SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the not-surrendering-to-corporations-for-now dept.
Common Dreams reports
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said [August 25] that the U.S. Senate will not vote on the 12-nation, corporate-friendly Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) this year, buoying progressive hopes that the trade deal will never come to fruition.
[...] McConnell told a Kentucky State Farm Bureau breakfast in Louisville that the agreement, "which has some serious flaws, will not be acted upon this year".
Common Dreams also reports
Germany's Vice Chancellor and Economic Minister said that the controversial Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) has "de facto failed", admitting that negotiations between the U.S. and E.U. have completely stalled.
"Negotiations with the U.S. have de facto failed because, of course, as Europeans, we couldn't allow ourselves to submit to American demands", Sigmar Gabriel told the German news station ZDF [1][2] in an interview that will air at 7pm German time [August 28], according to Der Spiegel. [1]
"Everything has stalled", Gabriel said.
[1] In German [2] Content behind scripts
Reported by BBC, in English.
In 14 rounds of talks, the two sides had not agreed on a single common chapter out of 27 being discussed, Mr Gabriel said. "In my opinion the negotiations with the United States have de facto failed, even though nobody is really admitting it," said Mr Gabriel.
He suggested Washington was angry about a deal the EU struck with Canada, because it contained elements the US does not want to see in the TTIP.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by meustrus on Monday August 29 2016, @05:36PM
Recently I watched a very interesting Cracked video about Idiocracy, and how specifically it is not actually as dystopian as it seems. Sure, it's a world full of idiots, but the one thing most strikingly different from the real world is that they all know what they are. The guy takes an intelligence test, and the results of it place him in the white house because of his unusual intelligence. The president fears not for his own safety despite being black, holding public parties on the white house lawn. And when there is a better person to hold the office, he simply steps down. Sure, everything boils down to a reality show, but it's dumbed down to the point that nobody even cares what specific crazy plan the president has to fix the vague problems that nobody even understands. Can you imagine a world in which the Trump candidacy was more like an episode of the Kardashians? Where all we really had to know was that Jeb is a mess and forget about all this wall nonsense? And in this fairy tale land where we don't even pretend to have the solution to all the world's problems, everybody including Trump himself knows exactly how much of a total idiot Trump is and nobody expects him to take action beyond the reach of his actual intelligence. All in all, I'd take the Idiocracy version of Trump over the real one. I think a lot of us like to pretend that's what we're going to get.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?