This sort of stuff should be harder to find. Catching up on a couple of days of not reading the news, these 2 news items, sort of jumped out at me. I’m not researching the use of globalization to undermine democracy, it’s just so prevalent that its hits you between the eyes, over your morning coffee, mixed in with debates on RDF, and SARS couture.

At Home: Defending the DMCA

In an attempt to derail the growing grassroot opposition to DMCA (like this cool Tennessee project to kill Super DMCA) and its criminalization of the public sphere, the US is entering treatries with foreign countries which make it illegal to change our domestic intellectual property regimes. Like the new Singapore FTA treaty currently in front of Congress. (via boingboing) ### Abroad: Force Feeding Frankenfoods

Not content to disenfranchise us at home, the US is busy trying to disenfranchise most of Europe as well, hauling the EU up in front of the WTO to insist that it not only buy our largely un-tested, genetically modified crops, but that it should re-sell them in secrets, and they should do it, Bush claims, “for the starving children in Africa.” (Bush addressed these issues at the graduation of the US Coast Guard Academy where presumably he wouldn’t get asked any hard questions.) Some people speculate that the US is gearing up to dictate a wide range of EU policies via the WTO. What happened to people being allowed to have so say on descisions that affect their lives, and well being?