U.S. President Barack Obama’s capstone to
his Presidency, his proposed megalithic international ‘trade’ treaties,
are finally coming into their home-stretch, with the Pacific deal
finally being made public on Thursday November 5th.
The final Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) proposed treaty
would leave each signatory nation liable to be sued by any
international corporation that objects to any new regulation, or
increase in regulation, regarding climate change, otherwise known as
global warming. In no terminology is that phenomenon even so much as
just mentioned in the “Environment” chapter. Regarding labor issues, including slavery, the “Labour” chapter of the TPP contains merely platitudes. (Obama allowed Malaysia into the compact despite its notoriously poor record of non-enforcement of its ban on slavery, because he
wants the U.S. to control the Strait of Malacca in order to impede
China’s economic and military expansion; it’s part of Obama’s anti-China
policy. Almost everything that he does has different motives
than the ones his rhetoric claims.) Throughout, the treaty would place
international corporations in ever-increasing control over all
regulations regarding workers’ rights, the environment, product safety,
and consumer protection. But the environmental and labor sections are
particularly blatant insults to the public — a craven homage to the top
stockholders in international corporations. The world’s richest 80 people own the same amount of wealth as the world’s bottom 50%;
and Obama represents those and other super-rich and their friends and
servants in the lobbying and other associated industries. But he also
represents the even richer people who aren’t even on that list, such as King Salman of Saudi Arabia, the world’s richest person. It’s people such as that who will be the real beneficiaries of Obama’s ‘trade’ treaties. The public will be harmed, enormously, wherever these treaties become law.
The full meaning of the terms that are set forth in the TPP agreement won’t be publicly known for at least four years,
but the explicit terms that were made public on November 5th, and that
will be presented to the 12 participating nations for signing, are
entirely consistent with what had been expected on the basis of
wikileaks and other earlier published information.
The 12 participating nations are:
Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand,
Peru, Singapore, United States, and Vietnam. Three countries were
excluded by U.S. President Obama, because the U.S. doesn’t yet control
them and they are instead viewed as being not allied with the main axis
of U.S. international power: U.S., Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and
Israel. Those three outright-excluded countries are Russia, China, and
India. (India, of course, has hostile relations with Pakistan, which is
Sunni and therefore part of the Saudi-Qatar-Turkey portion of the U.S.
international core, basically the Sunni portion of the core. By
contrast, Russia and China have been determinedly independent of the
U.S., and are therefore treated by President Obama as being hostile
nations: he wants instead to isolate them, to choke off their access to
markets, as much as possible. This same motivation also factored largely
in his coup to take control of Ukraine, through which Russia’s gas passes on its way into the EU, the world’s largest gas-market.)
6 nations that Obama had invited into the
TPP were ultimately unwilling to accept Obama’s terms and so were
excluded when the final text was published: Colombia, Philippines,
Thailand, Taiwan, South Korea, and Indonesia.
The phrases “global warming” and “climate
change” don’t appear anywhere in the entire TPP document, nor does
“climate” nor “warming” — it’s an area that’s entirely left to
international corporations in each one of the separate participating
nations to assault as much as they wish in order to gain competitive
advantage against all of the other corporations that operate in the
given nation: i.e., something for each corporation to sacrifice in order
to be able to lower the given company’s costs. That raises its
profit-margin. This also means that if any international corporation
claims to be subjected in any participating nation, to global-warming
regulation or enforcement which poses a barrier or impediment to that
corporation’s profits, then that corporation may sue that given nation,
and fines might be assessed against that nation (i.e., against its
taxpayers) for such regulation or enforcement. National publics are no
longer sovereign.
The “Labour” chapter is a string of
platitudes, such as, “Article 19.7: Corporate Social Responsibility:
Each Party shall endeavor to encourage enterprises to voluntarily adopt
corporate social responsibility initiatives on labour issues that have
been endorsed or supported by that Party.”
President Obama’s Trade Representative, his longtime personal friend Michael Froman, organized
and largely wrote Obama’s proposed trade treaties: TPP for the Pacific,
and TTIP and TISA for the Atlantic. Froman told the AFL-CIO and U.S.
Senators that when countries such as Colombia systematically murder
labor-union organizers, it’s no violation of workers’ rights — nothing
that’s of any concern to the U.S. regarding this country’s international
trade policies or the enforcement of them. On 22 April 2015, Huffington
Post, one of the few U.S. news media to report honestly on these
treaties, bannered “AFL-CIO’s Trumka: USTR Told Us Murder Isn’t A Violation,” and
Michael McAuliff reported that, “Defenders of the White House push for
sweeping trade deals argue they include tough enforcement of labor
standards. But a top union leader scoffed at such claims Tuesday,
revealing that [Obama] administration officials have said privately that
they don’t consider even the killings of labor organizers to
be violations of those pacts.”
In other words: This is, and will be, the
low level of the playing-field that U.S. workers will be competing
against in TPP etc., just as it is already, in the far-smaller existing
NAFTA (which Hillary Clinton had helped to pass in Congress during the
early 1990s). (Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama, all
campaigned for the Presidency by attacking Republicans for pushing such
‘trade’ deals. Their actions when they gain power, contradict their
words. America and virtually the entire world has become rule of a suckered
public, by perhaps as many as a thousand psychopathic aristocrats who
own the international corporations and ‘news’ media, and who regularly
do business with each other though they wall themselves off from the
public. Typically, at their level, it makes no real difference which
country their passport is from.) “Trumka said that even after the Obama
administration crafted an agreement to tighten labor protections four
years ago, some 105 labor organizers have been killed, and more
than 1,300 have been threatened with death.” The Obama Administration is
ignoring the tightened regulations that it itself had managed to get
nominally implemented on paper. “Pressed for details about Trumka’s
assertion that murder doesn’t count as a violation of labor rules, Thea
Lee, the AFL-CIO deputy chief of staff, told HuffPost that USTR
officials said in at least two meetings where she was present that
killing and brutalizing organizers would not be considered interfering
with labor rights under the terms of the trade measures.” Furthermore:
“’We documented five or six murders of Guatemalan trade unionists that
the government had failed to effectively investigate or prosecute,’ Lee
said. ‘The USTR told us that the murders of trade unionists or violence
against trade unionists was not a violation of the labor chapter.’” That
U.S. Trade Representative, Michael Froman, is the same person Obama has
negotiating with foreign governments, and with international
corporations, both Obama’s TPP, and his TTIP & TISA.
The most important chapter in the TPP treaty is “Dispute Settlement,” which
sets forth the means by which corporations will sue countries for
alleged violations of their stockholders ‘rights’ to extract profits
from operations of those corporations in the signatory countries. The
underlying assuption here is that the rights of international
stockholders take precedence over the rights (even over the sovereignty rights) of the citizens of any participating country.
Instead of these suits being judged
according to any nation’s laws, they are allowed to be addressed only by
means of private arbitration “Panels.” The Dispute Settlement chapter
contains “Article 28.9: Composition of Panels.” Section #1 there is
simply: “The panel shall comprise three members.” Each of the two
Parties will appoint a member; one for the suing corporation, and the
other for the sued nation; and both of those members will then jointly
select a third member “from the roster established pursuant to Article
28.10.3”; and this third member will automatically “serve as chair.”
Article 28.10.3 says that anyone who possesses “expertise or experience
in law, international trade, other matters covered by this Agreement, or
the resolution of disputes arising under international trade
agreements” may be selected for the roster, so long as the individual
meets vague criteria such as that they “be independent of, and not be
affiliated with or take instructions from, any Party.” No penalty is
laid out for anyone on the roster who lies about any of that. Basically,
anyone may become a person on the roster, even non-lawyers may, and
even corrupt individuals may, especially because there are no penalties
for anyone on the roster, none at all is stated.
Then, “Article 28.19,” section 8: “If a
monetary assessment is to be paid to the complaining Party, then it
shall be paid in U.S. currency, or in an equivalent amount of the
currency of the responding Party or in another currency agreed to by the
disputing Parties.” There is no appeals-process. If a nation gets fined
and yet believes that something was wrong with the panel’s decision,
there is no recourse. No matter how much a particular decision might
happen to have been arrived at in contradiction of that nation’s laws
and courts and legal precedents, the panels’ decisions aren’t appealable
in any national legal system. Whatever precedents might become
established from these panels’ subsequent record of decisions will
constitute no part of any nation’s legal system, but instead create an
entirely new forming body of case-law in an evolving international
government which consists of international corporations and their
panelists, and of whatever other panelists are acceptable to those
corporate panelists. Voters have no representation, they’re merely sued.
Stockholders have representation, they do the suing, of the various
nations’ taxpayers, for ‘violating’ the ‘rights’ of stockholders.
The roster of authorized panelists
available to be chosen by any corporation’s panelists in conjunction
with by any nation’s panelists, is customarily
composed of individuals who move back and forth between government and
private-sector roles, through a “revolving door,” so that on both ends
of that, the ultimate control is with the owners of the controlling
blocs of stock in various international corporations. This is
the newly evolving world government. It will not block any nation from
legislating protections of workers, or of consumers, or of the
environment; it will simply hold a power to extract from any
participating nation’s taxpayers fines for ‘violating’ the ‘rights’ of
stockholders in international corporations. Citizens will increasingly
be held under the axe, and the top stockholders in international
corporations will be holding it. This isn’t the type of world government
that was anticipated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, the
founders of the U.N., and by the other early (pre-1954) proponents of
world government. But, since 1954, the plans for this anti-democratic
form of emerging world government were laid; and, now, those plans are
the ones that are being placed into effect.
Thus, on 26 October 2015, the United
Nations Independent Expert on the Promotion of a Democratic and
Equitable International Order, the international legal expert Alfred de
Zayas, headlined, “UN expert calls for abolition of Investor-State dispute settlement arbitrations.” That’s
the system, otherwise called “ISDS,” which already exists in a few much
smaller international-trade treaties, and which is now being introduced
on the largest scale ever in TPP and in Obama’s other proposed
treaties. The U.N. press release, calling for its “abolition” or
explicit outlawing, said:
“In his fourth report to the UN
General Assembly, Mr. de Zayas focuses on the adverse human rights
impacts of free trade and investment agreements and calls for the
abolition of Investor-State dispute settlement mechanism (ISDS) that
accompanies most of these agreements.
“Over the past twenty-five years
bilateral international treaties and free trade agreements with
investor-state-dispute-settlement have adversely impacted the
international order and undermined fundamental principles of the UN,
State sovereignty, democracy and the rule of law. It prompts moral
vertigo in the unbiased observer,” he noted.
“Far from contributing to human rights
and development, ISDS has compromised the State’s regulatory functions
and resulted in growing inequality among States and within them,” the
expert stated.”
Earlier, on 5 May 2015, I headlined, “UN
Lawyer Calls TTP & TTIP ‘a dystopian future in which corporations
and not democratically elected governments call the shots’.” I close now by repeating the opening of that report:
The Obama-proposed international-trade deals, if passed into law, will lead to “a dystopian future in which corporations and not democratically elected governments call the shots,” says Alfred De Zayas, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Promotion of a Democratic and Equitable International Order.
These two mammoth trade-pacts, one
(TTIP) for Atlantic nations, and the other (TTP) for Pacific nations
excluding China (since Obama is against China), would transfer
regulations of corporations to corporations themselves, and away from
democratically elected governments. Regulation of working conditions and
of the environment, as well as of product-safety including toxic foods
and poisonous air and other consumer issues, would be placed into the
hands of panels whose members will be appointed by large international
corporations. Their decisions will remove the power of democratically
elected governments to control these things. “Red tape” that’s imposed
by elected national governments would be eliminated — replaced by the
international mega-corporate version.
De Zayas was quoted in Britain’s Guardian on May 4th as saying also that, “The bottom line is that these agreements must be revised, modified or terminated,”
because they would vastly harm publics everywhere, even though they
would enormously benefit the top executives of corporations by giving
them control as a sort of corporate-imposed world government, answerable
to the people who control those corporations.
—————
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
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