{"id":161586,"date":"2015-06-24T15:30:37","date_gmt":"2015-06-24T15:30:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=161586"},"modified":"2015-06-25T01:13:40","modified_gmt":"2015-06-25T01:13:40","slug":"the-day-the-earth-died","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/editorials\/the-day-the-earth-died\/","title":{"rendered":"The Day the Earth Died"},"content":{"rendered":"

And Why Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Etc., <\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Were Virtually Silent About It<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

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

As the civilizations that we all know, and love, and lived, slide increasingly into totalitarian misery; and the environment, which had been our lives, becomes less and less livable, there will be, in retrospect, one key day, which historians will mark, as the turning-point toward Earth\u2019s death; and it was 23 June 2015. That’s the day when the U.S. Senate, which had previously turned down the procedural move (called \u201cFast Track Trade Promotion Authority,” and discussed\u00a0here<\/span><\/a>)\u00a0that opens the door to passing U.S. President Obama\u2019s falsely-called \u2018trade\u2019 deals, finally (in effect) passed<\/span><\/a> it \u2013 thereby reducing the Constitutionally required two-thirds of Senators that\u2019s needed to approve any of these treaties in order for it to become law, down to merely an unConstitutional<\/span><\/a> 50% of the Senators (+ the Vice President as the tie-breaker), as if a treaty were like any merely ordinary law (which requires only 50%+1); \u201cFast Track” thus enormously increases the likelihood of passing any of Obama\u2019s world-murderous \u2018trade\u2019 treaties, from approximately 0%, to approximately 100%.<\/span><\/p>\n

Here is how these treaties will murder the Earth:<\/span><\/p>\n

Each of these \u2018trade\u2019 deals is about lots more than merely international commerce; it is far more fundamentally about sovereignty \u2013 who rules?<\/i> <\/span>There is a feature in each one of them that empowers international corporations to sue any member-nation to the treaty, which tries to pass any regulation, including any environmental regulation, that is stricter than what is set in stone forever in the given \u2018trade\u2019 deal. If, for example, scientists discover that, in order for our planet not to go into an exponentially increasing temperature \u2013 basically, to go environmentally haywire, and a rapid descent into planetary death (unlivable) \u2013 then the requirements for cutting back on fossil fuels must be increased, the situation will already be one in which any member nation that would even try to increase those requirements will be sued by international oil and coal and gas corporations for trying to prevent such environmental haywire, and these lawsuits will be adjudicated by panels not of judges who are appointed by democratically elected representatives of the given nation\u2019s public, but instead by mere panels of international \u2018arbitrators\u2019 whose careers will be dependent upon how favorably they rule for international corporations. There will be no democracy, at all, in this. The member-nations to the treaty will no longer actually be democracies. (If they ever were.) There will be a higher power, and it\u2019s trans-national: the hundred or so individuals who collectively control all of the major international coporations.<\/span><\/p>\n

Instead of national democracies, the member-nations of these \u2018trade\u2019 deals will have become little more than supplicants to the international corporate dictatorship, which dictatorship rules collectively over all of the national signatories to the international \u2018trade\u2019 treaty.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now, it\u2019s true that the international corporations will not be empowered to change any law within any one of the member-nations; but, they won\u2019t even need to. How do you think that, in this circumstance, countries will handle their regulatory obligations, if they can be sued for increasing their national standards so as to accommodate new scientific findings, or even merely in order to change financial regulations so as to prevent crashes such as in 1929 and 2008? Any increase in any national regulation will place that nation in almost certain jeopardy of being internationally assessed to pay huge fines to the suing international corporations. That will become the great international racket: suing nations, for violating the \u2018rights\u2019 of international investors \u2013 \u2018rights\u2019 that transcend any of the rights of the citizenry in any one of those countries. (No contrary provision is afforded for nations, to sue international investors; it\u2019s all just one-way.)<\/span><\/p>\n

So: these \u2018trade\u2019 deals will not directly and overtly block any increase in the regulations of food-safety, the environment, drug-safety, worker-safety, workers\u2019 wages, medical care, education, or any of the many other things that governments must regulate in order for the public to be protected, and served. Instead, this legislative blockage will be indirect, and covert. But it will be just as real, and just as effective, as if it were an outright legal prohibition. The individual nations will be forced to yield to the \u2018higher\u2019 rights (the real sovereignty) of the top international investors.<\/span><\/p>\n

In other words: What the U.S. Senate did on 23 June 2015 was to hand America\u2019s sovereignty over to international corporations. It gave President Obama what he had been seeking with unprecedented intensity, and which he has called his \u201clegacy\u201d: it\u2019s the power to transfer lots of America\u2019s democratic national sovereignty over to international corporations \u2013 that is, to the roughly 100 individuals on this planet who own the controlling blocks of stock in the world\u2019s large international corporations, the people who are the real beneficiaries in all of this.<\/span><\/p>\n

Not only will environmental regulations be frozen into place, once a given treaty is in force, and so the entire planet will become, essentially, doomed (because emerging science will be ignored if it doesn\u2019t serve the interests of the hundred or so top billionaiures); but protections of workers\u2019 rights will also not increase \u2013 not rise in any country \u2013 beyond what the treaty specifies. The set-in-stone standards will govern, while the planet simply boils away, and boils off. This will have been the ultimate conservative victory.<\/span><\/p>\n

The end result of that conservative victory will be global impoverishment, and ultimate environmental collapse, while the world\u2019s few billionaires, and especially the richest hundred of them, will become enormously richer, because their freedoms and associated power will be enormously increased, at everyone else\u2019s expense, by what happened on 23 June 2015. And, of course, those international corporations have been lobbying and buying politicians to the tune of billions of dollars, precisely in order to achieve this outcome \u2013 their totalitarian international power.<\/span><\/p>\n

The most curious aspect of this catastrophic outcome is that the so-called \u2018charities\u2019 and \u2018non-profits,\u2019 such billionaires\u2019 tax-writeoffs as the Sierra Club and other environmental organizations that are already heavily beholden to international corporations and to the people who control those, have been basically silent about the planetary destruction that their sponsors have been fighting to achieve, via Obama\u2019s \u2018trade\u2019 deals. (There\u2019s been token resistance, but only token.) The American public had falsely thought that only a few amendments needed to be added in order for these to be \u2018good\u2019 \u2018trade\u2019 deals for the public \u2013 amendments such as \u201cTrade Adjustment Assistance,\u201d which would provide token and brief transitional training to some of the millions of Americans who will be losing their jobs, as those jobs become increasingly outsourced abroad to lower-wage or more brutally anti-union countries and make \u2018us’ more like \u2019them\u2019 \u2013 the low-wage and desperate masses there.<\/span><\/p>\n

The real \u201cus,\u201d and \u201cthem,\u201d are instead the public, versus the aristocracy. It\u2019s so within every country, but it\u2019s unmentionable in the United States; and when you look at \u2018non-profits\u2019 such as Greenpeace, Sierra Club, etc., and see that they were virtually silent and not vigorously exposing the corrupt \u2018liberals\u2019 during the legislative process, while this monstrosity was passing into law \u2013 a monstrosity that will make all of those organizations\u2019 alleged \u2018missions\u2019 into mere mockery \u2013 the victory of them, over us, was as if those nominal \u2018charities\u2019 had never even existed.<\/span><\/p>\n

For example: the websites of all of those \u2018charities\u2019 should have been flaming against \u201cISDS\u201d as being an Earth-killer, but they weren\u2019t. Instead, they focused on far less-dangerous features, \u201cthreats to forests\u201d and the like. That was more covering-up than exposing the mega-threat.<\/span><\/p>\n

We\u2019re not all in this together. And they know it. Only the public were prevented from knowing it \u2013 until too late.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

For more about this, see\u00a0the article I previously linked to.<\/span><\/a>\u00a0It also provides the historical background, and the only remaining way forward that still might possibly be available to block Obama\u2019s success in this (a Constitutional challenge to the \u201cFast Track\u201d provision of Richard Nixon\u2019s Trade Act of 1974).<\/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":"

And Why Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Etc., Were Virtually Silent About It Eric Zuesse As the civilizations that we all know, and love, and lived, slide increasingly into totalitarian misery; and the environment, which had been our lives, becomes less and less livable, there will be, in retrospect, one key day, which historians will mark, as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":161587,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[461,1622],"tags":[115,30,96,927,535,654,103,2199,753,526,49,40,1024],"class_list":{"0":"post-161586","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-cover-up","12":"tag-environment","13":"tag-global-news","14":"tag-global-warming","15":"tag-health-news","16":"tag-labor-unions","17":"tag-police-state","18":"tag-propaganda","19":"tag-usa-news","20":"tag-white-house","21":"tag-ww3"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161586","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=161586"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161586\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/161587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}