“Sentence First, Verdict Afterwards”: The Alice in Wonderland World of Fast-tracked Secret Trade Agreements
Global Research, June 22, 2015
Url of this article:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/sentence-first-verdict-afterwards-the-alice-in-wonderland-world-of-fast-tracked-secret-trade-agreements/5457359
http://www.globalresearch.ca/sentence-first-verdict-afterwards-the-alice-in-wonderland-world-of-fast-tracked-secret-trade-agreements/5457359
`Let the jury consider their verdict,’ the King said, for about the twentieth time that day.
`No, no!’ said the Queen. `Sentence firstverdict afterwards.’
`Stuff and nonsense!’ said Alice loudly. `The idea of having the sentence first!’`Hold your tongue!’ said the Queen, turning purple.
`I won’t!’ said Alice.
`Off with her head!’ the Queen shouted at the top of her voice.
Lewis Carroll, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”
Fast-track authority is being sought in the Senate this week for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), along with the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA) and any other such trade agreements coming down the pike in the next six years. The terms of the TPP and the TiSA are so secret that drafts of the negotiations are to remain classified for four yearsor five years, respectively, after the deals have been passed into law. How can laws be enforced against people and governments who are not allowed to know what was negotiated?
The TPP, TiSA and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (or TTIP, which covers Europe) will collectively encompass three-fourths of the world’s GDP;
and they ultimately seek to encompass nearly 90 percent of GDP. Despite
this enormous global impact, fast-track authority would allow the
President to sign the deals before their terms have been made public,
and send implementing legislation to Congress that cannot be amended or
filibustered and is not subject to the constitutional requirement of a
two-thirds treaty vote.
While the deals are being negotiated,
lawmakers can see their terms only under the strictest secrecy, and they
can be subjected to criminal prosecution for revealing those terms.
What we know of them comes only through WikiLeaks. The agreements are
being treated as if they were a matter of grave national security, yet
they are not about troop movements or military strategy. Something else
is obviously going on.
The
bizarre, unconstitutional, blatantly illegal nature of this enforced
secrecy was highlighted in a May 15th article by Jon Rappoport, titled “What Law Says the Text of the TPP Must Remain Secret?” He wrote:
It seems like a case of mass hypnosis. . . .A Corporate Coup d’État
Members of Congress are scuttling around like weasels, claiming they can’t disclose what’s in this far-reaching, 12-nation trade treaty.They can go into a sealed room and read a draft, but they can’t copy pages, and they can’t tell the public what they just read.
Why not?
If there is a US law forbidding disclosure, name the law.
Can you recall anything in the Constitution that establishes secret treaties?
Is there a prior treaty that states the text of all treaties can be hidden from the people?To Congressmen who say they cannot reveal what is in a treaty that will adversely affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people, Rappoport says:
Wrong. You’re lying. You can reveal secret text. In fact, it’s your duty. Otherwise, you’re guilty of cooperating in a RICO criminal conspiracy.
What is going on was predicted by David Korten in his 1995 blockbuster, When Corporations Rule The World. Catherine Austin Fitts calls it a “corporate coup d’état.”
This corporate coup includes the privatization and offshoring of the judicial functiondelegated
to the US court system in the Constitution, through Investor-State
Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions that strengthen existing ISDS
procedures.
As explained in The Economist,
ISDS gives foreign firms a special right to apply to a secretive
tribunal of highly paid corporate lawyers for compensation whenever the
government passes a law to do things that hurt corporate profits such
things as discouraging smoking, protecting the environment or preventing
a nuclear catastrophe. Arbitrators are paid $600-700 an hour, giving
them little incentive to dismiss cases. The secretive nature of the
arbitration process and the lack of any requirement to consider
precedent give wide scope for creative judgments the sort of arbitrary
edicts satirized by Lewis Carroll in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
To
date, the highest ISDS award has been for $2.3 billion to Occidental
Oil Company against the government of Ecuador over its termination of an
oil-concession contract, although the termination was apparently legal.
Under the TPP, however, even larger and more unpredictable judgments
can be anticipated, since the sort of “investment” it protects includes
not just “the commitment of capital or other resources” but “the expectation of gain or profit.”
That means the rights of corporations extend not merely to their
factories and other “capital” but to the profits they expect to receive.
Just the threat of a massive damage award for impairing “expected
corporate profits” could be enough to discourage prospective legislation
by lawmakers.
The Trade in Services Agreement adds additional barriers
to proposed legislation. TiSA involves 51 countries, including every
advanced economy except the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and
South Africa). The deal would liberalize global trade in services
covering close to 80% of the US economy, including financial services,
healthcare, education, engineering, telecommunications, and many more.
It would restrict how governments can manage their public laws, and it
could dismantle and privatize state-owned enterprises, turning those
services over to the private sector. It would also block the emerging
trend to return privatized services to the public sector, by limiting or
prohibiting governments from creating or reestablishing public
utilities and other “uncompetitive” forms of service delivery.
It
seems that the TPP, TTIP and TiSA are not about the sort of “free
trade” that would free local businesses to sell abroad. They are about
freeing international corporations from the government regulation
necessary to protect the economy, the people, and the environment. They
are about preserving privatized monopolies and preventing competition
from the public sector. And they are about moving litigation offshore
into private arbitrary tribunals the sort of tribunal that might have
lost Alice her head, if she had not awakened from her bizarre dream.
Urge your local representative to vote “no” on Fast Track. For more information, see The Citizens Trade Campaign
Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch
Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and author of twelve books including the best-selling Web of Debt. Her latest book, The Public Bank Solution, explores successful public banking models historically and globally. Her 300+ blog articles are at EllenBrown.com.
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