{"id":297301,"date":"2017-03-02T18:47:52","date_gmt":"2017-03-02T17:47:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=297301"},"modified":"2017-03-02T18:47:52","modified_gmt":"2017-03-02T17:47:52","slug":"donald-trumps-deepest-fraud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/donald-trumps-deepest-fraud\/","title":{"rendered":"Donald Trump\u2019s Deepest Fraud"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org<\/a><\/p>\n

U.S. President Donald Trump came into office promising to \u201cdrain the swamp\u201d of corruption, and to restore the American people\u2019s control over their government, but what he has been doing since he started his Presidency on January 20th<\/span><\/span> is exactly the opposite: handing control of the U.S. government over to international corporations, and, really, over to the billionaires who control their corporations and who use them to rob the publics everywhere (in ways some of which will here be described).<\/p>\n

Consider his meeting, on February 13th, with Canada\u2019s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau:<\/p>\n

Trump had come into office opposing the George Herbert Walker Bush created, and Bill Clinton passed-into-law, NAFTA treaty, with Canada and Mexico, because it reduced employment and wages in the United States, but he said nothing at all about its severe reduction of American sovereignty, NAFTA\u2019s really toxic transference of America\u2019s sovereign ability to increase its regulations of the environment, product safety, and workers\u2019 rights \u2014 NAFTA\u2019s transference of certain regulatory portions of America’s sovereignty over to international corporations and their private three-person arbitration panels who would be making unappealable decisions to determine how many millions or billions of dollars America\u2019s taxpayers would be required to pay to the owners of international corporations who oppose those new regulations and whose rights are, under NAFTA, protected above the rights<\/i> of the mere citizens (such as taxpayers) of any<\/i> nation.<\/p>\n

The biggest issue between Canada and the United States now is something even worse than NAFTA: it\u2019s CETA, a treaty between Canada and the European Union, which would not only drive wages down, but enable international corporations \u2014 including American ones \u2014 to sue taxpayers in both Canada and the EU, for even enforcing their existing<\/i> laws regulating the environment, product-safety, and workers\u2019 rights.<\/p>\n

Here is a description of how that works.<\/a>\u00a0In that particular instance, a Canadian international mining company is suing Romania for enforcing its antipollution laws. \u201cThe project\u2019s majority owner Gabriel Resources is suing Romania at a World Bank-based international investment tribunal, seeking a reported US$ 4 billion in compensation for the alleged failure of the country to issue the necessary permits.\u201d “The mine would leave behind a\u00a0waste lake of cyanide-contaminated water the size of 420 football fields,\u201d and so it would vastly violate Romania\u2019s environmental laws; but, under the terms of a 1995<\/a> and of a 1997<\/a> treaty that Romania had signed, both of which had arbitration provisions just like CETA (and like Obama\u2019s proposed TPP, TTIP, & TISA treaties) would have, the Romanian government must now choose between either authorizing the project, or else paying the stockholders of Gabriel Resources $4 billion for blocking it. And CETA would be an absolute boon to U.S.-based international corporations, because “Four out of five US-based corporations with EU operations (41,811) could use CETA to attack the EU and its member states\u00a0if they structure their investment through Canadian subsidiaries.\u201d CETA wouldn\u2019t allow international corporations to sue U.S. taxpayers, because the U.S. wouldn\u2019t be a signatory to that particular treaty, but it would still be a huge new profit-center for America\u2019s international corporations (basically like activating Obama\u2019s moribund proposed TTIP treaty through a back door); and, if Trump represents the owners of American-based international corporations more than he represents the American public, he\u2019ll be supporting Canada\u2019s Prime Minister, who likewise represents the owners of international corporations and thus supports CETA.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, the first public financial report of Gabriel Resources, which was in 2012<\/a>, had noted that during the prior two years, the World Bank\u2019s partner, the IMF<\/a>, had imposed \u201causterity measures\u201d upon Romania; and, \u201cThese austerity measures, influenced also by the wider economic crisis within the European Union, gradually eroded the public support for the activity of the Government and led to public protests in Romania in January, 2012.\u201d Then, \u201cOn February 6, 2012, the lack of public support led to Prime Minister Boc announcing his resignation together with that of his entire Cabinet. Shortly thereafter, President Basescu asked Mihai Razvan Ungureanu, the Head of the Foreign Intelligence Service and a former Minister of Foreign Affairs, to form a new Government,\u201d which lasted \u201conly 11 weeks in power.\u201d<\/p>\n

So, the Romanian public were under the gun to approve this project. And, now, after mass demonstrations against it, and the government\u2019s rejection of the project, the Romanian public are being sued by the international corporation, for denying permission for it. The thumbscrews of economic austerity had failed to work, and so now an arbitration panel in which all nations\u2019 laws and courts were and are excluded and whose decision will be final no matter what Romania\u2019s Constitution and laws say, will determine what, if anything, Romania\u2019s taxpayers will pay to the corporation\u2019s stockholders, for \u2018violating their right to profit\u2019 (from a mining operation that Romania says would violate Romanian laws, which the mining company says should just be ignored). This is \u2018Western democracy\u2019. It fits the description of what Mussolini (whom we supposedly defeated) sometimes called \u201cfascism,\u201d and sometimes called \u201ccorporationism\u201d<\/a> (but this is an advanced, inter<\/i>-national, version of it: an emerging fascist world government<\/a>).<\/p>\n

The arbitral panel would adhere to the rules of something called ICSID, which is described in this article about Obama\u2019s proposed TPP treaty<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On 27 July 2016, George Monbiot headlined in Britain\u2019s Guardian<\/i>,\u00a0\u201cSovereignty? This government will sell us to the highest bidder\u201d<\/a>, and he reported that though UK\u2019s voters had voted to leave the EU because of its corrupt international-corporate-controlled government, the UK\u2019s own Prime Minister\u2019s government was now supporting CETA because UK\u2019s billionaires want to get in on this new booming business of suing taxpayers when countries enforce their consumer-protection, environmental-protection, and workers\u2019-rights, laws.<\/p>\n

On February 13th,\u00a0another article in the Guardian<\/i><\/a>\u00a0reported that:<\/p>\n

Ceta will eventually expose European regulations to more investor lawsuits from Canadian resource firms and the Canadian subsidiaries of US multinational corporations, ushering in, through the back door, a\u00a0<\/i>hated part of TTIP<\/i><\/a>, the supposedly\u00a0<\/i>moribund EU-US free trade deal<\/i><\/a>.\u00a0\u2026\u00a0the Canadian corporate sector is already pressing the Trudeau government to match the US president\u2019s deregulatory moves in order to remain competitive in their most important market. Ceta\u2019s regulatory cooperation mechanisms will provide an avenue for North American lobbyists to quietly deploy downward pressure against EU regulations. This is particularly true in sensitive areas such as\u00a0<\/i>genetically modified organisms<\/i><\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0<\/i>endocrine-disrupting chemicals<\/i><\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n

The international aristocracy has fooled publics throughout the world to believe that government regulations are bad and so the fewer and weaker they are, the better they are. Donald Trump himself spouts this lie, but it contradicts his alleged loyalty to the American (or any other) public. His actual actions since he came into the White House suggest that what he\u2019s serious about is stripping national sovereignty, not strengthening it.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s his deepest fraud, if that\u2019s what he\u2019ll actually follow-through on. There still is time for him to avoid being as rotten as most other leaders in \u2018the Western democracies\u2019 are. But, soon, we\u2019ll know which side he\u2019s really on.<\/p>\n

Without a doubt, the aristocracies of the U.S. and of all of its allied countries want this type of world government, even though it would hurt the publics everywhere<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/p>\n

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

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org U.S. President Donald Trump came into office promising to \u201cdrain the swamp\u201d of corruption, and to restore the American people\u2019s control over their government, but what he has been doing since he started his Presidency on January 20th is exactly the opposite: handing control of the U.S. government over […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-297301","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297301","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=297301"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297301\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}