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After months of back-room negotiations, key congressional negotiators are finally ready to unveil legislation that would fast-track approval for the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The bill would prohibit Congress from amending the trade deal, and would require a simple-majority vote for passage, but would in exchange set a variety of negotiating parameters. If the architects of the legislation—Senators Ron Wyden and Orrin Hatch and Representative Paul Ryan—are at all worried that members of Congress will feel fast-track leaves them out of the process, they are doing a pretty terrible job of addressing those concerns. A Senate Finance Committee hearing Thursday morning featured top US trade officials—but occurred before the legislation was even unveiled, and was called with almost no notice. This drew some unusual and strong rebukes from Democrats on the Finance Committee over an unfair process.

Hatch and Wyden, the chairman and ranking member of Senate Finance respectively, called hearing on Wednesday night that was ostensibly about “Congress and US Tariff Policy.” It featured several top US officials that deal with trade: US Trade Representative Michael Froman, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew. Hatch announced at the top of the hearing that fast-track legislation could come as early as the afternoon, and both he and Wyden began their opening statements by talking about the looming bill. Members of the committee thus suddenly found themselves in a fast-track hearing without knowing it—and before they saw the legislation. Many of them didn’t like it. Senator Chuck Schumer, likely to be the next Democratic majority leader, opposes fast-track and objecting in the hearing to “rushing” the legislation. Senator Sherrod Brown said “We got twelve hours notice on a bill we haven’t seen…you can’t fast-track fast track.”

Senators appeared unsure if they would even get to see the legislation before a vote. Senator Debbie Stabenow asked if the committee would have to vote “on an agreement that we have not yet even seen and that hasn’t been reached,” according to the Huffington Post.

Lawmakers have headed back to their home district for the Memorial Day recess, so there's a chance you, as a constituent, can meet with them. Absent that, you can visit their district staff who can receive and forward on your concerns to your representative even after lawmakers go back to the Capitol. They will be receptive to the concerns of smart, tech-savvy constituents who care enough to arrange a meeting. We know there's a big difference between calling and writing to your congressperson, and actually talking to them face-to-face. But this is a vital moment, and there's a fighting chance that your decision to meet with your representative's office could make all the difference.

On April 22, 2015, the Senate Finance Committee approved a bill to fast-track the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a massive trade agreement that would override our republican form of government and hand judicial and legislative authority to a foreign three-person panel of corporate lawyers. The secretive TPP is an agreement with Mexico, Canada, Japan, Singapore and seven other countries that affects 40% of global markets. Fast-track authority could now go to the full Senate for a vote as early as next week. Fast-track means Congress will be prohibited from amending the trade deal, which will be put to a simple up or down majority vote. Negotiating the TPP in secret and fast-tracking it through Congress is considered necessary to secure its passage, since if the public had time to review its onerous provisions, opposition would mount and defeat it.

The most controversial provision of the TPP is the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) section, which strengthens existing ISDS  procedures. ISDS first appeared in a bilateral trade agreement in 1959. According to The Economist, ISDS gives foreign firms a special right to apply to a secretive tribunal of highly paid corporate lawyers for compensation whenever the government passes a law to do things that hurt corporate profits — such things as discouraging smoking, protecting the environment or preventing a nuclear catastrophe. Arbitrators are paid $600-700 an hour, giving them little incentive to dismiss cases; and the secretive nature of the arbitration process and the lack of any requirement to consider precedent gives wide scope for creative judgments. To date, the highest ISDS award has been for $2.3 billion to Occidental Oil Company against the government of Ecuador over its termination of an oil-concession contract, this although the termination was apparently legal. Still in arbitration is a demand by Vattenfall, a Swedish utility that operates two nuclear plants in Germany, for compensation of €3.7 billion ($4.7 billion) under the ISDS clause of a treaty on energy investments, after the German government decided to shut down its nuclear power industry following the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011.

Under the TPP, however, even larger judgments can be anticipated, since the sort of “investment” it protects includes not just “the commitment of capital or other resources” but “the expectation of gain or profit.” That means the rights of corporations in other countries extend not just to their factories and other “capital” but to the profits they expect to receive there.

Since 2001, armed Predator drones have been used by the CIA in many foreign nations to attack individuals on the ground. There's a new revelation about them, too: In some cases, the NSA helped the CIA find targets by locking onto their powered-off mobile phones. Even when phones have their batteries removed, it appears the NSA still has the ability to locate them. Buried inside a Washington Post story by Dana Priest is the following tidbit: By September 2004, a new NSA technique enabled the agency to find cellphones even when they were turned off. JSOC troops called this "The Find," and it gave them thousands of new targets, including members of a burgeoning al-Qaeda-sponsored insurgency in Iraq, according to members of the unit. At the same time, the NSA developed a new computer linkup called the Real Time Regional Gateway into which the military and intelligence officers could feed every bit of data or seized documents and get back a phone number or list of potential targets. It also allowed commanders to see, on a screen, every type of surveillance available in a given territory.

"The Find," the Post article says, is run by a team in the basement of the NSA's headquarters whose job is to track the location of mobile phones in real time. Because many phones have chips that stay on even after a battery has been removed, tracking powered-down phones is within the realm of possibility. The revelations fit right in with the Edward Snowden disclosures, but the NSA isn't the only one tracking phones: Other government agencies and private companies regularly track them without warrants or court orders as well.

U.S. President Barack Obama’s proposed ‘Trade’ deals are actually about whether the world is heading toward a dictatorial world government — a dictatorship by the hundred or so global super-rich who hold the controlling blocks of stock in the world’s largest international corporations — or else toward a democratic world government, which will be a global federation of free and independent states, much like the United States was at its founding, but global in extent. These are two opposite visions of world government; and Obama is clearly on the side of fascism, an international mega-corporate dictatorship, as will be documented here in the links, and explained in the discussion.

Public banks in North Dakota, Germany and Switzerland have been shown to outperform their private counterparts. Under the TPP and TTIP, however, publicly-owned banks on both sides of the oceans might wind up getting sued for unfair competition because they have advantages not available to private banks.

Was “Mayan Jaguar” a Corrupt Undercover Op or a CIA Cover? An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) undercover operation involving the sale and tracking of aircraft to drug organizations played out for nearly four years in Latin America, likely allowing tons of narcotics to be flown into the US, yet it failed to result in a single prosecution in the United States, according to federal court pleadings recently discovered by Narco News. The ICE undercover operation, dubbed Mayan Jaguar, came to a screeching halt when one of the aircraft in its sights, a Gulfstream II corporate jet, crashed on Sept. 24, 2007, in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula with nearly 4 tons of cocaine onboard. Also on that jet at the time, according to recently discovered pleadings filed in US District Court in Florida, was an ICE transponder, which was being used as a tracking device.

The court pleadings are part of a case currently pending against a Brazilian national named Joao Luiz Malago, who is facing narco-trafficking and money-laundering conspiracy charges related to an indictment filed originally in January 2012. The presence of the tracking device on the ill-fated Gulfstream II, the court records allege, alerted Mexican authorities to the fact that the cocaine jet was on some kind of US government-sponsored mission prior to its demise. Also pointing to that fact was the Gulfstream jet’s tail number, N987SA, which past press reports have linked to CIA use — several flights between 2003 and 2005 to Guantanamo Bay, home to the infamous “terrorist” prison camp.

The court pleadings also assert that Malago was, in fact, a US government informant, who operated an alleged ICE front company called Donna Blue Aircraft Inc., which was set up in March 2007 in Florida, some seven months before it was used to sell the Gulfstream II jet to a Florida duo: Clyde O’Connor and Gregory Smith. O’Connor and Smith purchased the jet, according to a bill of sale, a mere eight days before it crashed in Mexico with its cocaine payload onboard. Narco News reported on the Gulfstream II jet crash and its aftermath extensively and has uncovered documents and sources indicating that Gregory Smith worked as a contract pilot for the US government, including US Customs (later rolled into ICE, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS), DEA, FBI and likely CIA.

The last time the main parties got together in a closed room, did a deal and told the country there was a need to act urgently, we were on the edge of abandoning 300 years of press freedom.This time our privacy is under threat. In the name of security, the Government is fast-tracking legislation through Parliament that will allow it to collect huge quantities of our personal data. We would do well to remember the advice of Ben Franklin: ‘Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.’

The Government has engineered a ‘theatrical emergency’ – in this case terrorism and hidden paedophile rings – to ram the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Bill through Parliament without proper debate. It is an insult to the supremacy of Parliament, to democracy and to the trust of the public.It was April 8 when the European Court of Justice struck down the Data Retention Directive for being incompatible with human rights. The Home Office has had time to put an alternative in place, so the excuses for why the legislation is being  fast-tracked are laughable.

It is a sad state of affairs when European courts are a greater defender of our ancient rights than Parliament and Her Majesty’s Government. Even the German Supreme Court overturned its far less invasive data collection laws for violating the privacy rights of German citizens. How far we have slipped, this birthplace of democracy, that our own judicial safeguards stand by while our hard-fought rights are stripped from us by a Government that has lost its sense of proportion in its fear of making a mistake.

the fiscal deficit is the most serious long-term economic problem facing US policymakers.

Amidst an astonishing, relentless, wide-ranging purge that shows no signs of abating, with 60,000 – and counting – civil servants, academics, judges, prosecutors, policemen, soldiers jailed, fired, suspended or stripped of professional accreditation, it’s relatively established by now the Turkish government was very much informed a military coup was imminent on July 15. The information may have come from Russian intelligence, although neither Moscow nor Ankara will reveal any details. So, once and for all, this was no false flag.

As Erdogan solidifies his internal iron grip, a formerly iron clad connection – NATO/Turkey – slowly dissolves into thin air. It’s as if the fate of Incirlik air base was hangin’ – literally – by a few, selected radar threads. There’s extreme suspicion across the spectrum in Turkey that the Pentagon knew what the «rebels» were up to. It’s a fact that not a pin drops in Incirlik without the Americans knowing it. AKP members stress the use of NATO’s communication network to coordinate the putschists and thus escape Turkish intel. At a minimum, the putschists may have believed NATO would have their backs. No «NATO ally» deigned itself to warn Erdogan about the coup. Then there’s the saga of the refueling tanker for the «rebel» F-16s. The tankers in Incirlik are all the same model – KC-135R Stratotanker – for Americans and Turks alike. They work side by side and are all under the same command; the 10th Main Tanker Base, led by Gen. Bekir Ercan Van, who was duly arrested this past Sunday – as seven judges also confiscated all the control tower communications. Not by accident Gen. Bekir Ercan Van happened to be very close to Pentagon head Ash Carter. What happened in Turkish airspace after Erdogan’s Gulfstream IV left the Mediterranean coast and landed in Istanbul’s Ataturk airport has been largely mapped – but there are still some crucial gaps in the narrative open to speculation. As Erdogan has been tight-lipped in all his interviews, one is left with a Mission Impossible-style scenario featuring «rebel» F-16s «Lion One» and «Lion Two» on a «special mission» with their transponder off; their face off with loyalist «Falcon One» and «Falcon Two»; one of the «Lions» piloted by the none other than the man who shot down the Russian Su-24 last November; the by now famous tanker that took off from Incirlik to refuel the «rebels»; and three extra pairs of F-16s that took off from Dalaman, Erzurum and Balikesir to intercept the «rebels», including the pair that protected Erdogan’s Gulfsteam (which was using callsign THY 8456 to disguise it as a Turkish Airlines flight).

Notorious Saudi whistleblower «Mujtahid» caused a sensation as he revealed that the UAE not only «played a role» in the coup but also kept the House of Saud in the loop. As if this was not damning enough, the self-deposed emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad al-Thani, very close to Erdogan, has alleged that the US and another Western nation (France is a strong possibility) had staged the whole thing, with Saudi Arabian involvement. Ankara, predictably, denied all of it.

For years, many of those who've been paying attention have wondered what the purpose is of these clearly artificial chemtrails. Well, based on the extensive research findings by The HAARP Report, it seems as though these fake sprayings are helping to redirect and alter weather patterns -- in this case, to steer rain away from California."Chemtrails create a hot air layer at 30,000 feet, capping inversion," explains the report. "They [the powers that be] want that to overrun this low pressure area and prevent this low pressure from forming," as low pressure is what produces precipitation, explains the report.

A secret US cybersecurity report warned that government and private computers were being left vulnerable to online attacks from Russia, China and criminal gangs because encryption technologies were not being implemented fast enough. The advice, in a newly uncovered five-year forecast written in 2009, contrasts with the pledge made by David Cameron this week to crack down on encryption use by technology companies.

In the wake of the Paris terror attacks, the prime minister said there should be no “safe spaces for terrorists to communicate” or that British authorites could not access. Cameron, who landed in the US on Thursday night, is expected to urge Barack Obama to apply more pressure to tech giants, such as Apple, Google and Facebook, which have been expanding encrypted messaging for their millions of users since the revelations of mass NSA surveillance by the whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Cameron said the companies “need to work with us. They need also to demonstrate, which they do, that they have a social responsibility to fight the battle against terrorism. We shouldn’t allow safe spaces for terrorists to communicate. That’s a huge challenge but that’s certainly the right principle”. But the document from the US National Intelligence Council, which reports directly to the US director of national intelligence, made clear that encryption was the “best defence” for computer users to protect private data. Part of the cache given to the Guardian by Snowden was published in 2009 and gives a five-year forecast on the “global cyber threat to the US information infrastructure”. It covers communications, commercial and financial networks, and government and critical infrastructure systems. It was shared with GCHQ and made available to the agency’s staff through its intranet.

Welcome to the sweet abyss of an Orwellian vortex. 2013 increasingly looks like 1984. In two previous articles, for RT RT and for Asia Times Online I have looked into the superimposed levels of blowback implied by the Boston bombing. With still so many unanswered questions regarding what took place on the ground in Boston after the bombing, it's time to look at an extra, possible Top Ten list of lingering absurdities. And this without sidestepping other unanswered crucial questions, such as why a bomb drill - organized by Craft - was going on during the marathon at which the bombing took place; and why it was <a href='http://asianmedia.com/GAAN/www/delivery/ck.php?n=a9473bc7&cb=%n' target='_blank'><img src='http://asianmedia.com/GAAN/www/delivery/avw.php?zoneid=36&cb=%n&n=a9473bc7&ct0=%c' border='0' alt='' ></a> vehemently denied that a bomb drill was going on. For this current set of questions, I'm grateful for the help of Asia Times Online's Bostonian readers.

2. Since 9/11, the preferred FBI modus operandi is to use informants to lure ''potential'' terra-rists to act. See for example the Fast and Furious<-style Iran cum Mexican cartel plot. There's a strong possibility the Tsarnaev brothers were set up. In this case, is there anyone anywhere among the vast US intel apparatus investigating the FBI investigators?

4. A Saudi student, injured at the bombing, who was in the US via a legal student visa, is suddenly deported on ''national security grounds'', even as investigators found ''unusual burns'' on his hand inconsistent with the injuries of other victims. He may have been a member of a Saudi clan notorious for its al-Qaeda connections. The FBI ''investigation'' is suddenly dropped shortly after the Saudi ambassador in the US held an unscheduled meeting with President Barack Obama. Add to it that even before the smoke had cleared, the Israel Lobby and the notorious disinformation website DEBKA were pointing their fingers at ''domestic terrorists with Middle East connections''.

In the Cold War years, while proxy battles took place between U.S.- and Soviet-backed forces in Angola and other African lands, the U.S. military, which by then had garrisoned much of the planet, was noticeably absent from the continent.  No longer.  And no one who might report on it seems to be paying attention as a downsizing media evidently sees no future in anticipating America’s future wars.  In fact, with the exception of Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post, it’s hard to think of any journalist who has dug into the fast-expanding American role in Africa.  Enter TomDispatch’s Nick Turse.  When it comes to American military plans for that continent, he has been doing the work of the rest of the American foreign press corps on his own.  For the last two years, while his bestselling book on the Vietnam War, Kill Anything That Moves, was being published, he has been carefully tracking and mapping the growing American military presence in Africa, exploring the way those moves may actually be helping to destabilize the continent, and doing his best to make sure that U.S. planning for future wars there doesn’t go unnoticed and unreported.  Today, he puts his work -- and his efforts to mine resistant AFRICOM spokespeople for information -- into a single panorama of everything a fine reporter and outsider can possibly know now about Washington’s ongoing militarization of Africa.  It’s a grim tale of the way, via a hush-hush version of mission creep, the Pentagon and AFRICOM are turning Africa into a battlefield of the future.  Don’t say you weren’t warned -- at TomDispatch. Tom

In what is becoming a weekly ritual, the German press continues to demolish the US case of "idealistic humaniatrian" Ukraine intervention. Recall, that it was a week ago that German tabloid Bild am Sonntag, hardly the most reputable source but certainly one which reaches the broadest audience, reported that dozens of CIA and FBI agents were "advising the Ukraine government." This conclusion is hardly a stretch and certainly based on facts considering the recent semi-secret jaunt by CIA head Brennan to Kiev. Fast forward one week when overnight the same Bild reported that about 400 elite mercenary commandos of the private US security firm, Academi, f/k/a Xe Services, f/k/a Blackwater "are involved in a punitive operation mounted by Ukraine's new government" against east Ukraine separatists.

Bild cites sources who report that on April 29, Germany's Federal Intelligence Service (BND) informed the Angela Merkel government about Academi commandos' involvement in Kiev's military operations in eastern Ukraine. Spiegel adds that "the information originates from U.S. intelligence services and was presented during a meeting chaired by the Chancellor's Office chief Peter Altmaier (CDU). At the meeting were present the president of the intelligence agencies and the Federal Criminal Office, as well as the intelligence coordinator of the Chancellor's Office and senior Ministry officials." Bild am Sontag did not have information about who was paying the Blackwater commandos: it is well-known they do not come cheap.

Of course, since no western entity, and certainly not the company itself, would ever admit its involvement in the Ukraine as it would promptly crash the official US foreign policy track claiming US non-involvement in Ukraine, none of this is surprising.

The Justice Department is preparing to announce that Barclays, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and the Royal Bank of Scotland will collectively pay several billion dollars and plead guilty to criminal antitrust violations for rigging the price of foreign currencies, according to people briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Most if not all of the pleas are expected to come from the banks’ holding companies, the people said — a first for Wall Street giants that until now have had only subsidiaries or their biggest banking units plead guilty.

The Justice Department is also preparing to resolve accusations of foreign currency misconduct at UBS. As part of that deal, prosecutors are taking the rare step of tearing up a 2012 nonprosecution agreement with the bank over the manipulation of benchmark interest rates, the people said, citing the bank’s foreign currency misconduct as a violation of the earlier agreement. UBS A.G., the banking unit that signed the 2012 nonprosecution agreement, is expected to plead guilty to the earlier charges and pay a fine that could be as high as $500 million rather than go to trial, the people said.

Holding companies, while appearing to be the most important entities at the banks, are in less jeopardy of suffering the consequences of guilty pleas. Some banks worried that a guilty plea by their biggest banking units, which hold licenses that enable them to operate branches and make loans, would be riskier, two of the people briefed on the matter said. The fear, they said, centered on whether state or federal regulators might revoke those licenses in response to the pleas. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Behind the scenes in Washington, the banks’ lawyers are also seeking assurances from federal regulators — including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Labor Department — that the banks will not be barred from certain business practices after the guilty pleas, the people said. While the S.E.C.’s five commissioners have not yet voted on the requests for waivers, which would allow the banks to conduct business as usual despite being felons, the people briefed on the matter expected a majority of commissioners to grant them.In reality, those accommodations render the plea deals, at least in part, an exercise in stagecraft. And while banks might prefer a deferred-prosecution agreement that suspends charges in exchange for fines and other concessions — or a nonprosecution deal like the one that UBS is on the verge of losing — the reputational blow of being a felon does not spell disaster.