The Trans-Pacific Partnership: Death of Western Sovereignty

(TRUNEWS) On February 4, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is set for formal signature in New Zealand.

The TPP is a global version of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which has been negotiated in secret for the last seven years and would place centralized regulation on 40 percent of the world’s economy.

NAFTA and GATT had a catastrophic effect on U.S. business competitiveness, and domestic export values, upon implementation in the 90’s, a trend the TPP is likely to follow.

Europe’s Latest Export to America: Internet Censorship

American Web users’ access to Internet content may soon be limited, thanks to a recent decision by French regulators. France’s National Commission on Informatics and Liberties (known by its French acronym CNIL) ordered Google to apply the European Union’s bizarre “right-to-be-forgotten” rules on a global basis in a June ruling. The search engine announced at the end of July that it would refuse to comply. If it is nevertheless forced to do so, the result could be unprecedented censorship of Internet content, as well as a dangerous expansion of foreign Web restrictions on Americans.

The European Union’s “right-to-be-forgotten” rules were first imposed in May of last year in a case decided by the European Court of Justice. The plaintiff, a Spanish citizen named Mario Costeja González, had his house repossessed in 1998 due to a tax debt. A notice of the sale was duly printed in a local paper. A decade later, concerned that the newspaper notice still appeared in search results when his name was Googled, he sued the search engine under the EU privacy law, to force it to filter the story from future search results.