Private Armies, Daesh, The CIA and the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement. . . Yes, it’s all about sovereignty, and Putin and many others understand this! ~J
By Katherine FriskNovember 22, 2015
SOURCE
My fellow Americans, have you completely, utterly and totally lost your frigging minds?
But what we have been wondering for months and what we hope some enterprising journalist will soon answer, is just who are the commodity trading firms that have been so generously buying millions of smuggled oil barrels procured by the Islamic State at massive discounts to market, and then reselling them to other interested parties.In other words, who are the middlemen. What we do know is who they may be: they are the same names that were quite prominent in the market in September when Glencore had its first, and certainly not last, near death experience: the Glencores, the Vitols, the Trafiguras, the Nobels, the Mercurias of the world.
Reps. Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat, and Austin Scott, a Republican, introduced legislation on Friday to end what they called an “illegal war” to overthrow Assad, the leader of Syria accused of killing tens of thousands of Syrian citizens in a more than four-year-old civil war entangled in a battle against IS extremists, also known as ISIS.“The U.S. is waging two wars in Syria,” Gabbard said. “The first is the war against ISIS and other Islamic extremists, which Congress authorized after the terrorist attack on 9/11. The second war is the illegal war to overthrow the Syrian government of Assad.”
Not mentioned in Gabbard’s statements, are the 350,00 Syrians who have died due to CIA involvement in Daeash/ISIL, or the 11 million who have been displaced.
In the last month the full text of the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement was leaked to the media. The Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement is similar to it’s European equivalent. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. As we have seen in the last month, France has strongly suggested that they are going to back out of this agreement entirely. I am sure many other European countries will follow.
In Plain English:
Those adventurous souls who want to wade through the mountain of legalese the elipses in the above paragraph are saving you from are invited to click the link and read the whole clause for yourself. Is your head hurting yet? Well then the negotiators have done their job.Don’t worry, I’ll spare you the other 6 equally inscrutable clauses of Article 9.18 of the TPP text, “Submission of a Claim to Arbitration.” Does it help if I explain this is a description of the arbitration procedure laid out under the terms of the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism of the deal? I didn’t think so.What all the acronym-laden legalistic jargon is hiding here is arguably the most controversial part of the entire deal. This article lays out the terms under which a corporation that is unhappy with a law, ruling or regulation of a former government can sue that government for its decision.Perhaps it’s easier to understand why this is so controversial if we look at a real life example.When German public sentiment turned strongly against the use of nuclear power in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, the German government committed to “Atomausstieg” (Nuclear Exit), a plan to close down all of the country’s nuclear power plants by 2021. Eight of the oldest nuclear plants were shut down right away, including two that were owned and operated by Swedish energy major Vattenfall. Vattenfall didn’t like this and is currently suing the German government for $6 billion in losses from the decision. They were able to do this under the terms of a World Bank mechanism called the Convention on the Settlement of Investment Disputes Between States and Nationals of Other States which arbitrates disputes between corporations and governments and which is specifically cited in the TPP’s Article 9.18 as one of the mechanisms that corporations could use to sue TPP member governments.In fact, this dispute settlement mechanism has been around for 50 years, is included in a number of free trade deals and has already been used to sue various governments. As citizen.org points out, taxpayers have already paid our $440 million to corporations for grevious offences like banning a neurotoxic gasoline additive or failing to grant drug monopolies to Big Pharma.So how could this play out if the TPP goes into effect? Well that’s the rub. Given the incredibly vague wording of the agreement, including a nebulous definition of “investment” itself, just about any company could bring a lawsuit against just about any government for just about any policy, ruling, procedure or law that it believes cuts into its potential profits, no matter how loosely. One possible example: tobacco companies suing TPP member governments for forcing them to sell cigarettes in plain packaging, thus “violating” their trademarks and intellectual property.
“…just about any company could bring a lawsuit against just about any government for just about any policy, ruling, procedure or law that it believes cuts into its potential profits, no matter how loosely…”
Just after the TPP negotiators reached an agreement, we asked Ralph Nader if the TPP could be stopped. He said, “It will be stopped on its demerits.” He further noted its wide impact, saying, “Its scope is everything,” and described it as a “global corporate coup … the most brazen corporate power grab in American history.” The TPP, he said, is “a major peril to our national authority” that is “ceding our sovereignty, ceding our self-reliance, ceding everything we can do within the boundaries of the United States.”
He described how it takes legislative authority away from Congress and the White House and gives it to trade officials and trade tribunals. Nader described how it undermines the civil justice system, the third branch of government, and the federal court system because of trade tribunals with corporate lawyer-judges whose decisions cannot be reviewed by the federal courts. Nader described the TPP as “democracy suppression.”
Do you know what nation-state sovereignty is?
My fellow Americans, have you completely, utterly and totally lost your frigging minds? This is NOT capitalism. This is CORPORATE FASCISM, a feudal system where you are the peasants on the plantation with no property rights, no legal representation and no say whatsoever in how your country is run. Your Constitution and Bill of Rights will count for nothing and not even be worth the paper it is written on!