#nix: Sovereignty posting

[elpurata-victim]

Some magma doodles

Really happy with how these oc ones came out

Special credit to my bestie estie (who isn’t on this app :(( ) for collating w me on the first design <33

[pplydm]

Isaiah 25:11-12

“..but the LORD will lay low his pompous pride together with the skill of his hands. And the high fortifications of his walls he will bring down, lay low, and cast to the ground, to the dust.”

This post’s unlike the previous ones. 

This Bible verse struck me strongly because right now, nothing connects so rightly than this verse and the circumstance I’m in. As I read this, as part of our monthly Bible reading plan, I was stupefied and slapped with the veracity all about the LORD GOD being my defender and supreme abettor. Deriving from this gospel, a human being’s skill and adroitness, it could be swimming of Michael Phelps, running of Usain Bolt, tennis playing of Serena Williams, champion in boxing Manny Pacquiao and the like, all those come to zero compared to the capacity of the LORD’s mightiness. There’s nix, as in zilch, to match the LORD’s sovereignty and strength. The world-renowned buildings and wonders built by hands of men is completely wrecked when the LORD GOD moves. Every thing an individual may boast of, which are of the world, don’t carry even a trifle of parity to the grand ingenuity of the LORD. This verse triumphs over my anxieties, apprehensions and anguishes. What else can’t the LORD prevail over? Having the LORD GOD and trusting, putting my faith in HIM and His promises are adequate.There’s clearly nothing to be distressed about. Thanks be to GOD! Praise the LORD! Hallelujah!

A prayer:

Dear GOD, thank you for Your Word and wonderfulness of Your love. Thank You for Your grace that you give another day to make new and righteous decisions. I ask to be reminded of this verse and for it to be kept in my heart. I give to You LORD all my worries and fears. I ask You carry me through it and grant me the wisdom to overcome each of them. I admit my incapacity and ask for forgiveness for the sins I have done. Thank You LORD! All praises and worship and honor go to You. In the name of Jesus I pray, amen.

[exfrenchdorsl4p0a1]

The TPP is dead: Time to transform the food system

Donald Trump just killed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The United States was to be the largest partner in a treaty that attempted to bring 40% of the world's economy into one trading region. The decision is huge. The silence is deafening. During the presidential campaign it began to dawn on politicians and mainstream media that the era of free trade ushered in by Bill Clinton with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993, is despised by working people. Gee. It only took them a quarter-century to figure it out. The alternative, bilateral approach signaled by the Trump administration is actually nothing new--and will not likely bring back manufacturing jobs (unless American workers are willing to work for Chinese wages). The United States has been pursuing bilateral trade agreements ever since the World Trade Organization got stuck in the mud in Cancun, Mexico in 2003. That was when South Korean farm leader Kun Hai Lee, immolated himself on the fence separating protesters from WTO negotiators claiming, "The WTO kills farmers!" No matter, the United States under Clinton, Bush and Obama all doggedly pursued free trade agreements (FTAs), behind closed corporate doors, no matter what the costs to people or the environment. Why? Because, until the recent elections, there was no political cost to supporting free trade agreements. Both Republicans and Democrats danced to the music of the global monopolies as they deregulated, privatized, and plundered the world's local economies. Elections could be fought over social issues, tax cuts, or birth certificates--anything but the trade agreements that gave corporations power over our national labor, environment, and property laws. Despite support from mainstream politicians, for decades FTAs have been bitterly opposed by progressive labor organizations, peasant and farm organizations, environmentalists, and hundreds of thousands of activists in the global justice movement . Well, Trump just nixed TPP and put NAFTA on notice. Shouldn't we be celebrating? The era of free trade has allowed major corporations to do as they please. Now that they have seized control of pretty much every economy on earth, protectionism--under new corporately-drawn boundaries--is going to be much more important for the monopolies controlling our energy and food systems than rampant free trade. In his move towards protectionism, Trump is only sealing the first deal in a trend that will further strengthen the power of corporations. It's hard to be happy about that. Anyway, for many activists--especially in the food movement--free trade was a remote issue. True, the global food sovereignty movement has always denounced FTAs as a façade for the corporate colonization of peasant food systems, but this had relatively faint echoes among US food activists. The food justice movement had its hands full trying to get healthy food into poor and underserved communities, making land available to young farmers, and setting up farmers markets, farm-to-school programs, and CSAs. The organic agriculture movement was wrestling with regulations, their struggling seed industry, and the difficulty of just making a living. The farm justice movement, committed to re-introducing the long abandoned idea of parity to the Farm Bill, did not come out strongly against the FTAs. Even the burgeoning food workers movement, whose ranks are replete with free trade refugees, focused on the immediacy of starvation salaries and miserable working conditions rather than the cause of their displacement and low-end jobs. Their struggles all brought important wins, but the separation of free trade from the food justice agenda came at a cost of a divided movement. This separation began with the food movement's high expectations for the presidency of Barack Obama, whom Michael Pollan called, "the farmer in chief." Actually, Michele Obama, with her White House organic garden and her efforts to get the food industry to clean up its act, was more of an ally. The Democrat's realpolitik towards the food movement was both receptive and contradictory. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack actively pushed GMOs, industrial agriculture, the "ethanolization" of the Midwest and FTAs while his Deputy-secretary Kathleen Meerigan supported community food security and pioneered the "Know your farmer, know your food" initiative. During every Farm Bill renewal, the food movement hitched its wagon to the Democratic Party in hopes of protecting the nutrition programs from Republican attack. However, corporate free trade agreements--despite their devastating impact on our food systems--were kept out of the political conversation with politicians, and stayed largely off the food movement agenda. One can understand the difficulty of working with the Republicans on these issues, but aren't the Democrats supposed to be "liberals" and "progressives"? Yes, indeed they are, but economic liberalism and social progressivism, while related, are two very different things. Starting with the Clinton administration, the Democratic Party has linked a progressive social agenda to a neoliberal economic agenda in a form of progressive neoliberalism. As Nancy Fraser wrote, "In its U.S. form, progressive neoliberalism is an alliance of mainstream currents of new social movements (feminism, anti-racism, multiculturalism, and LGBTQ rights), on the one side, and high-end "symbolic" and service-based business sectors (Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood), on the other. In this alliance, progressive forces are effectively joined with the forces of cognitive capitalism, especially financialization. However unwittingly, the former lend their charisma to the latter. Ideals like diversity and empowerment, which could in principle serve different ends, now gloss policies that have devastated manufacturing and what were once middle-class lives". For years, the Republican Party linked the same neoliberal economic agenda to a reactionary social agenda in a form of conservative neoliberalism. Donald Trump's clever trick was to mobilize social discontent against the political establishment by condemning the Democrats for their social progressivism and both Democrats and Republicans for their economic neoliberalism. His new brand looks to be a particularly toxic, socio-economic variety of reactionary reformism. That Trump and his crony cabinet would introduce reforms to dismantle FTAs doesn't mean he's abandoning the interests of the billionaire class; he's just changing the tools of domination. Where does that leave the food movement? (Or most progressives, for that matter.) First, the important news is that progressives no longer need to trade away economic justice for social justice. As the era of free trade comes to an end, those working on food justice, community food security, organic agriculture, and farm justice can join efforts with those working on food sovereignty and structural reforms. It's time to link social justice with economic justice issues. Therein lies the opportunity to build a broad-based movement for transformative reform--in the food system and beyond.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2liHkOA

[foreignpolicynewsorfonline-blog]

Trump may be pushing China into clash that won’t benefit anyone

Source:

futureatlas.com

ONE CHINA

TPP

TRUMP ERA

Given his actions on a range of issues so far, US President Donald Trump is likely to go after China using a range of tactics from punitive tarrifs to casting aside the US’s ‘One China’ policy and embracing Taiwan. So far, of course, he has scored a self-goal by scrapping the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), the foundation on which the Barack Obama administration’s “pivot” to Asia was anchored. In an intriguing op-ed in the

New York Times

, Yan Xuetong, a leading Chinese academician has painted a dramatic portrait of what China can become if it is put into the pressure cooker by Trump. Instead of playing it on the backfoot, China could, he said, actually take on the attack on the frontfoot and emerge as a “full fledged super power”. What does that mean? First, it could fill the vacuum left by the US abandoning free trade by creating a new trading bloc to replace the TPP. Australia and South Korea would be encouraged to join, but Japan would be left out of the new bloc.

Read Also | With Trump turning protectionist, can China and India lead globalisation

Second, he says, as of now, only “Pakistan is a traditional military ally,” but if the US changed its one China policy and recognised Taiwan’s independence, China “should establish as many military alliances as possible.” Specifically, Beijing should enter into military pacts with Cambodia, Thailand and the the Philippines. With the trade and military alliance in place, Beijing would become “the leader of East Asia and make the region safer.” Third, even as the US cracks down on immigration, Beijing should change its policy and begin welcoming immigrants. This way it could possibly attract some talented Americans who wanted to have nothing to do with the Trumpian US, as well as the best and the brightest from other parts of the world. Such immigration and the US ability to attract the best students from around the world has long been seen by China as an essential attribute of American soft-power. Despite its authoritarian system, China has been going out of its way to attract foreign students and talent, but it is no where as successful as the US. But, Yan says, opportunity is beckoning. Yan, dean of the prestigious Institute of International Relations at Tsinghua University in Beijing and a PhD from University of California at Berkeley, is perhaps the leading theorist of shaping the Chinese Communist Party’s Marxist-Leninist-Maoist system to the needs of the world of today. He has termed its culture as “atheist Confucianism” and has compared the politics of China’s “communist ruled socialist country based on private ownership” to the dragon that has aspects of fish, bird, deer and snake! Yan’s views on China developing alliances are well known because he believes that the world is becoming bipolar and that this will actually make it more stable.

Read Also | What Obama has wrought

In 1993 when presidential candidate Bill Clinton attacked incumbent George H.W. Bush’s China policy and threatened punitive tariffs,

Washington Post

carried a full page infographic which showed how much each household would end up paying for the common items they bought from the supermarket. Sanctions on US companies in China and counter-tariffs would bring the cost of the trade war back home as well. As Stephen S. Roach, former chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, has pointed out in a recent article, the relationship is more of a “co-dependency” and evolved out of their mutual needs. In the 2000s the Chinese helped to keep US consumer prices low, while their purchase of US treasury bills helped keep US interest rates low. There can be little doubt that making an abrupt and unilateral change to the terms of the relationship will have devastating consequences for not just the China and the US, but other countries as well. China has, of course, been steadily building its way into super-powerdom. The beginnings of its financial architecture are visible in the setting up of the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank. As for trade, it is mooting the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as well as the Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific. From the point of view of security, besides the bilateral pacts Yan is speaking off, China has already gone some way in creating the SCO where counter-terrorism military exercises and intelligence sharing are conducted. No doubt, the idea of China as a power rivaling the US appears to be fanciful today. China’s GDP may be greater than the American one in PPP terms, but it is still poor in per capita terms. Likewise, the US remains a much greater military power. But, unlike the US, which has stumbled twice in recent times – in its $ 2 trillion “war of choice” in Iraq and the 2008 financial crisis – China so far has been coasting along, though facing some headwind in recent years.

Read Also | The world system going through a serious churn

Trump’s policies seeking headlong confrontation may compel Beijing to get into a fight that it would otherwise have avoided. But there can be little doubt that such a clash will damage both parties, though to what extent cannot be gauged now. The danger became manifest this month when US secretary of state nominee Rex Tillerson said in his confirmation testimony on January 11 that “We’re going to send China a clear signal that first the island-building stops and second your access to those islands is also not going to be allowed.” The Chinese response was measured, emphasising its “irrefutable sovereignty” over the islands. Earlier this week, White House spokesman Sean Spicer said that the US would protect its interests in the South China Sea region. “We are going to make sure we defend international territories from being taken over by one country,” he added. Now, the international tribunal that nixed China’s Nine Dashed Line in 2016 has not had a say on the sovereignty of the islands which it says are not true islands, but rocks entitled to just 10 nm of territorial sea. The islands are contested between China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Brunei and Malaysia. So far the US position was to emphasise the freedom of navigation and overflight in the region, but not take a position on the sovereignty of the islands. In the past few years, China has built up military facilities on three key reefs after reclaiming land there. The Subi reef, Mischief reef and Fiery Cross island now have airstrips and hangars capable of taking military aircraft. A US effort to prevent their access to the islands would be a blockade, which is an act of war in international law. As it is, the location is sensitive for China because it is proximate to the Hainan Islands, the main base for the nuclear propelled submarines which carry a key element of their nuclear deterrent. It is no surprise then, that the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists have advanced their Doomsday clock by half a minute to just two and a half minutes to midnight.

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