{"id":70573,"date":"2016-03-07T12:00:14","date_gmt":"2016-03-07T12:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=70573"},"modified":"2016-03-07T07:45:35","modified_gmt":"2016-03-07T07:45:35","slug":"nobel-prize-economist-condemns-obamas-trade-deals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/03\/nobel-prize-economist-condemns-obamas-trade-deals\/","title":{"rendered":"Nobel-Prize Economist Condemns Obama\u2019s \u2018Trade\u2019 Deals"},"content":{"rendered":"

3 Mar 2016 – <\/em>The Nobel-Prize-winning former chief economist of the World Bank, and Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the U.S. President, Joseph Stiglitz, went to England to warn the British public, and Parliament, that \u201cno democracy\u201d can support U.S. President Barack Obama\u2019s proposed trade-deals, because all of these have a feature built into them, called Investor State Dispute Resolution, or ISDS, which will establish a supra-national authority that gives international corporations the power to sue any signatory nation that introduces new or increased economic regulations regarding product-safety, the environment, workers\u2019 rights, or anything else that the corporation alleges lowers the corporation\u2019s profits; and because these cases will be tried not in courts that are subject to the given nation\u2019s constitution and laws, but instead by private three-person panels of mainly corporate lawyers, and their rulings will not be subject to being appealed within the given nation\u2019s court system \u2014 the panel\u2019s decison will be final. There will be no democratic accountability at all, regarding regulations and laws that are designed to protect the public: environmental, product-safety, and workers\u2019 rights. The existing regulations will be, in effect, locked in stone, or else decreased \u2014 never increased, no matter how much the latest scientific findings might indicate they ought to be. That\u2019s because the international corporations\u2019 panels will have powers above and beyond any signatory nation\u2019s constitution and laws. ISDS gives international corporations the right to sue taxpayers; it does not give any government the right to sue an international corporation (and that also means no right to sue such a corporation for having filed a frivolous lawsuit against the taspayers). It\u2019s a new profit-center for international corporations, in which those profits are coming from the taxpayers of nations that lose these lawsuits \u2014 and these cases will explode in volume if Obama\u2019s deals get passed.<\/p>\n

\"Joseph<\/a>

Joseph Stiglitz speaking in Jackson Heights, Queens on February 25 2015 (Image by David Andersson)<\/p><\/div>\n

Stiglitz was speaking specifically about the TTIP, which is Obama\u2019s\u00a0proposed trade-deal with Europe<\/a>,\u00a0 and he based his analysis upon the published proposed TPP, which is its companion trade-deal for virtually all nations that are in or on the Pacific<\/a>. (Wikileaked texts indicate that the TTIP is basically similar to TPP.)<\/p>\n

In\u00a0the article by Huffington Post that reports on Stiglitze\u2019s comments<\/a>\u00a0was this, from Stiglitz:<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s nothing to stop you, in TTIP, from passing regulations.\u00a0You can keep the regulations. You would just have to keep\u00a0writing a cheque to [cigarette firm] Phillip Morris every year for\u00a0the profits they lost from what they would have been if they had\u00a0been able to kill people in the way they had in the past,\u201d he said.\u00a0\u201cEvery year you would have to write them another billion dollar\u00a0cheque.\u201d \u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

He said it would mean \u201cany government that passes a regulation\u00a0that has an adverse effect on the profits of a company can be\u00a0sued\u201d by that company.<\/em><\/p>\n

Stiglitz said the lawyers who drafted TPP designed it to be so\u00a0strict that if governments passed regulations \u201ctrying to prevent\u00a0polonium in baby cereal\u201d companies would sue. \u201cThis is not a\u00a0joke,\u201d he added.<\/em><\/p>\n

Previously, on the basis of a legal analysis of Obama\u2019s trade-deals, a leading legal expert at the United Nations, explained why (as my headline summarized it)\u00a0\u201cUN Lawyer Calls TTP &\u00a0TTIP \u2018a dystopian\u00a0future\u00a0in which corporations\u00a0and not democratically\u00a0elected governments\u00a0call the shots\u2019.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0That lawyer was saying essentially the same thing as Stiglitz, but from a legal not an economic standpoint.<\/p>\n

For information specifically about the motivation behind Obama\u2019s trade-deals, see\u00a0this<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s proposed \u2018trade\u2019 deals have not yet been passed into law in the United States. Here are the positions of leading U.S. Presidential candidates regarding whether they will favor or oppose them if they become the next U.S. President on 20 January 2017:<\/p>\n

Hillary Clinton supports and was actively involved in producing Obama\u2019s proposed trade-deals, but they became too unpopular among Democratic primary voters and so during her Democratic Party primary campaign for the White House she reversed her previous verbal position on the matter, just as she did in 2008 when she condemned her husband\u2019s more-limited model, the NAFTA, after her having actually helped him to win approval for it in the U.S. Senate.<\/p>\n

Bernie Sanders has condemned and voted against Obama\u2019s trade-deals consistently. His actions have matched his words.<\/p>\n

Donald Trump also condemns Obama\u2019s proposed trade-deals, but his opposition, like Hillary\u2019s, is merely verbal while he\u2019s running for President, and though he (unlike Clinton) has no active record of having helped to produce these deals, he (like Clinton) does have a record of switching his positions in order to win votes. He\u2019s not like Sanders; he can\u2019t be trusted (or, at least, not intelligently<\/em>\u00a0 trusted).<\/p>\n

More details about these deals, and their origins, can be found\u00a0here<\/a>, which provides the deeper historical context, going all the way back to the U.S. Constitution.<\/p>\n

Specifically regarding the corporate panels that will, in a sense, become an international-corporate world government if these deals become law, the details of that can be found\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Essentially, what both Stiglitz and the UN\u2019s lawyer are saying is that, if these deals become law, then workers\u2019 rights laws, and product-safety laws, and environmental laws, won\u2019t be able to be increased \u2014 not even, for example, in order to meet the verbal commitments that were recently made at the Paris conference on climate change. (Those \u2018commitments\u2019 to reduce global-warming gases would automatically become not merely unenforceable \u2014 which they already are \u2014 but they would become outright impossible to fulfill, because any effort to put them into place would produce crippling corporate-lawsuit-imposed fines against taxpayers.)<\/p>\n

When Stiglitz said, \u201cThis is not a joke,\u201d he was saying, essentially, the same thing as the UN lawyer did: \u201cWe don\u2019t want a dystopian future in which corporations and not democratically elected governments call the shots. We don\u2019t want an international order akin to post-democracy or post-law.\u201d He was saying: Don\u2019t assume that the future won\u2019t be an international-corporate dictatorship, because that now is actually quite likely. If both of these agreements become law, then even the publics in non<\/em>-member nations will almost certainly become crushed, because they\u2019ll be essentially boycotted by international corporations: both employment and consumption will collapse there. The interntional corporations would still come out way ahead, no matter how impoverished those people might become.<\/p>\n

President Obama has specifically targeted the BRICS nations for that type of crushing treatment. He says this within a moralistic context in which he also says \u201cthe United States is and remains the one indispensable nation.\u201d He said that on 28 May 2014, when he told graduating cadets at West Point<\/a> this too:<\/p>\n

\u201cRussia\u2019s aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China\u2019s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors.\u00a0 From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us.\u201d<\/p>\n

None of the five BRICS countries \u2014 Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa \u2014 is included in either of these two \u2018trade\u2019-pacts: Obama was telling America\u2019s future military leaders that those are enemy nations, which those future U.S. military officers might be fighting against in their careers, and he was placing that prospect into a broader economic<\/em>\u00a0 (not merely military) context. Obama\u2019s \u2018trade\u2019 deals are about lots more than merely<\/em>\u00a0 \u2018trade.\u2019<\/p>\n

It\u2019s widely expected that at least the TPP, if not also the TTIP, will become passed into law in the United States at some time between the November 8th U.S. Presidential election and the start of the new Presidency on 20 January 2017.<\/p>\n

Both of these \u2018trade\u2019 deals are being rammed through Congress in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution\u2019s Treaty Clause<\/a>. Apparently, the U.S. Constitution no longer rules in the United States. The U.S. Supreme Court has never considered the matter (even though it would entail overthrowing a large portion of the U.S. Constitution if it becomes passed into law and sticks). However, if Obama\u2019s \u2018trade\u2019 deals become passed into law, and remain, then what Stiglitz said, \u201cThis is not a joke,\u201d will also mean that no intelligent and decent person will want to have children, unless that person wants them to live in a downward-spiralling dictatorship \u2014 which is what that would mean (and which would hardly qualify as being \u2018decent\u2019).<\/p>\n

The vote that the American people will be making on November 8th could thus turn out to be the most important vote in the entire history of the world: the stakes are so large \u2014 for the entire world. And that\u2019s no joke, either. If these proposed deals are not already too late to stop, this could well be the last chance. And to say that isn\u2019t \u2018apocalyptic,\u2019 either: there\u2019s nothing at all of \u2018Scripture\u2019 referred-to here. There\u2019s nothing that\u2019s at all \u2018supernatural\u2019 about this. It\u2019s pure reality: very hard, very cold, and very real (and very profitable for the international billionaires whose agents have been pushing for this ever since at least 1954<\/a>).<\/p>\n

____________________________________<\/p>\n

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of\u00a0 <\/em>They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/a>,<\/em> of\u00a0<\/em>Christ\u2019s Ventriloquists: The Event that Created Christianity<\/a>, and\u00a0of<\/em>\u00a0Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Joseph Eugene Stiglitz is an American economist and a professor at Columbia University. He is a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences (2001) and the John Bates Clark Medal (1979). He is a former senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank and is known for his critical view of the management of globalization, free-market economists (whom he calls “free market fundamentalists”), and some international institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.\u00a0Stiglitz is the author of <\/em>The Price of Inequality.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 washingtonsblog.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

3 Mar 2016 – The Nobel-Prize-winning former chief economist of the World Bank, and Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the U.S. President, Joseph Stiglitz, went to England to warn the British public, and Parliament, that \u201cno democracy\u201d can support U.S. President Barack Obama\u2019s proposed trade-deals, because all of these have a feature built into them, called Investor State Dispute Resolution, or ISDS, which will establish a supra-national authority\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[105],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nobel-laureates"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70573"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70573\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}