http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-06-15/two-contending-visions-world-government
Submitted by Eric Zuesse, 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’s 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 world’s 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 don’t stand even a chance of passage.
I previously wrote about why it’s 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. Constitution’s 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 doesn’t 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%). Obama’s
‘trade’ deals don’t 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. Constitution’s Treaty Clause, and of the successful
modern movement, during the Twentieth Century, for its legislative
overthrow, something (the legislated overthrow of a provision that’s 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 Constitution’s 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 Senate’s 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
that’s Constitutional. (We’ll show: t’s not.)
AMERICA’S 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) that’s 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.
America’s 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 Clause’s
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 couldn’t get two-thirds of the U.S. Senate to
support it. (That’s tough, but a treaty is far more difficult than any
other law is to cancel; so, passing it is passing a law that’s virtually
permanent and virtually impossible to modify.) And their wisdom is why
our constitution remains the world’s 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 require—competent 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 can’t
change history.
Furthermore, George Washington’s 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.” Jefferson’s 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 to become laws. Though this thinking
was pervasive amongst the creators of America’s democracy (or people’s
republic), America’s aristocracy subsequently targeted this dilution of
the President’s treaty-making power as being an impediment toward their
re-establishing the aristocracy that the American Revolution itself had
overthrown and replaced by this people’s 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.
AMERICA’S 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 Nixon’s
Watergate scandal, one must go back actually to the first meeting of the extremely secretive elite fascistic international Bilderberg group, in 1954. 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 membership
of 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 Roosevelt’s international goal for the post-WW
II world (conceived in conjunction with Rexford Guy Tugwell, FDR’s 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 world’s
states. In other words: FDR’s 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 world’s 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 Roosevelt’s 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 America’s 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”. That’s 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)
America’s 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 world’s’ 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 group’s thrust for globalized international-corporate
control continued on, even after the Cold War’s end, as also did what
became their military extension, NATO — the international corporations'
global enforcement-arm. NATO continued on, even after the Soviet Union’s
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 NATO’s 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 aristocracy’s 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. Bernhard’s 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 nation’s
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 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 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, he’s referring only to
international corporations, but he doesn’t say that; he’s 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;
they’re not mom-and-pop-type “business people”; but he’s 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 FDR’s
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 didn’t 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. America’s aristocracy would thus rule
Europe’s and Japan’s. The great investigative historian F. William
Engdahl recently presented a superb summary
of how “In the early 1990s, Dick Cheney’s 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 today’s 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 Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan (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 1980’s, 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 Obama’s 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 tribunal’s 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 $1,769,625,000—over 1
billion dollars—in 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 Occidental’s 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 Ecuador’s signing on
to ISDS was their signing away Ecuador’s sovereignty over these matters.
Occidental sued and won against Ecuador’s enforcing Ecuador’s laws.
Occidental’s stockholders won; Ecuador’s public lost. If this isn’t 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 won’t have
the money to contest the allegation, and will thus be forced to
eliminate the requirement — and Uruguayans won’t 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 Obama’s U.S. Presidency, it’s 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 world’s 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 society’s 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 OBAMA’S 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 Madsen’s subscription-only website) “Obama’s 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, Obama’s
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 Obama’s 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
Obama’s 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 America’s aristocracy, ever
since he was in college; and his parents even raised him with money from
the CIA and the Ford Foundation. Furthermore, Obama’s 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 Obama’s 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 world’s 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 don’t have the U.S. Constitution’s two-thirds
requirement to contend with; and, so, they don’t 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, FDR’s 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
that’s 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, "I’ve Read Obama’s Secret Trade Deal. Elizabeth Warren Is Right to Be Concerned,” that,
“secretary [and she’s not ‘secretary,’ any more than she is ‘First
Lady’] Clinton … should be commended … for raising a note of caution”
about Obama’s proposed trade-deals (Wessel is implicitly recognizing
there that she is trying to avoid having to say publicly that she
supports Obama’s ‘trade’ deals, just like she long had avoided saying publicly that she had supported her husband’s), 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 she’s 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,’ she’d 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
haven’t already made clear to the public their intense opposition to the
fake ‘Democrat’ Obama’s ‘trade’ deals (since they have no such intense
opposition to them) — candidates such as Hillary Clinton are — are the
Democratic Party’s mega-donor aristocrats, and their mass of suckers on
the Democratic-Party side.
But that’s the way you get the money to be ‘a serious Presidential candidate’ in today’s 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 weren’t 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.
That’s just basic, to any constitutional democracy.
In February 2001, Michigan Law Review published John C. Yoo’s 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 Bush’s 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 don’t concern national security and so fall under the
President’s Commander-in-Chief authority, shouldn’t 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 didn’t 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 Tribe’s 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 Tribe’s case was far more persuasive than
Ackerman-Golove’s; 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 don’t think he makes much headway
against them [Tribe’s ‘points’]).” Golove’s 152-page treatise failed to
impress anyone. Among the legal scholars, it’s 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, that’s 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 President’s
authority as Commander-in-Chief, and so it wasn’t even a “trade” case at
all; it wasn’t relevant, and thus really shouldn’t have been cited,
because it dealt with different Constitutional provisions regarding what
does and what does not reside within the President’s authority —
namely, as Commander-in-Chief, and as the negotiator on mutual-defense
treaties. So, there wasn’t 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 question of just what constitutes a 'treaty'
requiring Senate ratification presents a nonjusticiable political
question.” It said this even despite denying that the meaning of the
Constitutional term “treaty” should be determined by the Executive and
the Legislative branches, instead of by the Judicial branch:
It is true that the Supreme Court has rejected arguments
of nonjusticiability with respect to other ambiguous
constitutional provisions. In Munoz-Flores, the Court was confronted
with the question of whether a criminal statute requiring courts to
impose a monetary "special assessment" on persons convicted of federal
misdemeanors was a "bill for raising revenue" according to the
Origination Clause of the Constitution, Art. I, § 7, cl. 1, in spite of
the lack of guidance on exactly what types of legislation amount to
bills "for raising revenue." The Court, in electing to decide the issue
on the merits, rejected the contention that in the absence of
clear guidance in the text of the Constitution, such a determination
should be considered a political question.
To be sure, the courts must develop standards for making [such] determinations,
but the Government suggests no reason that developing such standards
will be more difficult in this context than in any other. Surely a
judicial system capable of determining when punishment is "cruel and
unusual," when bail is "[e]xcessive," when searches are "unreasonable,"
and when congressional action is "necessary and proper" for executing
an enumerated power, is capable of making the more prosaic judgments
demanded by adjudication of Origination Clause challenges.
So: even that appeals court was not saying that the Legislative and
Executive branches, working in concert, should determine what a
“treaty” is and what it isn’t, but instead that court reaffirmed the
exclusive authority of the Judicial branch to make such determinations.
It simply refused to exercise the authority. Its argument on this was:
We note that none of these cases [the cited ones on the Supreme Court’s determinations regarding the meanings of specific terms and phrases in the Constitution],
however, took place directly in the context of our nation's foreign
policy, and in none of them was the constitutional authority of the
President and Congress to manage our external political and economic
relations implicated. In addition to the Constitution's textual
commitment of such matters to the political branches, we believe, as
discussed further below, that in the area of foreign relations,
prudential considerations militate even more strongly in favor
of judicial noninterference.
So, why didn’t those jurists even make note of the fact that their chief citation, Goldwater v. Carter,
concerned military instead of economic matters, and not the meaning of
“treaty,” at all? Stupidity, or else some ulterior motive — because no
reason at all was cited by them.
Their decision closed by saying:
We note that no member of the Senate itself has asserted that
body's sole prerogative to ratify NAFTA (or, for that matter, other
international commercial agreements) by a two-thirds supermajority. In
light of the Senate's apparent acquiescence in the procedures used to
approve NAFTA, we believe this further counsels against judicial
intervention in the present case.
This assertion totally ignored that “the Senate’s apparent
acquiescence” had occurred, and been measured, only according to the
50%+1 Fast-Track standard, never according to the Constitution’s
two-thirds standard. According to the Constitution’s standard, which was
applied nowhere in the process along the road toward approval of any of
the five Fast-Tracked treaty-bills into law, the Senate never actually
‘acquiesced in’ any of them. This court was simply accepting the
Constitutional validity of that ‘acquiescence,’ so as to determine
whether or not it was Constitutionally valid. Circular reasoning —
prejudice.
However, in order to assist blockage of Fast Track for Obama’s
proposed ‘trade’ treaties, it would greatly help if one or more of the
very vocal opponents in the U.S. Senate, against Fast-Tracking
these treaties — Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Sherrod Brown, and
Harry Reid, for examples — would petition the Supreme Court to rule on
the Constitutionality of the provision in the Trade Act of 1974 that
introduced Fast Track, and thus on Fast Track’s abolition of the
Constitution’s two-thirds rule. Perhaps the case might become titled
something like, “Warren v. United States,” where “Warren” stands for
America’s public, and “United States” stands for America’s aristocracy.
* * *
THE BOTTOM LINE
What’s at stake here is nothing less than whether the
future of the United States, and perhaps even of the world, will be
democracy, or else fascism. That’s a lot.
Obama, in his trade-deals, aims to culminate the American
aristocracy’s victory. If he wins all his trade-deals, then the Obama
Library and the other Obama-operations will become enormous with the
billions pouring in, even as he’ll go down in history as perhaps the
worst President, probably (due to those trade-agreements) worse even
than George W. Bush, or Harding, or Buchanan, or Grant, and with a far
lengthier catastrophic result trailing after his Presidency, because
those trade-deals will be very long-term catastrophes, which might end
up destroying the hopes for democracy, not just internationally, but
also nationally here in the U.S. The approval and resulting largesse
from America’s aristocracy doesn’t come cheap, these days.
The American aristocracy has spent billions for these deals since
1953, and now they demand their trillions on that investment. Obama aims
to give them the orgasms of power and money that they’ve been investing
in, during many decades. This has been a lengthy rape, and they’ll be
very grateful to Obama if he delivers this climax of it, to them —
handing to them the world, as it were, on a golden platter, reeking from
corruption, which is the sweetest smell they know, and which is by far
the most profitable of all fragrances, in their nostrils, as they inhale
it deep, and receive from it, this jolt, of sheer joy.
Alfred de Zayas is the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on Promotion of a
Democratic and Equitable World Order, which is the U.N.’s official who
speaks for the global institution regarding current issues that are of
concern to the achievement of the U.N.’s founding objectives. A report
in Britain’s Guardian on 4 May 2015, titled “UN Calls for Suspension of TTIP Talks,”
quoted him as saying that the reason why the U.S.-EU negotiations must
be suspended is that, “We don’t want a dystopian future in which
corporations and not democratically elected governments call the shots.”
But the international aristocrats do want that. De Zayas, the
institutionalized spokesperson for the vision of FDR and of RGT, spoke
for the great progressive leaders who were committed to the defeat of
fascism. However, Obama, the Clintons, all Republicans, and most of the
leadership around the world, are now again within the fascist camp.
In the long view of history, this matter is, on the global
level, a continuation of WW II between democracy versus fascism; but, on
the purely American national level, it is a continuation of the
American Revolutionary War between democracy and aristocracy. Either
way, what had been thought to have been a decisive victory for
democracy has turned out to have been not so decisive after all; and the
aristocratic, fascistic, forces have regrouped, and, at least up till June 12th,
appeared to be heading for victory. But, this time, if they win, it
might be final, because it truly would be a global victory for the
aristocracy, and a global defeat for the public everywhere. This is what
de Zayas warned of as “a dystopian future in which corporations and not
democratically elected governments call the shots.”
This is a global war, which has been waged since at least
1954, and Obama is aiming to negotiate the surrender of FDR and the
Allies who had won WW II. But they’d be surrendering to him. One might
call it “WW II, round 2.” But it’s also “The American
Counter-Revolution.” By either name, it’s the same war, and the
earlier victories for democracy are on the line, to be determined now,
by our generation — or, perhaps, only by the aristocrats in our
generation (if those few people will be its winners). If they win it,
then what could a round 3, or an American counter-counter-revolution,
conceivably be like — or would it be simply inconceivable? Or, perhaps,
just inconceivably violent? “All the world’s a prison” might sound
peaceful for the aristocracy, who would be luxuriously outside those
prison-walls in their own gated compounds, and far from earshot of the
explosions within; but, for the global public, what would there be left
to lose in a global revolution? The aristocracy already own almost everything. (And here
is another way of looking at this.) That’s not enough for them, but
maybe it will finally become too much for everybody else. This type of
“global warming” could thus become a global conflagration, even before
the environmental one destroys everything.
This is not biblical-doomsday stuff, at all. In fact,
any doomsday that could actually come, wouldn’t be at all mythological.
Myths are designed to misinform people. Science is designed to inform
them. One won’t find out what the real threats are, by reading myths.
Myths are shaped by the aristocracy, to control the public. Myths helped
cause today’s problems; they’re no solution to the problems. They’re
part of the problems. Myths are propaganda. They do their jobs, for the
deceivers, who generate them.
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