The
Two Contending Visions Of World Government
Eric
Zuesse
16
June, 2015
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,
in1954. Here
from wikileaks is
a 1955 status report from Bilderbergs, on their early-stage results;
and the
man who
wrote that report and hypocritically praised in it “the
quintessence of democratic life” was actually a ‘former’ Nazi,
Prince Bernhard, who went all the way to his grave in 2004 as a
champion of global rule by the American and European aristocracies.
(The group was subsequently expanded by Bilderbergers David
Rockefeller and the Polish noblemanZbigniew
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 ademocratic
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 theCongressional
Record,
that:
After the Kennedy round [international-trade talks] ended [in 1967], liberal internationalists, including people like Chase CEO David Rockefeller and former Undersecretary of State George Ball, began pressing for reductions in non-tariff barriers, which they perceived as the next set of trade impediments to pull down. Ball was an architect of 1960s U.S. trade policy — he helped write the Trade Act of 1962, which set the stage for what eventually became the World Trade Organization.
But 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.”
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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