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The Global Trade Corporatocracy Slams into Local Resistance
The Global Trade Corporatocracy Slams into Local Resistance
Not everything seems to be going according to script for the self-anointed architects of the new global order. For years lobbyists and representatives of the world’s largest corporations and banks have been meeting with government trade negotiators from Europe, North America and Asia to patch together what could soon be the world’s two biggest ever “trade” deals, the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). The problem is that as more and more people learn about them, public opposition continues to grow — and with good reason.
If signed, these new deals will enshrine into international law a new system of semi-global, technocratic governance for the exclusive benefit of the world’s largest, richest multinational corporations and private investors. What’s more, in the eternal words of the U.S. Trade Rep Michael Froman, once they are passed, agreements like TTIP will become “the global benchmark for standards in a globalized world.”
For the world’s uber-class of super wealthy individuals and corporations, this is great news.
A Two-Tier Global Justice System
Thanks to the inclusion of the investment protection charter – A.K.A. the Investor State Dispute Settlement (or ISDS) – foreign companies and big investors will be able to sue national governments in private arbitration tribunals for profits they might lose as a result of local or national laws or regulation.
As The Guardian columnist George Monbiot writes, “while the rest of us must take our chances in the courts, corporations across the EU, US and vast swathes of the Asia-Pacific region will be allowed to sue governments before a tribunal of corporate lawyers.” They will be able to challenge the laws they don’t like, and seek massive compensation if these are deemed to affect their “future anticipated profits.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Trade Deals and the Logic of the Middle Finger
Trade Deals and the Logic of the Middle Finger
After news broke that Senate Democrats had voted against giving President Obama fast-track authority for his TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) ‘trade’ agreement there was a moment when true knowledge of the world was held ever-so-briefly in suspension. Eternal optimists of the liberal and progressive persuasions instantly declared that Democrats had acted on, if not quite their moral compasses, at least credible threats from the electorate that their futures as professional collectors of campaign contributions might be at risk. However, upon reading the ‘reasons’ for the vote it became clear that said Democrats were only moving slowly to assure they would be paid their proper tribute for endorsing the deal.
While optimism is certainly within the range of normal human emotions, those expressing it in socially beneficial forms can be found facing down militarized cops in Ferguson, Missouri, fighting mountaintop removal in West Virginia and occasionally burning cop cars in Baltimore. As Senate Democrats were quick to demonstrate, where optimism is never rewarded is in expectations that they will act in the public interest. It took only twenty-four short hours for the graftariat to ready itself to once again conduct the (rich) people’s business. If the fact of the reversal fails to impress, the speed with which it took place certainly should. With the capitalist coup (TPP, TTIP) now so near completion, the call of opposition has been rephrased as it always should have been, to ‘take the politics out of money.’
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How America’s ‘News’ Media Killed America’s Democracy: TPP & TTIP
How America’s ‘News’ Media Killed America’s Democracy: TPP & TTIP
As I reported on Wednesday, a deal was worked out in the U.S. Senate on the early afternoon of May 13th to “Fast-Track” through to approval U.S. President Barack Obama’s proposed trade deals, TPP with Asia, and TTIP with Europe. (It should have been reported on the nightly TV news programs, but most of them ignored it then, and reported the news only the next day when the Senators made it official.)
TPP and TTIP have been represented in America’s press as ‘trade’ deals, but instead they’re actually about sovereignty. They’re about America and the other participating countries handing their democratic sovereignty — on regulation of the environment, consumer protection, worker protection, and finance — over to panels, all of whose members will be selected by the large international corporations that for years have been working with U.S. President Obama’s Trade Representative to draft these “trade” treaties.
If some corporation “C” under these ‘trade deals’ then brings a case to one of those panels and says that country “X” has any regulations regarding the environment, consumer protection, worker protection, or finance, that are stricter than the ones that are set forth in TPP and TTIP, then country X will be assessed to pay a fine to corporation C, for “unfair trade practices” against that corporation.
In other words: these corporate panels will constitute a new international government, with the power to fine countries for exceeding the regulations that are set forth in these international ‘trade’ treaties.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
“Free Trade” Run Amok: Canada Challenges U.S. Laws Reining In Banks
“Free Trade” Run Amok: Canada Challenges U.S. Laws Reining In Banks
We noted in 2013 that the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) would let big banks run amok, and wouldincrease the cost of consumer loans.
Ellen Brown asked last month:
Under the TPP, could the US government be sued and be held liable if it decided to stop issuing Treasury debt and financed deficit spending in some other way (perhaps by quantitative easing or by issuing trillion dollar coins)? Why not, since some private companies would lose profits as a result?
Under the TPP or the TTIP (the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership under negotiation with the European Union), would the Federal Reserve be sued if it failed to bail out banks that were too big to fail?
[U]nder the Netherlands-Czech trade agreement, the Czech Republic was sued in an investor-state dispute for failing to bail out an insolvent bank in which the complainant had an interest. The investor company was awarded $236 million in the dispute settlement. What might the damages be, asks Firestone, if the Fed decided to let the Bank of America fail, and a Saudi-based investment company decided to sue?
Michael Snyder noted:
[TPP] would give Wall Street banks much more freedom to trade risky derivatives ….
We’ve all been proven right …
Specifically, Reuters reports today that Canada is trying to stop enforcement of America’s law prohibiting big banks from engaging in risky “prop trading” for the banks’ own gambling profit on Canadian debt:
The U.S. ban on its banks doing proprietary trading of Canadian debt likely violates an international agreement between the nations, Canadian Finance Minister Joe Oliver said on Wednesday, urging American lawmakers to adjust the so-called Volcker Rule.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
As the Senate Prepares to Vote on “Fast Track,” Here’s a Quick Primer on the Dangers of the TPP
As the Senate Prepares to Vote on “Fast Track,” Here’s a Quick Primer on the Dangers of the TPP
The United States is in the final stages of negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a massive free-trade agreement with Mexico, Canada, Japan, Singapore and seven other countries. Who will benefit from the TPP? American workers? Consumers? Small businesses? Taxpayers? Or the biggest multinational corporations in the world?
One strong hint is buried in the fine print of the closely guarded draft. The provision, an increasingly common feature of trade agreements, is called “Investor-State Dispute Settlement,” or ISDS. The name may sound mild, but don’t be fooled. Agreeing to ISDS in this enormous new treaty would tilt the playing field in the United States further in favor of big multinational corporations. Worse, it would undermine U.S. sovereignty.
ISDS would allow foreign companies to challenge U.S. laws – and potentially to pick up huge payouts from taxpayers – without ever stepping foot in a U.S. court. Here’s how it would work. Imagine that the United States bans a toxic chemical that is often added to gasoline because of its health and environmental consequences. If a foreign company that makes the toxic chemical opposes the law, it would normally have to challenge it in a U.S. court. But with ISDS, the company could skip the U.S. courts and go before an international panel of arbitrators. If the company won, the ruling couldn’t be challenged in U.S. courts, and the arbitration panel could require American taxpayers to cough up millions – and even billions – of dollars in damages.
If that seems shocking, buckle your seat belt. ISDS could lead to gigantic fines, but it wouldn’t employ independent judges. Instead, highly paid corporate lawyers would go back and forth between representing corporations one day and sitting in judgment the next. Maybe that makes sense in an arbitration between two corporations, but not in cases between corporations and governments. If you’re a lawyer looking to maintain or attract high-paying corporate clients, how likely are you to rule against those corporations when it’s your turn in the judge’s seat?
– From Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s Washington Post Op-Ed: The Trans-Pacific Partnership Clause Everyone Should Oppose
Trying to learn about the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, is like trying to walk through a minefield. The only information we really have is courtesy of leaks, and those snippets are definitely not encouraging.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Free Trade is Plutocratic Propaganda
Free Trade is Plutocratic Propaganda
With the looming Trans-Pacific Partnership dominating the headlines, now is a good time to revisit an old scam called “free trade.”
In 2003, Kevin Flanagan was an information technology employee at Bank of America. They told him he was being replaced with foreign labor, and he was ordered to train his replacement. After he completed his assignment, he was laid off. Then he went to the parking lot and shot himself.
That’s “free trade.”
Like The Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984, sometimes, the most effective way to lie is to use the most innocent words. No word is more susceptible to propaganda-leveraging than “freedom.” Attach that word to any concept, and all of a sudden, it’s unassailable. That’s exactly what happened with “free trade.”
Proponents of free trade will often use the simplest analogies to convey their point, as if you were retarded. The reason they have to resort to such caveman illustrations is because free trade does not exist in the real world. There is no such thing as equality of bargaining power. If someone has ten million dollars and you have zero dollars, anything above zero is an “improvement” in your situation. The free trade economists will say this person with zero dollars is “free” to work for $1 per hour, and they will do so because it improves their situation. This is what “freedom” means to free trade economists.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
A Multinational Trojan Horse: The Trans-Pacific Partnership
A Multinational Trojan Horse: The Trans-Pacific Partnership
“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” – James Madison in The Federalist Papers.
You don’t have to know much about the “trade” deal called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) to be more than a little suspicious.
First, there are the very peculiar bedfellows. Supporting the TPP are President Obama and most Congressional Republicans, the same Republicans who’ve vehemently opposed his every initiative for the past six and one-half years.
Against the TPP are most (but not all) Congressional Democrats, Ford Motor Company, virtually all trade unions and environmental groups, watchdog groups such as Public Citizen, and usual Obama allies such as Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, who, in a testy open letter to the President on April 25, called for greater transparency on the TPP.
Furthermore, when asked to lend his support for so-called “Fast Track” authority for the TPP, Obama water-carrier and former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid chafed, “So the answer is not only no, but hell no.”
Also opposed: liberal icon Noam Chomsky, Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders, Republican hopeful Mike Huckabee, many Tea-Party groups, and conservative Republican editorialist and former presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan. Conspicuous by silence: Hillary Rodham Clinton.
What’s going on here? Why the strange alliances?
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CFR Says China Must Be Defeated And TPP Is Essential To That
CFR Says China Must Be Defeated And TPP Is Essential To That
Wall Street’s Council on Foreign Relations has issued a major report, alleging that China must be defeated because it threatens to become a bigger power in the world than the U.S.
This report, which is titled “Revising U.S. Grand Strategy Toward China,” is introduced by Richard Haass, the CFR’s President, who affirms the report’s view that, “no relationship will matter more when it comes to defining the twenty-first century than the one between the United States and China.”
Haass gives this report his personal imprimatur by saying that it “deserves to become an important part of the debate about U.S. foreign policy and the pivotal U.S.-China relationship.” He acknowledges that some people won’t agree with the views it expresses.
The report itself then opens by saying: “Since its founding, the United States has consistently pursued a grand strategy focused on acquiring and maintaining preeminent power over various rivals, first on the North American continent, then in the Western hemisphere, and finally globally.” It praises “the American victory in the Cold War.” It then lavishes praise on America’s imperialistic dominance: “The Department of Defense during the George H.W. Bush administration presciently contended that its ‘strategy must now refocus on precluding the emergence of any potential future global competitor’—thereby consciously pursuing the strategy of primacy that the United States successfully employed to outlast the Soviet Union.”
The rest of the report is likewise concerned with the international dominance of America’s aristocracy or the people who control this country’s international corporations, rather than with the welfare of the public or as the U.S. Constitution described the objective of the American Government: “the general welfare.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Caving In to Corporatism: Endgame for Secret “Trade” Pact Negotiations
Caving In to Corporatism: Endgame for Secret “Trade” Pact Negotiations
Two game-changing trade agreements — the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and its sister pact, the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) — are perilously close to completion. Their basic aims are three-fold: to elevate the rights of “investors,” that is of corporations, above the rights of citizens; to transfer sovereignty from the seats of national government to the corporate HQs of the world’s largest multinationals; and to cement Western domination of the global economy for the foreseeable future.
Naturally, few voters are likely to support such a radical program. Hence the acute need for secrecy, obfuscation and lies throughout the negotiation process. Eventually, even they are not enough. The lies start showing through and the flimsy facade begins to slip. In the later stages — roughly where we are now — the only way to finish the job is to incrementally, almost imperceptibly snuff out the institution of representative democracy itself. To do that, one must still keep the illusion of democracy alive, at least until the ink on its death warrant (i.e. a fully signed trade agreement) is dry.
This explains the European Commission’s constant empty promises of increased transparency, accountability and public consultation. The latest installment in this ridiculous charade came not from Brussels but from the US government, which announced that it will open up reading rooms in its embassies across the EU, so that national politicians can read secret documents related to TTIP.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement and The Covenant of Secrecy
The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement and The Covenant of Secrecy
The TTIP and TPPA, both sounding like ominous injections of political disaster, continue their march towards belittling, and corroding the democratic content of its participating countries. The holder of the needle remains US President Barack Obama, while the incentive is that grand fantasy that the more parties cooperate, the merrier will be the international scene when it comes to making money in a tariff-free world. Negotiate, in other words, with “like-minded” partners, and your limited leverage becomes far more significant.
In this regard, the US Congress has proven a funny old thing. Having made such a fuss about the issue of any nuclear deal with Iran and its necessary involvement, it has proven less enthusiastic about meddling in the matter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, or economic instruments with vast consequence. This is one of the centrepieces of Obama’s policy, central to his “shift” towards the Asia-Pacific and containing the increasing shine of Chinese development.
Nor is the equivalent agreement covering Europe, known as the Transatlantic Trade Investment Partnership, is not proving as big a bother as it should. The GOP members have not been opposed to Obama in one key aspect: that he remains the classic lobbyist on the issue that America’s business has always been business.
Last Thursday saw the Ways and Means Committee pass a bill by 25-13 that would actually accelerate trade deals, effectively curbing Congressional power to amend them. That vision stemmed largely from the work of such figures as Senate Finance Committee Chair Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). Debate in the chamber would be restricted, leading, instead, to mere “yes-or-no votes”. Effects of trade, it seems, is something exclusively reserved to the wisdom of the executive.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Death of the Republic
The Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Death of the Republic
“The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.”
— Article IV, Section 4, US Constitution
A republican form of government is one in which power resides in elected officials representing the citizens, and government leaders exercise power according to the rule of law. In The Federalist Papers, James Madison defined a republic as “a government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people . . . .”
On April 22, 2015, the Senate Finance Committee approved a bill to fast-track the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a massive trade agreement that would override our republican form of government and hand judicial and legislative authority to a foreign three-person panel of corporate lawyers.
The secretive TPP is an agreement with Mexico, Canada, Japan, Singapore and seven other countries that affects 40% of global markets. Fast-track authority could now go to the full Senate for a vote as early as next week. Fast-track means Congress will be prohibited from amending the trade deal, which will be put to a simple up or down majority vote. Negotiating the TPP in secret and fast-tracking it through Congress is considered necessary to secure its passage, since if the public had time to review its onerous provisions, opposition would mount and defeat it.
Abdicating the Judicial Function to Corporate Lawyers
James Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers:
The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, . . . may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. . . . “Were the power of judging joined with the legislative, the life and liberty of the subject would be exposed to arbitrary control, for the judge would then be the legislator. . . .”
And that, from what we now know of the TPP’s secret provisions, will be its dire effect.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
TPP Would Destroy State, County and Local Government Power
TPP Would Destroy State, County and Local Government Power
The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) would take sovereignty away from the American government … and hand it to a bunch of giant corporations, many of them foreign.
It would also take sovereignty away from state, county and local governments …
The attorney general of the State of New York explains:
[TPP’s sovereignty-stripping provisions are] particularly worrisome to those of us in states, such as New York, with robust laws that protect the public welfare — laws that could be undermined by the TPP and its dispute settlement provision.
To put this in real terms, consider a foreign corporation, located in a country that has signed on to TPP, and which has an investment interest in the Indian Point nuclear power facility in New York’s Westchester County. Under TPP, that corporate investor could seek damages from the United States, perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars or more, for actions by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, the Westchester County Board of Legislators or even the local Village Board that lead to a delay in the relicensing or an increase in the operating costs of the facility.
The very threat of having to face such a suit in the uncharted waters of an international tribunal could have a chilling effect on government policymakers and regulators.
Or consider the work my office has done to enforce the state of New York’s laws against wage theft, predatory lending and consumer fraud. Under TPP, certain foreign targets of enforcement actions, unable to prevail in domestic courts, could take their cases to TPP’s dispute resolution tribunals. Unbound by an established body of law or precedent, the tribunals would be able to simply sidestep domestic courts. And decisions by these tribunals cannot be appealed.
