”), taking the total in need of humanitarian food aid to almost 18 million.

The WFP explains that the level of humanitarian need in Ethiopia has “tripled since early 2015…caused by successive harvest failures and widespread livestock deaths. Acute malnutrition has risen sharply, and one quarter of Ethiopia’s districts are now officially classified as facing a nutrition crisis.” With a shortage of food, families are forced to make children drop out of school to take up into menial jobs to survive; such children, lacking a decent education, are unable to find well-paid jobs in adulthood in order to feed their own children properly, and so the spiral of exclusion, poverty and deprivation continues.

Land grabbing and hunger

Since 2008 the EPRDF government has been leasing huge amounts of fertile agricultural land to so-called “foreign investors’’: international corporations, domestic agents, fund managers, and nations anxious to secure their own future food security.

Detailed research by the OI in 2011 estimated that “3,619,509ha of land have been transferred to investors, although the actual number may be higher.” Incentives to investors include exemption from import taxes, income taxes and custom duties as well as ‘easy access to credit’; the Ethiopian Development Bank will contribute up to 70% towards land costs – which are extremely cheap to begin with.

The need for sharing

It is the poor who die of hunger-related causes throughout the world; it is the poorest people in rural Ethiopia – who constitute some of the poorest people on Earth – who are currently at risk. Every day 35,000 children in the world die of starvation and its attendant causes, but we live in a world of plenty; there is no need for a single man, woman, or child – in Ethiopia or anywhere else – to die because they do not have enough food or water to survive. Oxfam reports that the world now “produces 17% more food per person today than 30 years ago. But close to a billion people go to sleep hungry every night.” And they all live, more or less, in seven countries: India, China, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Pakistan.

Food, like water, shelter, access to education and health-care is a human right, and is enshrined as such in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Like all natural resources it should be shared equitably amongst the people of the world, so that nobody, anywhere – specifically the famine-affected regions of Ethiopia, where so many are once again in dire need – experiences food-insecurity and dies of hunger.