Posts that I especially recommend for yesterday and today: Wednesday, December 11, 2019

• NIST Publishes New FAQ on Its Refusal to Release Key Building 7 Data by Ted Walter from Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

• Trump-Pelosi Trade Maneuvers: USMCA, China Tariffs, & Brazil-Argentina Steel by Jack Rasmus from his weblog. (Note: You will need to know who AMLO is.)

• Human Rights from an Indigenous Perspective by Ollantay Itzamná from Internationalist 360°. 

• The true legacy of US central banker Paul Volcker (1927–2019) by Nick Beams from World Socialist Web Site.

• WADA Sporting Ban is Part of West’s New Cold War Against Russia. This post features an interview with 21st Century Wire's Patrick Henningsen via RT. 

• NATO Secretary General Targets ‘Rising China’: Why Cold War Newspeak Never Went Away by Cynthia Chung from Strategic Culture Foundation.

• The Art of Doublespeak: Bellingcat and Mind Control by Edward Curtin from his weblog. 

• Russiagate media smears against Corbyn brought to you by US and UK military-intelligence apparatus by Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal from The Grayzone.

• The Deep State by Alex Diaz from BSNews (Britain). (Note: More about smearing Corbin.)

• The Most Significant Afghanistan Papers Revelation Is How Difficult They Were To Make Public by Caitlin Johnstone from her weblog.

• How Many Types of “Good” Capitalism Are There? by Shawgi Tell from Dissident Voice. 

• A system that steals from our future by Ian Angus from Climate & Capitalism.

• The portent of runaway greenhouse warming by Andrew Glikson from Arctic News.

Articles recommended for Saturday, October 6, 2018

• Scientists Raise Alarm Over U.S. Bio-Weapon Programs by Bernhard from Moon of Alabama.

• Washington’s Quiet Proxy War Against Vietnam by Tony Cartalucci from New Eastern Outlook.

• New Silk Roads define brand China by Pepe Escobar from Asia Times.

• USMCA: New Economic Alliance Formed to Isolate China by Arkady Savitsky from Strategic Culture Foundation. 

• Julian Assange in Crisis for Fifth Unity4J Online Vigil; Consortium News to Broadcast it Live on Saturday from Consortium News.

Sleeping Monster: The Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA) and Its Expansive Definition of “Services”

Click here to access article by Lambert Strether and posted on Naked Capitalism. 

This is the best article I could find about a report entitled "Foul Play" authored by Legal scholar Jane Kelsey from New Zealand who was apparently commissioned by the UNI Global Union to report on ongoing secret meetings held by transnational corporations to promote versions of TISA in any free trade agreement.  I am posting this because I think that all social justice advocates should be aware of the continuing attempts by transnational corporations to eliminate any governmental regulations that protect workers and might interfere with the profits of transnational corporations. 

I read only the initial Summary of the report and the Introduction. (You might want to see links to the various sections of the report here--you will need to scroll down.)

Corporate Sovereignty Used To Bully Ukraine, Colombia And Italy For Protecting Public Health And The Environment

Click here to access article by Glyn Moody from Techdirt. 

Corporate sovereignty provisions in investment treaties have become much better known than they were when Techdirt first wrote about them in 2012. Despite that growing awareness, and widespread outrage at the idea that corporations can request secret supra-national tribunals to make awards of hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars paid from public funds, companies continue to use the system to bully governments into changing their policies.

Frequently asked questions about the Investor-State Dispute Settlement

Click here to access article from ISDS Platform.

The Investor-State Dispute Settlement clause is included in all the new trade treaties. This website, in contrast to corporate media, explains how these neoliberal trade treaties actually give more rights to investors than to entire countries. Here is one question and revealing answer provided by the people at the ISDS Platform:

Why is ISDS so problematic?

In effect, ISDS creates a parallel business-friendly judicial system exclusively for transnational corporations. The power rests upon for-profit arbitrators who come from the corporate sector and face unverifiable conflicts of interest. They have no sovereign legitimacy and are not accountable to the public. The decisions they make can be inconsistent between one another and cannot be appealed. Plus, the arbitrators effectively serve as judge and party, because the same appointed arbitrators who plead the case for the parties make the decision. Imagine a football match where the referee plays for one of the teams! With ISDS, this becomes a possible scenario. So much for justice.

If you peruse other current articles on this website you will learn that most of the arbitration hearings are held in secret. It's obvious why corporate media refuses to cover these new trade treaties in any depth. Corporate media's function is to serve the interests of a tiny class of people known by various names: capitalists, investors, corporations, etc. Their mission is to serve their US-led Empire and to maintain your ignorance about the neoliberal trade treaties and all other matters that might impinge upon opportunities to enhance the wealth and power for this tiny class of people.

Protests in Mexico Push Country to Brink of Revolution and Nobody’s Talking About It

Click here to access article by Nick Bernabe from Anti-Media. 

To be more specific, US corporate media are not covering it honestly.

Much like the U.S., the Mexican government is susceptible to corporate influence. It just so happens that the most influential corporate entities in Mexico are drug cartels — and it’s hard for the government to reign in entities that fund and infiltrate it. Similar to the phenomenon of “regulatory capture,” the Mexican government is at least partially funded and co-opted by drug cartels. This festering problem is an underlying factor in the current civil unrest in Mexico.

When You Thought Trade Deals Could Not Get Any Worse -- Enter Wall Street.

Click here to access article by Paul Keenlyside from the Sierra Club.

Because only corporations, not governments, can launch ISDS [my link] cases, governments have no equivalent funding sources [compared to wealthy hedge funds which are backing corporate law suits against governments].

Multinationals launch 50 lawsuits worth $31b against Asian nations

Click here to access article by Thuy Ong from ABC News (Australia). 

A new report has found that corporations have launched 50 lawsuits, worth at least $US31 billion, using secret international arbitration tribunals against 11 countries in the Asian region.

Saving Face: America's TPP Disaster

Click here to access article by Joseph Thomas for New Eastern Outlook. 

The author poses some interesting thoughts as suggested in the headline about the significance of Trump's election/selection to be the CEO of US Empire, Inc. According to Thomas, while our masters may have given up the idea of TPP, they will continue with the other methods of containing China.

The 101 on how global trade treaties came to threaten the environment

Click here to access article by Jennifer Huizen from Mongabay.  (Note: I am very impressed with the people involved with this website. I will only be posting this first part of the series, so if you want to read the rest, you should continue to follow the website.)

It looks like this 4-part series offers everything you wanted to know about the neoliberal trade treaties and especially the subversive Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism which provides an end-run around national governments who attempt to protect their habitats.

A host of trade treaties are in negotiation around the globe, many of which, say critics, stand to enrich investors at the expense of the environment and ultimately, democracy, threatening the right of individual nations to pass and impose laws meant to protect their citizens and nature. In this four part series, Mongabay dives deep into the history of global trade to explain how we got to where we are today and what may lay ahead.

Part One is an origins story, beginning in a period of economic recovery and great hope after two World Wars and the Great Depression.

Abby Martin interviews Rafael Correa, President of Ecuador

from the Empire Files/TeleSur via YouTube.

In this interview you will learn what developing countries have to deal with from highly developed, powerful countries like the US, their corporations, and the international tribunals that they control.

Published on Jul 29, 2016
Abby Martin sits down with the President of Ecuador to talk about different issues impacting the country and region. One of the more important questions Abby has for the president is finding out how he feels about devastating damage that oil giant Chevron caused in the Amazon rainforest. The president also talks about how tax havens are affecting developing economies and, how giving me the environment legal rights is important.

 
You might also be interested in reading this article entitled "Ecuador Foreign Minister: $3B in Tax Havens Could Fund Earthquake Reconstruction" from TeleSur.

Who really won the legal battle between Philip Morris and Uruguay?

Click here to access article by Cecilia Olivet and Alberto Villareal from ISDS Platform.

The David-Goliath battle between Uruguay and Philip Morris is an iconic case because it so clearly illustrates the way corporations can use international investment treaties to attack regulations made in the public interest.

So does Big Tobacco’s defeat by Uruguay mean that the growing public opposition to these investment treaties is mistaken? The corporate arbitration lawyers that take up many of the cases – and their supportive political allies – are keen to say that it proves the system can work fairly.

The question however is for whom is the system working? In investment arbitration cases, states never win. States can never file lawsuits against investors, so the best-case scenario for them is if the tribunal dismisses the investor’s accusations.

Regulation of financial industry is history if Trade In Services Agreement passes

Click here to access article by Pete Dolack from Systemic Disorder.

Based on Wikileaks' revelations on TISA,  Dolack finds that this third plan, in addition to TPP and TTIP which apply to corporations with investments in commerce, will subordinate governments in most countries to the interests of financial corporations, the primary engines used by capitalists to exercise control over most economies. Thus TISA will further strengthen their domination over member countries.

What reads as bland bureaucratic text will be interpreted not in ordinary courts with at least some democratic checks, but by unaccountable and unappealable secret arbitration panels in which corporate lawyers alternate between representing multi-national corporations and sitting in judgment of corporate complaints against governments.

International investment law, development and sovereignty: no harm?

Click here to access article by Nicolás Marcelo Perrone from ISDS platform. 

This case involving Ecuador as reported by Perrone provides an excellent illustration of how this new stage of capitalism, called neoliberalism, actually functions to undermine the sovereignty of nations when they interfere with the transnational capitalist class's right to pursue profitable opportunities. In recent decades this transnational class has evolved under the hegemony of the US Empire and come from nations who have a modicum of "democratic" institutions. As ruling classes of the latter they intentionally designed these institutions to serve as a facade behind which they could exercise rule that would support their pursuit of profits and power. (For an excellent description of this in the US, read a section of a post by Stephan Gowans: scroll down to the subtitle to "Who Rules America", read from there to the subtitle "US Foreign Policy Goals in Syria".)

Having subdued and subverted any significant challenges to their power from workers within their nations, these transnational capitalists are now moving to eliminate national barriers that impede their quest for ever greater profits and power. Hence they are now constructing a new neoliberal regime (World Trade Organization, TPP, TPIP, etc) in an attempt to eliminate any interference in their pursuit of profits and power anywhere in the world.

However there are a few nations where regimes exist that espouse a very different view of development that is subordinate to other values. Perrone explains how a corporate case against Ecuador is an illustration of this. 

The international investment regime, which consists of more than 3,000 treaties for the protection of foreign investment, has been fundamental in promoting this development model and in supervising states that tried to defy its orthodoxy. ...an initial purpose of investment arbitration was to lock-in a foreign investment-led development project. International arbitrators were in charge of preventing governments from changing their minds, and disappointing foreign investor expectations. Most of the criticisms against the international investment regime, however, are not based on these grounds. The main argument sustains that some investment arbitrators have gone too far, limiting regulation to curb negative externalities and market abuses —involving, for instance, plain-tobacco packaging. The increasing discussion about the right to regulate, in this way, has eclipsed a more profound debate about the role of the international investment regime in limiting alternative forms of development and policy experimentation.

This short essay aims to illustrate this more general debate by looking at the awards in the case Occidental Petroleum (Oxy) II v Ecuador, where the tribunal imposed one of the highest awards against a host state.

Signing away sovereignty

Click here to access article by Cecilia Olivet, Jaybee Garganera, Farah Sevilla, and Joseph Purugganan from the Transnational Institute (TNI).

This article provides another illustration of corporations über alles.

The stark truth that communities across the Philippines who are facing pollution in their rivers and destruction of their lands have realised is that they are up against some of the most powerful transnational mining companies, and that an international trading system is stacked against them. This complex web of trade and investment agreements has created an architecture of impunity that has made it increasingly impossible to reject or even effectively regulate mining operations. 

TTIP leaks highlight the dangers of regulatory cooperation

Click here to access article from Corporate Europe Observatory.

On top of private parallel courts which would create an avenue for multinationals to receive vast amount of taxpayers’ money in 'compensation' for democratic decisions, TTIP poses another threat to public interest legislation: regulatory cooperation (or convergence, as often referred to in the USA). Regulatory cooperation aims to align standards across the Atlantic by changing law-making in the European Union and the United States of America.

Another goodbye to democracy if Transatlantic Partnership is passed

Click here to access article by Pete Dolack from Systemic Disorder.

I presume he means the anemic version of "democracy" that our masters permit us to exercise--like having to choose between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Corporate control on both sides of the Atlantic will be solidified should the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership be passed. Any doubt about that was removed when Greenpeace Netherlands released 13 chapters of the TTIP text, although the secrecy of the text and that only corporate representatives have regular access to negotiators had already made intentions clear.

 Health, safety, environmental and food laws will all be at risk....

Ecuador earthquake disaster relief undermined by multi-million dollar investment tribunal decision

Click here to access article by Cecilia Olivet (Transnational Institute) posted on Friends of the Earth. 

Today, the Ecuadorian government is required to pay $180 million to multinational oil corporation Occidental, the final payment of a total settlement of $980 million following the widely criticized decision of an Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) tribunal. Just two weeks after a major earthquake, this payment threatens to undermine Ecuador’s disaster relief efforts by financially limiting the government’s ability to rebuild severely damaged hospitals, homes and hundreds of schools.

Obama: ‘If we let Americans sue Saudis for 9/11, foreigners will begin suing US non-stop’

Click here to access article from RT. 

It seems that Obama's employers in the ruling class directorate have ordered their chief of US public relations to scurry over to Saudi Arabia and mollify the medieval princes who are worried about the disclosure of the censored 28 pages of the official 9/11 Commission report. The Saudi royalty are famous for sponsoring terrorists and beheading people. 

What is surprising to me is that our capitalist masters don't see any contradiction between their government's support of the major trade agreements (TPP and TTIP) which gives corporations the right to sue governments for loss of profits in private tribunals with Obama's latest argument that it is unthinkable for ordinary people to sue governments, and especially the US government, for major crimes.

The myth of ‘free trade’

Click here to access article by Stephen Millies from Workers World. 

I think that "free trade" can be better understood as a euphemism for unrestricted capitalist exploitation of man and nature. Millies describes some of the most outrageous crimes committed by capitalists whenever and wherever they could due to a lack of restrictions.