Submitted by Eric Zeusse, author of
They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic
Records, 1910-2010
and of
Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and
Economics,
U.S. President Barack Obama has for years been negotiating
with European and Asian nations — 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’s
aristocracy) — three international ‘trade’ deals (TTP, TTIP, &
TISA), each one of which contains a section (called
ISDS) 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 ‘arbitrators’ deciding cases brought before this panel to hear
lawsuits by international corporations accusing a given signatory
nation of violating that corporation’s ‘rights’ by its trying to
legislate regulations that are prohibited under the ’trade’
agreement, such as by increasing the given nation’s 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’s energy that comes from renewable sources, or by
penalizing corporations for
hiring people to kill labor union
organizers — 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 ‘rights’ of
‘investors’ — but really of only the top stockholders in
international corporations — are placed higher than the rights of
any signatory nation.)
This provision, whose full name is “Investor State Dispute
Resolution” 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 ‘arbitrators’ 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 ‘donate’
and so to turn what would otherwise be PR expenses into corporate
tax-deductions. In other words: to be an ‘arbitrator’ on these
panels can produce an extremely lucrative career.
These are in no way democratic legal proceedings; they’re
the exact opposite, an international conquest of democracy, by
international corporations.This “ISDS” 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 ‘right’ to sue, essentially,
those taxpayers; and ISDS includes no countervailing ‘right’ to
those taxpayers, to sue those international corporations; it’s 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 ‘arbitrating’ panel, it is final, it cannot be
appealed. And no nation may present a challenge to the
constitutionality of the ‘arbitrators’ decision. These treaties, if
signed, will override the signatory nation’s constitution, on those
matters.
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’s round 2 of WW II.
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 “corporatism” or
“corporationism,” in which the state, or
the national government, serves its corporations (see page 426
there):
"The 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.
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.
Evidently the two phenomena—I will not say conditions—present 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. …
There is no doubt that, given the general crisis of capitalism,
corporative solutions can be applied anywhere."
After World War II, the ‘former’ Nazi, Prince Bernhard,
took up the fascist (lower-case f, indicating the ideology, instead
of Mussolini’s Fascist political party; Bernhard had belonged
instead to Hitler’s 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’s 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’s possessed by any merely national government. Just as
the anti-Russian, anti-Chinese, G-7 conference
ended on 8 June 2015, the Bilderberg conference
opened 15 miles away three days later (after a few days of vacation
in the Bavarian Alps), and Britain’s
Telegraph(as it does every year with extraordinary
boldness for the Western press) issued
the list of attendees, which included top
advisors to many heads-of-state, plus major investors in ‘defense’
stocks, plus top propagandists against Russia (such as Anne
Applebaum).
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’s ‘trade’ deals, be fined if a
three-person panel of servants (the ‘arbitrators’) to that perhaps
fewer than 100 people, rule to say that the given nation has
violated the ‘rights’ of those ‘investors,’ and assesses the ‘fine’
against those taxpayers.
The
first Bilderberg meeting was called
together by Bernhard in a
personal invitation which proposed that,
“I think that a 'partnership for growth' is a fine
idea. A good deal has been said but very little has
been done about trade policy, and this would be a good place
to start the partnership.” (Note the ‘Partnership’ in “Trans
Pacific Partnership,” and in “Transatlantic Trade & Investment
Partnership”; but TISA doesn’t use that term.)
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’t even mention any proposed framework, and virtually
everyone at that time was simply assuming that nobody in ’the West’
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’t what Bilderbergers actually had in mind,
however.
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 the
Congressional 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 Ball’s idea behind getting rid of these barriers wasn’t
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 Froman’s
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
Newsweekan 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.”
He meant there that international corporations should have
supreme sovereignty, above that of any nation. He always emphasized
what he proudly called
“internationalism.”To him, like to Ball,
governments — that is, national governments — 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 that any nation.
A two-minute video
succinctly states the case for UK citizens against ISDS
regarding Obama’s proposed TTIP or Transatlantic Trade &
Investment Partnership with Europe, but the case equally applies
for all citizens, regarding Obama’s TPP with Asia, and his
TISAwith all countries for “Services,”
including financial services and the ‘rights' that international
financial corporations such as banks have to transfer their
billionaires’ gambling (‘investment’) losses onto the taxpayers
(via megabank bailouts).
Obama’s ‘trade’ 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’t 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, “I happen to be a proponent
of single-payer universal healthcare coverage.”
He didn’t just lie: he’s now fighting to make socialization of
health insurance absolutely impossible in the United States. No
wonder why as President, Obama’s White House
argued to the Supreme Courtthat no state may
limit lying in political campaigns — that lying in politics is
Constitutionally protected ‘Free Speech.’ Obama sets the record for
phoniness.)
The world is already almost completely
fascistic.As I previously reported, it really, truly, is
the case that the
“World’s Richest 80 People Own Same Amount as
World’s Bottom 50%.” And, furthermore, the only rigorous
scientific study that has ever been done of the extent to which a
recognized ‘democratic’ 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’s policies.
A brief video accurately summarized
that study (by Gillens and Page) and
explained why its findings are that way.
This 6-minute video is a crash course on political reality. That
Gillens and Page study noted at the end, that,
"Our findings also point toward the need to learn more about
exactly which economic elites (the ‘merely affluent’? the top 1%?
the top 0.01%?) have how much impact upon public policy.”
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 ‘America’s economic recovery’ and
‘the end of the recession,’ etc., have gone only to the top 1%.
(The
‘news’ media try to say it’s not ‘really’
so, but the finding is based on the most solid of all
data, and that’s the most reliable way to calculate anything.)
Another study, which I did, also based on the best available data,
“The Top 1% of America’s Top 1%,”has shown that
the reason for the immense power that’s within the top 10% is the
soaring wealth-boost to
onlythe top 0.01%, the very top end of the top end.
Comparing the boost to incomes at America’s 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,
“the wealthiest of the billionaires are getting almost everything.”
And, this is the situation even before the Bilderberg plan is fully
in force. Obama’’s ‘trade’ deals wouldn’t just lock this in; they’d
vastly increase the power, and also the wealth, of the perhaps 100
or fewer people who control the largest international
corporations.
The fact that these ‘trade’ deals are being pushed right now,
means that the people who are in power have concluded that,
already,
‘the free world’ 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.
