Posted 12/12/2012
by Yasha Husain

'Charting the Course'
is an education
proposal
that encourages
more whole brain
thinking,
the reliance
on
interhemispheric
thinking,
which brings
together
dominant
left-
and
right-brained
thinkers, in a
closed, holistic
learning network.

The author of this
website has written
in her book, Holistic
Living: Tips for
Youth, how
people along the
autism spectrum are
naturally more
right-brained,
while "neurotypical"
people, tend to, from a young age, become dominant
left-brained
thinkers, with the exception that both
character-types
access interhemispheric, and graduated, thought.

The 'Charting the Course' education proposal
shares a vision for a school system that will help all character-types, including people who are dominant left-brained thinkers, who think more linearly, and who are dominant right-brained thinkers, who think more by association, in part by bringing them together into one classroom.

The proposal is also for a single, closed, holistic system, which interweaves the modern education system with holistic, closed systems of the world.

The full education
proposal
can right now
be viewed
using the
following
link.

With questions
or comments,
please email:
yashahusain@gmail.com.

Article - Opinion

A Voice on Free Trade
by Yasha Melanie Husain
Posted March 9, 2013

We seek dictum in law and not its metaphor. And, in addition to the law, precedence, not malarkey. These notions apply not only to domestic legal practice or “tender” but to international treatises and agreements.

Free trade agreements, in light of this, are not intended to be fodder for unacceptable market manipulation or corruption. Yet, as a reflection of both the recent Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership talks, nontransparent and transparent negotiating tools alike reveal seeming abuses of the law's intended purpose.

In the February 13, 2013 Washington Post-Bloomberg article, by Howard Schneider, “With trade already flowing, U.S. and European Union aim for something deeper,” a title that's seemingly steeped in irony, Schneider reports, in response to the US-European trade talks:

...the core of the negotiations will revolve around efforts to ensure that the vast regulatory bureaucracies in Europe and the United States — the agencies that oversee everything from the effectiveness of pharmaceuticals to the safety of baby toys — are as closely aligned as possible in how they evaluate products and are willing to accept each other’s results. That applies to such existing goods as automobiles, and to emerging areas like regulations governing the cross-border data flows important to businesses providing services on shared “cloud” networks.

Business officials point to the earlier aircraft agreement as a model: A plane certified for service by the Federal Aviation Administration is accepted for the same by European officials and vice versa...

I behoove you to do a Wikipedia search of the TPP, underway as early as 2002, as it reveals how ongoing negotiations for the Trans-Pacific talks have been at once concealed from public purview and corruptible. Almost from the outset, this Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership also has its convoluted elements that might seriously impede on economic justice and human rights if they're not superceded.

The aviation contract mentioned is contrived as dictum while the potential for it is that it be used as metaphor and in light of serious imbalances stemming from bilateral disagreement, such as a ban on the top-selling herbicide, atrazine, in Europe, and a lack of one in America and more strenuous taxation and or “green” policy in much of Europe than currently in place in America. There's meanwhile a continued lack of regulations to prevent something akin to the run-up of the subprime mortgage crisis. For, in response to the surge in building that that momentum created, homes were constructed hurriedly using environmentally irresponsible technique and at a time of global crisis revolving around global warming, natural resource allocation and environmental pollution.

The article goes on to state:

...advocates say, it could stoke investment, innovation and commerce by merging the world’s two largest trading areas into what would amount to a single market — with investment flowing unimpeded, regulators cooperating on common standards and accepting each other’s product testing, and tariffs all but eliminated. As companies lower costs, become more competitive and adapt to the new rules, it could add a full percentage point to U.S. economic output, boost trade on both sides and perhaps influence how other countries behave, according to studies of a possible agreement done by the European Center for International Political Economy.

While this may sound enticing to a novice, it's filled with wonder, as stipulated above by way of proposing law be metaphor and, then, directly, the mention of a single market. Additionally, how might such unregulated treaties negatively affect “other countries.” We don't know exactly. But consider this so far says nothing of developments in trade-specific matters, or intellectual property, such as access to medicine, net neutrality versus cyber warfare, the continuation of self-publishing rights and the continuation of cultural heritage, pivotal issues with potential for corruption the TPP might tragically help institute.

There's ongoing, problematic development arising from both the TPP and TTIP talks. We ought to aim, by way of law, for “positive” globalization, unaffected by both deceptive and unenlightened negotiating tactics.

President Obama might seek not only transparency in trade developments, but might close the door to potential for market manipulations which strangle progress, which have such a wide set of consequences, and encourage and even demand that agreements, national and international, be only holistic in scope.

During the President's State of the Union address, he did promise to pursue a “comprehensive Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.”

The pressure should be on all attending parties to the talks to also take into consideration, as a part of those talks, the needs of the world, and not only of the governments participating in the United States and 27-nation European Union Transatlantic missive.

It's worth mentioning, in the same breath, that the TPP is so far accused of partially eroding protections for nation-states in favor of business interests and ignoring parts of human rights law. The United States and Europe must as well be protected by all trade talks and pursuant agreements.

Keynesianism, also, has been a solution to the recent global, socioeconomic crisis for America, and before the crisis, was an important part of Denmark, Spain, and Portugal's progressive business developments. It was a contributing factor in Greece's noteworthy idealism, marked by pragmatism, that I would argue was consequentially largely left asunder by sequential financial crises.

What does this mean for the future of free trade agreements? Simply that they ought to be reflective of a nation's current and future needs, Adam Smith combined with John Maynard Keynes, the Federal Reserve combined with the Environmental Protection Agency, as relevant examples, and they be limited in scope, so that nations may remedy, as they must, by way of law, their unique economic and legal challenges.

Schneider's article states in its conclusion:

The upcoming negotiations — even if they produce an agreement that can clear Congress and Europe’s complex political hierarchy — may only start the process. The working group said the agreement “should be designed to evolve over time” by “establishing mechanisms” that would allow officials from the two sides to resolve regulatory disputes bit by bit.

Then,

“We don’t expect a transatlantic regulatory body. Regulators are regulators. They are answerable to their domestic political bodies,” said Peter Chase, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s vice president for Europe. “The question is: How do you make them more efficient?”

We must now feel the need to question the foresight and motives for “evolvement,” and so, to avoid obstructions of justifiable treaties and agreements, drafts as well as final resolutions, both of which ought to be made available to the people whose interests they affect. TPP proposals generated by Americans, and the progress made in TPP negotiations, draft documents and resolutions, have, for example, not been privy even to US Congress members, and this is shameful. There must be a sharing of the facts.

Certainly, regional, “socioeconomic” agreements have potential to do good, but only if they are built on sound principles and practice. This should be the path forward which would be inclusive, ultimately, of not only a President's input, and that of his or her nation's trade specialists, but of a particular nation-states' people and their total promise, as they stand committed to their needs, including, importantly, medical needs, as medical requirements have been restricted by the TPP, and against President Obama's foreign policy agenda.