ON THURSDAY AFTERNOON, the U.S. Senate was presented with an 850-page amendment to a bipartisan piece of legislation that has already drawn controversy for a provision that preps a $10 billion bailout for a space firm run by Jeff Bezos.

In the scramble that followed, they were given just a few hours to read it, and only four senators — Tom Cotton, R-Ark., Josh Hawley, R-Mo., Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. — voted against the measure. In the wake of the vote, the contours of what the Senate passed with more than 90 votes is beginning to come into view. At its heart, the measure strips authority from the new U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai, who has already shaken up the global trade order by launching a direct challenge to the pharmaceutical industry over its vaccine patent rights.

The bill instead shifts power to Big Tech, insisting the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative recognize a host of new restrictions on the ways that governments around the world are allowed to challenge the monopolistic power of technology companies.

The measure justifies its defense of Big Tech by claiming that it is standing up against censorship in China, but critics argue it is in fact intended — and will be used — to push back against data privacy efforts around the world, which have become a threat to the tech business model.

The trade bill was the cause of much mayhem on the Senate floor and, despite the lopsided vote, now threatens Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s prized China bill. Schumer initially forbade trade amendments to the Innovation and Competition Act but eventually relented after Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, threatened to blow up the legislation if they weren’t included.

The amendment, sponsored by Sens. Crapo and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., the two most powerful lawmakers on the Senate Finance Committee, got a last-minute inclusion in the China bill with little time for lawmakers to scrutinize or even seriously review its content. One particular proposal in the bill modifies the Trade Act of 1974 to support Big Tech’s fight against international online censorship — much to the concern of activists who worked behind the scenes seeking its removal.

The provision calls on the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to come up with an annual report of trading partners whose digital censorship regulations harm American technology companies’ business operations — which Crapo and Wyden claim would address anti-competitive trade practices like China’s so-called Great Firewall.

A group of consumer and labor rights organizations warned lawmakers, however, the language in the trade bill could have severe consequences for the global movement to defend user privacy rights, employment protections, and, ironically, competitive markets. A dozen organizations — including Color of Change, Decode Democracy, Jobs with Justice, and Public Citizen — sent Senate Democrats a letter Thursday, after Schumer and Crapo’s deal, urging them to abandon the censorship report plan. The letter also opposed two other Big Tech-friendly provisions that Wyden and Schumer authored, both of which were ultimately left out of the final text.

“This amendment would require the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) to become an agent of Big Tech, continually monitoring other nations’ existing and proposed digital governance policies to undermine important pro-consumer, pro-worker, pro-privacy, pro-competitive and pro-fair-business-practices policies and proposals,” wrote the coalition. A copy of the letter was reviewed by The Intercept.

Wyden’s office dismissed concerns about his amendment as the Schumer-Crapo conflict dragged on, and the likelihood of other trade-related regulations even finding their way into the China bill seemed in doubt.

“Unfortunately, a few people seem to be misunderstanding what the amendment says,” Wyden spokesperson Keith Chu told The Intercept Wednesday. “To be clear, the Wyden-Schumer proposal would do nothing to stop Europe or democratic countries from regulating tech companies on biased algorithms, antitrust, privacy or any other legitimate policy objective.”

But free speech for people and free speech for corporations are not synonymous and are often in tension. Digital corporations have long relied on claims of First Amendment protections to challenge any regulation that threatens their revenue models.

Verizon, for example, famously sued the Federal Communications Commission a decade ago to overturn net neutrality rules, arguing government requirements for undisrupted digital traffic infringe on internet service providers’ First Amendment rights, noted Matt Stoller, an antitrust expert and director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project. AELP signed onto the letter advocating against Wyden’s proposal.

“If this were just about China instead of helping Big Tech, that section would be written solely to target China,” Stoller told The Intercept. “When you’re talking about censorship, unless you’re defining it very clearly, you open the door to a very expansive … corporate First Amendment reading.”

Meanwhile, the broader trade bill includes other Big Tech-friendly tariff relief proposals.

Specifically, the bill extends the Generalized System of Preferences program that offers developing countries duty-free access to the U.S. in exchange for adopting pro-democracy and poverty-reducing practices. But it also adds new language to persuade countries to refrain from “digital trade barriers,” such as “unnecessary or discriminatory data localization or data transfer restrictions.”

This could deter governments from adopting strong digital governance policies designed to protect consumers, workers, and competitive markets.

Read more:

https://theintercept.com/2021/05/28/trade-bill-china-big-tech/

US President Joe Biden praised the passage of the bill, saying: “We are in a competition to win the 21st century, and the starting gun has gone off.”

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Putin/Biden Summit: The world demands maturity

By Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey

Standing at a critical moment at multiple crossroads, the world cries out for leadership with maturity, a quality clearly demonstrated by Vladimir Putin. Does Biden have what it takes?

The words of US President Joe Biden as he gears up for his summit with Vladimir Putin demonstrate what appears to be a total lack of skills. In declaring that he aims to discuss Russia’s “behavior” which is out of line with international law, he shows himself yet again to be arrogant, insolent, out of touch and totally unwilling to address the real issues affecting every woman, man and child living on this planet: climate change, the pandemic and the ensuing economic and financial tsunami building up as we speak. He chooses instead, to yet again launch aggressive diatribes, like the gatecrasher at the party who nobody wants.

After all, we are speaking of someone who in 2003 supported the USA’s illegal act of butchery in Iraq, a barbaric attack outside the auspices of the United Nations Organization, with no remit from the Security Council, rendering this attack based on barefaced lies illegal, and a war crime.

Reading through the clouds of bull emanating from the western press – references to the G7 countries as representing freedom and democracy, reference to Biden as “Leader of the Free World” (what is that supposed to mean?) and references to that Navalny character as the “Leader of the Russian Opposition” – we see a clear need for someone to tell the truth and for some leadership which takes the decisions, today, which will affect our children, tomorrow.

Let us start with a crystal-clear summary of current events, put in a nutshell. The West, collectively, has only ever regarded Russia as an ally while the armed forces of the Soviet Union were decimating the Wehrmacht (9 out of every 10 troops killed) during the Second World Watr/Great Patriotic War. Before that, and after it, western forces were busy conducting terrorist, subversive and sabotage operations inside the USSR and inside the sovereign territory of its allies.

The aim is to dismember the Russian Federation and make a grab for its resources, funding separatist groups, stirring up trouble and using NGOs as social terrorist weapons to destabilize. We only have to see the collective arms budget of NATO countries, set at one point two trillion USD per annum (enough to eradicate poverty for good in just one year), we only have to look at the offensive nature of NATO’s armoury, we only have to note that after NATO promised not to expand eastwards, it did precisely that and now encircles western Russia like a vice, while carrying out war games in the Baltic.

Fortunately, Russia has a President who is a patriot and fortunately, Russia has political and military leaders who are capable of neutralizing such provocations. A recent one was the Fascist coup in Ukraine, where gangs of thugs chanting “Death to Russians and Jews” seized power and ousted the democratically elected President. Biden’s own hand was visible in this sorry episode, which saw these demonic hordes conduct massacre after massacre of Russian-speaking Ukrainian citizens. Cleaning ladies suffocated with telefone wire. Office workers kicked to death. To date I have not read one single quote in which Biden denounces these acts of terror.

Lies are told to cover uncomfortable truths and reiterating these lies time and time again, Goebbels-style, does nothing more than underline the notion that Biden is hiding behind a wall of ignorance. For a start, Navalny is not the leader of the Russian Opposition, he is not the leader of anything. His own racist comments are very well known, making him an extremely unsavoury character, while the Leader of the Opposition is the leader of the Russian Communist Party, second in polling intentions to Putin’s United Russia.

Let us continue with Crimea. It was not annexed, as western sources say, there was a free and fair referendum in which over ninety per cent of the population voted to return to Russia. In the absence of the democratically elected President, the legal power in force was the Republic of Crimea’s Parliament, which organized the referendum.

As for the G7 being paragons of freedom and democracy, Google up the disgusting story of the Chagos Isles. Never heard of them? No, well you wouldn’t, would you? Culprits: the dynamic duo, the UK and its chief bedmaster. The UK deported the entire population, gassed their pets, yes I repeat, gassed their pets, and handed them over to the USA.

So let us get real here. Putin did not favor the foreign policy disaster which was Iraq and it was not Putin or Russia connected with the ensuing stories about concentration and torture camps, in which all roads led to Washington. The one supporting the Iraq war was Joe Biden. So perhaps we should discuss the behavior of the United States of America which has been totally outside any norm of international law for decades. We might discuss Operation Condor in Latin America where political representatives of the Left fighting against fascist military regimes were raped, tortured or killed. Pretty demoractic, eh? Leader of the Free World, or Agent of Satan?

We might discuss the shocking act of terror in Libya, sending the country with the highest Human Development Index in Africa back to the Dark Ages, crawling with jihadis and studded with slave markets. How democratic was that? We might discuss the west’s siding with terrorist groups in Libya, on its own lists of proscribed groups, we might discuss the west’s siding with terrorists in Syria, you know, the guys who raped little girls before and after beheading them and playing soccer with the head, after the little girls were forced to watch their mom and dad being tortured to death. Freedom and democracy. Yeah right.

So instead of the lies, the diatribes and the shit-headed, pigfaced insolence, supposing for once in his life Joe Biden acted like a man and showed some skills? He has been long enough in the corridors of power, after all and what does he have to show for it? Foreign policy disasters, breaking international law and his country's image connected with torture camps and terrorists.

What we need is a definitive reset in relations between multiple players in a multilateral world, not a Cold War Mark II with Russia and China on one side and the European ex-Imperialist states and their overseas abortions on the other. We want to see global leaders with the skills to make a global mark on policymaking, not unilateral exercises in drum-banging and sabre-rattling, which belong to Medieval times.

We demand a multifaceted and universal approach to climate change, which makes a difference and guarantees that the next generations to come will be safe; we demand a definitive approach to animal welfare, humane farming and habitat management which makes the Half the World goal a reality (human activity being restricted to tarnishing only half the planet, leaving the rest of it intact and unpolluted for others to enjoy); we demand that every child on this planet is born with equal opportunities, regardless of nationality, race, color or creed.

Putin has what it takes to make this happen. Does Biden?

The author can be contacted at [email protected]

Читайте больше на https://english.pravda.ru/opinion/147591-need_for_maturity/

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Quiet note: lets hope that each of the respective goon apparatus does not try to "poison" the other guy... or give him a deadly disease... 

During the congress of the majority United Russia party, the Russian president advocated massive investments in public infrastructure and the health sector, and reiterated his attachment to the traditional family structure.

“A prosperous and solid family, with children, is the future of Russia”: it is in these terms, in particular, that Vladimir Poutine presented on June 19 his plans for his country. The Head of State was speaking within the framework of the United Russia party, which has a majority in the Duma (lower house of parliament) and at the head of the majority regions, in front of several hundred senior officials gathered in Moscow.

A prosperous and strong family, with children, is the future of Russia

With regard to economic prosperity, the president defended the idea of ​​massive aid to several key sectors: he proposed to invest tens of billions of rubles in improving public transport, roads and infrastructure. , the renovation of schools, the cleaning of rivers and even health.

On this last point, Vladimir Putin called for the launch of “a special program for the development of the medical rehabilitation system by 2026”, to the tune of at least 100 billion rubles (approximately 1.1 billion euros ), in the context of the worrying spread of Covid-19 in the Russian capital. The leader, moreover, hammered his support for mass vaccination against the new coronavirus, while about 13% of the national population received a first dose: “I repeat: it is better to be vaccinated than to get sick. ”

On the family side, the Head of State advocated public actions to help society overcome its demographic difficulties. For this, the authorities must in particular “develop” medical care and education and “strengthen traditional values”, according to Vladimir Poutine. In particular, the President stressed the importance of public support for families with children.

Finally, in general, Vladimir Putin argued with United Russia executives that “the program of the leader’s party [devait] to be the people’s program ”.

The next major ballot in Russia will take place in September 2021: the citizens of the Federation will be called upon to elect the members of the Duma.

Read more:

https://goodwordnews.com/putin-speaks-at-united-russia-party-congress-rt-en-francais/

original text:

https://francais.rt.com/international/87969-investissements-publics-valeurs-familiales-poutine-congrès-parti-russie-unie

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by Stan Grant

...

Our strategic mistake

The same exists in China, where Xi also speaks the language of history and grievance in China. The West underestimates this, and that is a strategic mistake.

Joe Biden has set out a great contest between democracy and autocracy that will frame his foreign policy. Just as at the end of the Cold War, Biden believes history is on the side of the West.

Putin would say Biden does not understand history at all, history is struggle and survival.

He would tell him to read Tolstoy.

Happy people have no history.

Stan Grant presents China Tonight on Tuesdays at 8:00pm on ABC News Channel and 10:30pm on ABC TV.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-20/vladimir-putin-joe-biden-meeting-last-word/100226200

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"When Barack Obama failed to enforce his "red line" in Syria after Assad's use of chemical weapons, Putin seized an opportunity. He is now an indispensable figure in that conflict."

Stan, this uses bullshit and my guess is you know it... Assad did not use chemical weapons and this is controversy peddled by the Western media.

"Under Putin, Russia is at war in Ukraine, has annexed Crimea (albeit Russia points to a controversial referendum result showing 97 per cent of the population voting to be integrated with Russia), occupied territories in Georgia, expanded influence in the Middle East, especially in Syria, where Putin has decisively intervened to prop up the government of Bashar Al Assad, and supports autocrats like Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko."

Stan, this uses bullshit and my guess is you know it... The referendum was not "controversial" in Crimea (a gift "from Russia" by Krutchev without approval of the Douma, to Ukraine). Crimea is home to 90 per cent Russians who speak Russian and who resented Ukraine. Sevastopol Crimean city and harbour was still "Russian". Furthermore, the colour revolution in Ukraine was fomented by the USA helping the Nazis in that country. As you might have noticed, even the football team from Ukraine in the EU soccer cup has adopted a NAZI SLOGAN AND LOGO. 

Putin and Xi are well aware of "history". And Biden's democracy in the USA is to try and ban anything that is not progressive or "woke"... It's far more complicated I know.

"In any event, in his recent book, Russia as Empire: Past and Present, historian Kees Boterbloem says "the real opportunity was likely missed earlier, in the 1990s, when politicians in the EU and NATO countries passed up the chance welcome the Russian federation into their midst"." The main question is why?

The answer is simple: the capitalists hurried to basically try and rape Russia... This is history. Putin is a smart guy and saw this coming... He had great mentors including the mayor of St Petersburg to help him digest recent and past history which Putin had studied fiercefully when he was a spy... Do not forget that George Bush senior was in the CIA from age 18 till he became the head of the CIA — an organisation the main purpose of which is to promote lies and fake truths.

The agreement made between Gorbachev and Reagan about the former Soviet satellites became a joke to the Western conquerors... They have met their match and they don't like it, so they carry on prodding China and Russia. Lucky, Putin and Xi are far more intelligent than the devious dithering Biden... There I said it... I KNOW you cannot say all of what I said here, otherwise you would be booted out...

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See also: https://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/36652

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