{"id":159503,"date":"2015-06-18T01:47:45","date_gmt":"2015-06-18T01:47:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=159503"},"modified":"2015-06-18T01:47:45","modified_gmt":"2015-06-18T01:47:45","slug":"how-obamas-trade-deals-are-designed-to-end-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/editorials\/how-obamas-trade-deals-are-designed-to-end-democracy\/","title":{"rendered":"How Obama’s ‘Trade’ Deals Are Designed to End Democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse<\/span><\/p>\n

U.S. President Barack Obama has for years been negotiating with European and Asian nations \u2013 but excluding Russia and China, since he is aiming to defeat them in his war to extend the American empire (i.e, to extend the global control by America\u2019s aristocracy) \u2013 three international \u2018trade\u2019 deals (TTP, TTIP, & TISA), each one of which contains a section (called\u00a0ISDS<\/span><\/a>) that would end important aspects of the sovereignty of each signatory nation, by setting up an international panel composed solely of corporate lawyers to serve as \u2018arbitrators\u2019 deciding cases brought before this panel to hear lawsuits by international corporations accusing a given signatory nation of violating that corporation\u2019s \u2018rights\u2019 by its trying to legislate regulations that are prohibited under the \u2019trade\u2019 agreement, such as by increasing the given nation\u2019s penalties for fraud, or by lowering the amount of a given toxic substance that the nation allows in its foods, or by increasing the percentage of the nation\u2019s energy that comes from renewable sources, or by penalizing corporations for\u00a0hiring people to kill labor union organizers<\/span><\/a>\u00a0\u2013 i.e., by any regulatory change that benefits the public at the expense of the given corporations’ profits. (No similar and countervailing power for nations to sue international corporations is included in this: the \u2018rights\u2019 of \u2018investors\u2019 \u2013 but really of only the top stockholders in international corporations \u2013 are placed higher than the rights of any signatory nation.)<\/span><\/p>\n

This provision, whose full name is \u201cInvestor State Dispute Resolution\u201d grants a one-sided benefit to the controlling stockholders in international corporations, by enabling them to bring these lawsuits to this panel of lawyers, whose careers will consist of their serving international corporations, sometimes as \u2018arbitrators\u2019 in these panels, and sometimes as lawyers who more-overtly represent one or more of those corporations, but also serving these corporations in other capacities, such as via being appointed by them to head a tax-exempt foundation to which international corporations \u2018donate\u2019 and so to turn what would otherwise be PR expenses into corporate tax-deductions. In other words: to be an \u2018arbitrator\u2019 on these panels can produce an extremely lucrative career.<\/span><\/p>\n

These are in no way democratic legal proceedings; they\u2019re the exact opposite, an international conquest of democracy, by international corporations. This \u201cISDS\u201d sounds deceptively non-partisan, but it’s really a grant to the controlling international investors giving them a ‘right’ against the taxpayers in each of the signatory nations, a \u2018right\u2019 to sue, essentially, those taxpayers; and ISDS includes no countervailing \u2018right\u2019 to those taxpayers, to sue those international corporations; it\u2019s an entirely one-sided provision, and it even removes the authority of the democratically elected national government to adjudicate the matter. It even removes the appeals-court system: once a decision is reached by the \u2018arbitrating\u2019 panel, it is final, it cannot be appealed. And no nation may present a challenge to the constitutionality of the \u2018arbitrators\u2019 decision. These treaties, if signed, will override the signatory nation\u2019s constitution, on those matters.<\/span><\/p>\n

This idea started after World War II and the defeat of the fascist nations on the military battlefields, and it moved this great fascist-v.-democratic war to a different type of battlefield. It\u2019s round 2 of WW II.<\/span><\/p>\n

Unlike many wars, WW II was an ideological war. On the one side stood the Allies; on the other, the fascist powers. The first fascist leader, Italy’s Benito Mussolini, said in November 1933 that his ideal was \u201ccorporatism\u201d or\u00a0\u201ccorporationism,\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0in which the state, or the national government, serves its corporations (see page 426 there):<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe corporation plays on the economic terrain just as the Grand Council and the militia play on the political terrain. Corporationism is disciplined economy, and from that comes control, because one cannot imagine a discipline without a director.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Corporationism is above socialism and above liberalism. A new synthesis is created. It is a symptomatic fact that the decadence of capitalism coincides with the decadence of socialism. All the Socialist parties of Europe are in fragments.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Evidently the two phenomena\u2013I will not say conditions\u2013present a point of view which is strictly logical: there is between them a historical parallel. Corporative economy arises at the historic moment when both the militant phenomena, capitalism and socialism, have already given all that they could give. From one and from the other we inherit what they have of vitality. \u2026<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

There is no doubt that, given the general crisis of capitalism, corporative solutions can be applied anywhere.”<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

After World War II, the \u2018former\u2019 Nazi, Prince Bernhard, took up the fascist (lower-case f, indicating the ideology, instead of Mussolini\u2019s Fascist political party; Bernhard had belonged instead to Hitler\u2019s Nazi Party) cudgel, when he created in 1954 his then-secret (and still secretive today) Bilderberg group, which brings together the leaders, and the advisers to the leaders, of international corporations, meeting annually or bi-annually, near the places where major national leaders or potential future leaders have pre-scheduled to congregate, such as this year\u2019s G-7 meeting in Bavaria, so that even heads-of-state (and\/or their aides) can quietly slip away unofficially to join nearby the Bilderbergs and communicate privately with them, to coordinate their collective international fascist endeavor (and decide which presidential candidates to fund), to institute a fascist world government that will possess a legal control higher than what\u2019s possessed by any merely national government. Just as the anti-Russian, anti-Chinese, G-7 conference ended on 8 June 2015<\/span><\/a>, the Bilderberg conference opened 15 miles away three days later (after a few days of vacation in the Bavarian Alps), and Britain\u2019s Telegraph<\/i> (as it does every year with extraordinary boldness for the Western press) issued the list of attendees<\/span><\/a>, which included top advisors to many heads-of-state, plus major investors in \u2018defense\u2019 stocks, plus top propagandists against Russia (such as Anne Applebaum). <\/span><\/p>\n

Bilderbergers have always been opposed to the old ideal of an emerging global federalism of democracies to constitute an ultimate world government; they instead favor a dictatorial world government, imposed by (the controlling owners of) international corporations. The major international corporations are controlled by perhaps fewer than a hundred people around the world; and, the other billions of people, the mere citizens, will, in this plan, as realized under Obama\u2019s \u2018trade\u2019 deals, be fined if a three-person panel of servants (the \u2018arbitrators\u2019) to that perhaps fewer than 100 people, rule to say that the given nation has violated the \u2018rights\u2019 of those \u2018investors,\u2019 and assesses the \u2018fine\u2019 against those taxpayers.<\/span><\/p>\n

The\u00a0first Bilderberg meeting<\/span><\/a>\u00a0was called together by Bernhard in a\u00a0personal invitation which proposed<\/span><\/a>\u00a0that, \u201cI think that a ‘partnership for growth’ is a fine idea.\u00a0A good deal has been said but very little has been done\u00a0about trade policy, and this would be a good place to\u00a0start the partnership.\u201d (Note the \u2018Partnership\u2019 in \u201cTrans Pacific Partnership,\u201d and in \u201cTransatlantic Trade & Investment Partnership\u201d; but TISA doesn\u2019t use that term.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Among the leading Americans at the first (and perhaps each of the subsequent) Bilderberg meetings, were Wall Streeters David Rockefeller and George Ball, both of whom subsequently lobbied the U.S. Congress heavily to replace national standards with international standards, something that would be an improvement if done within a democratic framework (which would thus have electoral accountability to the public, and be appealable and amendable), but they didn\u2019t even mention any proposed framework, and virtually everyone at that time was simply assuming that nobody in \u2019the West\u2019 would have any dictatorial framework in mind; everybody assumed that, after the defeat of the fascist nations, any emerging world government could only be democratic. This isn\u2019t what Bilderbergers actually had in mind, however.<\/span><\/p>\n

Matt Stoller, on 20 February 2014, bannered, \u201cNAFTA Origins, Part Two: The Architects of Free Trade Really Did Want a World Government of Corporations,\u201d<\/span><\/a> and he reported, from his study of the Congressional Record<\/i>, that:<\/span><\/p>\n

After the Kennedy round <\/i>[international-trade talks] ended<\/i> [in 1967], liberal internationalists, including people like Chase CEO David Rockefeller and former Undersecretary of State George Ball, began pressing for reductions in non-tariff barriers, which they perceived as the next set of trade impediments to pull down. Ball was an architect of 1960s U.S. trade policy \u2013 he helped write the Trade Act of 1962, which set the stage for what eventually became the World Trade Organization.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

But Ball\u2019s idea behind getting rid of these barriers wasn\u2019t about free trade, it was about reorganizing the world so that corporations could manage resources for \u201cthe benefit of mankind\u201d. It was a weird utopian vision that you can hear today in the current United States Trade Representative Michael Froman\u2019s speeches. \u2026<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

In the opening statement<\/i> [by Ball to Congress in 1967], before a legion of impressive Senators and Congressmen, Ball attacks the very notion of sovereignty. He goes after the idea that \u201cbusiness decisions\u201d could be \u201cfrustrated by a multiplicity of different restrictions by relatively small nation states that are based on parochial considerations,\u201d and lauds the multinational corporation as the most perfect structure devised for the benefit of mankind.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

As for David Rockefeller, he wrote in the 1 February 1999 Newsweek<\/i> an essay \u201cLooking for New Leadership,\u201d in which he stated (p. 41) the widely quoted<\/span><\/a> (though the rest of the article is ignored): \u201cIn recent years, there’s been a trend toward democracy and market\u00a0economies. That has lessened the role of government, which is something\u00a0business people tend to be in favor of. But the other side of the coin is\u00a0that somebody has to take governments’ place, and business seems to me to\u00a0be a logical entity to do it.\u201d He meant there that international corporations should have supreme sovereignty, above that of any nation. He always emphasized what he proudly called \u201cinternationalism.\u201d<\/span><\/a> To him, like to Ball, governments \u2013 that is, national governments \u2013 <\/span>were the problem, and democracy is not the solution. The solution is, to exact the contrary: provide supreme sovereignty to international corporations, as an international authority higher than any democracy, or than any nation.<\/span><\/p>\n

A two-minute video<\/a><\/span>\u00a0succinctly states the case for UK citizens against ISDS regarding Obama\u2019s proposed TTIP or Transatlantic Trade & Investment Partnership with Europe, but the case equally applies for all citizens, regarding Obama\u2019s TPP with Asia, and his TISA<\/span><\/a> with all countries for \u201cServices,\u201d including financial services and the \u2018rights’ that international financial corporations such as banks have to transfer their billionaires\u2019 gambling (\u2018investment\u2019) losses onto the taxpayers (via megabank bailouts). Obama\u2019s \u2018trade\u2019 deals will thus internationalize the system to bail out billionaires on their losses. Furthermore, (as that linked source on TISA explained): if TISA passes, then the United States, which is virtually the only industrialized country that hasn\u2019t socialized the health-insurance function, would be prohibited from ever socializing it. (This, mind you, from the very same Barack Obama who, while he was running against Hillary Clinton in 2008 to win the Democratic Presidential nomination, told the AFL-CIO<\/span><\/a>, \u201cI happen to be a proponent of single-payer universal healthcare coverage.\u201d He didn\u2019t just lie: he\u2019s now fighting to make socialization of health insurance absolutely impossible in the United States. No wonder why as President, Obama\u2019s White House argued to the Supreme Court<\/span><\/a> that no state may limit lying in political campaigns \u2013 that lying in politics is Constitutionally protected \u2018Free Speech.\u2019 Obama sets the record for phoniness.)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The world is already almost completely fascistic. As I previously reported, it really, truly, is the case that the\u00a0\u201cWorld\u2019s Richest 80 People Own Same Amount as World\u2019s Bottom 50%.\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0And, furthermore, the only rigorous scientific study that has ever been done of the extent to which a recognized \u2018democratic\u2019 country actually is a democracy found that that nation definitely is not. The nation was the United States. The U.S. was discovered to be, and long to have been, a dictatorship, in which the people who are not in the richest 10% have no impact whatsoever on the nation\u2019s policies.\u00a0A brief video<\/span><\/a>\u00a0accurately summarized\u00a0that study (by Gilens and Page)<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and explained why its findings are that way. This 6-minute video is a crash course on political reality. That Gilens and Page study noted at the end, that, “Our findings also point toward the need to learn more about exactly which economic elites (the \u2018merely affluent\u2019? the top 1%? the top 0.01%?) have how much impact upon public policy.\u201d However, the most detailed study of the flow of economic benefits and costs in the United States since 2000 has found that all of the economic benefits from \u2018America\u2019s economic recovery\u2019 and \u2018the end of the recession,\u2019 etc., have gone only to the top 1%. (The\u00a0\u2018news\u2019 media try to say it\u2019s not \u2018really\u2019 so,<\/span><\/a>\u00a0but the finding is based on the most solid of all data, and that\u2019s the most reliable way to calculate anything.) Another study, which I did, also based on the best available data, \u201cThe Top 1% of America\u2019s Top 1%,\u201d<\/span><\/a> has shown that the reason for the immense power that\u2019s within the top 10% is the soaring wealth-boost to only<\/i> the top 0.01%, the very top end of the top end. Comparing the boost to incomes at America\u2019s top 0.1% to that of the top 0.01%, one sees that most of the income of the top 0.1% is actually going to merely the top 0.01%, so that, as I summed it up, \u201cthe wealthiest of the billionaires are getting almost everything.\u201d And, this is the situation even before the Bilderberg plan is fully in force. Obama\u2019\u2019s \u2018trade\u2019 deals wouldn\u2019t just lock this in; they\u2019d vastly increase the power, and also the wealth, of the perhaps 100 or fewer people who control the largest international corporations.<\/span><\/p>\n

The fact that these \u2018trade\u2019 deals are being pushed right now, means that the people who are in power have concluded that, already, \u2018the free world\u2019 is so dictatorial, that the chances that their plan can now be imposed globally are about as good as is likely ever to be the case again. The time is ripe for them to establish a global corporate dictatorship. The political money this year will be flowing like never before.<\/span><\/p>\n

———-<\/span><\/p>\n

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i> and of \u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a>, and\u00a0of \u00a0Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics<\/i><\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse U.S. President Barack Obama has for years been negotiating with European and Asian nations \u2013 but excluding Russia and China, since he is aiming to defeat them in his war to extend the American empire (i.e, to extend the global control by America\u2019s aristocracy) \u2013 three international \u2018trade\u2019 deals (TTP, TTIP, & TISA), […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":159504,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[461,1622],"tags":[115,30,32,96,962,535,844,1479,49,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-159503","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-editorials","8":"category-featured","9":"tag-barack-obama","10":"tag-big-brother","11":"tag-cia","12":"tag-cover-up","13":"tag-fast-track","14":"tag-global-news","15":"tag-tisa","16":"tag-tpp-ttip","17":"tag-usa-news","18":"tag-white-house"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=159503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159503\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/159504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=159503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=159503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=159503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}