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Why Canada Needs To Stop Embracing Corporatocracy | Mark Taliano
Why Canada Needs To Stop Embracing Corporatocracy | Mark Taliano.
Why Canada Needs To Stop Embracing Corporatocracy
Canada is in denial of her true self. We have been co-opted by a globalized corporatocracy.
This chosen self-negation is exacting a heavy toll. We have arguably lost our democracy, and our much of our sovereignty, in addition to cultural pluralism, biodiversity, and economic self-determination.
The facilitator of this “corporate coup” is a toxic mental landscape.
Transnational corporations and their political lobbyists wilfully co-opt the language of human rights as a subterfuge for retrograde supranational agreements that deny democracy, as well as economic and cultural self-determination. We are daily bombarded with false terms such as “free trade” and “private sector” to the point where we internalize (subliminally?) incorrect meanings.
Ubiquitous “free trade” rhetoric infers freedom and prosperity even as it delivers the opposite. Protectionist agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) enable the outsourcing of labour to authoritarian regimes where human and labour rights are much lower. The movement of capital is protected and deregulated as jobs, public health, environmental, cultural, and human rights disappear.
Investor-state laws effectively subordinate a country’s economic and political self-determination when international and domestic laws or regulations are perceived to be an impediment to corporate profits. Unelected supranational arbitrators make decisions and the public is often left paying the bill. Stuart Trew, trade campaigner with Council Of Canadians, explains in John Bonnar’s article, “Toronto activists oppose Trans-Pacific Partnership and corporate globalization” : “Within all these trade deals there is an investor rights chapter that lets companies sue countries when they feel their profits have been harmed, … giving corporations more rights than anyone else in this country and any other country.” Trew cites Calgary’s Lone Pine Resource’s lawsuit against Canada as an example:
“(Lone Pine Resources) first disclosed last week that it intends to sue the Canadian government for at least $250-million under NAFTA’s Chapter 11, which allows investors from the U.S. and Mexico to take government policies or actions that hurt their interests before a panel of arbitrators, (Globe and Mail, Nov. 22, 2012.)
In its notice of intent, Lone Pine charges that the government’s move, ‘without a penny of compensation,’ violates NAFTA’s provision that companies facing expropriation should be reimbursed. Lone Pine also charges that Quebec’s move unfairly pre-empts the conclusion of the province’s ongoing study on the safety of fracking.
The Quebec government’s move to cancel a natural-gas exploration permit for deposits beneath the St. Lawrence River last year was “arbitrary, capricious and illegal,” according to the U.S. energy company challenging the move under the North American free-trade agreement.”
(Lone Pine Resources is incorporated in Delaware, U.S, a known tax haven, but has its headquarters in Calgary.)
The “private sector” rhetoric infers independence and freedom, yet it is highly socialized — the 2008/09 bailouts would be a case in point — by the public sector. Additionally, as public funds flow into the “private” sector, corporations return the favour by capturing legislatures and engineering self-serving laws and regulations — or the absence thereof — to entrench their monopolies and their anti-public behaviours. Bruce Livesy explains in “Tax Dodge: Gildan Activewear” how Canada’s Gildan corporation avoids paying taxes: “By moving its factories overseas, Gildan managed to cut its Canadian tax rate down to nothing in the past four years, despite earning profits of $95 million in 2009, $196 million in 2010, $224 million in 2011 and $144 million last year.”
Currently there is a host of anti-democratic corporate-power agreements being negotiated behind closed doors, including the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), the Foreign Investment Protection Agreement (FIPA) with China , the CETA, as well as agreements with India, Japan, Honduras, and South Korea. Each of these (largely secret) deals promises to enrich and empower foreign investors to the detriment of local economies and public spheres. Outcomes, such as those resulting from the 20 year old North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) will likely include and exacerbate some of NAFTA’s symptoms,
which are:
* increased inequality between rich and poor nations
* increased inequality within rich and poor nations
* an exodus of good-paying manufacturing jobs
* collapsing small farm incomes
Corporate globalization entrenches parasitical monopoly capitalism. In agriculture, for example, large agribusiness monopolies, often funded by international banking institutions, push out smallholders — thereby reducing economic diversity — so that they can grow monoculture cash crops for export. Consequently, people are displaced, and nation states lose their food sovereignty. Mexico now imports most of its food.
Globalized monopoly capitalism also reduces biodiversity. Ahmed Djoghlaf,
secretary-general of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, explains that if the continued accelerated trajectories towards biodiversity losses continue, we can expect “total disaster”, and the disaster includes the economic realm. Djoghlaf explains that “in immediate danger”, are the 300 million people who depend on forests for their livelihoods and the more than 1 billion who depend on sea fishing for their livelihoods.
Of equal importance is cultural diversity and the respect for international and national laws that enshrine rights of indigenous peoples throughout the world. Anthony James Hall, author of The American Empire And The Fourth World, argues that we need to recognize and affirm aboriginal and treaty rights throughout the world to build what George Manuel referred to as the Fourth World. Such a world would value unity in pluralism, and be a counterbalance to the totalitarianism of globalized neoliberal capitalism, sometimes referred to as the corporatocracy.
Hall poses the question, “Will we grapple with the substance of our inheritances from history or will we continue to retreat into the black hole of memory loss, the willed amnesia that facilitates the on-going neo-liberal revolution of the New World Order?”
Canada is currently grappling with this question as it continues to deny and negate aboriginal and treaty rights at home and abroad.
Activists of Fourth World pluralism from countries such as Honduras are pushing back, at great cost, against the international reach of Canada’s neo-liberal agenda that denies and negates aboriginal and treaty rights. In this video, Alfredo Lopez of the Honduran Garifuna Collective describes the shackles that we are imposing on his community.
The oppression of the Garifuna is an outward expression of Canada’s wilful amnesia that denies its own pluralism, and its unmitigated embrace of the monoculture of globalized neoliberal corporatism.
There are steps that can (and must) be taken to push back against these converging totalitarian trajectories. A paper entitled “Towards an Alternate Trade Mandate for the E.U — an invitation to participate” offers a comprehensive list of ideas.
All steps should be considered. Listed below are two of the most salient ones :
1) ensure a transition to a low-carbon economy
2) stop pushing for the deregulation of financial services and the privatisation and deregulation of public goods like water, health and education, but improve the quality of and access to these goods, for example, through partnerships among public authorities.
Activist Post: Master of the Universe – Trailer
Activist Post: Master of the Universe – Trailer.
This documentary features an elite German investment banker as he reveals the bankers’ plans to rule the world. Filmmaker says it’s a frightening megalomaniacal, quasi-religious parallel world.
See more about this film here.
Activist Post: The U.S. Voted Biggest Threat to World Peace, Right According to Plan
Activist Post: The U.S. Voted Biggest Threat to World Peace, Right According to Plan.
Eric Blair
Activist Post
The United States has just been voted the most significant threat to world peace according to a global survey conducted by Gallup and Worldwide Independent Network at the end of 2013.
Twenty-four percent of those polled in 60 nations said America was the greatest threat, dwarfing Pakistan who came in second with around 8%.
Is this a surprise to anyone given the aggressive action of the U.S. military? Some would say this “reaction” was predictable, or even a desired outcome.
The powers-that-be don’t have allegiances to nations, they just want control over them. If we understand the globalist agenda to centralize power, America must be destroyed as a super power and brought under the control of a larger governing body like NATO or the UN.
In order for that to occur, America must be viewed as the enemy of peace and human rights around the world. Mission accomplished, apparently. From this growing “reaction” we will see a “solution” presented shortly. In fact, global citizens may demand action against the U.S. if this continues.
Don’t believe me? It’s already happening from American citizens!
In July of last year, a human rights organization in America petitioned the United Nations in a “letter of allegation” to recognize that school closures in Chicago amount to human rights abuses. The group readily admits their intention is to have the U.N. influence U.S. policy.
“We believe that reaching out to the U.N. will draw international attention to this issue and hopefully encourage the United States government to take action,” said University of Chicago law professor Sital Kalantry who penned the letter on behalf of The Midwest Coalition for Human Rights.
We have already seen U.N. treaties that usurp sovereignty from the U.S. like the small arms banoverturning the Second Amendment, or the U.N. drug czar threatening America over marijuana legalization due to a drug war treaty, or the multitude of economic treaties that force choking regulations on small businesses.
Ultimately the examples provided above are small potatoes compared to a global call to oppose or even confront the U.S. military which is conceivably one of the “solutions” to imperial warmaking. Is it still a conspiracy theory to think U.N. Peacekeepers will engage the U.S.? It can never go that far, right?
Well, anti-America perception is only likely to grow larger and louder. Even anti-war blogs like this one contribute to it merely by publishing America’s crimes against humanity. In this way, the alternative media is being used by the agenda as an echo chamber for anti-American content. As honest, pro-peace and human rights media, we propagate this agenda whether we want to admit it or not.
Yet, we must remember that the American military has almost always been the tool of a larger power and certainly does not have the consent of the people. Recent polls showed the lowest support on record for any U.S. war in history for the Afghanistan war:
This was also evident when the U.S.’s aggressive posturing toward Syria was smacked down by a loud and angry population. Hopefully this showed the world where Americans really stand on these military excursions.
Unfortunately most people can’t separate U.S. military action from their perception of “America”. They’ve been conditioned to blame a collective for the actions done under a flag. The perception of America as a tyrannical state will likely increase (because that’s what it’s actually become) until the world demands, no begs, for some outside “authority” to intervene.
» New armored tank for town police sparks fear, war of words Alex Jones’ Infowars: There’s a war on for your mind!
Joe Saunders
bizpacreview.com
December 23, 2013
A war of words has broken out over police force in California getting a new armored vehicle built more for a state of war than patrolling in the Golden State.
The Salinas Police Department recently issued a news release proudly announcing the arrival of the armored truck built to survive minefield explosions, which it got compliments of federal taxpayers as part of a program to convert military equipment to law-enforcement use.
Critics took to the police department’s Facebook page to ask exactly why a city of 150,000 on the northern California coast really needs a vehicle designed for battlefield use. It’s more likely to be used against its own citizens, they said..
“That vehicle is made for war. Do not use my safety to justify that vehicle,” one wrote. “The Salinas Police Department is just a bunch of cowards that want to use that vehicle as intimidation and to terrorize the citizens of this city.”
‘To stop gang members?” another wrote. “Hmmm gang members don’t riot in mass numbers. It’s right in front of our faces and we don’t see it. Why would the ARMY!!! give something like that for FREE!!! Let’s think for once people.”
Police Chief Kelly McMillin said he doesn’t understand the problem.
“I knew this was going to come up,” he said in an interview with the Salinas Californian. “It’s the militarization-of-the-police issue. People are like, ‘Why do you need this?’”
He said it’s not what the department has, it’s what it does that’s the point.
“An allegation that we are militarizing has to be that we were patrolling the streets in platoons in greater numbers, that we were setting up checkpoints and searching people in and out of neighborhoods,” he told the interviewer.
The Salinas PD isn’t doing any of that, he said.
Maybe not. And maybe it never will under Kelly McMillin. But that’s not the point, and it’s hard to believe McMillin and the reporter from the Salinas Californian don’t know that.
This country only two months ago saw rangers for the National Park Service – National Park rangers, for God’s sake – turn into a bunch of storm troopers keeping World War II vets out of their own monument, and visitors from “recreating” at Yosemite.
And Chief McMillin doesn’t understand why citizens don’t trust the government with ever-greater weaponry in the hands of a “civilian” police force?
Just ask the commenters on the Salinas Californian article.
“It could be used to deliver a whole bunch of shut the hell up to the citizens of this fair town,” one wrote.
Another agreed.
“And Obama said we don’t need military weapons in hands of citizens”
Hardball US Geopolitics
America seeks unchallenged global dominance. No holds barred tactics pursue it. Rule of law principles don’t matter. Means justify ends. Might makes right.
Events are manipulated. Wars, economic disruption, financial terrorism, and other upheavals play out in real time. Grand schemes reflect them.
Ongoing Ukrainian protests didn’t erupt by chance. Washington’s dirty hands manipulated them. Obama officials want Kiev turning West, not East. They’ll stop at nothing to achieve it.
They want Russian influence weakened. They want Ukraine’s potential ruthlessly exploited. They want its people transformed into serfs. They want another NATO member they control.
They’re playing hardball against Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. They’re considering various options. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said:
“All policy options, including sanctions, are on the table, in our view, but obviously that still is being evaluated.” She didn’t say what kind Washington has in mind.
It imposes sanctions recklessly. It does so lawlessly. It does it ruthlessly. One day it’ll go too far. It’ll target one victimized country too many.
Most others won’t go along. They’ll maintain normalized relations. They should be doing it now. Washington rules don’t matter if no one obeys them. It’s high time that practice took hold.
America is a global bully. It’s all take and no give. US officials warned Yanukovych. Don’t target protesters forcefully, they said.
Doing so in America is common practice. So is lawlessly interfering in the internal affairs of other countries. State terrorism is official policy. War on humanity rages.
New World Order ruthlessness reflects it. McAlvany Intelligence Advisory calls it:
• “a supranational authority to regulate world commerce and industry;
• an international organization that would control the production and consumption of oil;
• an international currency that would replace the dollar (and other major currencies);
• – a world development fund that would make funds available to (all) nations alike; (and)
• an international police force to enforce the edicts of the New World Order.”
These policies reflect the Bilderberg Group’s grand design. It includes:
• universal rules it sets;
• centralized control of world populations;
• manipulating public sentiment to do so;
• controlling global wealth and power;
• eliminating middle class societies;
• replacing them with ruler-serf ones;
• preventing real democracy from emerging;
• crushing it when it does so;
• perpetuating crises and wars;
• expanding corporate controlled trade worldwide;
• making NATO a global military;
• imposing a universal legal system;
• abolishing human and civil rights; and
• placing monied interests above all others.
This type world isn’t fit to live in. Money power in private hands is tyrannical. It’s abhorrent. So is waging war on humanity ruthlessly.
Washington glorifies it in the name of peace. The business of America is war, grand theft, and unchallenged global dominance.
One nation after another is ravaged. They’re pillaged. Their sovereignty is destroyed. Washington rules replace it. Brute force harshness reflects it.
Smedley Butler (1881 – 1940) was a former Marine major general. It was the highest authorized rank at the time. He served on active duty for over 33 years.
He was cut out of a different mold. He transformed himself after years of service. He looked back with regret. He justifiably called war a “racket.”
He spent “most of (his) time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers.” He called himself “a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”
He “helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests. (He) helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in.”
He “helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street” and other corporate crooks.
“The record of racketeering is long,” he said. He “helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers.”
He “brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests. In China, (he) helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.”
“During those years, (he) had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket.”
“Looking back at it, (he felt he) could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate his racket in three districts.” Butler “operated on three continents.”
America’s global empire stretches everywhere. Super-weapons Butler couldn’t have imagined enforce it. Going public made him an American hero.
Who in today’s military can match him? Who in government? Who’d dare try? Who’d survive if they did? Who’d make a difference long enough to matter?
Obama and Vladimir Putin reflect opposing doctrines. Obama solely serves monied interests. He deplores popular ones.
He advocates conflicts and instability. He pursues global dominance. He does so ruthlessly.
Putin supports peace and stability. He champions nation-state sovereignty. He respects international laws and norms. He endorses multi-polar world priorities.
On Thursday,he delivered his state of the nation address. He did so before Russia’s Federal Assembly.
It consists of the lower house State Duma and upper house Federation Council. It’s the equivalent of a joint session of Congress.
Russia seeks to be a world leader, he said. It doesn’t seek super-power status. It doesn’t want to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries.
“We will aspire to be a leader by protecting international law and insisting upon respect for national sovereignty, independence and uniqueness of peoples,” he said.
“We have always been proud of our country, yet we do not aspire to super-power status, which is understood as a claim to global or regional hegemony.”
“We are not encroaching on anyone’s interests. We are not pushing our patronage on anyone, and we are not trying to lecture anyone on how one should live.”
He called Moscow’s policy on Syria “resolute, well-judged and reasonable.”
“Not a single time have we put either our own interests and security or global security in danger. In my opinion, this is the way a mature and responsible power should act.”
“(W)e and our partners managed to turn the situation there away from war and toward the development of a nationwide Syrian political process and the achievement of civil reconciliation.”
He wants 33 months of conflict resolved peacefully.
“In my opinion,” he added, “it is our shared success that the choice was made on the basis of the fundamental principles of international law, common sense and the logic of peace.”
“At least thus far we have managed to avoid foreign military intervention in Syrian affairs and the spread of the conflict beyond the region.”
Russia “made quite a significant contribution to this process,” he stressed.
“The Syrian precedent reaffirmed the UN’s central role in global politics.”
“As the situation around Syria and around Iran today has shown, any international problem can and should be resolved exclusively by peaceful means, without resorting to military actions, which have no prospects, but only serve to cause denunciation by the majority of countries in the world.”
Putin didn’t mention America directly by name. He commented on destabilizing conflicts it initiated. He warned against foreign powers seeking a military advantage over Russia.
He called attempts to destroy the current global strategic balance futile. He dismissed claims about Washington’s so-called missile shield being defensive.
He said it has strategically offensive potential. He was outspoken about Western nations attempting to undermine Moscow’s national defense strategy.
He’s mindful about fast-strike weapons platforms able to hit high priority targets worldwide.
“The increase by foreign countries of their strategic, high-precision non-nuclear systems potential and boosting missile defense possibilities could ruin earlier reached agreements on nuclear arms control and reduction, and lead to the disruption of the so-called strategic balance,” he said.
“No one should have illusions over a possibility of taking military advantage over Russia. We will never allow this.”
Moscow’s military capability is able to respond to all challenges effectively, he stressed.
Putin commented briefly on Ukraine. Earlier he said Russia’s “integration project (is) based on equal rights and real economic interests.”
On January 1, 2010, Moscow’s Customs Union with Belarus and Kazakhstan was established. Putin hopes other regional states will join.
“I’m sure achieving Eurasian integration will only increase interest from our neighbors, including our Ukrainian partners,” he said.
His Eurasian Union success depends in large measure on whether Ukraine opts in. Putin envisions a cooperative trading bloc extending from the Pacific to Western European borders.
Ukraine weight heavily in his plans. It’s future is up for grabs. Turning East, not West, offers Yanukovych the best chance for economic progress. Joining a troubled EU alliance assures harder than ever hard times.
The battle for Ukraine continues. Washington’s hardball tactics show no letup. It remains to be seen how things turn out. Kiev’s future hangs in the balance.
A Final Comment
On December 12, Yanukovych said he’ll remove officials responsible for drafting the Association and Free Trade Area Agreement with the European Union.
“Those who prepared the agreement will be relieved of their duties or sacked altogether,” he said.
According to Prime Minister Mykola Azarov, Ukraine will sign a trade agreement with Moscow. It removes all trade contradictions.
“A visit to Moscow is planned for (December 17) so that we can sign agreements eliminating the majority of contradictions in trade with the Russian federation at the presidential level,” Azarov said.
Customs, standardizations and other issues will be resolved. Restoring trade with Russia to its former level will help Ukraine avoid economic collapse, he added.
“I assure you that we will do everything we can to” restore normal Russian/Ukrainian trade relations, he stressed.
Expect Washington and rogue EU partners to go all out to disrupt them.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
His new book is titled “Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity.”
http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanII.html
Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
The Emerging New World Order – Part 2. The End of Sovereignty » Golem XIV – Thoughts
The Emerging New World Order – Part 2. The End of Sovereignty » Golem XIV – Thoughts.
The Emerging New World Order – Part 2. The End of Sovereignty
In part one I wrote, ” …in every country the people who run the State have largely decided they no longer wish to serve the people but prefer instead to serve the interests of a Global Over-Class”. I believe we are in the midst of an historical shift in the alignment of loyalty and political power, away from democracy. I want to make it clear I do not believe the new arrangement of political and economic power was the clear goal of some hidden cabal. I think each change had an ideological drive behind it but, to begin with at least, each change was largely opportunistic and piecemeal. These pieces have, however, added up. And as time has gone by and the different pieces have accumulated, I think some wealthy and powerful people as well as some who were ideologically driven, have seen the chance to make something they desired out of the pieces. I think those who never liked democracy-for-the-masses, but preferred something that was more like the Roman senate – a place for the sons and daughters of the already wealthy and powerful families to ensure they remained wealthy and powerful – I think those people have seen an historical chance to further their vision of the future they desire and, particularly in the last twenty or so years, have actively schemed and pushed for it. Some of them have lobbied for it from Wall Street and the City, others of the same elite have written laws for it when they were in Congress and Parliament. And always they have found affordable lackeys among our political class.
Of course no one is going to admit to this. No one wants it to be clear that this is what is happening. So what our leaders have needed for some time, is a way of serving their new masters, while claiming to be still serving us; a way of saying,”The best, if not the only, way for the State to help you, the nation/people, is for us to first help these other people.”
The Trickle Down ‘theory’ was an early attempt . But Trickle Down was always too clearly a political sound-bite rather than a grand theory. What was really needed was a new vision of what the ‘Greater Good’ should look like and a theory of how to get there. And critically it had to be something that, it could be claimed, Nations could not deliver. Not only not deliver but were actively standing in the way of. There had to be a shining future which the old order of Nation States was preventing us from reaching. And this idea has, I think, surfaced again and again in different guises, certainly since WW1, but more and more prominently in the last three decades. The idea that Nations and nationalism are standing in the way of the progress and prosperity that only a free and unfettered global market can offer, and that the State must remedy this, by limiting the power and sovereignty of their Nations is, I suggest, one of the most powerful ideas of our age and is now maturing into the ideology and politics the Global Over-class has been seeking.
A brief history of how the State sold out the Nation
In the aftermath of WW1 the League of Nations was created because, it was said, nations left to their own nationalistic devices could not keep the peace. The League’s stated goals were nearly all political and very little mention was made of finance or trade. Perhaps if the League had prospered it might have been adopted by the then rising power of global finance and history might have been very different. Instead the Great Depression happened and the power of global finance was set back. The regulations brought in to prevent another systemic Banking Crisis held back the unfettered growth of finance for two generations. Only finally undone at the end of the century.
After WW2, however, the idea of supra-national governance, and the inadaquacy of nationalistic governments, rose again this time with the creation of, among other things, the IMF, World Bank, and the United Nations. This time the agenda of the supra-national powers was much more focussed on finance and trade. As US Secretary of State from 1933-44, Cordel Hull put it,
[U]nhampered trade dovetailed with peace; high tariffs, trade barriers, and unfair economic competition, with war….
Trade barriers and ‘unfair economic competition’ were the creations of national governments, free trade was, therefore, the remedy and was to be championed by the supra-national, impartial IMF and World Bank. Of course in reality the IMF and WB were not impartial. Whatever their stated purpose, the IMF and WB were tools of one ideology only , the freemarket , and were the post-war means by which the powerful nations crow-barred open the economy of any poorer nation that fell into their grasp. The attack on sovereignty had begun.
But it was little noticed in the West. In part because people were too busy being comfortable and in part because the UN was the part of Bretton Woods we saw most of in the West. The UN didn’t have an ideology – so the publicity went – other than universal declarations of human rights. It was all about aid for the starving and the rule of law. Sheltered behind this public face, however, the IMF, in particular was in every way different. It was completey ideological. And its ideology was narrowly free-market. It had the mandate and the power to force governments to alter their policies in favour of open markets and international western companies.
While the UN rushed aid to the starving, the IMF forced poor nations to get rid of tariffs that tried to nurture local farmers paving the way for global agribusiness. Local economies were laid bare on every hillside where global capital picked their carcasses clean. But because it was happening over there, few of us over here gave a damn. And if anyone was tempted to see any of it as an attack on sovereignty, it was given other names, such as ‘liberalization’. We weren’t attacking the sovereignty of poor peoples, we were helping them.
Their governments, we told ourselves, were corrupt and had no vision beyond a tribal nationalism. We, on the other hand, being wealthy white people, could save them. Let our companies in and we’ll lend you the money to save yourselves from nationalism and poverty. Above the entrance to the freemarket future we may as well have put a sign which read, “Shuld Macht Frei”. But we still did not think this was ever going to be our future.
We might have been less sanguine had we been more aware of what the poor relation of the Bretton Woods era, the GATT, would one day bring us.The General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) was created in 1947 with the purpose of regulating international trade mainly by reducing “tariffs and other trade barriers”. Those other trade barriers were anything from subsidies for local industries, to environmental requirements and labour laws. In 1995 the GATT hatched the World Trade Organization (WTO). What made the GATT and WTO quite different from the IMF and WB is that it was no longer just a matter of policy as it had been with the IMF, it was now about rolling back specific laws and tariffs. AND you didn’t have to fall into debt to find yourself subject to their rule. Your government simply had to sign away some sovereignties and “voila”, your government had made you subject to rules and a world governing body you had not elected and had no power over at all. The power in the WTO very obvioulsy and clearly lay with the corporations, their lobbyists and their experts.
Thus while the IMF and WB trampled mainly on poor nations the WTO had power over any nation including the wealthy. And it was no longer purely at the level of trade policy and politics, it now opened to corporations an avenue for them to object to and challenge specific sovereign laws and tariffs. The rules of the GATT and the WTO were specifically created in order to supercede any nation’s and region’s laws where they concerned trade.
While the Conservative (Tory) party here in Britain, would rail about Europe ‘stealing away our sovereignty’, the truth was that those same Tory politicians had been delighted, in 1995, to sign away far more sovereignty to GATT. The difference for them was that Europe was seen as still harbouring some vaguely Socialist ideas about environment and employment rights, while the WTO very specifically did not recognize such things and in fact regarded them as exactly the sort of barriers to trade it was there to get rid of. Such was and is the hypocrisy of the Tories, and now UKIP (UK Independence Party), about sovereignty and Europe. Labour was at least consistent in happily handing over soverignty to anyone and everyone. And the faithful western main-stream media never bothered to say a word nor to offer even an analysis let alone a critique.
Throughout the 90′s and noughties the GATT and the WTO were the primary means whereby corporate interests in one country were able to stop or roll back any rules and regulations they didn’t like, in any other country. Suddenly westerners who had never before felt threatened by international capitslism, woke up. There were suddenly ‘anti capitalist’ protests in rich nations. People who had never bothered about what capitalism did in poor nations were suddenly outraged. Now things were being done to them in their country and that was wrong! Of course there had always been those who had fought against what was done in the developing world. I don’t meant to suggest there weren’t. I am just noting how suddenly their numbers were swelled when they realized it could happen here, to them.
BUT it was still the case under the WTO rules that corporate interests could only roll back sovereign national rules and laws via their own national governments. The companies of a country could complain to their government about a foreign law or tariff but it had to be their own government, their State, which went to the WTO and filed a complaint. Thus although more corporate than the earlier IMF and WB, the WTO is still tied to the power of the State.
Which bring us nearly up to date. The last and by far the most dangerous part of the State’s dismantling of national sovereignty, although it has its roots back in the 1970′s, has really only taken off in the last 5 years and has only in the last few months received much attention in the main stream media.
Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs)
If the WTO is the State acting on behalf of corporations, then Bilateral Investment Treaties and their rules for “Investor-State Dispute Settlement” give corporations the power to challenge and over-rule nations directly. They are entirely non-democratic and stand completely outside of national based law and even outside of most of international law. They are therefore a major crystalization of the shift in power from the Nation to the Corporation and of course it has been the State which has facilitated this transfer of power.
I apologize that the preceeding history took so long and that I have therefore still not written about BITs. I just felt the context of what came before and what still today makes up a large part of the over-ruling of the Nation was important enough to do properly. I promise I will write about BITs in part 3. I hope you’ll bear with me .
The New World Order – Part 1. The Betrayal of the Nation » Golem XIV – Thoughts
The New World Order – Part 1. The Betrayal of the Nation » Golem XIV – Thoughts.
In every country I can think of, the sovereignty and wealth of the Nation, which was once the embodiment of the power and will of the people, is being butchered and sold to the highest bidder. Everywhere, the Nation and the people within it, are under attack. Not from without by terrorists but from within. Because in every country the people who run the State have largely decided they no longer wish to serve the people but prefer instead to serve the interests of a Global Over-Class.
Of course we are not encouraged to see this clearly or if we do, certainly not to speak of it to others. And many of those we might try to talk to, do not want to hear.
Many of us prefer instead to find what warmth we can in the false and threadbare beliefs fed to us by the quisling elite of the State and their close friends and allies in a rigged and corrupted ‘free’ market. Together they tell us that whole functions of our nation which we built and treasure, are no longer viable because they are at odds with the ‘realities’ of a global economy. The more ideological of them proclaim that the state, whenever and wherever it tries to do good, will always and by necessity do harm. The more ‘realist’ among them tell us that once inalienable liberties, must now be curtailed or suspended in the name of defending the ‘nation’ from outside enemies. And yet I want to argue it is now, not ever us or the nation that is being defended or empowered. It is always and everywhere a small elite who own and control both the State and the Markets who are being defended.
In my view, we are, in most industrialized countries, watching the machinery of the State being used to betray the Nation in favour of global finance and the elite who own it. It is a familiar betrayal in the third world. One we have all watched with sordid complacently as the wealth of nation after nation is gutted for the benefit of the few. The disease is now with us.
I want to make it clear, as I have before, that I am neither libertarian nor anarchist and therefore have no ideological distrust of the State. In my opinion, there have been times and places, when the machinery of the State did animate and represent some of the wishes of the at least some of the people – of the Nation. There have been instances when the State was, in many, though certainly not in all ways, the means by which the great ideal, of government of the people, by the people, for the people, was made real. The creation of the National Health Service in Great Britain is one shining example.
I think that great ideal of government by and for the people is being butchered – for profit. The Nation-State is dying, because any given arrangement of power can be corrupted and will be, by those who benefit from it most – those who hold its powers – in this case the powers of the State – IF people cringingly let them. And that it what we are doing.
We are allowing the elite of the State, to convince us that we are ‘all in it together’, and to claim that our interests and their interests are still one and the same. But they are not. And we must come to see this clearly – and soon. As long as we deny the truth, that they are not standing ‘with us’, and do not have our best interests at heart – until we can face these self evident but chilling truths, then we are never going to see them for what they have become nor see their actions for what they are.
I think it is critical that we disentangle in our minds the State and the interests of those who control it, from those of what I am calling the Nation. The State and the Nation are not the same. They are, in fact, at war.
The Propaganda War
Our problem and their advantage is that it is deeply ingrained in us to see the State and the Nation as almost interchangeable. The very name, ‘The Nation State’ inclines us to believe that the State and Nation are one and therefore that any action taken by the State, no matter how harsh or unfair it might seem to us, must necessarily be for our good. It allows those who control the State to hide their narrow selfish interests behind a smokescreen of talk about the Nation.
This intentional confusion of Nation and State is everywhere in reporting about global finance and trade.
Battle lines drawn for EU-US trade talks
Cried a recent headline in the Telegraph. To me, it reads intentionally like an old fashioned report of a war. Wars of any sort are fantastically useful for the elite of the State because wars, better than anything else, encourage people to collapse the State and the Nation together in their minds. Faced with an external enemy it is the State and those who guide it, who marshal our defenses and face the enemy. And so we are encouraged to assume that when the EU and the US meet it will be ‘our side’ fighting for us, against theirs. But will it?
In reality it will be unelected, largely un-named trade representatives supported and surrounded by a legion of lawyers, advisors and lobbyists, nearly all of whom will be recently seconded from or still in the pay of global corporations, who will meet behind closed doors to negotiate in secret. Whose interests will they be fighting for?
They, with the help of a largely supine and grovelling media, will claim to be there for you. They will be decked out in flags and called by the names of our nations or national groupings, such as the EU. But the truth will be otherwise. Behind the national name plate a largely unseen machinery will be almost entirely corporate. Both sides will be there to seek advantage, not for you the people, not for the nations whose flags they use as camouflage , but for the corporations who pay them. The US delegation will seek advantage for US based global corporations and the EU delegation will seek advanage for EU based global corporations. Both sides will be hailed victorious. The real question – very carefully never ever raised by the compliant media – will be who lost? And the answer, studiously unreported, will be the ordinary people of both sides.
The object of the whole endeavour is to roll back soveriegn protections and powers in favour of an ‘unregulated’, unfettered, free market. How can I make such a sweeping claim? Because we have seen the results of over 200 previous Free Trade Agreements which these same people have negotiated and agreed previously. Just think of NAFTA.
If you think those agreements have benefited you, rather than, as I claim, the global corporations parasitical upon your nation and mine , then show me the proof. Don’t trot out platitudes about increased GDP without showing me who owns that GDP. Don’t bore me with text-book clap trap about how much corporations contribute unless you show me how much tax those corporations actually pay versus how much they quite legally move off-shore to low tax or no tax havens. Show me figures. I challenge you.
In part two I will return to this, and to explain what Bilateral trade Agreements are and what extrordinary and completely anti-democratic new power the State has given to corporations to over-rule Nations and to sue them for democratic decisions corporations do not like.
For now lets move from trade and finance to the actions of the machinery of State itself.
The NSA: Is It American, or British?
Is the title of a recent paper written by Edward Spannaus at Executive Intelligence Review.
What makes the author think the NSA’s primary loyalty is to either, other than simply being used to thinking they must be? The NSA and its UK counterpart, GCHQ, exist in thoir respective nations but is it really sensible to assume they feel loyal to the people who live there? And yet the author and his paper, like so many who are trying to understand what is going on around us, are stuck in the logic of what I think is now a world gone by.
If you were to ask someone from the NSA or GCHQ who they worked for would they immediately say, ‘the people’ or would they say ‘the NSA’ or ‘GCHQ’?
All those organs of power whose names and acronyms we are familiar with exist officially as servants of the… well of the what? Of the People? Of the Nation? Or of the State? Once power is created, it does not have to remain loyal to its creators. Any organization will come over time, as ambition eclipses morality, to regard its own survival and rise to greater power as paramount. Its original purpose will be drowned in a rising tide of inward looking ambition and greed for power.
It is my contention that we have become so used to the word and the idea of ‘the Nation-State’ that we have forgotten it is a compound of two very different things.
One more example, as quoted at Zerohedge,
Melissa Harris-Perry, from the otherwise progressive cable channel MSNBC, critized Snowden’s behavior as “compromising national security.”
But is it really National Security Mr Snowden compromised or State Security? When someone appeals to ‘National Security’ the unspoken assumption is that they are talking about your security and mine. We, after all, are ‘the Nation’. But I wonder if Mr Snowden might be more accurately described as having compromised the State’s security rather than the Nation’s. Which doesn’t sound nearly as good, does it? State security has a ring of the Stasi about it. And for good reason. Protecting the interests and security of the State is quite different from protecting the interests of the people who make up the Nation. One is about protecting you and me. The other is more about protecting the position, power and wealth of those who make up the State and its various organs of power. State security is about the security of the jobs and social postion of those who are ‘the State’. It is about the security of a particuar arrangement of power and those who benefit from that arrangement. Which one does the NSA or GCHQ serve? Which did Mr Snowden really compromise by revealing the extent of the NSA’s and GCHQ’s indiscriminate and unlawful spying upon ordinary and innocent citizens?
If we wish to hold on to the fiction that the NSA and GCHQ work for their respective Nations then how do we explain that the people we elect, even very senior members of the State, even within the government of the day, had NO idea what the NSA or GCHQ were doing? Certainly the NSA and GCHQ were financed by us, and draw their original legitimacy from us, but they no longer answer to those who we elect. So who do they answer to? To what are they loyal and to whom do they report?
Think of how different ‘One Nation under God’ sounds from “One State under God”.
My point is that we are so used to thinking of the State – our elected officials and the machinery that carries out their wishes, as being part of the Nation, loyal to it and us, that we are not seeing clearly that this relationship has ended. I am not saying that the old relationship between Nation/People, State and Market has altogether gone. It has not. Not everyone in the State has forsaken their old loyalties. We are in a moment of transition. But I am saying we need to see the new relationship more clearly, if we possibly can, because only then can we defend ourselves.
We are at war, we need to know who our real enemies are and take up arms against them.
The New World Order
While everyone agrees you cannot stuff a square peg into a round hole, when it comes to the new and unfamiliar, humans have a dreadful habit of trying. I think this is particularly true at the moment. The world is changing, a new order of things is taking shape around us but we are loathed to see it because we insist on trying to see everything through the lens of the previous world order.
The old order was laid out from left to right: Communist to Libertarian. From those who felt the State was there to guarantee certain protections and provide a minimum of welfare and service, over to those who felt any intervention from the State was no more than an abuse of power by a group of self serving insiders. Largely this is still the range of thought and opinion. Those on the Left see the Free Market as the greatest danger to liberty, welfare, justice and fairness, and regard the State as our best protection against it. While on the Right the fears are exactly the same but the State is now the great danger and the market the best protection. Each side regards the other as hopelessly, even criminally, misguided. Each side sees the other advocating that which will bring disaster.
Into this sterile and suffocating tweedledumness a new ideology and power has grown. It is neither Libertarian nor Left, but has been called both. The Libertarians have seen how eagerly and constantly this new politics intervenes in and distorts the market and cries “Socialism”. Which, it has to be said, makes anyone who knows anything about Socialism gasp with amazement. Nevertheless you can read this ‘it’s socialism’ opinion in most of the right wing press and on most blogs where Libertarians comment, such as ZeroHedge or The Ticker.
On the other hand the Left sees the way the new politics intervenes on behalf of and protects the interests of the wealthy (The financial class and global corporations) doing nothing about tax avoidance, nothing to regulate the banks, insisting instead that the only answer is more free market, less regulation and austerity to be borne by those least able to bear it – and sees clear evidence that this new politics is right wing and libertarian.
Both sides seems only able to see things in terms of the labels and world view they are used to and as a consequence see nearly nothing at all. The truth, I suggest, is that we are at a moment when an entire cultural form is ending. At such times it is not one part or another, government or market, which corrupts and breaks, which betrays the values it was meant to embody and ceases to do the job for which it was created, it is all parts at once. All parts of our society have become corrupted.
We must move beyond the politics of the last century, seeking to blame all ills on a corrupt and captured State or alternatively on a corrupt, captured and rigged market. BOTH are true. Both are corrupt. Neither is working for us. A new elite exists in every nation, has control over every State but which has no loyalty to the Nation of people in which it exists any more than a tape worm is loyal to the creature in whose body it feeds and grows.
The New World Order has its own ideology which does not fit happily on the old left to right axis.
The new ideology is not fully formed yet, but already it is clear that it is not Libertarian because unlike Libertarianism, the new ideology believes the State should be very powerful and large and should intervene. But neither is it Socialist, because unlike the Left the new ideology believes those interventions should be on behalf of the wealthy not the poor.
It’s a new world. We need to see it anew.
In Part Two I will look in more detail at what I merely introduced almost in passing in this introduction: the new and rapidly mutating and evolving ideology in the world of Finance, in particular at Bilateral Investment Treaties which are the real danger point inside the Trade Agreements currently being negotaited. And the mutation of the security and Intelligence world into something that spies upon Nations rather than working for them, in the serivce of a new ‘Greater Good’.