NOVANEWS
The Origin and Broader Context of Obamas “Trade” Deals
By Eric Zuesse
Global Research
U.S. President Barack Obamas proposed Trade deals are actually about whether the world is heading toward a dictatorial world government a dictatorship by the hundred or so global super-rich who hold the controlling blocks of stock in the worlds largest international corporations or else toward a democratic world government, which will be a global federation of free and independent states, much like the United States was at its founding, but global in extent. These are two opposite visions of world government; and Obama is clearly on the side of fascism, an international mega-corporate dictatorship, as will be documented here in the links, and explained in the discussion.
Also as a preliminary to the discussion here is the understanding that if Obama wins Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority, then all of his trade deals will be approved by Congress and then be able to be considered seriously by other governments, and that if he fails to receive this Authority, then none of them will.
Fast Track, as will be explained in depth here, is, indeed, the open Sesame for Obama, on the entire matter. Without it, his deals dont stand even a chance of passage.
I previously wrote about why its the case that Fast Track Violates the U.S. Constitution. The details of the case are presented there; but, to summarize it here: Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority,” which was introduced by the imperial President Richard M. Nixon in the Trade Act of 1974, violates the U.S. Constitutions Treaty Clause the clause that says The President … shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur. (In other words:otherwise, the President simply doesnt have that power, the President cannot make treaties. Nixon wanted to make treaties without his needing to have two-thirds of the Senate vote Yea on them.) Fast Track abolishes that two-thirds requirement and replaces it by a requirement such as that for normal laws, of only a majority of the Senate approving, 50%(+1, which would be Vice President Joe Biden, so all that will actually be needed would be just that 50%). Obamas trade deals dont stand a chance of receiving the approval of two-thirds of the U.S. Senate.
What follows here will continue from that case, by providing the history of the U.S. Constitutions Treaty Clause, and of the successful modern movement, during the Twentieth Century, for its legislative overthrow, something (the legislated overthrow of a provision thats in the Constitution) that in-itself is prohibited by the U.S. Constitution an Amendment, or else a Constitutional convention, is instead required, in order to overthrow any provision of the U.S. Constitution) but which the Trade Act of 1974 said can be done by means of a mere Legislative-Executive Agreement, to carve out an exception to the Constitutions Treaty Clause (The President … shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur.), whenever the President and 50%+1 members of the Senate decide to do so.
Now, of course, each and every formalized international agreement, including agreements about trade, is a treaty and therefore it falls under this two-thirds rule. Furthermore, until 1974, every nation in the world, including the United States, accepted and did not challenge the view that every international agreement is a treaty, and that every treaty is an international agreement. In fact, even right up to the present day, every dictionary continues to define treaty as an international agreement. An international agreement is a treaty, and a treaty is an international agreement. Throughout the world, except in the United States starting long after the Constitution was written (i.e., starting in 1974), treaty = international agreement. It was always quite simple, until recently. However, after the Trade Act of 1974, starting in 1979, five such treaties have been set by the President and the Senates Majority Leader on Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority under the Trade Act of 1974, which provision of that law requires only 50%+1 Senators to vote Yea in order for the proposed treaty to be able to become U.S. law. The question is whether thats Constitutional. (Well show: its not.)
Americas Founders
America’s Founders instituted this Constitutional treaty-requirement, for any treaty to win two-thirds of the Senators instead of the mere majority (50%+1) thats required for passing normal laws (such as the Trade Act of 1974 itself is), because the Founders recognized that an international agreement cannot be undone by simply passing a new law that reverses it. An international agreement that is to say a treaty cannot be undone unless all nations that are parties to it are willing to change it in a way which will allow one of the signatories to depart from that group. Each signatory had signed it partly because the others did. There are at least two sides to any agreement, including to any international agreement or treaty. The member-nations are thus an intrinsic part of the agreement (or “treaty) itself (unlike the case with any normal, merely national, law), and so the agreement itself is changed whenever one of them departs from it. This fact distinguishes any treaty from any regular law which can be cancelled at will by the single nation that passes it, because that nation is the only party to it.
Americas Founders were wise, and were extraordinarily learned about history; and the U.S. Constitution (the first-ever constitution for a democracy) embodies this wisdom and learning; the Treaty Clauses two-thirds requirement exemplifies that. It is a crucial part of their determination to prevent any President from having too much power from becoming a dictator (something that becomes even worse if the dictator has rammed through not only mere laws, but also treaties, since those are far harder to undo). For example: it was intended to block any President from making a treaty with a foreign nation if that treaty would be so bad that he couldnt get two-thirds of the U.S. Senate to support it. (Thats tough, but a treaty is far more difficult than any other law is to cancel; so, passing it is passing a law thats virtually permanent and virtually impossible to modify.) And their wisdom is why our constitution remains the worlds longest-lasting one.
As Alexander Hamilton wrote on 9 January 1796, defending the new Constitution, and especially its Treaty Clause: I aver, that it was understood by all to be the intent of the provision [the Treaty Clause] to give to that power the most ample latitude to render it competent to all the stipulations, which the exigencies of National Affairs might requirecompetent to the making of Treaties of Alliance, Treaties of Commerce, Treaties of Peace and every other species of Convention usual among nations and competent in the course of its exercise to controul & bind the legislative power of Congress. And it was emphatically for this reason that it was so carefully guarded; the cooperation of two thirds of the Senate with the President being required to make a Treaty. I appeal for this with confidence.
He went further: It will not be disputed that the words Treaties and alliances are of equivalent import and of no greater force than the single word Treaties. An alliance is only a species of Treaty, a particular of a general. And the power of entering into Treaties, which terms confer the authority under which the former Government acted, will not be pretended to be stronger than the power to make Treaties, which are the terms constituting the authority under which the present Government acts. So: there can be no doubt that the term treaty refers to any and all types of international agreements. This was the Founders clear and unequivocal intent. No court under this Constitution possesses any power to change that, because they cant change history.
Furthermore, George Washingtons famous Farewell Address asserted that, It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world; and the third President Thomas Jefferson said in his equally famous Inaugural Address, that there should be “Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations entangling alliances with none. Jeffersons comment there was also a succinct tip-of-the-hat to yet another major concern that the Founders had regarding treaties that by discriminating in favor of the treaty-partners, they also discriminate against non-partner nations, and so endanger peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, which was the Founders chief goal in their foreign policies. But, the Founders chief concern was the mere recognition that treaties tend to be far more permanent and entangling than any purely national laws. This was the main reason why treaties need to be made much more difficult tobecome laws. Though this thinking was pervasive amongst the creators of Americas democracy (or peoples republic), Americas aristocracy subsequently targeted this dilution of the Presidents treaty-making power as being an impediment toward their re-establishing the aristocracy that the American Revolution itself had overthrown and replaced by this peoples republic. And, the big chance for the aristocracy to restore its position via an imperial President, and so to extend their empire beyond our shores, came almost two hundred years later.
Americas Post WW II Counter-Revolution
In order to understand why President Richard Nixon was able in 1974 to obtain the support of both of the then-solidly Democratic two houses of Congress to pass into law the unConstitutional Fast-Track-initiating Trade Act of 1974, notwithstanding the then-ongoing investigations by Democrats regarding Nixons Watergate scandal, one must go back actually to the first meeting of the extremely secretive elite fascistic international Bilderberg group, in1954. Here from wikileaks is a 1955 status report from Bilderbergs, on their early-stage results; and the man who wrote that report and hypocritically praised in it the quintessence of democratic life was actually a former Nazi, Prince Bernhard, who went all the way to his grave in 2004 as a champion of global rule by the American and European aristocracies. (The group was subsequently expanded by Bilderbergers David Rockefeller and the Polish nobleman Zbigniew Brzezinski to include Japan in their Trilateral Commission.) Within just three years, the 1957 membershipof the Bilderberg organization became far more American, far less European, but David Rockefeller and his Wall Street friend George W. Ball were two of the leading Bilderberg members from the very start.
The Bilderberg group turned away from the former Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelts international goal for the post-WW II world (conceived in conjunction with Rexford Guy Tugwell, FDRs chief policy-advisor), which international goal, building upon an already-existing grassroots movement, and entirely alien to the artificial concept of top-down aristocratic global control that the Bilderbergs promote, had been instead the gradual natural evolution, bottom-up, toward a democratic world government: a global confederation of free and independent states, not corporate at all but instead a United States of the World, in which the types of imperial international aggressions that the fascist powers had perpetrated and which had produced WW II would be outright banned, and this aggression-ban would be backed up by an international military force which would have the participation of each one of the worlds states. In other words: FDRs co-conception, and his enduring goal, was of a democratic federal world government, not of a fascist or any other dictatorial and non-federal world government. It envisioned an international democracy, consisting of the worlds nations as its federal units, even if some of those nations might still be dictatorships, in which case the democracy at the federal level (and the pressure from the democratic nations of the world) would then encourage any dictatorial nations to change or evolve in the direction of democracy. This was Franklin Delano Roosevelts hope. It was a reasonable one. And it was rooted not only in an existing grassroots American movement but in a conception of how future history could evolve toward peace as naturally as possible, and with a minimum of command-and-control from the top no aristocracy in control. This was a vision that was fully in keeping with the goals of Americas Founders. But it sought to extend that vision to the international sphere, in the modern age. The concept of a United States of the World was based on that. And the U.N. was to be the first step towards it.
Rex Tugwell was very active while teaching at the University of Chicago right after WW II, promoting democratic world government as being key to the establishment of peace on a more secure institutional basis. Thus, in 1946, Albert Einstein wrote an essay, Toward a World Government, which was published in his Out of My Later Years, (pp. 131-33), and it opened: A conversation I had with three students of the University of Chicago has made a strong impression on me. He then expressed his conviction that A person or a nation can be considered peace loving only if it is ready to cede its military force to the international authorities and to renounce every attempt or even the means, of achieving its interests abroad by the use of force. Einstein was specific: This [world] government must be based on a clearcut constitution which is approved by the governments and the nations and which gives it the sole disposition of offensive weapons. In other words: it must represent ultimately the people who elect the leaders of the various nations of the world, not international corporations, which answer instead to the families that hold the controlling blocks of stock in them. Einstein was anti-fascist, never pro-fascist. He was 100% in the FDR mold. He was 100% a democrat, small-d. Thats what this statement of his reflected; and as he understood, there must ultimately be both a global democracy, and also a global monopoly by that democracy on the control of all nuclear weapons. Otherwise, there will emerge a global dictatorship, and perhaps a nuclear war, which would destroy all civilization. He understood.
This immediate post-WW-II vision of an ultimate world government in the FDR democratic mold lasted unchallenged until Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower (who chose Nixon as Vice President) came into office in 1953, and (now that FDR and his power-heir Truman were gone) Americas large international corporations, and their tax-exempt foundations including think-tanks, started pressing for a world government in the Bilderberg mold, one that would be comprised instead mainly of international corporations which would help shape and would become subject to the same rules and laws and regulations in each and every democratic country that is, in each and every non-communist country. International corporations during the Cold War championed the goal of a bi-polar, capitalist-versus-communist, world, in which the international corporations would, themselves, ultimately become the world government on our side (the free worlds side), dictating not only international environmental rules, and international product-safety rules, and international labor-rules, and international rules on banking and finance, but also international rules on immigration and on the rights of refugees.
But, then, the Soviet Union and its communism ended, and yet the fascist Bilderberg groups thrust for globalized international-corporate control continued on, even after the Cold Wars end, as also did what became their military extension, NATO the international corporations’ global enforcement-arm. NATO continued on, even after the Soviet Unions Warsaw Pact disappeared in 1991. NATO became, then, instead of an anti-communist alliance, an anti-Russian alliance, an alliance to conquer Russia. The imperial focus continued; but it had underlain the ideological gloss even during the early Cold War years. The 1955 summary by Prince Bernhard of the 1954 Bilderberg meeting mentioned that Article 2 of the 1949 founding document of NATO, the Atlantic Treaty, had been discussed there. That portion of NATOs treaty said: The Parties will … seek to eliminate conflict in their international economic policies and will encourage economic collaboration between any or all of them. This was an early harbinger of the aristocracys thrust for what finally became U.S. policy, the Trade Act of 1974 and its results in such international treaties as NAFTA and, now, as Obama hopes, his TPP, TTIP, and TISA, treaties. Bernhards summary also devoted an entire section to European Unity, including passages such as:
A European speaker expressed concern about the need to achieve a common currency, and indicated that in his view this necessarily implied the creation of a central political authority. A participant, speaking as a German industrialist, said that, having fought for integration before, German industry was still determined to pursue the same purpose, but he expressed considerable doubt as to the functional approach to integration by moving from one economic sector to another. In his view, the common problems of differences in labour standards and currencies and the various elements entering into the common market must be brought nearer to parity as a condition of further progress.
A major thrust of the early Bilderberg meetings was to establish uniform economic, environmental, and labor, regulations, and a common currency, throughout Europe: this goal of transferring to an ultimate European Union a substantial portion of each Euronpean nations sovereignty, started being realized in the 1957 Treaty of Rome, but some features of the Bilderberg plan were enacted only much later, such as the common currency, the euro, which began in 1999.
Another section of the 1955 Bilderberg summary was titled Economic Problems, and it opened: A United States rapporteur, defining convertibility as a state of affairs in which there is a minimum of restriction on international trade, believed that a good deal of progress had been made in that direction since the war. … The increase in trade and prosperity both in Europe and the United States, however, was due in no small part to the steps which had been taken to reduce restrictions on trade. So: both the U.S. aristocracy, and the various European aristocracies, aimed to transfer at least some of their individual nations sovereignty to supra-national treaties; but there was no discussion of how this was to be achieved whether via democratic processes, or by dictatorial ones, or some mixture of the two.
Among the leading members of the Bilderberg group since its inception were David Rockefeller and George Ball. The latter was the first person on the Democratic side of American politics who championed as an ideal an anti-democratic, pro-aristocratic world government. Matt Stoller, on 20 February 2014, bannered, NAFTA Origins, Part Two: The Architects of Free Trade Really Did Want a World Government of Corporations, and he reported, from his study of theCongressional Record, that:
After the Kennedy round [international-trade talks] ended [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 he helped write the Trade Act of 1962, which set the stage for what eventually became the World Trade Organization.
But Balls idea behind getting rid of these barriers wasnt about free trade, it was about reorganizing the world so that corporations could manage resources for the benefit of mankind. It was a weird utopian vision that you can hear today in the current United States Trade Representative Michael Fromans speeches. …
In the opening statement [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 business decisions could be frustrated by a multiplicity of different restrictions by relatively small nation states that are based on parochial considerations, and lauds the multinational corporation as the most perfect structure devised for the benefit of mankind.
As for David Rockefeller, he wrote in the 1 February 1999 Newsweek an essay Looking for New Leadership, in which he stated (p. 41) the widely quoted (though the rest of the article is ignored): In recent years, there’s been a trend toward democracy and market economies. That has lessened the role of government, which is something business people tend to be in favor of. But the other side of the coin is that somebody has to take governments’ place, and business seems to me to be a logical entity to do it. (Of course, by business there, hes referring only to international corporations, but he doesnt say that; hes tactful enough not to make it explicit.) This has been his clearest statement endorsing the emergence of a future world government by international corporations, which will possess a sovereignty higher than that of any national government, which he says that he endorses because a lessening of the role of democratic government is something business people tend to be in favor of. (Of course, those business people are only the hundred or so who actually control the major international corporations; theyre not mom-and-pop-type business people; but hes tactful enough not to make that explicit, either. The whole endeavor is a con.)
This was the basis upon which Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority was actually accepted by congressional Democrats in 1974. George Ball was the key person, but he was chosen for this role because he could be paraded as being a Democrat, so that support for the position would be bi-partisan, not merely Republican. (Similarly, the Wall Street Democrat Bill Clinton in 1999 derailed and subverted FDRs Glass-Steagall and other financial regulations.)
After the end of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, NATO became the military arm of a hoped-for future no-longer bipolar world instead a monolithically uni-polar global empire, which set out to conquer the former communist nations (first by corrupting their transitions into capitalism, but then increasingly by military means including NATO itself.) The ideological gloss was now gone, but the purpose of global domination by the international aristocracy didnt go away. NATO became, far more clearly, simply the military arm of the global aristocracy, whose brain is located in Washington as to politics, and in Wall Street as to finance. Americas aristocracy would thus rule Europes and Japans. The great investigative historian F. William Engdahl recently presented a superb summary of how In the early 1990s, Dick Cheneys company, Halliburton, had surveyed the offshore oil potentials of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and the entire Caspian Sea Basin.
They estimated the region to be another Saudi Arabia worth several trillion dollars on todays market. The US and UK were determined to keep that oil bonanza from Russian control by all means. The first target of Washington was to stage a coup in Azerbaijan against elected president Abulfaz Elchibey to install a President more friendly to a US-controlled BakuTbilisiCeyhan (BTC) oil pipeline. And that was all part of this operation: Not long after the CIA and Saudi Intelligence-financed Mujahideen had devastated Afghanistan at the end of the 1980s, forcing the exit of the Soviet Army in 1989, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself some months later, the CIA began to look at possible places in the collapsing Soviet Union where their trained Afghan Arabs [headed by Osama bin Laden] could be redeployed to further destabilize Russian influence over the post-Soviet Eurasian space. In other words: after the Cold War against communism had already ended by the collapse of the communist economies, the Bilderbergers and their agents continued the war as being merely a war of conquest and exploitation of the formerly communist nations and especially of resource-rich Russia an anti-Russia war that has recently been intensified by Democratic President Barack Obama.
The U.S. aristocracy, and, to a lesser extent, the European and Japanese aristocracies, within the Trilateral Commission which had been set up by the Bilderbergers (especially under Bilderberger David Rockefeller), all continue their international-corporate aim for unitary corporate global power, and for the crushing of democracy within all of the member-nations. President Obamas proposed international treaties, the TPP, TTIP, and TISA, would replace national democratic laws and regulations regarding the environment, consumer protection, workers rights, and investor protection, by means of international-corporate control of those regulations, via panels of three arbitrators, all of whom will be selected by or otherwise beholden to the international corporations that are being regulated; and, if any nation then tries to legislate stronger laws to protect the public than those panels approve under the given treaty, that nation will be fined by any corporation whose rights, under these treaties (TPP, TTIP, and TISA), have been ruled by those panels to have been infringed by that violating nation. The basic idea is that the rights of the owners of the controlling blocks of stock in the international corporations take precedence over the rights of any mere nation, or of the public in any nation that participates in these vast American-dominated trade deals. (The underlying ideology behind this is discussed in my 2015 book, Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics.)
This new system, called Investor State Dispute Resolution, or ISDS, is only just starting to be employed and applied, from NAFTA and the few other such international agreements that are already in force. The following is from a Congressional Research Service report (which is generally heavily biased in favor of ISDS), in which is described one of the biggest cases yet that has been resolved by such panels:
A tribunals inability to change the laws or regulations of the United States directly does not mean that arbitration awards cannot be substantial. For example, in Occidental Petroleum Corp. v. Ecuador, the tribunal ordered Ecuador to pay Occidental $1,769,625,000over 1 billion dollarsin damages.63 The tribunal rendered that award, which is one of the largest awards in favor of a claimant under ISDS arbitration, after finding that Ecuador violated an investment agreement by expropriating Occidentals property in response to Occidental transferring some of its economic interests under an oil production contract in contravention of Ecuador law.64 Therefore, although a tribunal lacks authority to alter a U.S. statute directly, some commentators believe that the possibility for such large monetary damages potentially could influence lawmakers and regulators when they consider proposed laws or regulations that may run afoul of IIA obligations.65
The arbitrators said that the Ecuadorean laws, and even the Ecuadorean Constitution, were irrelevant, because Ecuadors signing on to ISDS was their signing away Ecuadors sovereignty over these matters. Occidental sued and won against Ecuadors enforcing Ecuadors laws. Occidentals stockholders won; Ecuadors public lost. If this isnt a warning to all subsequent signators to a treaty that has ISDS in it, nothing is.
Another case pits the tobacco company Philip Morris against Uruguay. Philip Morris is saying that the percentage of warning labels that are required on cigarette packs in Uruguay goes beyond what is reasonable to protect people from the harmful effects of smoking. Perhaps Uruguay wont have the money to contest the allegation, and will thus be forced to eliminate the requirement and Uruguayans wont have the money to take care of the additional cancer and heart-attack cases.
This is what a fascist instead of a democratic world government is like. In the final years of Barack Obamas U.S. Presidency, its what he turns out to be pushing with more intensity than he has pushed anything before, even his Obamacare.
Andrew Gavin Marshall posted an article on 16 June 2011 which provided a remarkably well-documented history of the Bilderberg group and of their plan to supplant the rule by national democracies, and to replace it with an international government by the owners of the controlling blocks of stock in the worlds largest international corporations. He notes there that the large foundations and think tanks already represent the large international corporations, and that they operate as tax-exempt extensions of them. One person that he cites sums this up well:
Foundations like Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford have a corrosive influence on a democratic society; they represent relatively unregulated and unaccountable concentrations of power and wealth which buy talent, promote causes, and, in effect, establish an agenda of what merits societys attention. They serve as cooling-out agencies, delaying and preventing more radical, structural change. They help maintain an economic and political order, international in scope, which benefits the ruling-class interests of philanthropists and philanthropoids a system which… has worked against the interests of minorities, the working class, and Third World peoples.
Barack Obamas Role In This
As the great independent investigative journalist Wayne Madsen has reported, in depth, in his many articles, such as (and these are repostings of originals from Madsens subscription-only website) Obamas CIA Pedigree and “Details revealed about Obama’s former CIA employer and “The Story of Obama: All in The Company, and in his 2012 book The Manufacturing of a President: The CIA’s Insertion of Barack H. Obama, Jr. into the White House,Obamas parents and grandparents were in the pay alternately of the U.S.-aristocracy-controlled CIA and of the U.S.-aristocracy-controlled Ford Foundation; and the boss of Obamas mother at the Ford Foundation was none other than Peter Geithner, who was the father of Timothy Geithner, the Wall Street operative who ran the U.S. Treasury Department in Obamas first term and who bailed out the investors in the megabanks while he refused to bail out the uneducated and poor mortgagees they had suckered with excessive loans, and the pension funds and other outside investors in the fraudulent resulting AAA-rated Mortgage Backed Securities (MBSs, which the Federal Reserve is still buying up and transferring onto the backs of future U.S. taxpayers).
So, Obama was deep into service to Americas aristocracy, ever since he was in college; and his parents even raised him with money from the CIA and the Ford Foundation. Furthermore, Obamas first employment was with the CIA front firm, Business International Corporation, in 1983 and 1984, though he might have been recruited by the CIA even as early as around 1980. (Going back even farther than Madsen, some terrific independent investigators, such as Joseph Cannon and the libertarian Robert Wenzel, were already exploring Obamas CIA connections within mere months of his having won the U.S. Presidency in 2008. And, then, after Madsen, Andrew Krieg, in his 2013 blockbuster Presidential Puppetry, brought all of this together into a much broader, well documented, recent history of the U.S. as being an oligarchic instead of a democratic nation.)
So: Obama represents (not just in his policies, but even in his background) the U.S. aristocracy (or oligarchs), and he aspires to bring to ultimate fruition his predecessors dream, the dream of Bill Clinton, who did the largest previous Fast-Track-approved treaty, NAFTA, and, before him, of Richard Nixon, who created Fast Track (and before everything, there was the Bilderberg group): the goal of a fascist world government designed in Washington and signed by the aristocracies of the worlds countries that are subservient to the U.S. aristocracy trade agreements that are actually a signing-away of democratic national sovereignties to this U.S.-aristocracy-dominated global international-corporate sovereign, which is both the treaty and its implementation a world-government in the fascist style.
Other countries dont have the U.S. Constitutions two-thirds requirement to contend with; and, so, they dont necessarily need to rape their constitutions in order to achieve this fascist conquest of their nation. Only the U.S. does; and this is the reason why, even the five international treaties that were passed via Fast Track are called, in every country that signed them, treaty, except in the United States, where they are instead called (in accord with Fast Track) merely an international trade agreement.
On 20 April 2015, InfoWars headlined, “Is Jeb Bush Going to Bilderberg 2015? and reported that:
Infowars correctly predicted in 2007 that former Texas Gov. Rick Perry would run for president in 2012 after traveling to the Bilderberg conference in Istanbul, Turkey. Barack Obama also also reportedly visited the Bilderberg conference just prior to becoming the presidential frontrunner after he infamously disappeared to a secret location with Hillary Clinton in June 2008 in Northern Virginia, at precisely the same time and location the Bilderberg Group were convening in Chantilly, noted Infowars Paul Joseph Watson.
Basically, FDRs post-WW-II agenda was highjacked by the fascists against whom FDR had led this country in order to defeat them; and, now, our Presidential candidates are needing to obtain the fascists approvals in order for them to be able to receive the campaign-funding thats necessary in order to become a serious candidate.
Consequently, any Democrat who says, like the Democratic operative Michael Wessel did headlining in Politico on May 19th, “Ive Read Obamas Secret Trade Deal. Elizabeth Warren Is Right to Be Concerned, that, secretary [and shes not secretary, any more than she is First Lady] Clinton … should be commended … for raising a note of caution about Obamas proposed trade-deals (Wessel is implicitly recognizing there that she is trying to avoid having to say publicly that she supports Obamas trade deals, just like shelong had avoided saying publicly that she had supported her husbands), is merely sucking her up for a job in her campaign and/or in the White House (if she becomes President). Clinton is 100% sold already, to the highest bidders, just like every overtly Republican Presidential candidate is.
Trusting her word on what her policies would be if she were to win, would be ridiculous, because shes not nearly as skilled a liar as Obama and her husband were, and she has a much lengthier career in public life than either of them did, and that career amply displays both her incompetency and her cravenousness. As a servant of the people, shed be a bad joke, not even a skilled con-artist, such as her husband and Obama were and are.
And, the only people who support any one of the Republican candidates are the 0.01% of them who are aristocrats, and the 99.99% of them who are their aristocrats’ suckers. And the only people who support the obviously fake Democratic presidential candidates, the ones who havent already made clear to the public their intense opposition to the fake Democrat Obamas trade deals (since they have no such intense opposition to them) candidates such as Hillary Clinton are are the Democratic Partys mega-donor aristocrats, and their mass of suckers on the Democratic-Party side.
But thats the way you get the money to be a serious Presidential candidate in todays America.
In other words: the origin of the unConstitutional Fast Track is the war against the public that the aristocracy (both the Republican and the Democratic wings of it) has been waging, and increasingly winning, since 1953.
The Main U.S. Constitutional Issue
In June 1954, Morris D. Forkosch headlined in Chicago-Kent Law Review, Treaties and Executive Agreements, and summarized the status of this issue up into the start of the Eisenhower Administration. It was a different nation then. He noted:
“Suppose, however, that a treaty conflicts with a provision of the United States Constitution or contradicts the terms of a federal statute. Which, then, governs? In the first of these situations, the United States Supreme Court has indicated, albeit the language is obiter, that the treaty would be ineffective.29 (His footnote included: DeGeofroy v. Riggs, 133 U. S. 258 at 267, 10 S. Ct. 295, 33 L. Ed. 642 at 645 (1890), and Fort Leavenworth R. R. Co. v. Lowe, 114 U. S. 525 at 541, 5 S. Ct. 995, 29 L. Ed. 264 at 270 (1885).)
So: according to U.S. Supreme Court decisions up till at least 1954, any one of the five Fast-Tracked international trade agreements that has been passed since the Fast-Track law, the Trade Act of 1974, was passed, would have been blocked by the Supreme Court, were it not for the Trade Act of 1974 a mere law that, supposedly, has changed the Constitution without amending it, but that did this simply by asserting that when the Founders said treaty they werent referring to any and all forms of international agreement which they clearly were referring to, in their era. Obviously, the power to interpret the Constitution rests solely with the U.S. Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court is supposed to interpret the words that are in the Constitution as closely as possible to the way the Founders who wrote it intended those terms to be understood to mean. Thats just basic, to any constitutional democracy.
In February 2001, Michigan Law Review published John C. Yoos January 2000 article, Laws as Treaties: The Constitutionality of Congressional-Executive Agreements, in which Yoo, the lawyer who subsequently provided to George W. Bush the rationalization for Bushs authorization to use torture after 9/11, argued that the two-thirds Senate rule needs, for practical purposes, to be nullified for certain types of international agreements, including for the five that had already been Fast-Tracked. Rather than his dealing with the question of whether the Executive and the Legislative branches possess Constitutional authority to interpret the Constitution, he wrote there the argument that he would present to the Judicial branch, at the U.S. Supreme Court, if he were to be the attorney arguing there for the Constitutionality of Fast-Track. (Perhaps this paper was even one of the reasons why he was selected by Bush.) His entire argument was pragmatic as he saw it, such as, this: Today, however, the Senate has about fifty percent more members than the first House of Representatives envisioned by the Constitution, suggesting that the Senate no longer has the small numbers that the Framers believed necessary for successful diplomacy. This sort of thing constituted his argument for why treaties that dont concern national security and so fall under the Presidents Commander-in-Chief authority, shouldnt be considered to be treaties, but only Congressional-Executive Agreements.
However, even Yoo noted, at the time, that the most-prominent scholarly argument in favor of the Constitutionality of Fast-Track, Is NAFTA Constitutional? by Bruce Ackerman and David Golove, in the February 1995 Harvard Law Review, was a provocative and idiosyncratic theory of unwritten constitutional amendments, whereas Yoo didnt have the nerve to demean, but only to note, the article in that same publication by Laurence Tribe, which demolished the Ackerman-Golove article. In December 1998, Golove came forth in New York University Law Review, with a 152-page treatise, Against Free-Form Formalism, trying to overcome Tribes case. But, more recently, Michael Ramsey posted online his 13 August 2012 review of all of that, Laurence Tribe on Textualism (and Congressional-Executive Agreements), where he devotes most of his attention to the two original pro-and-con articles in the 1995 HLR, and says that Tribes case was far more persuasive than Ackerman-Goloves; and, then, he notes parenthetically near the end: (David Golove makes an attempt, in a reply article published at 73 N.Y.U. L.Rev. 1791 (1998), but I dont think he makes much headway against them [Tribes points]). Goloves 152-page treatise failed to impress anyone. Among the legal scholars, its pretty much a settled matter.
Thus: the current academic status of the issue is: The Supreme Court would have little choice but to overturn the Fast-Track provision of the Trade Act of 1974, if the matter were to be accepted by the Court for adjudication, unless the high Court were willing to be despised not only by the public but especially by legal scholars. If the Court were to decline to consider the case, then it would be accepting the authority of the Executive branch in conjunction with some members of the Legislative branch, to interpret the meaning of treaty in the U.S. Constitution and, in the entire history of the United States, the Supreme Court has never done that.
Well, in a sense, thats not entirely correct: the 2001 appeals-court case, Made in the USA Foundation v. U.S., was the only case to deal with this issue, and it concluded, citing as its chief authority a non-dispositive Supreme Court decision that was written by Justice William H. Rehnquist, in the 1979 case Goldwater v. Carter, which said that a certain action that President Jimmy Carter had done under both his treaty authority and his Commander-in-Chief authority could not be Constitutionally challenged by Senator Barry Goldwater.
But that Supreme Court decision, which was the supposed authority for this, concerned not international trade, but instead the Presidents authority as Commander-in-Chief, and so it wasnt even a trade case at all; it wasnt relevant, and thus really shouldnt have been cited, because it dealt with different Constitutional provisions regarding what does and what does not reside within the Presidents authority namely, as Commander-in-Chief, and as the negotiator on mutual-defense treaties. So, there wasnt even a question in this matter as to whether it concerned a treaty. On that shoddy basis, the appeals court said: “We nonetheless decline to reach the merits of this particular case, finding that with respect to international commercial agreements such as NAFTA, the