{"id":7584,"date":"2015-04-26T07:19:47","date_gmt":"2015-04-26T12:19:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=7584"},"modified":"2015-04-26T07:19:47","modified_gmt":"2015-04-26T12:19:47","slug":"the-trans-pacific-partnership-and-the-death-of-the-republic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=7584","title":{"rendered":"The Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Death of the Republic"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"article-title\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2015\/04\/24\/the-trans-pacific-partnership-and-the-death-of-the-republic\/\" target=\"_blank\">The Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Death of the Republic<\/a><\/h3>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cThe United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Article IV, Section 4, US Constitution<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>A\u00a0republican\u00a0form of government is one in which power resides in elected officials representing the citizens, and government leaders exercise power according to the\u00a0rule of law. In\u00a0<em>The Federalist\u00a0Papers<\/em>,\u00a0James Madison defined a\u00a0republic as \u201ca government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people . . . .\u201d<\/p>\n<p>On April 22, 2015, the Senate Finance Committee\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/2015\/04\/23\/us-trade-tpp-idUSKBN0NE07F20150423\">approved a bill<\/a>\u00a0to 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.<\/p>\n<p>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.\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/tim-robertson\/trans-pacific-partnership_b_1476261.html\">Negotiating the TPP in secret<\/a>\u00a0and 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.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Abdicating the Judicial Function to Corporate Lawyers<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>James Madison wrote in\u00a0<em>The Federalist Papers<\/em>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, . . . may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. . . . \u201cWere the power of judging joined with the legislative, the life and liberty of the subject would be exposed to arbitrary control, for\u00a0<em>the judge<\/em>\u00a0would then be\u00a0<em>the legislator<\/em>. . . .\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And that, from what we now know of the TPP\u2019s secret provisions, will be its dire effect.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Death of the Republic \u201cThe United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.\u201d \u2014 Article IV, Section 4, US Constitution A\u00a0republican\u00a0form of government is one in which power resides in elected officials representing the citizens, and government leaders exercise power according to the\u00a0rule [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5,6],"tags":[1272,171,4651,710,804,805,808],"class_list":["post-7584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-geopolitics","category-liberty","tag-congress","tag-corporations","tag-globalisation","tag-secrecy","tag-tpp","tag-trade","tag-trans-pacific-partnership"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7584"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7584\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7585,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7584\/revisions\/7585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}