if one can take a break from the personality driven politics in the US
in a country where 36% of the "citizens" cannot name the current VP
and consider that in this country which was the first republic for 2,000 years after the Roman republic
From the first article, the bold is a section heading
Abdicating the Judicial Function to Corporate Lawyers
James Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers:
The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, . . . may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. . . . “Were the power of judging joined with the legislative, the life and liberty of the subject would be exposed to arbitrary control, for the judge would then be the legislator. . . .”
and the author of the article "
The Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Death of the Republic" continues
And that, from what we now know of the TPP’s secret provisions, will be its dire effect.
The most controversial provision of the TPP is the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) section, which strengthens existing ISDS procedures. ISDS first appeared in a bilateral trade agreement in 1959. According to 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.
Have you heard the latest poll numbers of Hillary? Have the crazy Republicans and their billionaire owners gone so far over the top yet to be rejected by the voters? Even if they are rejected, can the power of the corporations and the military be checked by the legislative branch through the political parties?
Politics in the US is for the most part defined by what happens between the two parties. What did the founders think about factions and parties?
I added the bold to the quotation from the second president of the US
“There is nothing I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This in my humble apprehension is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under the constitution. John Adams
The diary continues after the squiggle
Have we forgotten the crash of 2008? Have the banks been brought under control? Elizabeth Warren says that there are now 11 big banks and if any one of them failed, it could take down the economy. Well in a coup, there is no concern for real safety and security, but the powers that be are acting for our safety and security to suspend the constitution.
The article on the Death of the Republic continues with this (bold a section heading in the original)
Abdicating the Legislative Function to Multinational Corporations
Just the threat of this sort of massive damage award could be enough to block prospective legislation. But the TPP goes further and takes on the legislative function directly, by forbidding specific forms of regulation.
Public Citizen observes that the TPP would provide big banks with a backdoor means of watering down efforts to re-regulate Wall Street, after deregulation triggered the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression:
The TPP would forbid countries from banning particularly risky financial products, such as the toxic derivatives that led to the $183 billion government bailout of AIG. It would prohibit policies to prevent banks from becoming “too big to fail,” and threaten the use of “firewalls” to prevent banks that keep our savings accounts from taking hedge-fund-style bets.
The TPP would also restrict capital controls, an essential policy tool to counter destabilizing flows of speculative money. . . . And the deal would prohibit taxes on Wall Street speculation, such as the proposed Robin Hood Tax that would generate billions of dollars’ worth of revenue for social, health, or environmental causes.
Click on this for the link to the article
The Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Death of the Republic
I know that there have been many diaries here on dailykos on the TPP because if this is passed and enacted, what is going on in Kansas right now and their race to the bottom, could well be the continued race to bottom for the whole country. And just as the poor have few resources to enable them to climb out of a hole, there will be fewer resources in the US as the middle class collapses and wealth is more concentrated. Will we have to rely on the survivors of colonization, the world's indigenous people, to save the earth?
I was stimulated this morning to write this diary by another article which is available on this link.
Obama, Corporate “Free Traitors” and You!
The TPP ..
The first skirmish is a fast track bill to have Congress formally strip itself of its constitutional authority to regulate trade and surrender this historic responsibility to the White House and its corporate lobbies.
Lest you think the TPP is too commercially complex to bother about, think again. This mega-treaty is the latest corporate coup-d’état that sacrifices the American consumer, labor and environmental standards – inventively called “non-tariff trade barriers” – and much U.S. sovereignty to the supremacy of corporate commercial trade.
No single column can adequately describe this colossal betrayal – camouflaged by phrases like “free trade” and “win-win agreements.” For comprehensive analysis of the TPP you can go to Global Trade Watch (http://www.citizen.org/...).
Trade treaties, like NAFTA and GATT, which created the World Trade Organization (WTO), already have proven records of harming our country through huge job-exporting trade deficits, unemployment, freezing or jeopardizing our consumer and environmental rules, holding down regulations on giant banks and weakening labor protections.
How does the corporate state and its “free traitors” construct a transnational form of autocratic governance that bypasses the powers of our branches of government and accepts decisions that greatly affect American livelihoods issued by secret tribunals run by corporate lawyers-turned-judges? Well, first they establish autocratic procedures, such as fast track legislation that facilitate the creation of an absentee autocratic government, which betrays the American people by going far beyond reducing tariffs and quotas.
I added the bold to link it to the second half of the title of the diary,
latest US coup d'etat.
Just these paragraphs should be a call to arms for those who are committed to saving the republic.
But before you go to the link and find out who wrote Obama, Corporate “Free Traitors” and You!, a few words help to put the author in context.
The person who wrote that is often the subject of scorn and vilification here on dailykos and in other parts of the liberal class. I am not going to bring up the old fights, but to bring in some history.
Many have pointed out that the political parties have shifted far to the right. Glenn Greenwald, before Edward Snowden appeared, was almost finished with a book on how the media and politicians have successfully attacked and marginalized voices critical to the power structure. There was going to be at least one chapter on Noam Chomsky who is recognized as one of the top public intellectuals in the world. Chomsky has never been on the PBS evening news but you can find him on such independent places as democracynow.org
The controversial author of the second article by 1973 was named the fourth most influential person in the county after Richard Nixon, Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren and labor leader George Meany.
For those who know their history, in 1971, Lewis Powell wrote an eight page memo "Attack on the American Free Enterprise System" which was the blue print for the corporate coup d'etat. He explicitly named the target, Ralph Nader.
This article from 2010 describes earlier stages of the corporate coup d'etat we are seeing enacted before our eyes
How the Corporations Broke Ralph Nader and America, Too
Ralph Nader’s descent from being one of the most respected and powerful men in the country to being a pariah illustrates the totality of the corporate coup. Nader’s marginalization was not accidental. It was orchestrated to thwart the legislation that Nader and his allies—who once consisted of many in the Democratic Party—enacted to prevent corporate abuse, fraud and control. He was targeted to be destroyed. And by the time he was shut out of the political process with the election of Ronald Reagan, the government was in the hands of corporations. Nader’s fate mirrors our own.
there were good old days in the past, not just the New Deal, ...
The Congress, between 1966 and 1973, passed 25 pieces of consumer legislation, nearly all of which Nader had a hand in authoring. The auto and highway safety laws, the meat and poultry inspection laws, the oil pipeline safety laws, the product safety laws, the update on flammable fabric laws, the air pollution control act, the water pollution control act, the EPA, OSHA and the Environmental Council in the White House transformed the political landscape. Nader by 1973 was named the fourth most influential person in the country after Richard Nixon, Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren and the labor leader George Meany.
“Then something very interesting happened,” Nader said. “The pressure of these meetings by the corporations like General Motors, the oil companies and the drug companies with the editorial people, and probably with the publishers, coincided with the emergence of the most destructive force to the citizen movement—Abe Rosenthal, the editor of The New York Times. Rosenthal was a right-winger from Canada who hated communism, came here and hated progressivism. The Times was not doing that well at the time. Rosenthal was commissioned to expand his suburban sections, which required a lot of advertising. He was very receptive to the entreaties of corporations, and he did not like me. I would give material to Jack Morris in the Washington bureau and it would not get in the paper.”