Then a camp where someone had set up a tall, linoleum-covered slide that you could toboggan down on a plastic magic carpet, after first dumping a gallon of waste water over the lino to make it plenty slippery. I’d been wandering up and down the radial avenues that cut through the city, lined with big camps sporting odd exhibits - one camp where a line of people were efficiently making snow cones for anyone who wanted them, working with huge blocks of ice and a vicious ice-shaver. The secret part of the plan failed - ACTA ran into heavy opposition in Congress and has been rejected by Mexico and the European Parliament - but the treaty isn’t dead yet, and has supporters on both sides of the house who keep attempting to bring it back under a new name. ACTA began under Bush, but the Obama administration has pursued it with great enthusiasm, and presided over the creation of TPP. In America, the plan was to pass it without Congressional debate, using the executive power of the President. The plan was to agree to them in secret, without public debate, and then force the world’s poorest countries to sign up for it by refusing to allow them to sell goods to rich countries unless they do. It gets worse: around the world, rich countries like the US, the EU and Canada negotiated secret copyright treaties called “The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” (ACTA) and “Trans-Pacific Partnership” (TPP) that have all the problems that the Digital Economy Act had and then some.
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